"Into the Memory Hole": Totalitarianism and "Mal d'Archive" in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "The Handmaid's Tale."

Totalitarianism in literature; 1984 (Book : Orwell); Handmaid's Tale, The (Book : Atwood); Orwell, George, 1903-1950; Atwood, Margaret, 1939-; Derrida, Jacques, 1930-2004; Essays

Drawing on Jacques Derrida's deconstructive engagement with the concept of the archive, this essay offers a comparative reading of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1948) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985). Focusing on their depictions of the dystopian manipulation of history and memory, it argues that Orwell and Atwood both equate totalitarianism with the domination of the individual subject via the insidious control of the documentary record. Totalitarianism is thus exemplary of what Derrida would call "mal d'archive," a "fever" in the archives that also amounts to an archival violence or "archive evil." But "mal d'archive" can also be translated as a legitimate "passion" for the archive, and each novel features a resistant protagonist who attempts to create an archive of documents for a future history beyond the reach of the dystopian regime's purview. This essay concludes, however, by casting doubt on such a utopian linking of the archive with the possibility of ideological critique. Specifically, metafictional framing devices are included at the conclusions of both novels to suggest that the seemingly liberatory scholarly discourse of "archival recovery" has the potential to produce its own troubling effects of totalitarian domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]