Kunio Shin

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia. Instead, many early readers chose to read it as the very opposite, as an anti-utopia or dystopia—a form centrally defined by its negative reaction against any attempt at realizing or imagining a utopia. Identifying the novel’s target exclusively with Soviet Russia, such readers often regarded it as a result of its author’s dark disillusionment with utopianism itself, which was seen as a misguided movement that woefully ended in the regime of totalitarianism. Even George Woodcock, a reader sympathetic to Orwell, agreed to read it as an anti-utopia, claiming that it was the migration of utopias from the realm of imagination to that of “practical probability” in the early twentieth century that provoked anti-utopians such as Orwell to react violently against them. As Krishan Kumar points out, the problem here lies in the widespread tendency to regard utopias solely as “blueprints for action” in the world of practical politics, a reductionism that not only denies “the richness and multiformity of the utopian inheritance” but also obscures the possibility of utopia as a critical form that is itself significantly inspired by a utopian vision. I contend that it is in this complex sense that Orwell called his last novel “a Utopia in the form of a novel.” Undoubtedly, one major difficulty for this reading is the problem of nostalgia. Critics have long regarded Orwell as a writer obsessed with nostalgia, suggesting that it was his nostalgic, or indeed conservative, concern with the past that ultimately caused him to lose faith in the progressive, future-oriented politics of utopia. However, neither the commonsense distinction between nostalgia and utopia nor the binary opposition between the past and the future is adequate to capture the complexity of Orwell’s treatment of nostalgia. Relevant here is Svetlana Boym’s explication of nostalgia’s ambivalence. Originally coined from nostos (return home) and algia (longing), nostalgia is inherently paradoxical