Orwell in the Archives: Memory, Records, and PoliticsRandall C. JimersonWestern Washington University Paper Presented at the 2007 Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives, University of Dundee, Scotland, August 14, 2007 In some societies people who commit history can be jailed, or even made to 'disappear.' Remembering unpleasant truths is illegal. Thus, memory becomes a political act, charged with social meaning. In his poem 'Against Amnesia,' John Ross writes:
...In Uruguay now, in Chile,
it is official, there is no memory, you are not allowed to remember the bad times, they are over, and the rememberers have been ordered by the Commission of Oblivion to forget. Ross writes that the imperative to forget or ignore painful aspects of the past occurs in the United States as well as Latin America - and, by implication, in most societies. In the United States, he declares,
amnesia is the norm,
the schools teach us to unremember from birth In Latin America, the authorities 'will try and make us forget/the mass graves' and other atrocities; 'they will shrug and say it never happened/it is written nowhere.' However, Ross insists, 'the past will never go away.'
it will always return,
it is always present, it is always future... Memory, the poem concludes, is the most 'fundamental human right...what belongs to us.' 1 Historians - and archivists - work in a public arena, which is unavoidably political. Every choice we make about what documents and evidence to save, what to include in our research, and how to frame the questions for our interpretations of the past reflects our own personal and collective perspectives on the world. This is as true of the historical past as it is of the political present. As Ross warns in his poem, those who dispute the past 'will shrug and say it never happened, it is written nowhere.' This is why it is essential for societies to preserve documentation of the past to prevent amnesia, to ensure an accurate record of events that will serve as a corrective to false memories or oblivion. This is why archives are so important not only to historians, but to all citizens concerned about truth, accountability, and social justice. Orwell as social critic The nightmare world for those concerned about history, memory, and recordkeeping is perhaps best represented in the writings of George Orwell. In his totalitarian dystopias and in his essays, Orwell warned against powerful rulers who controlled their subjects, in part, by hiding or distorting the truth through destruction or alteration of records. Although he never directly addressed the issue of archives per se, his writings about the necessity for authentic written records clearly embed Orwell in the realm of archives. Orwell developed a coherent argument about the importance of history, records, and memory in a series of essays and books written between 1938 and 1949, in the midst of the worlds greatest crises--totalitarian ideologies, global warfare, and atomic weapons. The sequence of Orwells reasoning about history, records, and memory can be summarized briefly:
Orwell in Spain Orwells interest in history, records, and evidence grew out of his personal experiences as a volunteer fighting against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. In his 1938 memoir of the war, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell stated, 'It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda.' 2 Personal memory could expose the falsity of these accounts. However, without records corroboration could not exist. Orwell could not have anticipated that with the fall of the Soviet Union, forty years after his death, documents from the Soviet Military Archive in Moscow would reveal the secret plotting behind the coup attempt in Barcelona in 1937. 3 Although it took decades for this information to surface, this shows the significance of archives in correcting falsehoods and disclosing the truth. Orwell wrote, 'During the Spanish Civil War I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist.' Even if Franco were overthrown, Orwell asked, 'Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable - even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?' Some kind of history would be written, he predicted, 'and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.' 4 The lies about past events of the Spanish Civil War led Orwell to warn, 'The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.' 5 Orwell repeatedly lamented the fragmentary record of the past and the resulting gaps in our knowledge of historical events. 'When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever.' 6 These silences of the archives, the absence of records, deeply troubled Orwell. Orwell on memory and records In his essays he clearly explained the importance of truth as a protection against tyranny and dictatorship. When faced with the difficult task of distinguishing truth from lies, Orwell concluded, the first recourse to establish what actually occurred is through authentic records. Without reliable records, he warned, 'One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources.' First-hand accounts, accurate newspaper reporting, official records, and personal papers could establish claims to veracity. The significance of written records - whether in textual, visual, sound, or electronic media - rests on cultural assumptions that give validation to particular kinds of evidence. Pierre Nora writes, 'As traditional memory fades, we feel obliged religiously to accumulate the testimonies, documents, images, and visible signs of what was, as if this ever-proliferating dossier should be called on as evidence in some tribunal of history. In former times, only great families, the Church, and the state kept records; today memories are recorded and memoirs written not only by minor actors in history but by their spouses and doctors.' 