The lesser-known Orwell: are his novels deserving of reappraisal?
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
It used to be available on line, but with the copyright crackdown, films only of historical interest, with near zero revenue potential, are no longer available.
"Orwell, the Lost Writings" is quite useful. It makes it clear where Orwell got many of the ideas for "1984". During WWII, he worked for the British Ministry of Information. Part of his job was translating news reports into the Basic English 1000 word vocabulary, for transmission on the BBC to the colonies. Mostly India. He discovered that translation to Basic English is a political act. Basic English cannot express much ambiguity. So ambiguous political statements had to be hammered down into simple unambiguous statements.
Hence Newspeak and the Ministry of Truth.
I recently noticed that "Oxford World's Classics" has started publishing Orwell's works in their series. The books in this series are generally very good with a great introduction giving the background/setting the tone for the work and great authorship/translators.
The book shop that Orwell worked in and lived above when he wrote Keep The Aspidistra Flying is now split between a fancy bakery and a hairdresser. I get my hair cut at the hairdresser.
I think Orwell's books are more than social commentary, and more than far-sighted predictions.
If you look carefully, they can help navigate, survive, and thrive in an "Orwellian" environment.
I think that's why 1984 is standard reading material in Orwellian schools.
It makes the smart kids think about things, and come to the conclusion that they can try to start a rebellion, get found out, and find a rat cage on their head, or they can be happy getting better rations than the dumber kids.
there is plenty of fiction out there that takes another route, from bringing down the system, to the system collapsing upon itself, to finding a symbiotic way to co-exist with it while maintaining the self, to many other approaches.
This isn't a hypothesis I've come across before. On reflection I firmly disagree with it, but it's an interesting claim and worth discussing.
The main problem I have is that there is a much simpler explanation for why schools choose the bleak dystopian novels: simply because all the most established, popular, and excellent dystopian novels are the bleak ones. 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale etc... . The reason these books are taught in school is actually that bleak novels capture the human condition more successfully, and thus stand the test of time and become classics. The only dystopian novels I can think of with a successful protagonist, which are cuturally established and excellent at a literary level, are Philip K Dick's books; there are many other reasons schools would not choose to offer these, not least the prevalent casual attitudes towards drugs.
The other issue I have is that the commonly accepted moral thrust of the above listed books is not that one should simply play by the rules and keep one's head down. It is instead that we should be collectively aware of the threat of society going in that direction, and take steps to prevent it before it gets as bad as that. Whilst all those novels are bleak depictions, they contain a message of hope: that we still have time to stop this from happening. If you look at the life of George Orwell and the views he expressed publicly, it's clear that he would not advocate keeping your head down and working hard to get more "rations" than your neighbour. He fought in Spain with the anarchists against the fascists, and spent a lot of his life going hungry rather than give up his vocation of being an authentic writer.
Lastly, is there any evidence/data to suggest that books like 1984 are more common in more authoritarian schools? I would actually expect the opposite, that schools with a more liberal leaning are more likely to teach it for the reasons I state in the paragraph above.
Also compare to various essays of Orwell's, especially Such Such Were the Joys, The Atomic Bomb and You, etc.
Some people find the writing about all of the factions confusing and hard to track, but I think that's on purpose. I think being there, it would have been confusing as well.
I read it a few years before actually making it to Barcelona and the description of the city came back to me in a flood as I was spending time in it. I hadn't realized how well he had described the look at feel of the city but the image I drew in my mind while I read the book was almost exactly what it actually looks like in many parts.
Orwell had an amazing ability to evoke complex settings in surprisingly sparse and unadorned language.
I find it strange that a widely read author with a known interest in history had apparently never heard of the panopticon. Orwell outright states that the telescreens work on the same principle: "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. ... You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
At least the Orwellian invisible guards were paid employees. On contemporary Internet, there is no shortage of unpaid volunteers digging in other people's activity just for the thrill of getting someone punished.
The difference is that the state apparatus may run out of money; the USSR did. You never run of enthusiastic volunteers, as long as you reward their actions with what they want, in this case, a public spectacle of a virtual guillotine.
Orwell understood that in order to create an atmosphere of total oppression there could be no loyalty between anyone. This is why the party criminalizes sex for pleasure. It’s the recognition that the loyalty within families is the greatest threat to the totalitarian state.
The government in Brave New World recognizes that as well but seeks to eliminate the threat by other means (taboo and superficial pleasure).
We liked 1984. Forbidden fruit tastes the best, but it also spoke to us. Those empty slogans and lingering fear of the Secret Police did translate fairly well into real life behind the Curtain.
Plus, Asimov complaining about Orwells female characters is kind of rich.
I'd go with Orwell over Asimov as far as predictions of the future...
Great ideas, great concept, definitely food for thought - but painful to read.
Narrative is a different art.
Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)
I suspect you mean Atlas Shrugged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
(And now I've got Tom Hanks as Hank Reardon in my head. Didn't see that coming.)
