Inside the Myth

Orwell: Views From the Left

edited by

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

LAWRENCE AND WISHART
LONDON

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This edition first published 1984
© Lawrence and Wishart, 1984

Each essay © the author

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Contents

Introduction 7

Malcolm Evans

Text, Theory, Criticism: Twenty

Things You Never Knew About George Orwell 1 2

Alan Brown

Examining Orwell: Political and Literary Values

in Education 39

Alaric Jacob

Sharing Orwell’s ‘Joys’ - But Not His Fears 62

Bill Alexander

George Orwell and Spain 85

Robert Stradling /

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War:

A Historical Critique 103

Beatrix Campbell

Orwell - Paterfamilias or Big Brother P 1 26

Deirdre Beddoe

Hindrances and Help-Meets:

Women in the Writings of George Orwell 139

Stephen Sedley

An Immodest Proposal: Animal Farm

155

6

Inside the Myth

Lynette Hunter

Stories and Voices in Orwell’s Early Narratives 163
Andy Croft

Worlds Without End Foisted Upon the Future -

Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four 1 83

Stuart Hall

Conjuring Leviathan: Orwell on the State 2 1 7

Christopher Norris

Language, Truth and Ideology:

Orwell and the Post-War Left 242

Antony Easthope

Fact and Fantasy in Nineteen Eighty-Four 263

Notes on Contributors 286

Christopher Norris
Introduction

Few readers will need to be warned in advance that this book is
no pious celebration of Orwell in the wake of his annus
mirabilis. ‘Orwell and the Left’ is a violently disjunctive
coupling, as many of these essays make clear. They focus on the
ways in which Orwell has been kidnapped by the forces of
reaction, taken over triumphantly by those who hold him up as
the great example of a socialist who finally saw the light. No
matter how ambivalent (or downright contradictory) his
writings, Orwell is now firmly established as the voice and
conscience of ‘liberal’ values against everything perceived as a
threat to consensus democracy. The fact that such consensus is
largely manufactured - and by methods which Orwell clearly
foretold - is an irony which socialist readers will recognise but
hardly relish. The prophecies lent themselves all too readily to
the kind of right-wing recuperative reading which has turned
Orwell into the patron saint of current Cold-War doublethink.
One can imagine his misery and revulsion had Orwell lived to
read some of the subtle and not-so-subtle propaganda put out
in his name during 1984. The ghost must still be dancing on
his grave in a fury of impotent scorn. But the fact that his
writings are subject to such gross appropriation is evidence of
their deeper complicity with those who would so use them.

Alan Brown shows this process very strikingly at work in the
school examination system, where Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four are among the perennial O and A Level texts, with
students left in no doubt as to what kind of model answer the
examiners are looking for. The simplest-seeming questions

7

8 Inside the Myth

conceal a whole rhetoric of loaded politcal values. Malcolm
Evans extends a similar analysis to the way that ‘Orwell’ has
been processed by the popular media as a handy source of
images and slogans for various propaganda purposes. That
these are often crude interpretations - strategic misreadings at
some crucial point - doesn’t alter the fact of Orwell’s being
constantly available for just such uses. Stephen Sedley makes
this point very firmly in his discussion of the weaknesses of
Animal Farm , whether judged as political tract or narradve
fiction. The deep-laid conservative cast of Orwell’s writing
goes along with the repeated assertions that everything he
wrote was devoted to defending ‘democratic socialism’ against
all forms of totalitarian threat. Nowadays he is cited as chief
witness for a form of repressive ‘consensus’ politics which finds
no need for the cruder methods predicted in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. This, more than anything, requires that the left
should address itself to analysing the Orwell myth in all its
latter-day manifestations.

