The Reality of Nineteen Eighty-Four. How Fiction Becomes Social

A literary text, according to the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser, operates by oscillating between the limits of the fictional and social worlds and thereby expresses the plasticity of the human being and its continued evolution of self. Notwithstanding, the question of how these fictional ideas spread into the social domain is rarely tackled. At the heart of this presentation is the task to forward develop an understanding of how the fiction found in literature participates in the shaping of social reality.

The reception of George Orwell’s popular novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in the German public sphere in the years 1983/1984 will be taken to exemplify the irruption of the fictional into the social. Symbolizing the concept of totalitarianism in its purest and most extreme form, the element of imagery provided by the (fictional) literary text moves beyond signification and pretends an ontology. This socio-fictional aggregate referred to either by the novel’s title or the term Big Brother has come to shape the idea of totalitarianism for a whole era. I will introduce the social philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis to the debate, as I believe it can help us understand the functioning of the fictional within the social as displayed in this phenomenon. Castoriadis attributes primary importance to the imagination for the creation of social knowledge as well as the interaction between the social imaginary significations and the (individual) radical imagination. His framework of the interrelation between the individual and the social may well be perceived as a gateway for the irruption of the fictional as found in the arts into the social.

For a sociological understanding of literature, I therefore propose to take the element of ontological pretension provided by fiction into consideration. Fiction can thus lay the foundation for abstract social terms and hence becomes part of social reality.