LITERATURE - George Orwell

George Orwell is the most famous English language writer of the 20th century, the author of Animal Farm and 1984. What was he trying to tell us and what is his genius? If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): https://goo.gl/vSiVRh

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Produced in collaboration with:

Mike Booth
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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.