O p e n i n g s4 3hope in this dismal situation. As Winston Smith enters the
Mansions, a swirl of gritty dust manages to infiltrate the building
along with him; and though the novel itself seems to find some
ominous meaning in this intrusion (the wind is ‘vile’), a reader
might find this gust of grit rather less sinister. Dust and grit are
signs of the random and accidental. They represent bits of stuff
without rhyme or reason, which fail to add up to any total or mean-
ingful design. One might therefore see them as the opposite of the
totalitarian regime portrayed by the novel. In the same way, the
wind might be seen as a force that defies human regulation. It
blows as it will, now this way and now the other. There is no rhyme
or reason to it, either. The state, it would appear, has at least not
been able to harness Nature to its purposes. And totalitarian states
are uneasy with anything they cannot dragoon into order and intel-
ligibility. Perhaps the regime cannot entirely banish chance, rather
as Victory Mansions cannot entirely keep out the dust.
Some readers will no doubt find this interpretation absurdly
fanciful. This is because it may well be exactly that. It seems improb-
able that Orwell himself intended the dust as a positive image, or
that the thought even crossed his mind. But we shall see later that
readers must not always meekly conform to what they imagine an
author had in mind. All the same, there may be other reasons why
the interpretation does not work. It might not fit in with what we
discover as we read further into the book. We might find that the
wind is always presented as an image of evil. On the other hand, we
might not – in which case sceptical readers might need to find some
other grounds for judging this a ridiculous reading of the text, a
conclusion which is by no means out of the question.
In these brief critical exercises, I have tried to show some of the
various strategies literary criticism may involve. You can analyse