George Orwell
Was an English intellectual who died in 1950,
and used literature
for the only reason it utimately really exists:
to try to change the world for the better.
He was in the deepest sense
a political writer;
someone who wanted art
to help us grow kind,
fair, wise.
In 1946, the year after the publication
of his momentaneously popular fable,
''Animal Farm'', he wrote an essay titled
''Why I write'',
which laid out his approach
with a characteristic clarity.
''What I wanted to do throughout
the past ten years
is to make political writing
into an art.
My starting point is always
a feeling of partisanship,
a sense of injustice.
When I sit down to write a book,
I don't say to myself
´´ I'm going to produce
a work of art´´
I write it because there is some lie
I want to expose,
some fact to which I want
to draw attention, and my
initial concern is to get a hearing
To understand why Orwell matters
we therefore have to undestand
what this most political of writers loved
and what he hated,
what he was in rebellion against
and what he championed.
This is what will give us the keys
to undestanding his remarkable work,
and painful, yet deeply
fullfiled life.
George Orwell always hated
the social group which he was,
despite everything, an exemplary member:
Intellectuals.
From an early age,
he'd wanted to be a writer.
But George Orwell exelled
at never quite belonging
He was born in 1903 in India,
which was then part of the British empire,
to economically fragile
civil servant parents,
who fought for him
to have a classic, upper middle class
English upbringign.
And then hoped he might become
a doctor or a lawyer.
They sent him to what turned out to be
a crippling, mean spirited
English prep school, at the age of eight,
from where he won a scholarship to Eton
But he turned against the values
and spirit of the English Public School System
He never went to university
and stint as an imperial policeman in Burma,
he settled into the life of the odd throbbing
literary intellectual.
Working in a hampstered bookshop,
reviewing other people's books,
and eventually,
writing some of his own.
Nevertheless, Orwell's desdain of
intellectuals was a constant.
He accused them of a range of sins:
a lack of patriotism,
resentment of money,
fisical vigor,
concealed sexual frustration, pretension
and dishonesty.
He knew it all from the inside.
But Orwell's greatness
emerged from the right determnation
with which he recognized and
came to triumph against such tendencies
in himself.
´´The really important fact about
the English intelligentsia´´,
he once wrote,
is that severance from the common culture
of the country.
In left wing circles
it's always felt that there is something slightly
disgraceful in being an English man.
And there is a duty to snigger
at every English institution,
from horse racing to suet puddings.
Orwell's generation of intellectuals,
which has witnessed the first
World War and the Great Depression
was obsessed with aerie,
abstract, large schemes to redeem
human kind.
Some were fanatical communists,
others staunch offenders of
radical capitalism, a few
admired the new authoritarian regimes
of Italy, Spain and Germany
and wanted something similar
to take hold in anglophones fear.
Orwell listened, and was for a time a little
seduced, but became gradually
to champion something far
more radical: the tastes, opinions,
needs and outlook of someone
he called the ordinary person.
A knowledge of ordinary life came
rather late to Orwell.
As a typical product of an English Public
School, he was a little exposed
in anyone below his own social
class.
A tendency compounded by a naturally
aloof, bookish and different manner.
A friend described him in age 25 as,
remarkably muff eaten for one of his age.
But Orwell set out to make up
for his lack of knowledge
and gradually came to be the grat defender
of what he repeatedly called
ordinary life.
Life of people, not especially blessed
with material goods, but people who
work on ordinary jobs,
who don´t have much of an education,
who won´t achieve greatness
and yet nevertheless, love, care for
others, work, have fun, raise children,
and have large thoughts about the deepest
questions, in ways that Orwell
thought especially admirable.
Orwell´s journey into ordinary life
began in the spring of 1928,
when he left the privileges of
his class behind, and went
to work in series of menial
service jobs.
In the French and English capitals
experiencies he was to recount in
his book: Down and Out in Paris and London
published in 1933.
The book is filled with
affection and portraits of life
behind stairs in hotels and restaurants
and reveals camaraderie, humor and warmth.
of an assortment of cleaners,
shoe rubbers, waiters, chefs,
and the occasional prostitute tramp.
It was a side of life Orwell was further
to investigate. In a book chronicling his
around the industrial coal mining of
Northern England.
In a 1937 book titled ´´The Road to Wifan
Pier´´again, without sentimentality or
reverse snobbery, Orwell casts the
generous complex eye over
the people he met, and concluded that
the average pub in a coal mining
village contained more intelligence,
wisdom, than the British cabinet, or the
high table of an Oxbridge college.
Orwell especially liked the lack of
prudishness and hipocrisy among
the ordinary people he met. One thing one
notices when he writes, if he looks
directly at the common people,
especially in the big towns, is that they
are not uritanical; they are veteran
gamblers, drink as muh beer as their
wages will permit and devoted to
boardy jokes and use, probably, the
foulest language in the world.
Then, as now, there was plenty of
information in the news about
ordinary people. But Orwell understood
that these news tended to turn people
into abstractions, and he saw it as the
role on his craft, literary journalism, to
flesh out the human beings behind
the statistics.
And so, correct the prejudice and casual
racism that circulated all around.
In an essay written on a trip to Marrakech
Orwell wrote sarcastically are
the typically neo-colonial attitude of
travelers towards the local inhabitants.