7 Any records deemed appropriate to retain in archives thereby acquire even greater value and meaning. Those records preserved in archives achieve significance, Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg explain, in part from 'the notion that archival documentation embodies particular kinds of truth: ones that can be referenced and hence 'verified', ones that are at least partly, in other words, created by the real and symbolic capital of archival institutions themselves.' 8 However, to control popular thought totalitarian leaders can either destroy or falsify records. This danger exists even in democratic societies. Government agencies often create a culture of secrecy by limiting access to public records. As one researcher discovered, when he sought to locate records of 1970s farm work in Great Britain, a government official told him that the file had been archived. 'When I asked where the archive was kept, I was told that archived meant destroyed.' 9 Animal Farm and the politics of memory Orwells essays warning of such dangers reached a limited audience. By turning to fiction he gained a worldwide audience, portraying the dangers of totalitarianism in vivid imagery. Central to the themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are the concerns outlined above regarding history, memory, and records. Although it would be a stretch to claim that these are novels about archives (Orwell never used the word archives), in both works the importance of records is critical in securing the ruling elites control over public thought. In Animal Farm Orwell created a 'fairy story' revealing the tendency toward totalitarianism among barnyard animals who escape the tyranny of their human masters only to suffer oppression from their own kind. Central to the development of this allegory is the concept of a written document - a rudimentary constitution - designed to protect the rights of the animals, which the ruling pigs alter to suit their needs. They cover up this falsification of the written record by challenging the other animals' memory of the past. When the animals claim that they had all agreed on a resolution never to engage in trade with humans, spokes-pig Squealer claims that such a resolution 'had never been passed, or even suggested.' Squealer asks shrewdly, '"Are you certain that this is not something you have dreamed, comrades? Have you any record of such a resolution? Is it written down anywhere?" And since it was certainly true that nothing of the kind existed in writing, the animals were satisfied that they had been mistaken.' 10 Without written evidence, memory could not be verified. As their selfish interests change, the pigs furtively alter the painted sign listing the Seven Commandments governing Animal Farm by adding words or phrases that change the meaning of these social rules. When the domineering pigs decide to move into the farmhouse and sleep in the beds, for example, they amend the commandment 'No animal shall sleep in a bed' by adding the words with sheets. The faithful horse Clover 'had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets; but as it was there on the wall, it must have done so.' 11 Each time a written rule is altered, the animals question their own memory, rather than doubt the validity of the documents. When falsifying existing records is not enough, the pigs create or 'discover' new documents to solidify their absolute power. In order to discredit the rebellious pig Snowball, Squealer tells the animals that Snowball was a secret agent of farmer Jones. 'It has all been proved by documents which he left behind him and which we have only just discovered.' As Squealer depicts Snowball's treasonous actions, the animals edit their own memories of the event. 'Now when Squealer described the scene so graphically, it seemed to the animals that they did remember it.' 12 Repeated often enough, and without contradictory documentary evidence, such lies became truth. The pigs use their mastery of writing to solidify their power and authority. Squealer tells the animals that the pigs 'had to expend enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called 'files', 'reports', 'minutes', and 'memoranda.' These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace.' 13 (This is what a records manager would call a very short-term retention schedule.) Without recourse to their own records, the animals lacked both personal and collective memory of the past: Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go upon except Squealers lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. 14 Animal Farm depicts a totalitarian society in which the rulers consolidate their power through control of both memory and records. Orwell thus found a fictional setting to illustrate his growing alarm for a society in which absolute power could be wielded not with a gun but with a pen. Nineteen Eighty-Four and the destruction of memory Orwell brought these concerns to full realization in his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In portraying a bleak totalitarian dystopia, he demonstrated the ability of the rulers to control their subjects through constant surveillance, thought control, and manipulation of language. Central to this power was the Party's control over written records and human memory: The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. 15 Orwell clearly distinguished memory from records. They are alternative means of understanding and representing the past. Yet it is clear that written records - the very stuff of archives - hold primacy in this system of thought control. The Party gains control over records both by destroying and by altering them. Winston Smith, the ill-fated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, works in the Records Department of Oceania, where he daily must go back into the archives of government reports, newspapers, books, and party speeches to alter the historical record in accordance with changing needs of those in power. In order to show the leaders' infallibility, Smith and his fellow records specialists would 'rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.' Once a revised version of the record has been substituted, the obsolete records of the past are quickly discarded down the 'memory hole' - Doublespeak for a chute that leads to an enormous central incinerator. 