We need to demythologize Orwell so as to see more clearly
the nature of that ‘common-sense’ ideology which lends itself
so willingly to propaganda purposes. A number of
contributors here — Easthope, Evans, Norris — draw upon
recent (post-structuralist) theories of language as a means of
relating that covert ideology to Orwell’s style and narrative
stance. But to leave the analysis there would be to give Orwell
up into the hands of a dominant consensus reading utterly
indifferent to such challenges. ‘Theory’, after all, is a
well-known affliction of left-wing ideologues, deprived of the
common-sense wisdom that comes of accepting things as they
are. This attitude is doubtless reinforced by the fact that most
varieties of ‘left’ criticism tend to take a negative or strongly
demythologizing view of whatever they interpret. In Orwell’s
case, such a reading would point to the delusions of a
common-sense empiricist idiom that sets itself up as a
knowledge independent of language, ideology and politics.
One can hardly begin to take account of the Orwell
phenomenon unless by way of this negative critique. But
clearly there is something more to be said if one wants to go on
and reclaim Orwell’s writing - some of it at least - for the
purposes of socialist critique.

Christopher Norris 9

Fredric Jameson makes this the central issue of his book The
Political Unconscious (1980). The negative labour of demysti-
fication is a necessary stage but the first stage only in what
Jameson sees as the project of Marxist criticism.

A Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological
analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and
interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive
hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these
same still ideological cultural texts.

Jameson writes in passing of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a
‘counter-revolutionary’ text, but one which possesses the
disrupdve potential to undermine confidently orthodox
readings. This merest of hints is amplified here by Antony
Easthope, whose essay develops a strategy of reading to
discover (by way of the Lacanian unconscious) what textual
symptoms are repressed or occluded in the authorized version.
Lynette Hunter’s is also a redemptive reading, though one
which places more faith on Orwell’s conscious management of
narrative technique. She sees the novels as developing steadily
from an immature stage of confusedly subjective self-assertion
to a point of more sophisticated narrative control where
‘characters’ assume a certain credible autonomy of viewpoint.
There is an obvious tension between Hunter’s reading and the
argument (implicit in Easthope and Evans) that any such talk
of the ‘autonomous’ individual is falling directly into Orwell’s
ideological trap. What these essays share is a clear
understanding that the ‘honest George’ style of plain,
no-nonsense reportage has to be patiently deconstructed if we
want to resist its more insidious rhetorical effects. Otherwise
that style will continue to impose its bogus common-sense
‘values’ in the service of every kind of reactionary populist
creed.

The left has need of theory in its task of challenging the
apparendy self-evident truths of consensus politics. One effect
of Orwell’s style was to institute a certain idea of documentary
realism which sounded very much (in Raymond Williams’s
phrase) like a man ‘bumping up against experience’ and setting
down the facts in a straightforward, truth-telling way. But this

10 Inside the Myth

raises the question of how to draw a line between
‘documentary’ texts (like The Road To Wigan Pier) and those of
Orwell’s novels which exploit the same devices of style and
narrative stance. To point out such signs of rhetorical
convergence between Orwellian ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ is to throw a
very sizeable paradox into the myth of Orwell as an unbiased
partisan of social and historical truth. This myth has been
constructed around the twin presumptions of his factual
accuracy as a recorder of events and his authenticity as the
intellectual ‘conscience of an age’. It is a view which finds
classic expression in the well-known essay by Lionel Trilling,
where Orwell’s style is taken on trust as the very embodiment
of political good faith against the pressures of conformist
ideology. Hence the desire of these essays to read Orwell’s texts
against the grain of their own clearly- marked values and
assumptions. This in turn means pressing hard on the
distinction between novel and documentary modes, since it is
here - in the tensions necessarily ignored by wholesale
admirers and ideologues — that Orwell’s writing comes up
against the limits of its own contradictory project.

Other contributors are not so much concerned with matters
of language, ideology and representation. They focus more
specifically on the ways in which Orwell either falsified the
documentary record or allowed mere prejudice to pass for
objective fact. Bill Alexander, who fought in Spain with the
International Brigades, challenges Orwell’s version of events
on various points of detailed historical accuracy. His
conclusion is that Homage to Catalonia not only treats the record
selectively but practises a form of systematic distortion wholly
in keeping with Orwell’s anti-Communist bias. Robert
Stradling likewise casts a cold eye on Homage and the other,
more overdy polemical wridngs which came out of Orwell’s
Spanish experience. As an historian of the period, with
knowledge of other contemporary sources, Stradling is
prompted to reflect on the ambiguous status of Orwell’s text,
its failures in point of historical accuracy going along with its
almost novelistic sense of worked-up narrative involvement.
But of course it is impossible to criticise Orwell on
documentary grounds without believing that there is, after all,
an historical truth of the matter which his wridngs more or less

Christopher Norris 11

consciously distort. None of these essays can be taken to deny
that belief, whatever their suspicions of the form it took in
Orwell’s plain-dealing literary style.

