[lbo-talk] Orwell

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Mar 19 12:48:27 PST 2004


I don't know what sort of criticism of Orwell Catherine is looking for, but here are a couple of articles (neither is anti-Orwell, though):

Terry Eagleton, "Reach-Me-Down Romantic," LRB, 25.12, June 19, 2003,<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/eagl01_.html>. It's a book review in which both prosecution and defence of Orwell are represented.

Stephen Woodhams, "The English observer: Orwell, Englishness and Empire," _Imperium_ 3, Spring 2002, <http://www.imperiumjournal.com/0pages/30004.html>.

***** Raymond Williams in his excellent book in the "Modern Masters" series [_George Orwell_, Viking, 102 pp.] interprets the division [between Eric Blair and George Orwell] not so much as a dichotomy within Orwell himself as a split in English life to which he was partly exposed in his childhood and at school, and to which he later deliberately exposed himself. Williams produces the theory that Orwell was in pursuit of three myths:

The myth of his boyhood, the special people, the "family," is succeeded by the observations he made on his return -- a scene of bitter and bleak contradictions. But then, in a third phase, he creates a new myth that until quite recently remained effective.

This new myth is of "an England of basic ordinariness and decency," a "real England," "an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past," a family in which the "wrong members" have gotten into control.

Orwell thought -- or felt -- then that he had been thrust, by circumstances, among the "wrong members" of the society, that is to say the upper class. He had to get back to the "real England"; slogging his way there in muddy boots and having changed into a working-class uniform, following the example of Jack London.

(Stephen Spender, "The Truth about George Orwell," _The New York Review of Books_, November 16, 1972, <http://home.planet.nl/~boe00905/OrwellNYreview161172.html>) *****

About _1984_, Williams wrote:

***** Not in Utopia -- subterranean fields -- Or in some secret island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us -- the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!

Wordsworth's emphasis, it is true, can go either way: into revolutionary effort, when history is moving; into a resigned settlement when it goes wrong or gets stuck. The utopian mode has to be read, always, within that changing context, which itself determines whether its defining subjunctive mood is part of a grammar which includes a true indicative and a true future, or whether it has seized every paradigm and become exclusive, in assent and dissent alike.

For the same consideration puts hard questions to the now dominant mode of dystopia. Orwell's 1984 is no more plausible than Morris's 2003, but its naturalized subjunctive is more profoundly exclusive, more dogmatically repressive of struggle and possibility, than anything within the utopian tradition. It is also, more sourly and fiercely than in Huxley, a collusion, in that the state warned against and satirized -- the repression of autonomy, the cancellation of variations and alternatives -- is built into the fictional form which is nominally its opponent, converting all opposition into agencies of the repression, imposing, within its excluding totality, the inevitability and the hopelessness which it assumes as a result. No more but perhaps no less plausible than Morris's 2003; but then, in the more open form, there is also Morris's 1952 (the date of the revolution), and the years following it: years in which the subjunctive is a true subjunctive, rather than a displaced indicative, because its energy flows both ways, forward and back, and because in its issue, in the struggle, it can go either way.

(Raymond Williams, _Problems in Materialism and Culture_, Verso, 1997 [1980], p.207-208) *****

Also take a look at Raymond Williams, "Nature's Threads," _Eighteenth-Century Studies_ 2.1 (Special Issue: Literary and Artistic Change in the Eighteenth Century), Autumn, 1968, pp. 45-57, <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-2586%28196823%292%3A1%3C45%3A%22T%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F>. The article is, obviously, not about Orwell at all. Its main object of criticism is Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village_ (which you can read at <http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem875.html>). But in the course of analysis, Williams explains the concept of "negative identification," which he applies to Orwell as well as Goldsmith. -- Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list