16 'The past, [Winston] reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?' 17 Winston felt this loss personally. 'When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.' 18 These concerns emerged in public life clearly during the Cold War (a term which Orwell himself coined in October 1945). 19 Both sides sought to control knowledge of the past, E. P. Thompson writes, 'through a continual reprocessing of approved views of the past (or amnesia about the past) and the accretion of new dimensions of myth.' 20 Dissenters can be eliminated without a trace when there are no records to expose such acts. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, 'People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.' 21 Absolute control over records gave the Party absolute power over knowledge of everything outside one's personal experience. 'If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death', Orwell warned. '...And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' 22 The power over history thus shapes the political power of the ruling elite, and this power over historical reality comes from control of written records --from archives. It is significant that Winston Smith works in the Records Department, which plays a central role in solidifying the Party's power. Documentary evidence lies at the heart of Orwell's depiction of totalitarianism. 'Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date,' he explains. 'In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.' 23 This falsification of records requires extensive archival institutions, perverting the proper role of archives. 'There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed,' Orwell explains. 24 In addition to written records, virtually all information sources have to be manipulated by the Party. 'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered,' Winston explains to Julia. 'I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but...[t]he only evidence is inside my own mind, and I dont know with certainty that any other human being shares my memories.' 25 In this situation personal memory requires confirmation from external records or from some form of collective or social memory. Under the apartheid regime in South Africa the struggle over public records and social memory echoed Orwell's warnings. Public archives became first the supports for apartheid control and later a means of reconstructing the truth of the nations past. Verne Harris states, 'In imposing apartheid ideology, the state sought to destroy all oppositional memory through censorship, confiscation, banning, incarceration, assassination, and a range of other oppressive tools. This was the context within which public archivists practiced under apartheid...Impartiality was patently a pipe dream.' 26 As an 'organ of the state' the public archives services, 'whatever the intentions of the service or of individual archivists may have been, were fashioned into tools of the apartheid system.' The states 'disregard for accountability and transparency' resulted in 'numerous cases of unauthorized destruction of public records by government offices' in a 'systematic endeavor to secure a selective amnesia as the apartheid system crumbled.' 27 Verne Harris asserts, 'Between 1990 and 1994, the state engaged in large-scale sanitization of its memory resources designed to keep certain information out of the hands of a future democratic government.' 28 Hilda Bernstein describes South Africa's history as one of 'torn and missing pages', and Harris adds, 'Any nation that has an incomplete understanding of its past rests on shaky foundations, and...government must be made accountable, especially in the light of the historically repressive role of the South African state.' 29 This experience echoes both Orwell's memory holes and the forced forgetting of which John Ross warns in 'Against Amnesia.' Efforts to control the past through restricting access or destroying records characterize totalitarian and closed political regimes. Jeremy Black explains, 'Terror works on ignorance, on the ungraspable nature and undefined scope of the arbitrary power of the oppressor. The authoritarian state needs to locate its opponents, to understand and control dissidence, but does not wish to be understood, other than as a comprehensive force.' In the Baltic States and former Soviet Union, 'As part of reconstruction, previously blank periods in national records could now be studied, and the archives of Communist states and parties were opened for examination.' 30 As Orwell implicitly recognized, archives thus emerged as central to the efforts to resist, to overcome, and eventually to understand and remember the oppression of totalitarian dictatorships. In Nineteen Eighty-Four memory takes several forms - personal memories of one's own experiences, collective memories shared by all members of society, memories grounded in historical interpretation of the past, and archival memory embedded in documents, statues, monuments, and even an antique glass paperweight. Winston despairs of enlisting the proles in resistance against the Party because they cannot remember their own lives before the Revolution. He tries to query one elderly prole, but concludes, 'The old man's memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information.' Soon no one would be able to compare their lives before the Party's takeover to the present; hence no one could identify the lies being told about the past. Smith despairs, '...when memory failed and written records were falsified...the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.' 