Eagleton, Terry - How to Read Literature

H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e

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There is scarcely a word in this scurrilous first sentence that is
not designed to raise the reader’s eyebrows. In the opening sentence
of George Orwell’s 1984 , by contrast, only one word is intended
to do so:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking

thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an

effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass

doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to

prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The first sentence gains its effect from carefully dropping the
word ‘thirteen’ into an otherwise unremarkable piece of descrip-
tion, thus signalling that the scene is set either in some unfamiliar
civilisation or in the future. Some things haven’t changed (the
month is still named April, and winds can still be bitter), but others
have, and part of the effect of the sentence springs from this juxta-
position of the ordinary and the unfamiliar. Most readers who
open Orwell’s novel will know already that it is set in the future,
though in the author’s future rather than our own. One might feel,
however, that the strangely striking clocks are a little too voulu, a
term meaning ‘willed’ in French that is used to describe an effect
that is rather too calculated or self- conscious. Perhaps this detail is
too contrivedly placed. It proclaims ‘This is science fiction’ rather
too loudly.
This is a dystopian novel (dystopia being the opposite of utopia)
about an all- powerful state that can manipulate everything from
the historical past to its citizens’ habits of mind. No doubt it is this
state that gave Victory Mansions its triumphalistic name. Yet it may
be that the second sentence of the passage offers a mild degree of