Texts and Human Experiences: Orwell, Stalin, and the History Paradox

I forgot how much fun teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four was. Perhaps that's a paradoxical statement, considering the miserable nature of the text and the misery-inducing state it can inspire in the reader (Orwell's masterpiece is more likely appreciated than 'enjoyed'). That said, paradox works here due to the text's inclusion as part of the Year 12 HSC Common Module Texts and Human Experiences, in which readers gain insight into 'anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies in human behaviour'. I can see that Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a joyful book and yet... I enjoy teaching it so much!

There's a certain comorbidity between the Advanced English and Extension History courses in that both involve interrogating the text to identify degrees of subjectivity. If you're lucky enough to have students who do both courses you'll notice their growing aptitude in relation to this. In regards to Nineteen Eighty-Four there's also a lot to be gained from students who do the Modern History course with all its political -isms. One key concept from Orwell's text that benefits from this increased historical understanding is the idea of a palimpsest.

The palimpsest is an ancient or medieval manuscript page that has been 'cleaned' of its original text and re-used. There's nothing sinister about this; in pre-Gutenberg times parchment was invaluable and hard to come by so repurposing was par for the course. In Winston Smith's world, however, Orwell uses the term to refer to the Party's habit of literally re-writing historical and journalistic documents. Smith's occupation is to locate any documents that contain information the Party has decided no longer fits with their official history and then rewrite them to fit with the new 'facts'.

Orwell was inspired by real practices in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Every time Stalin 'purged' an offending member from his Party and made them 'disappear' an order would go out to schools to have the students paste new text into their textbooks over the old information, essentially rendering the figure a non-person; someone who never existed. Stalin's comfort with rewriting history can also be observed in the doctored photographs from this era, whereby purged members were painted out of the pictures as if they were never there. 

Activity

My friend Kira told me that she likes to start her students off in studying Nineteen Eighty-Four by imposing an Orwellian atmosphere on the classroom with a series of strict rules designed to get them thinking about totalitarianism. It can be hard for us, having grown up with relatively high levels of privilege, to understand what it might have been like to live in the kind of nightmarish government-controlled state that Orwell describes. I wanted to do something like this and help students get their heads around the palimpsests that Winston is tasked to make throughout the course of the novel.

I don't know how else to relay this other than just describe what I did. So here it is:

• I wordlessly stopped the students at the door. This was automatically different for them because I've never been one for making kids line up outside the classroom. I usually say hello to them too but this time I just held my hand up and went back into the room for a bit as I wanted to heighten their anxiety a little.
• I drew up a table on the board, like this:

• Then I beckoned the students in and told them to place all their bags at the front of the room, and that there was to be no talking or communication. I also had a cardboard box with 'Phone Haven' written on the front and told them to place their phones into it for their 'safekeeping'. The students were very confused by this point and my straight face and lack of eye contact seemed to prevent any discussion around what was going on.
• I then dictated the following:

Year 12 HSC Advanced English is a very intense subject and requires concentration and consistent engagement. In order to foster a better working arrangement it has been decreed that you can now call your teacher by his first name within the confines of this class room. There will also be a rotating roster in which one of you must walk the room every four minutes and check that everyone is OnTask. Infractions or OffTask behaviour will be reported to the teacher immediately.

• Students then copied the table into their books, with four student names placed into the roster.
• I then gave them this context sheet to work on and had Student A start their rounds, checking that each person was doing their work. I asked Student A quietly (the room was so silent that everyone could hear me still) to report back on who was working well and who wasn't. 
• Student B had to report to me on who they thought was enjoying the activity the most and who wasn't. 
• At this point I was admittedly getting a little bored, so I gave Student C a ruler and asked them to make sure that everyone's things were at least 5cm from the edge of the table.
• Student D was told to make each individual student raise their index finger on their non-dominant hand and count slowly to five. There wasn't any relevance to this, I just wanted to emphasise how arbitrary the rules were.  
• This is where the palimpsest comes in. I looked at the roster on the board and decided which student had complied least willingly. To be truthful, all of the students had gone along with the activity with surprisingly little complaining, so I just randomly picked Student A. I told him that he hadn't done a very good job and that he was to stand outside the classroom. I then removed his name from the roster on the board, replaced it with another student's name, told this new student in front of everyone that they had done a good job as the first monitor, and then provided the whole class with paper, glue and scissors.
• I told them that they needed to change the roster in their books to reflect what was on the board. That this had always been the roster. Furthermore, I was to only be referred to as 'Sir' and not my first name and that the text in their book should reflect this. Students wrote out this new information and pasted it over the 'offending' parts of the dictated text. 

All in all, this took about 30-40 minutes. I couldn't help but laugh by the end of it, having kept a straight face for so long, and the students were relieved for the spell to be broken. This Advanced English class had only had me for a teacher for 1 lesson before this (I didn't have them for their Preliminary HSC) so a few were seriously worried that this would be how the class was like from now on!

We discussed the purpose of the activity, what a palimpsest was, and some of the students who'd already read to the end of the book told me that they'd cottoned on partway through. I have some of Stalin's doctored photographs on the back wall so we looked at those and spoke about Stalin's sinister censorship practices in the Soviet Union and how this would have influenced Orwell.

This links back really well to the rubric's mention of 'paradoxes in human behaviour', after all, what greater paradox could there be than history itself being rewritten? If history is meant to be true then how can it be changed? And yet, it happens all the time.