31 Remaining human - retaining his personal identity and mental coherence - creates for Smith an obligation to remember. Fighting against historical amnesia becomes essential in a society that seeks to deny the past. Citing Pierre Noras monumental Les lieux de mémoire, Nancy Wood states, 'Under the impact of the waning fortunes of 'environments of memory' in the modern world, individual memories acquire ever-greater significance as the guarantors of social continuity, instilling an 'obligation to remember' that assumes the 'power of an internal coercion.'' 32 Such forms of memory thus carry significance for social stability, as Orwell recognized. The call for preservation of human memory echoes most clearly in efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, lest such atrocities be repeated. In their examination of war and remembrance in the twentieth century, Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan argue that 'experience is intrinsically social' and that remembrance is 'a process, dependent upon groups of people who act over time.' Although recognizing that 'state agency and manipulation' have been well documented, they counter Orwell's pessimism about the possibility of overcoming such efforts at control. 'Even in totalitarian situations,' they argue, 'state agency does not control individual or group memory completely.' 33 In his own effort to preserve memory as a corrective to state-enforced amnesia, Winston Smith encounters two objects - a newspaper photograph and a glass paperweight - that provide tangible links to the past. His hope of disproving the Party's lies rests on these seemingly inconsequential objects. In 1973, in his daily work routine, he had unrolled a wad of documents that included a half-torn newspaper page dated ten years earlier. This scrap of paper included a photograph of three men, later executed for conspiracy, at a Party function in New York. This evidence proved that they had not been in Eurasia on that date, as their subsequent confessions claimed, thus proving that their confessions were lies. Smith says,'...this was concrete evidence: it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.' 34 Fearful of being caught with such evidence, Smith had 'dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.' Eleven years later, he reflects that now he probably would have tried to keep the photograph. 'It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory,' he thought. Was the Party's hold on the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which exited no longer had once existed? 35 By now, however, such facts would have little significance, apart from the evidence that the Party's 'truth' consisted of lies. Smith can understand 'the immediate advantages of falsifying the past,' but the 'ultimate purpose was mysterious.' Big Brother's fierce visage could almost convince one to deny the evidence of the senses. 'Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy,' Smith concludes. 36 Memory can carry forward knowledge of the past and fills gaps in the written record. Yet to sustain memory over time we need some form of tangible evidence. 'Memory is an image of the past constructed by a subjectivity in the present,' as historian Allan Megill states. 'It has long been clear that, without independent corroboration, memory cannot serve as a reliable marker of the historical past.' 37 Orwell clearly recognizes this necessary linkage between memory and documentation through tangible traces of the past. This evidence reappears after Smith's capture, during his final interrogation by O'Brien. 'You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false,' O'Brien taunts Smith, showing him another copy of this same photograph. 'It exists!' Winston cries. 'No,' says O'Brien, before dropping it into a nearby memory hole. 'Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.' 'But it did exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it,' Smith cries out. 'I do not remember it,' says O'Brien. 38 This doublethink is an effective means of denying the past. The second memory trace is an antique glass paperweight with a piece of coral embedded, which Smith buys at a junk shop. 'I dont think it was ever put to any use. Thats what I like about it,' he tells Julia. 'It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.' 39 Smith enacts a common human response to antique objects. Allan Megill observes, 'The aesthesis of history amounts to an aesthetic orientation toward objects that are left over from the past, or that appear as if they are left over from the past.' 40 Archivists frequently see this response, or experience it themselves, toward old manuscripts or documents from earlier eras. Such relics connect us to the past, show that we are not alone in the relentless onrush of time, and provide a sensual and aesthetic pleasure. For Winston Smith such pleasures came at great cost. During a raid on the secret room where he met Julia for illegal sexual liaisons, one of the Party policemen shatters the glass paperweight on the hearthstone, exposing the fragment of coral. 'How small,' thought Winston, 'how small it always was!' 41 Without protection memory and records cannot survive intact; they cannot convey the past to future generations. This control of both records and memory is essential to the Party's ongoing power. In his efforts to undermine the Party's control, Winston imagines the possibility of a resistance movement, 'small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we have left off.' 42 The futility of such hope becomes apparent at the end, when Party loyalist O'Brien interrogates the captured Winston Smith: O'Brien smiled faintly...'Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?' 'No.' 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?' 'In records. It is written down.' 'In records. And -- ?' 'In the mind. In human memories.' 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?...I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth is truth.' 43 Once all documents have been falsified or destroyed, the only hope for salvation is the human memory and the will to resist the temptations and mind control of the Party. 'It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory,' Orwell explains. 'To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But...if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so.' 44 This completes the cycle, perfects the lie; it fills the archives with doctored records, and the human mind with false memories. In the end, of course, Winston Smith succumbs to the mind control of the Party and comes to love Big Brother. Yet Orwell did not think the future hopeless for mankind. As he stated in a letter to Francis Henson, he set the story in Britain 'in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.45 The possibility of - the necessity for - resistance to tyranny gave Orwell some optimism about the future. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not a hopeless lament, but a cry for action, a call to unseat the forces of totalitarianism wherever they might arise. Politics and literature The nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a clear political message, a warning against totalitarianism. Orwell intended this to apply both to Fascism and to Communism, and even to English Socialism. When criticized for being a political writer, Orwell countered that 'every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not...All art is propaganda.' 46 In an era of war, fascism, concentration camps, and atomic bombs, Orwell argues, these are 'what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about.' Politics invades literature, in large measure because writers have developed 'an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible.' Therefore, 'no thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one.' 47 In writing about the Barcelona fighting, for example, Orwell states that 'no one can be completely objective' on such a momentous issue. 'One is practically obliged to take sides,' he argues, and he warns the reader of his 'bias' and his possible mistakes. 'Still, I have done my best to be honest,' he pledges. 48 If a writer is forced to consider political issues, Orwell admonished, 'the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.' 49 Any use of language to convey ideas or influence another's thinking becomes political. Orwell wrote, 'In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics."' 50 The same is true for those responsible for written records, in all formats, and for shaping institutions of social memory. Historians and archivists cannot avoid taking actions that are fundamentally political. Nearly every decision they make, nearly every word they speak or write, enters the political fray. If their actions do not challenge the status quo, they will enforce it. Orwell in the archives If it is true that the victors write history, as Orwell declares, it follows that they often employ archives to institutionalize their power. This has been true throughout human history. Despots, kings, religious leaders, and presidents have legitimized their authority through documents, both symbolic and real. From Greek and Roman archives preserving records of governmental power, to medieval charters, to the American Constitution, such documents have strengthened the power of the rulers. Yet the rights of subjects have also been protected by resort to documents, from the Magna Carta to the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. In archives, from ancient to modern times, the preponderance of records has documented the activities and interests of the more powerful groups in society. Education, literacy, and access to power have reinforced the entrenched interests of the elite classes. Representation in archives has privileged the stories of these groups, since it is their voices that are most often recorded and thus most frequently heard in historical accounts. Examples abound of societies in which the powerful have ruled by controlling and manipulating information and records. As Noam Chomsky argues, 'elites depend on sophisticated information systems, media control, surveillance' and related measures to maintain their positions. 51 Echoing the implicit objective of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, Jacques Derrida explicitly links political power to the archives: 'There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.' 52 Even in democratic societies, public officials often seek to control public discourse by manipulating access to information, as former Society of American Archivists president Tim Ericson states: 'Nothing has been able to slow the growth of secrecy in government. Many suspect it serves the interests of politics, malfeasance, misdeeds, and potential embarrassment more than our national security.' 53 Government secrecy is the enemy of truth, and the beginning of amnesia. As George Orwell reminded us, the very act of remembering can be a powerful political statement. What we remember, and how we form and preserve our memories, defines us as individuals, as members of various social groups, and as a society. Confronted by demands for sanitizing the past - for a collective drink of the fatal kool-aid of amnesia - we can join Winston Smith in resistance. Faced with the overpowering totalitarian control of the Party, Smith placed his hope in history. When members of a clandestine resistance group offer a toast, the leader asks, 'What shall it be this time? ... To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?' 'To the past,' Winston suggests. 'The past is more important,' his comrade agrees. 54 For Orwell memory, both personal and collective, provided the only antidote to totalitarianism. The political act of defiance required both personal memory and the corroborating evidence of authentic and reliable records. Orwell found his answer to the dangers of political repression in the archives. |
