1984 The opening sentence of Nineteen Eighty-four is (with that of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) one of the most famous in literature.
It was bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The allusions are clear and traditional. April, from Chaucer’s ‘showres soote’, is the month of annual rebirth. But Orwell is more in line with Eliot’s Waste Land:
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
No spring crueller than 1984 in Oceania.
We later learn that the ‘bright cold day’ of the opening sentence is 4 April 1984. The hero, Citizen Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party (and a Times journalist, whose task is to destroy news unwelcome to the Inner Party), has begun a diary. If found out, it will mean death, but he deludes himself that he has the scarcest thing in 1984, a private place.
Keeping a journal, or diary, or chronicle was – for Orwell – a defining act. It established one’s selfhood and one’s self-control. As he lay suffocating to death in University College Hospital he kept his terrors at bay by simply writing, as accurately as he could, the things around him in his sick room. Winston Smith’s keeping a diary is the first step to his becoming Winston Smith, rather than Citizen 6079 Smith W.
The diary (literally ‘daybook’), however, poses an intractable problem:
April 4th, 1984
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended on him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
A world without dates induces that collective schizophrenia (melted reality) on which totalitarianism depends. Orwell should really have entitled his novel Nineteen Eighty-four(?). But of cruel April we are sure. The only historically significant event recorded for 4 April 1984 is President Ronald Reagan’s call for the abolition of chemical weapons.