This aspect of the Futurians is often memory-holed, I thank you for bringing it to everyone's attention.
His critique of the science fiction, that screens which watch you back is a poor prediction (because how on Earth could Google watch people at scale?!) is particularly hilarious, if a bit sad.
It critiques 1984 for it's narrow focus on the Stalinist form of totalitarianism, but I see no actual apologia for Stalinism. (The closest is the acknowledgement of the role the USSR under Stalin played as an ally against the Nazis.)
It does argue that 1984 misses the internal instability of totalitarianisms like Stalinism, which besame evident after 1984 was written.
> His critique of the science fiction, that screens which watch you back is a poor prediction (because how on Earth could Google watch people at scale?!) is particularly hilarious, if a bit sad.
The critique isn't of screens that watch you back, but of the failure of imagination of Orwell envisioning only screens by which a human watches you in real time rather than one that does so by some automated, scalable means.
Instability compared to what? Stalin's USSR survived major natural disasters and wars, expanded its territory and the leader died in office. Multiple democracies in contemporary Europe were destroyed from the same influences. Only UK, Sweden and Switzerland could be said to be at least as stable as Stalinist USSR.
I despise and hate Stalin, but his regime was fairly stable compared to contemporaries.
Instability compared to what Asimov sees as Orwell's perspective that Stalinism is impervious to internal erosion (including death of the leader.)
Soviet Communism survived, it did not survive unchanged.
> it became more stable as Stalin was driver of instability at the top.
Asimov would, based on the fairly explicit statements in the review on the topic, say that it got more stable precisely because it became less totalitarian.
I’m not interested in arguing whether Asimov is right on this point, but it is indefensible to claim that his painting of Stalinism as tyranny that was explicitly repudiated as such by later Soviet Communism is an apologia for Stalinism.
"Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight."
That is not what instability of regime means. It does not refer to individual being forced to retire. The regime itself was more stable then before. Khruschev retirement did not weakened nor endangered regime.
Stalin did changed people on top too. Some changes and power struggles after his death are not more instability or "touched" communism.
Khruschev was the first one retired. Powerful people before him left power dead (by execution) or by being imprisoned forever. That is being more stable.
It did became safer to both hold power and not to hold it in Russia after Stalin death.
Also, actual Stalin system was remarkably stable.
Finally, the system was that most of the time they don't watch. Only sometimes. Which would describe tech of 2021 quite accurately. It is 40 years later and pretty much that is what we got.
Sure, but that's not really germane to the review, which isn't that 1984 doesn't highlight some things that are real concerns that might affect even non-Stalinist governments (as Stalinism itself includes some elements that can be found outside of it, as well), but that 1984 is basically an unimaginative, literal overlay of Stalinism on top of contemporary (at the time of writing) English society through the biases of the authors social class where the technical elements were relatively unimaginative and poorly thought through in their pragmatics.
Scroll to the bottom of the article.
> His critique of the science fiction, that screens which watch you back is a poor prediction (because how on Earth could Google watch people at scale?!) is particularly hilarious, if a bit sad.
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
I guess this answers it
It is also stretch - not making robots did not mean you are not able to imagine them. It means they are not necessary for story. Asimov was not too good with humans, which would be fine. But the idea that it must be robots is weakness of his critique.
In general, the fact that Orwell is remembered in the public consciousness as the 1984 guy is a shame (and is particularly jarring when right wing populists invoke his name to decry people who try and get them to stop lying).
Orwell's essay 'England Your England' (the first part of 'The Lion and the Unicorn') is perhaps his piece which is dearest to my heart, as a patriotic but anti-reactionary Englishman. However, of broader appeal are 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging' - essays which expose the brutal workings of colonialism better than any jargon-laden journal of post-colonial theory ever could.
But that's just the start when it comes to Orwell. I don't think the man wrote anything not worth reading and at his best he was near-untouchable in his ability to capture in the written word a society and its injustices.
> In general, the fact that Orwell is remembered in the public consciousness as the 1984 guy is a shame (and is particularly jarring when right wing populists invoke his name to decry people who try and get them to stop lying).
What do "right wing populists" mean when they call critics "Orwellian"?
Not surprising that this sentence was written by someone in the UK; to the US reader it's still quite relevant: for a significant proportion of the population life is just as desparate and his trenchant commentary on the Fabians (closest to contemporary US socialists) as earnest, sandal-wearing vegetarians is apposite here, not just metaphorically but just as often literally as in his time.
Politics and the English Language https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
It shows that, even before actual self-proclaimed fascist nations were defeated in WW2, the word had effectively lost all meaning and was just a pejorative:
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
The short-lived "Orange man bad" meme has not aged well.
Ian Hislop has a very good introduction to Orwell's "As I please" lectures.
Conflating the two is disingenuous at best.
As for "ideas", look at what Fox News has done to political discourse in America and tell me that's a good thing. I'm against outright censorship but they really push the limits of "free speech". From my point of view, they engage in stochastic terrorism and do not engage in good faith.