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[1] John Ross, 'Against Amnesia'; available 18 January 2007 at: http://www.media-alliance.org/article.php?story=2004051402014153/. [2] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston, 1952): 150. [3] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2002): 67. [4] George Orwell, 'Looking Back on the Spanish War', in A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY, 1954), 202-204. [5] George Orwell, "As I Please" column, Tribune, February 4, 1944, available January 3, 2007 at: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell [6] Orwell, 'Looking Back', 206. Writing about French Caribbean archives, Laurent Dubois echoes Orwell. Dubois examines the 'limits of the archives left by slavery' and 'the stories of the slaves themselves - the absences and silences in the archives. Laurent Dubois, 'Maroons in the Archives: Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean,' in Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, 'Part III: Archives and Social Memory,' in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006): 292. [7] Pierre Nora, Entre mémoire et histoire, in Lieux de mémoire (1984), quoted in David Lowenthal, 'Archives, Heritage, and History,' in Blouin and Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: 195. [8] Blouin and Rosenberg, 'Archives and Social Memory,' in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: 165. [9] Quoted in Lowenthal, 'Archives, Heritage, and History,' in Blouin and Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: 195. [10] George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (New York: Signet Classic, 1996): 76-77. [11] Orwell, Animal Farm, 79. [12] Orwell, Animal Farm, 89-91. [13] Orwell, Animal Farm, 129. [14] Orwell, Animal Farm, 129-30. [15] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Signet Classic, 1950): 213. [16] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 38-39. [17] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 36. [18] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 32. [19] Orwell, 'You and the Atom Bomb' (1945), quoted in Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters: 86. Hitchens states that Orwell 'is credited with coining the term "cold war" in this passage.' [20] E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, quoted and paraphrased in Jeffrey Burds, 'Ethnicity, Memory, and Violence: Reflections on Special Problems in Soviet and East European Archives,' in Blouin and Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: 469. [21] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 19. [22] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 34-35. [23] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 40. [24] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42. [25] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 155. [26] Verne Harris, 'Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990-1996,' in Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007): 173-74. [27] Harris, 'Redefining Archives in South Africa': 176-77. [28] Harris, 'Contesting Remembering and Forgetting: The Archive of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission,' in Archives and Justice: 290. [29] Harris, 'Toward a Culture of Transparency: Public Rights of Access to Official Records in South Africa,' in Archives and Justice: 273-74. [30] Jeremy Black, Using History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005): 140-141, 144. [31] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 92-93. [32] Nancy Wood, "Memory's Remains: Les lieux de mémoire," History and Memory 6:1 (1994): 131 [33] Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 29. [34] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 78. [35] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 79. [36] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 80. [37] Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 35 [38] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 246-47. [39] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 145. [40] Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: 34. [41] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 222-223. [42] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 155-56. [43] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 248-49. [44] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: 213. [45] Orwell quoted in Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters: 85. [46] Orwell, 'Charles Dickens,' in A Collection of Essays: 97. [47] George Orwell, 'Writers and Leviathan,' Politics and Letters (Summer 1948) available 3 January 2007 at: a http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/writers-and-leviathan.htm. [48] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia: 159-60. [49] Orwell, 'Why I Write,' A Collection of Essays: 318. [50] Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language,' A Collection of Essays: 173-74. [51] Noam Chomsky as paraphrased by Verne Harris, 'Archives, Politics, and Justice,' in Margaret Procter, Michael Cook, and Caroline Williams, editors, Political Pressure and the Archival Record (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005): 175. [52] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996: 4. [53] Timothy L. Ericson, 'Building Our Own "Iron Curtain": The Emergence of Secrecy in American Government,' American Archivist 68 (Spring/Summer 2005): 50. [54] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 176. |