A Modern Dystopian Writer’s and an Ancient Greek Tragedian’s Thoughts on the Natural Way of Life

For one of my courses during my Erasmus in Ireland I had to read Sophocles’s Antigone and I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with it and with my favorite book 1984 by George Orwell, as both works deal with the idea of the natural way of life, which then gets disturbed in one way or another. Even though the two works were composed approximately 2,500 years apart, one can draw similar ideas and conclusions from both of them, suggesting that maybe there has always existed some natural, or indeed most human, way of life, worth upholding and defending.

The protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith, thinks about the natural way of life most vividly during a scene where he is eating lunch in the canteen of his workplace, The Ministry of Truth. Whilst eating lunch he finds himself in quite horrid conditions: in a dirty, greasy, and low-ceilinged room, so overcrowded that people were sitting with their elbows touching, eating crappy food with bent spoons, dented trays, and coarse white mugs. Winston looked around and found that everyone around him was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls of the party. He thought that: “there was always in one’s stomach and in your skin a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.” But he did not have memories of anything greatly different: there had never been quite enough to eat and the living conditions had always been horrible, with houses falling to pieces, overcrowded tube trains, and underheated rooms. And he pondered that: “whilst of course all of this grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes?” Before Winston eventually had to end his lunch and get back to work, he asked himself: “had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?”

Orwell wrote 1984 shortly after World War Two and the fear that he and others in his generation had was of the totalitarian states that they had just witnessed and were still witnessing at the time. These states demanded far greater compliance and obedience from the societies that they ruled over, to the extent that no state in the past had ever matched them in their demands. It were the technological advances of the 20th century that made this despotic control possible and in 1984 these technological means are made out to be even more powerful than they were during Orwell’s time, allowing for ever greater control. It is then also ironic that the technology used in 1984 has now become commonplace. The intrusion by the state into the private life of the individual and the end of personal relationships is one of the main themes of 1984 and a big fear of Orwell’s. In 1984 familial bonds are corrupted by the state, as for example children’s belief in their parents is destroyed through youth organisations which encourage them to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police, what they then also regularly do; close friendships are corrupted and made impossible by the lack of trust and great suspicion between people caused by the state’s constant surveillance and terror; as is love purposefully condemned and ruined by the state.

1984 deals then with the balance between the private and the public life, which both, I would say, consist in the loyalties we have to different institutions and/or people. In 1984 the public life has completely consumed the private one – there exist no other loyalties but the ones to the state and to the ruler and the ruling party. This, and well also the horrible material conditions rather purposefully imposed by the state on its subjects, is what makes Winston meditate in the canteen of his workplace whether the life that he is experiencing is actually the natural way of it. He certainly seems to think that it is not and that things had once been different in a long forgotten ancestral past.

1984 presents the importance of the private life and the dangers of a state with excessive power coupled with a determination to use that power against its subjects to further its own interests. In the 5th century BC Athenian play of Antigone by Sophocles the ruler of the city of Thebes, Creon, and also the chorus of the play, which represents the elders of the city, stand out in defence of the public life and its associated loyalties. In the play the view of Creon is that the public life is more important than the private one: “whoever thinks a friend more important than his fatherland, I say he is nothing,” and, “our country is our safety. Only while she voyages true on course can we establish friendships, truer than blood itself.” The first of these quotes is something that many contemporaries of Sophocles would have agreed with, that loyalties to the community take precedence over any private loyalties; whilst the second quote strongly suggests that the private life can’t even exist without the public one. And in many ways I think that the Greeks and Sophocles are right. We all enjoy the benefits of belonging to a community: law that defends us and our property, various essential infrastructure, defence against hostile groups and much more. Without these the private life would likely be impossible and as people have lived since prehistoric times in some sorts of communities one could then say that the public life has always been a component of the natural way of life and of the ancestral memory that Winston was referring to in the canteen, alongside the private one.

But, the play is more nuanced than simply stating that the public life is more important than the private one. The play presents the same theme as 1984 does of the state, or in this case the ruler, using its superior power to intrude upon the private life of the individual. After repelling the attack on Thebes by Antigone’s brother Polynices, Creon then gives the order that Polynices’s body mustn’t be buried by anyone. By giving such an order Creon blocks Antigone, a member of his community and also his relative, from burying her brother, thus intruding upon private familial bonds. This intrusion is especially significant and important in the context of ancient Greece, where funeral rites and emotional lament over the dead were the duty and privilege of the women. Creon also goes against the wishes of the gods and their laws by denying burial to a mortal, as Antigone says: “Death longs for the same rites for all,” appealing to the divine law and a widely established custom that required proper burial for every Greek. Even though this is something religious, it is actually fascinating that the gods could be seen as acting in defence of the private life of the individual, because at the end of the play Creon gets punished by the gods for his actions, which also now include burying Antigone alive in a tomb, by the suicide of both his wife and his son leaving him with no one. So, maybe what Antigone is trying to tell us, through the actions of the Greek gods, is that the boundaries of both the private and the public life should be respected and that neither one of them should encroach upon the other.

…it is the balance and stability between the private and the public life. Both are necessary for the human life and fulfill us in different ways. As an Estonian I definitely feel like I get to live in a country where this balance is respected, but as one can see from history and from the present day, it is not like that everywhere, and even in my own country there can be shifts in this balance, even though I think that the Police’s plans, as they have not been realized and were just ideas, are in that sense minor. Based on 1984 and Antigone, and on the example from my country, it seems that this balance usually gets disturbed most significantly by the state, since it is more powerful and thus also more capable in intruding upon the private life. I personally feel like that in my country a well-functioning democracy is what has led to the stability between the private and the public life. Thus, I would say that we should strive for governments that uphold and respect this balance, whether that be democracies or something else.