HyperCultura (Oct 2014)
The British Interregnum: A Yesterday that Never Happened
Abstract
Abstract Three hundred years before George Orwell wrote his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty Four (edition 1984), 17th century events referred to as the ‘Interregnum’, could have served as one source for his inspiration. Several themes run through Orwell’s musings, and one pertains to the compilation of a dictionary scheduled for publication by the year 2050. The purpose of Orwell’s lexicon is to document the finality of a process achieved through ‘extirpation by redaction’. By intentionally reversing common definitions of specific words, and then interjecting those alternative renditions into common usage, they eventually lose their original meanings, and those words can then be removed from the dictionary. Orwell explained that it is part of a process to control human memory: “You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened” (212). Today, each time the word ‘Interregnum’ is substituted for events which took place between the years 1649 to 1660, the process of ‘extirpation by redaction’ is being employed.