His treatment of women gives further cause to look at the
forms of ingrained prejudice which skewed Orwell’s vision in
novels and documentary writing alike. Deirdre Beddoe brings
out the very marked sexual politics which effectively confines
his female characters to a role of passive dependence or (like
Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter) short-lived domestic
rebellion. Beatrix Campbell pursues this analysis into Orwell’s
failure to understand the politics of working-class sexual and
family life, as portrayed with such offensive disdain in Wigan
Pier and elsewhere.

In the end - as Alaric Jacob remarks in his essay - the reader
is brought up against the same negativity, the same despairing
upshot to every line of thought in Orwell’s political writing. It
is for critics on the left to point out the varieties of false logic
and crudely stereotyped thinking that produced this vision of
terminal gloom. Thus Stuart Hall, for one, brings out the
mixture of half-truths and predisposed pessimist conclusions
which characterized Orwell’s thinking on the origins and logic
of the modern totalitarian state. From a different but related
angle, Andy Croft places Nineteen Eighty-Four in the company of
other, less celebrated works of political fiction which held out
against the Orwellian malaise. Either they preserved some
measure of utopian commitment, or - failing that - they
diagnosed contemporary dangers and evils with a force and
acuity wholly lacking in Orwell. It is too much to hope that
Nineteen Eighty-Four , like 1984, will soon be consigned to the
dusty annals of Cold-War cultural propaganda. Celebrations
may cease upon the stroke of twelve, but there will still be
many whose interests it suits to go on mistaking the Orwellian
pumpkin for a Natopolitan coach-and-six.

Malcolm Evans

Text, Theory, Criticism:

Twenty Things You Never Knew
About George Orwell

1. In his essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, Orwell maintained that the two
basic political assumptions of publications like the Gem and
Magnet were ‘nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny’, 1
illustrating the second with an account of some popular
conventions:

FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
SPANIARD, MEXICAN etc.: Sinister, treacherous.

ARAB, AFGHAN etc.: Sinister, treacherous.

CHINESE: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.

ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, DANE etc.: Kind-hearted, stupid.

NEGRO: Comic, very faithful. ( CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 517)

In response to this and Orwell’s broader critique, Frank
Richards, the editor of Magnet and doyen of the genre, argued
that barring a few temporary mutations, such as the craze for
lipstick and modernist literary ‘muck’, nothing ever does
change: ‘Decency seems to have gone - but it will come again.’
As for the comic qualities of foreigners, Richards goes on,

I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny.
They lack the sense of humour which is the special gift of our
chosen nation: and people without a sense of humour are always
unconsciously funny. (CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 538)

12

Malcolm Evans

13

Thus Orwell’s comments on the conservatism, snobbishness
and insularity of the weeklies constitute, for Richards, an attack
on a typically English decency and geniality which it is
incumbent on the writer of popular fiction to nurture, so
protecting the nation’s youth from overwrought foreign ‘duds’
like Ibsen and Chekhov, and from intellectuals, like Orwell
himself, preoccupied with sex, class, strikes and politics. The
function of the boys’ writer is to entertain, turn the reader’s
mind to ‘healthy pursuits’, give him a feeling of ‘cheerful
security’, and to avoid at all costs any engagement with politics
or an incitement to ‘unhealthy introspection’, both of which
are harmful to the young: ‘If there is a Chekhov among my
readers, I fervently hope that the effect of Magnet will be to turn
him into a Bob Cherry!’ (CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 540)

