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June 5 - July 10, 2019
No work of literary fiction from the past century approaches its cultural ubiquity while retaining its weight.
I’d rather not repeatedly dig the reader in the ribs but do keep our present rulers in mind.
Orwellian has two opposing definitions: either work that reflects Orwell’s style and values, or real-world developments that threaten them.
A novel that has been claimed by socialists, conservatives, anarchists, liberals, Catholics, and libertarians
It is also, to varying and debatable degrees, a satire, a prophecy, a warning, a political thesis, a work of science fiction, a spy thriller, a psychological horror, a gothic nightmare, a postmodern text, and a love story.
While I was planning and writing The Ministry of Truth, however, the world changed.
You started this BEFORE all the madness?
Orwell wrote about fascism in 1936: “If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.”
One fellow pupil remembered him as “a boy with a permanent chip on the shoulder, always liking to find everything around him wrong, and giving the impression that he was there to put it right.” Another said, “he was more sardonic than rebellious, and standing aside from things a bit, observing—always observing.”
Welwyn Garden City, the Hertfordshire town custom-built on utopian principles.
The short story about the town with annual funeral
Up to 35,000 men from fifty-three countries served in the International Brigades and another five thousand in militias affiliated with anarchists and the POUM. Over a thousand journalists and authors went, too, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the poet Stephen Spender, who later wrote, “It was in part an anarchist’s war, a poet’s war.” Few, if any, foreigners understood the complexity of the political situation before they arrived, but still, said the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in
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“The peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so . . . One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education and so forth, to realize that ‘the truth is great and will prevail’ is a prayer rather than an axiom.”
“Progress is the realization of Utopias.” Orwell’s response was effectively “Yes, but . . .”
Perhaps it’s a credit to humanity that people were designing the ideal society long before they imagined the opposite.
To Bellamy, the status quo was not just unjust; it was untenable. He believed that he was living in critical times and that a great transformation was surely imminent, for good or ill. The fate of America would decide the fate of the world. “Let us bear in mind that, if it be a failure, it will be a final failure,” he wrote. “There can be no more new worlds to be discovered, no fresh continents to offer virgin fields for new ventures.”
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
One of his favourite quotations around this time was Nietzsche’s argument that those who fight dragons risk becoming dragons themselves.
“the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries” can happen here.
“The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards,” he later wrote, “is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”
“We can create nothing,” complains the disillusioned Knight Friedrich Von Hess, “we can invent nothing—we have no use for creation, we do not need to invent. We are Germans. We are holy. We are perfect, and we are dead.”
The events of the summer plunged Orwell into despair: “Within two years we will either be conquered or we shall be a Socialist republic fighting for its life, with a secret police force and half the population starving.”
He considered radio, as it existed in the 1940s, “inherently totalitarian.”
What would he have thought of podcasts?
Appendix Theory.
A reputation is a precious, fragile thing and must be defended.
“Is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?” Orwell asked. “Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true.”
he wrote in his pedantic, somewhat exasperated prose.
You make a few jabs at Orwell's contemporaries writing skills; do you think part of 1984 success was down to its writing being exceptional?
Orwell did not agree with Burnham, but he ensured that O’Brien did. In places, the writer (“No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power”) and the character (“We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power”) are almost interchangeable.
Under the influence of Burnham, Orwell’s thoughtful response was Nineteen Eighty-Four in embryo: “If the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it . . . though, of course, the process is reversible.” Hence the importance of describing the worst-case scenario: “If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.”
Orwell reviewed The Road to Serfdom alongside The Mirror of the Past, Lest It Reflect the Future by the pro-communist Labour MP Konni Zilliacus: “Each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.” The dangers of collectivism had been amply demonstrated but Hayek’s free-market fundamentalism, he decided, would mean “a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” Worse? From the author of Animal Farm, that was really saying something.
overheard a scared woman claiming that the rockets were the ghosts of Luftwaffe pilots killed in the Battle of Britain.
“Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life,” Orwell offered, “perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.”
“I don’t think he looked after her much, but I think he loved her,” said Eileen’s friend and colleague Lettice Cooper. “I think he didn’t know how to look after anybody, not even himself.”
Orwell visualised racial prejudice as a nerve that might go unnoticed until it was prodded. Ideologies such as Nazism activated that nerve for their own ends, but a dictatorship could only function if the mass of people went along with it, whether through malice, apathy or fear. Orwell’s belief in self-criticism on both a personal and a national level meant acknowledging that totalitarianism was not a disease unique to Germany and Russia but one with the potential to seize any society on Earth. Everybody is wired to believe themselves righteous and to defend their positions with whatever
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Orwell was less interested in the personalities of Hitler and Stalin, about whom he wrote surprisingly little, than in the reasons why so many ordinary people followed them. One was the decay of consensus reality. He described how newspaper readers, faced with genuine confusion and outright dishonesty, surrendered the idea that the truth was attainable at all: “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.”
Orwell can be forgiven for failing as an election pundit. A greater disappointment was his muted enthusiasm for a government that went on to do more to make democratic socialism a reality than any Labour administration before or since.
A glaring example of subjective author?
Lord Beaverbrook, the belligerently right-wing newspaper baron whom Orwell had memorably described as “looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose,”
Orwell’s reaction was perversely irritable: “In England you can’t get paper to print books on, but apparently there is always plenty of it for this kind of thing.”
If you suppress the rights of your political enemies, he thought, then you can be sure that one day they will suppress yours.
“Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom,” wrote Allene Talmey, “even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people beside whom he is fighting.” Not a bad capsule description.
“He is too fond of apocalyptic visions, too ready to believe that the
muddled processes of history will happen suddenly and logically,” Orwell wrote.
As a democratic socialist, Orwell felt like “a doctor treating an all but hopeless case.” The “mental disease” that gripped the world in the 1930s had not yet been diagnosed, let alone cured. Like Attlee, who talked of combining “individual freedom with a planned economy, democracy with social justice,” Orwell was looking for a third way, dominated by neither America nor Russia. He hoped for a socialist United States of Europe:
As far as Orwell was concerned, “a book doesn’t exist until it is finished.”
Do you subscribe to this?
“Reflections on Gandhi,”
A lot can happen in thirty-five years. Thirty-five years before the novel’s publication was the glorious summer of 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was still alive, Orwell was about to turn eleven, and death camps and atom bombs were science fiction. One of the novel’s dark jokes is that it may not even be 1984. When Winston comes to write his diary, he realises he isn’t sure, because “it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.” So the very first line he writes may be untrue. Orwell is telling the reader early on that this is a book in which you can trust nobody
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Very impactful sentence
Always a creature of paranoia, Hoover declined the request and instead opened a file on Orwell.
I lol'd
Evelyn Waugh
Lively and playful, it suggests, like his reading diary, that he had finally got totalitarianism out of his system,
Philosophically, Julia represents a third way to live under Ingsoc. O’Brien claims there is no such thing as objective truth; Winston insists there is; Julia maintains that it doesn’t matter.
Is Julia's philosophy appropriate?
Totalitarian states depended on the Julias.
two-way telescreen.
