Censorship and Historical Revision in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Censorship and Historical Revision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, control of the past is more than the suppression of inconvenient facts: it changes language, collective memory, and the grounds on which a person can claim a legitimate identity. Tengo’s account of George Orwell’s novel becomes a frame for the book’s own secret literary operation. He describes historical revision as a crime against personality even as he participates in rewriting Fukaeri’s story, a tension that the story leaves unresolved rather than smoothing away.

Orwell’s system of control

Tengo recalls that when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, its year was a distant future; now, he observes, that future has become the present and will in turn become the past. In the novel as he describes it, a dictator, Big Brother, rules a bleak totalitarian society in which every piece of information is subject to censorship. The machinery of control reaches into the language itself: the protagonist works in a ministry replacing words and selecting new terms.

Revision does not merely add a preferred account to the old one. Once a new history has been manufactured, the earlier history must be entirely annulled; as the language changes, the meanings of words already in use change too. The ongoing replacement of the past ultimately leaves people unable to know what is true, or even who is an enemy and who an ally. Tengo’s explanation makes the system’s force cumulative: political control becomes control over the categories by which reality can be recognized.

Memory, truth, and personhood

Tengo calls the stripping of truth from history a crime, comparing it to depriving someone of part of their personality. He then locates history within collective memory, which is intimately interwoven with individual memory. If collective memory is falsified or rewritten, people lose the ability to preserve their legitimate sense of themselves. The damage is therefore not confined to a public record: it reaches into personal identity.

This account gives historical revision a moral weight beyond ordinary editing. The danger lies in severing people from a truthful past while leaving them with words whose meanings have been altered. In Tengo’s telling, the resulting uncertainty about truth and allegiance is also an uncertainty about the self: a person’s identity depends partly on a shared history that cannot be repeatedly replaced without consequence.

The novel’s rewriting in miniature

The discussion turns back on Tengo when Fukaeri points out that he, too, is rewriting. The remark is brief, but it places his practical work beside the political revision he has just condemned. He has agreed to reconstruct The Air Chrysalis from the core of Fukaeri’s story, changing its style deeply while trying to preserve its narrative and atmosphere. The distinction between rewriting as craft and rewriting as falsification is present, but the parallel makes it impossible to treat his work as ethically neutral.

The production history of the manuscript further complicates authorship. Fukaeri told her story while Azami typed it; Tengo works out that Azami submitted the printed text for the newcomer’s prize and probably chose its title, The Air Chrysalis, without telling Fukaeri. Later, Tengo insists that the revised work will still be Fukaeri’s novel, written by a seventeen-year-old girl, and that she alone will receive the credit if it wins or is published. Komatsu and Tengo will remain behind the scenes, like stagehands. The promise protects Fukaeri’s public authorship, but it also reveals how many hands and decisions can shape a text while disappearing from its visible attribution.

Permission, publication, and the limits of reversal

Tengo does not begin the rewrite on his own authority. When he asks the Master directly for permission, he explains that he has come for a clear yes or no. The Master agrees, citing Fukaeri’s trust in Tengo and granting him full freedom with the work, while asking to read the revised version. The authorization gives the rewriting a basis in consent, but it does not erase the differences between Fukaeri’s telling, Azami’s transcription, Tengo’s adaptation, and Komatsu’s role in production.

Once the revised manuscript has gone to the printer and proofs are being prepared for the editor-in-chief, the publications director, and the four judges, Komatsu says the process cannot simply be undone. He rejects the idea of retrieving the text and asking its recipients to act as if they had never seen it. The manuscript’s circulation has created consequences that a private decision to restore the original cannot reverse. Komatsu takes charge of what follows and plans to keep Fukaeri’s public appearances to a minimum if the work wins, presenting her as an enigmatic young writer who refuses to appear in public.

A counterpoint to the written record

Fukaeri eventually describes why the rewritten text no longer feels like her story. She says she does not want to become a novelist or write something else afterward; she asked Azami to research the Gilyaks, who live on Sakhalin and, like the Ainu and Native Americans as she describes them, have no writing system and make no documents. Fukaeri identifies with that absence of written records: once her account is written down, she says, it is no longer her story. She accepts that Tengo changed the writing exceptionally well and tells him it is not his fault, but insists that she is walking away from the broad roads.

That image of leaving the broad roads gives the conflict over revision a final, personal edge. Against a system that makes history endlessly writable—and against the layered production of a manuscript that moves toward print—Fukaeri claims a form of departure from written mediation. The novel thus places Orwell’s political falsification alongside a more intimate problem: even a rewrite undertaken with permission, preserving the story’s core and crediting its originator, may alter the relationship between a teller and what is told.