* * *

2. This exchange, published in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in
March and May 1940, sketches a theoretical conflict which
remains unresolved. While Richards promotes ‘pure’ enter-
tainment, decency and an unchanging human nature, Orwell
focuses on popular literature’s reproduction of hegemonic
constructions of class, race, manliness and the distinctively
‘English’. Stripped of Richards’s overt prudishness and his
willingness to declare assumptions about foreigners, some of
the basic positions outlined in the two essays might reappear in
a contemporary debate on ‘professionalism’, ideology and
popular demand between a producer of television comedy, for
example, and a researcher in Cultural or Communication
Studies, disciplines anticipated to a degree in Orwell’s writing
on popular culture. But this conflict also shapes Orwell’s own
practice in fiction, his comments on more conventionally
literary topics, and the contention of critical discourses within
which his criticism and fiction are themselves now reproduced
and evaluated. Frank Richards’s defence of a fiction which is
‘outside politics’, which deals with matters ultimately more
‘human’ and ‘fundamental’, is a demotic analogue of the
‘disinterested’ criticism dominant in English schools and
universities from the 1920s to the mid-1970s, in which the
‘literary’ is constructed precisely in terms of its transcendence, in

14 Inside the Myth

the last analysis, of the ephemeral, the ideological, the
propagandist. Before this tradition was isolated by contem-
porary feminist, post-structuralist and post-Althusserian
criticisms, and its own ideological interests disclosed, it was
already subject to the challenge of a series of propositions
popularized by Orwell - ‘All art is propaganda’, ‘All issues are
political issues’, ‘The opinion that art should have nothing to
do with politics is itself a political attitude’ 2 - and a critical
practice which implicitly questioned formalism, aestheticism
and the fetishization of the ‘literary’ by returning to history,
politics, material factors operating in the text’s production and
reception, and the conditions of its reproduction in criticism
and commentary. When Orwell writes about Shakespeare,
Dickens or Henry Miller, no less than in his work on boys’
weeklies and comic postcards, there is a call for something
more than ‘literary’ criticism, a gesture toward articulating
‘literature’ itself within a larger theory of discourse and
ideology. The need for this articulation to continue, against the
inertia of the loosely contextualized and nominally apolitical
discourses that constitute traditionalist literary studies, is
nowhere clearer than in the problems posed by reading Orwell
in 1984.

* * *

3. The ‘Orwellian future’ became the present and soon the

past, the preoccupation with prophecy giving way to an

examination of the forces that sustained its vitality for so long
and in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. Orwell
predicted, at various times, that the Stock Exchange would be
pulled down after World War II and the country houses turned
into children’s holiday camps, that the Conservative Party
would win the 1945 election, and that England would be blown
off the map by atomic weapons before 1967. He imagined that
he would end up in a concentration camp. 3 Even these
miscalculations pale beside the vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four of
The Times as an organ of Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’ in
Oldspeak). But this, as Orwell insisted in his comments on the
novel, 4 was not so much a prophecy as part of a satirical
warning, a possible scenario itself engaged in the fight against

Malcolm Evans 1 5

totalitarianism and its own imaginary future. So what could
have been another wildly inaccurate prediction becomes a
successfully self- negating projection, a minor landmark on the
road to Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of The Times in 1984 and
to that paper’s financial and ideological alliance, linking both
ends of the ‘free market’ in information, with the News of the
World (‘all human life is here’) and the Sun (‘the place where
there is no darkness’).

*

4. The literary text, as Pierre Macherey argues, 5 is impenet-
rably encrusted with its criticism, commentary and other
nominally secondary discourses, which all become assimilated
to it as part of its material history. For this reason Britain’s
best-selling daily newspaper was essential reading for Orwell
scholars in 1984. The Sun s consideration for slow readers, in
underlining, italicizing or capitalizing all essential phrases, has
the useful side-effect of producing a sketch-map of ideological
landscapes less clearly visible through the ‘balances’ and
superior ‘textuality’ of more reputable institutions (The Times ,
the BBC). Here, in its refreshing simplicity, is an uncluttered
version of hegemony, and a key to discourses that have
continually reworked Nineteen Eighty-Four since 1949. The Sun s
first leader page of the new year was, predictably, devoted to an
oblique celebration of Orwell’s work under the headline
‘1984: What we must do to keep Big Brother at bay.’ (2 January
1984, p.6) The prose is urgent and concise, almost as clear as a
window-pane, producing a world which is readable,
incontestable, out there . Orwell foresaw ‘an England dominated
by Marxist tyranny’, but Margaret Thatcher, at the passing of
the old year, ‘spoke of the reality of 1984 as a time of liberty
and hope.’ While accepting ‘the truth of her words’, set against
Orwell’s ‘fictional view’, the Sun insists that its readers must
maintain their customary standard of critical awareness.
Orwell ‘saw Marxism leading inevitably to what he described
as a foot stamping constantly on the human countenance.’ This
has happened in Russia, ‘where Yuri Andropov presides like
some invisible Big Brother’ denying freedom and privacy:

16 Inside the Myth

IT HAS HAPPENED in Poland, where basic human rights are
regarded as a crime against the state.

