I rarely feel scared when reading horror books, perhaps because supernatural entities sound, in a way, like something very abstract and relatively distant from my everyday life. But dystopian universes always leave me extremely shaken. After the third attempt, I finally managed to finish reading 1984.
I began to think about the book's possible relationships with Foucault's Biopolitics, in terms of the expansion of political control strategies to other spheres: hygiene, food, birth, longevity. The object would be to control the entire dynamics of the population: its body, its health, its ideas, its subjectivity, its life. Are our actions, dreams, behaviors, desires and everything else that is part of our life mostly our choices or are they subtly imposed by others? Or a little bit of both?
Right now, I'm not knowing what to think and, contradictorily, I’m thinking about several things at the same time. But I guess this is a feeling that only wonderful books are capable of provoking.
Dystopian universes have always had a much greater ability to make me scared. Regarding 1984 specifically, when I read it, I couldn't help but make comparisons between our politics in a modern world to the fictitious world Orwell has created here. I think that was the idea when he wrote this book: just as in his book, in real life power has no end, no satisfaction. When it can, it will control every aspect of life. When it can't, it will try. You ask very good questions, how much of life is controlled by us. I believe we have much more control than we initially think.
In my opinion Orwell was answering that via Winston. Even though his end experiences in the book were dark, he chose to look at power in the face and question it. Orwell's books are unsettling but they force the reader to ask hard questions, and that's needed especially today.