´´The people here have brown faces´´
´´´There are so many of them, are they
really the same flesh as yourself?´´
´´Do they even have names?´´
´´Or are they merely a kind of
undifferentiated brown stuff?´´
´´As individual as bees or coral insects´´
All people who work with their hands are
partly invisible. And the more important
the work that they do, the less visible
they are.
Orwell´s ove of the ordinary inspired his
curiosity about a range of themes
not often considered in literature. He
thought about and wrote in praise of
comics and country walks, dancing and
flowers. He wrote bravely in defense
of English cooking, kippers, Yorkshire,
pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and
crumpets he wrote. And then asked,
where else other than Englsh cooking
do you see potatoes roasted under the
joint? Which is, far in a way, the best
way of cooking them. Orwell wrote tenderly
in defense of Charles Dickens, at the time
this great writer was considered low brow
and too popular to win the esteemed
of intellectuals. In a great essay of 1946
Politics and the English Language,
Orwell stood up against the pros typical
of intellectuals, high blown and full
of long fancy words and defended
a simple, almost naive way of writing.
He outlined the list of rules for how to
write well, which included a complete ban
on fancy words like ´´phenomenon´´,
´´categorical´´, ´´utilize´´,
´´inexorable´´ and ´´veritable´´.
Orwell revealed a hatred of foreign words
like status quo and deus ex machina, and
concluded that there is really no need
for any of the hundreds of foreign
phrases now curent in English.
George Orwell is today extremely
famous for two books which played a very
small part in his life, if measured simply
in terms of years. He wrote Animal Farm
in 1945 when he was 42 and he published
Nineten Eighty-Four in 1949 when he
was 45. But he was dead by January 1950
at the age of only 46.
In other words, he had just four short
years being the Orwell we know today.
Nevertheless, these two books are
anchored in deep thinking that Orwell
had done all his adult life about how
literature should be written in an age
of movies and mass communication.
In short, he knew that the task of a
writer was to ensure that the most serious
ideas should achieve mass popularity, a
double act, which requiered particular
skill and intelligence. Animal farm is a
political trapped about how revolutions
fall prey to counter-revolutions,
and turn their backs on their own original
ideals.
It fairly maps out the progress of French
revolution. The European Revolutions
of 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1917
But, described like this, no one outside
of the few academics would ever bother
to read it.
Orwell´s genius was to hit upon of
form the fable which would carry his story
to a mass audience and could be undestood
as he put it, by more or less, anyone.
So Orwell did what Aesop, Walt Disney,
La Fontaine and Beatrix Potter amog many
others, have done. Which is to tell a
story about humans via animals.
In the process, Orwell revealed the sins
of revolutionaries are not limited to
people involved in actual revolutions.
Indeed. that it´s a permanent human
possibility to believe when he´s guided
by high ideals and then go on to betray
them all. Every time a revolution now goes
wrong, people bring up Animal Farm, and
declare it to be ahead of it´t time.
So prescient.
This is the genius of Orwell´s fable.
By cutting out all contemporary human
references, Orwell found a way to tell us
about ourselves, for all time, even for
the future.
Having successfully reinvented the fable,
Orwell, in an astonishing burst of
creativity, reinvented the science fiction
novel.
As a boy, he loved the novels of H.G.Wells
Especially, the Time Machine and The War
of The Worlds.
Like Wells, Orwell seized upon trends in
his own time and try to imagine how they
might develop over the long term.
His sience fiction novel is set in
Airstip One, a place once known as
Great Britain, but now province of super
state of Oceania, and lockd in perpetual
ideological conflict with two other blocks
Eurasia and East Asia,
Like all great dystopian novels, Orwell´s
book was an attempt to warn his own
society about it´s own alarming trends.
For example, he could see that what can
terrorize a country is not so much
outright turture or clumsy covert
restrictions on free speech, but a lulling
of the citizenry through sophisticated
entertainment and empty-headed
news reports, all wrapped up in a constant
reference to freedom.
So, in 1984, society is full of intriguing
new machines, omnipresent screens, which
both addicted and at the same time watch
over their citizens.
Julia, the leading female figure in the
novel, works on the department of
goverment known as ´´Mini True´´, which
systematicaly distorts access to
information in highly subtle ways
To blind the citizenry to their
enslavement. Julia operates a machine that
turns out porn novels alongside films
oozing with sex, rubbishing newsapers
containing almost nothing but sport, crime
and astrology. The people, however, don´t
feel they are enslaved.
As Orwell so well understood, the really
clever and scary regimes of the modern
world aren´the obviously dictatorial ones.
They are the apparently democratic ones
that give their citizens the distinctive
feeling that they are free, when in fact
blinding them with constant sexual
titillation, and sentimental distractions.
George Orwell had the wisdom to make
himself remarkably future proof.
He was weary of economic and political
abstractions. He stayed close to the truth
of ordinary ife. The realities of sex,
food, money, love and pleasure and he
wrote with total clarity about enduring
eternal themes on human nature.
He is perhaps, the most successfull
serious English language writer of the 20th
century and gives us the tools to continue
to imagine what writing should be in our
own time. Ultimately, Orwell´s message is
the same as the plea that he discerned in
all of Charles Dickens books. In the
essay he wrote on him namely, that human
beings should behave better. This, as he
pointed out, is either a terrific cliche
or just about the most important
instruction in the whole life. It was
Orwell´s genius to remind us that it is,
of course,very much, the latter.