In America, whose second name, I sometimes think, should be “amnesia,” the historical sense in this century chronically suffers one lesion after another as literary periods crowd each other out with extreme celerity, each presenting itself as the culmination of the imaginative process of all times. In consequence our literary world is afflicted with an acute loss of memory ….
—Philip Rahv, in Literature and the Sixth Sense

All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”
—George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four

No reader of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is likely to forget the phenomenon of the “memory hole.” By means of this insidious device, all inconvenient reminders of the past—anything, indeed, that threatens to contradict the currently accepted gloss on past events—is swiftly consigned to oblivion. Nor is the essential purpose of the “memory hole” easily forgotten, either. “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date . . . . All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

When Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published in 1949, it was hailed by a critic in Partisan Reviewas “the best antidote to the totalitarian disease that any writer has so far produced.” This was high praise indeed from a quarter that—in those days—rather specialized in the literature of totalitarianism. The critic who wrote those words was Philip Rahv, one of