Kafkaesque nightmare or Orwellian hell: which dystopia are we currently living in?
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EIn the upcoming Radio 4 series Orwell vs Kafka, Ian Hislop recounts being told off by a reader of Private Eye for running an article that described the Post Office scandal as “Orwellian”. It wasn’t Orwellian, the reader argued. It was Kafkaesque. Hislop, Private Eye’s longtime editor, was unsure. Which was it?
Decades after the deaths of both writers, their adjectives have entered the bloodstream of the English language, for better or, frequently, for worse. In recent weeks, they’ve been used to describe everything from Scotland (apparently Orwellian) to the use of VAR in the Premier League (Kafkaesque), and a particularly gnarly ultramarathon in Tennessee (also Kafkaesque).
For Hislop, as well as for Helen Lewis, the journalist and Have I Got News for You regular who co-presents Orwell vs Kafka, the adjectives haven’t run out of juice. “I think they’re a good shorthand,” Hislop tells me on Zoom from the BBC. Kafka and Orwell purists may hate seeing the writers’ names used in vain, he says, but that’s the lot of the lucky writer who gets turned into an adjective: they get boiled down. “They pick up one meaning in the end. I don’t really mind.”
Since doing the series, Lewis says that she’s noticed the word “Kafkaesque” everywhere; but it doesn’t trouble her. “It is obviously such a useful way for people to encapsulate something about the world that doesn’t make sense.” Both writers address the hell of bureaucracy, “a world in which you have to interact with a machine, a world that no longer feels personal… Every time you try and return something to Amazon, that is the experience that you have.”
The series is being released to mark the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death and the 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Radio 4 also has new productions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Kafka’s The Trial); although on the face of it, the two writers don’t have a whole lot in common. They are from different backgrounds: Orwell, who was born in 1903, described himself as “lower-upper-middle class”; Kafka, who was born in 1883, was from an aspirational middle-class Jewish family from Prague.
Orwell fought to publish as much as he could; we only have Kafka’s seminal novels because they were published after his death, against his wishes, by his literary executor. But the series builds a persuasive case that both men foresaw many of the more unsettling experiences of modern life: the Twitter storm, reality TV, smartphones that surveil us.
Have Lewis and Hislop been inspired to protect themselves from the threats that Orwell and Kafka foresaw? Are they, say, getting twitchy about whether their phone is listening to them? “I’m protected largely by my own incompetence,” Hislop says cheerfully. “So technology has, I think, less of a role in depressing and oppressing my life due to the fact that I can’t work it.” One thing Orwell didn’t predict, Lewis says, is that people would choose convenience over privacy. “I think the weirdness of modern life is that we volunteer to surveil each other and ourselves. We give away so much of our privacy.”
Both writers’ fiction features protagonists who are fated to fail. After manfully resisting Big Brother, Winston Smith succumbs. At the end of The Trial, having sought to understand why he has been arrested, Josef is shot “like a dog”. Do Hislop and Lewis, I wonder, struggle with the writers’ deterministic world-view, or do they share it?
Hislop points out that around the world, in places where freedom is under threat, it’s clear that people don’t love Big Brother: “There are still people saying, ‘No, I don’t. I haven’t given in.’ The amazing protests in Iran, or the dissidents in Russia who fly back knowing they’re going to die – they do it. They don’t love him. They’re still in revolt.”
The Post Office scandal, Lewis says, is a good example of “a very long, drawn-out process that finally seems to have achieved a resolution. So I don’t think I’m quite at the Winston Smith level, where I’d just rather surrender to it and love Big Brother. I think it’s still worth fighting”.
It’s a rare author who gets turned into a widely used adjective: Dickens, Byron, Freud, Dante and Shakespeare have all had the honour, but many giants of literature have not. Who would they like to see elevated? “Terry Pratchett,” Lewis says. “I’ve been trying to make Pratchettian happen for years, and that’s because his vision of the world is very humane, very funny. He knows that humans are flawed, but he doesn’t hate them for it. He knows people are susceptible to wild enthusiasms. I’ve tried to lift my entire career, basically, from that insight.”
Hislop says he’s “very keen on Atwoodian. Because I think The Handmaid’s Tale is the best dystopia we’ve had since Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Trial. It’s the most creepy, and it’s the most worrying, and it feels in many ways the most modern.” Lewis agrees. “Since The Handmaid’s Tale came out, we have had the Dobbs decision in the US that has rolled back abortion rights, which was exactly what she warned about; we have had the growth of commercial surrogacy, which is exactly what she warned about.”
Plenty of people reckon they have a feel for both Kafka and Orwell, but haven’t actually read them. Do we perhaps overstate their importance and relevance? “A lot of people do [read them],” Hislop argues. “One of the things we chart in the series is the popularity of the books depending on what’s happening in world events. They spike in sales in particular countries when things are going wrong, which is quite interesting.” The election of Donald Trump and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine both sent sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four rocketing.
And though censorship in the UK may feel like it’s happening in increasingly subtle ways – in tweets that don’t get sent, or heterodox opinions that aren’t aired even with close friends – in much of the world, Hislop points out, the kind of hobnailed censorship foretold by Orwell is alive and well. “Orwellian is still pretty accurate in terms of describing Russia, China, Iran. A lot of totalitarian states are still really unsubtle. They don’t say, ‘Censor yourself on social media.’ They say, ‘Don’t criticise us on social media or we’ll come round and arrest you.’”
Still, the reputation of both writers can’t have been hurt, Hislop and Lewis agree, by the fact that both died young (Orwell at 46, Kafka at 40). “Dying young in English literature is a very good move,” Hislop says. Lewis tells me she read an analysis of genius once, which argued that if you want to be considered a genius, you need to die young, or “live a really long time and become the father of the nation. What you absolutely mustn’t do is die at 60, which is just a terrible in-between age.” Both authors, she believes, have benefited from people wondering wistfully, “Oh, all the works they could have written…”
Time is short. Who would win, I venture, in a fight between Orwell and Kafka? It is, Lewis suggests, tricky to be sure. “Two men with tuberculosis, men who didn’t really eat enough – they’re not really prize specimens.” What about social media? “Orwell is nothing if not up for a ruck,” says Lewis. “So I think Orwell would be on Twitter. I’m not sure about Kafka, but Orwell, yes.” And with the election coming, which is Rishi Sunak and which is Keir Starmer? “Well, Starmer has conducted a few trials,” Hislop says. “The legal process will be familiar to him.” And Sunak, Lewis says, went to Winchester; given Orwell went to Eton, they’re probably a fair match.
The radio series is excellent, full of insight and humour, but one of its pleasures is simply spending time with Lewis and Hislop, who clearly like each other a good deal.
How did they find working together? “It was Kafkaesque,” is Hislop’s immediate reply. “Yeah,” Lewis agrees. “It was Orwellian.”
Orwell vs Kafka begins on Radio 4 next Saturday 8 June at 10am, as part of a special weekend of programming to mark 75 years since the publication of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the centenary of Kafka’s death
