I was surprised at this article, posted by a colleague on Facebook. Apparently, it is necessary to debunk Orwell. The article meanders, mostly stressing the "constructedness" of Orwell's nonfiction and his use of a persona, and moving to the inaccuracy of his fiction. The assumption is that the person who would see Orwell's vision in 1984 as relevant in some way has been deluded into thinking that it is not fiction but prophecy. In doing so, the writer is speaking first of all to an audience of intellectual equals and like-minds, who look down on all of the uninitiated who get dangerous ideas from reading without guidance. At the same time, a group of outsiders is constructed, who are misinformed about the author and his works, and the connection between life and fiction in general. Though not the primary audience of the article, these individuals can benefit from the wisdom imparted, while the intended audience is invited to dismiss Orwell intellectually, or to take comfort in the fact that those who use him incorrectly are ignorant of Orwell's true character and purpose in writing. What risk does he pose? What is the motivation behind this article? What occasioned the discussion of his life and works? Any ideas I might have about it derive from the following passages:
Some people in 1949 received "1984" as an attack on the Labour Party (in the book, the regime of Big Brother is said to have derived from the principles of "Ingsoc"; that is, English Socialism), and Orwell was compelled to issue, through his publisher, a statement clarifying his intentions. He was a supporter of the Labour Party, he said. "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive," he continued, "but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences."
The attitude behind this last sentence seems to me the regrettable part of Orwell's legacy. If ideas were to stand or fall on the basis of their logically possible consequences, we would have no ideas, because the ultimate conceivable consequence of every idea is an absurdity—is, in some way, "against life." We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices, intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation; a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition—to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all. Orwell did not invent this kind of argument, but he provided, in "1984," a vocabulary for its deployment.
"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as "liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. [And "fascist." Don't forget "fascist." There are a lot of labels given to opponents that stop the conversation.] When a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people shout "Big Brother." When a politician refers to his proposal to permit logging on national land as "environmentally friendly," he is charged with "doublethink." When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is accused of being a member of the "thought police." The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. [True, but Orwell's lifetime saw, by the admission of the article, saw the actualization of extreme versions of ideas. One of the article's points is that Orwell considered Hitler attractive; that he had the same attraction to Hitler's brand of socialists as the "few" fascist sympathizers in England and France. And yet, he witnessed the extremist tendency of the ideas' implementation. Can we be secure in the assumption that ideas will NOT tend toward extremes?] People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to "1984."
There are Big Brothers and thought police in the world, just as there are liars and madmen. "1984" may have been intended to expose the true character of Soviet Communism, but, because it describes a world in which there are no moral distinctions among the three fictional regimes that dominate the globe, it ended up encouraging people to see totalitarian "tendencies" everywhere. There was visible totalitarianism, in Russia and in Eastern Europe; but there was also the invisible totalitarianism of the so-called "free world." [I wonder what is in the author's head here. Hasn't discussion of U.S. "imperialism" become common place? How is that different from the "invisible totalitarianism of the so-called "free world"? The author's intentions are well-concealed, here. The U.S. is mentioned in the article as a variable that was outside of Orwell's consideration. So is the "free world" evoked ironically here because Orwell viewed it skeptically? Or is the "free world" being evoked skeptically by the author, who does not believe in a distinction between the "free world" and "totalitarianism"? I tend toward the former interpretation: that the author is referring to Orwell's supposed fallacy. But it seems to me that this is contrary to how we see the U.S. represented--oh wait! It seems contrary to how the U.S. was described under Bush. But this is a Brave New World! And we should not see it in Orwellian terms--so this author seems to say. Or Huxleyan terms either.] When people talk about Big Brother, they generally mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, oppression in democratic disguise (unlike the system in Orwell's book, which is so overt that it is advertised). "1984" taught people to imagine government as a conspiracy against liberty.And the conclusion:
Orwell's prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought. Orwell was not clairvoyant; he was not infallible; he was not even consistent. [How many theorists are?] He changed his mind about things, as most writers do. [BINGO!] He dramatized out of a desire to make the world more the way he wished it to be, as most writers do. He also said what he thought without hedging or trimming, as few writers do all the time. It is strange how selectively he was heard. [Don't we typically take the works that are most useful or relevant and apply those works? It is strange how selectively Kristeva was heard, and she wasn't writing imaginative prose. . .] It is no tribute to him to turn his books into anthems to a status quo he hated. [Nor is it a tribute to him to ignore that which he critiqued--even if he hated everything!!] Orwell is admired for being a paragon when he was, self-consciously, a naysayer and a misfit. If he is going to be welcomed into the pantheon of right-thinking liberals, he should at least be allowed to bring along his goat. [Really, he was an intellectual freak. Don't use his works to refute US.]
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