IT HAS HAPPENED in China, under the lunatic Red Guards.
IT HAS HAPPENED everywhere in the third of the world that
now lies under the Communist heel.

Moving back from this boys’ weeklies site of sinister and
treacherous foreigners, the editorial warns that the threat
diagnosed by Orwell comes ‘not just from the military power
of Russia but from the enemy within.’ The Opposition’s
programme for the 1983 General Election was ‘Marxist in
everything but name’, and had it prevailed ‘we would have
been taken so far down the path to the Corporate State, there
could have been no turning back.’ The Labour Party spent
much of 1983 purging itself of socialists but it remains, in spite
of its ‘cosmetic treatment’, in the hands of ‘all manner of
extremists’, while the ‘ugly face of Socialism’ is still shown by
‘industrial bullies who try to take away men’s livelihood if they
are not in a union.’ The piece concludes with a guarded
optimism:

As 1984 opens, we have been spared the Orwell nightmare. We
have liberty under Margaret Thatcher. We have hope of a better
tomorrow.

Yet all these things are not automatic.

We have to deserve them. We have to earn them.

We must be vigilant every day in 1984 and beyond to preserve them
from any assault.

*

5. Here ‘Socialist’ slides into ‘Communist’ via the intermediary

term ‘Marxist’ to constitute a ‘lunatic’ and ‘nightmare’ order

directly opposed to ‘liberty’, ‘hope’, ‘truth’, ‘human rights’,
‘Margaret Thatcher’ and to what ‘we’ must strive for and
preserve according to the choric exhortation which blends the
Sun s public discourse with the private voices its antagonists in
Russia, the British unions and the Labour Party would seek to
silence. This basic opposition, in all its banality, is validated by
the authority of astringent prophecy and literary canonization,

Malcolm Evans 17

and establishes the frame for an accompanying feature - ‘20
THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT GEORGE
ORWELL’. 5 6 Most of these you knew already. Orwell, whose
real name was Eric Blair (1), was the son of a ‘minor civil
servant’ (2), served in the Imperial Police in Burma instead of
going to university (6), became ‘fiercely anti- Communist’
during the Spanish Civil War (12), married twice (10,18),
smoked too much (17) and, mostly in circumstances of
financial hardship, wrote books that became ‘modern classics’
(14,20). These items establish Big Brother’s paternity and
produce for the author a history and a private life in no way
incompatible with the leader writer’s appropriation of Nineteen
Eighty-Four. There is even leeway for some faint traces of the
‘left’ Orwell - his formative experiences at St Cyprian’s (3) and
sense of social inferiority at Eton (4) - and for an
acknowledgement of other factors contributing to the
‘nightmare’ qualities of his last novel, which ‘ “wouldn’t have
been so gloomy if I hadn’t been so ill” ’ (18). Such details add
an element of ‘complexity’ and a solidity of specification which
vouches for the metonymic realism of the pivotal, editorial
construction of ‘Orwell-in-1984’. But this, like any other text
signifies as much through its strategic silences as by what it
makes manifest, 7 and there are at least twenty other things the
ideal Sun reader never knew about George Orwell, each of
which would tend to decentre the text, disclose its contrivance,
and displace its evasively tendentious subject. This silenced
discourse, largely Orwell’s own, includes:

a) The writer who specifically refuted any interpretation
of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an attack on socialism or the
British Labour Party and who claimed, in 1947, that all
his serious work during the previous decade had been
written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic
Socialism, as I understand it.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 4, p. 566;
Vol. 1, p. 28)

b) Orwell’s ability to distinguish socialism or communism
from the prospect of Soviet state capitalism. {CEJL,
Vol. 1 , p. 369)

c) His belief in the need for revolution in England,
coupled with his contempt for the small percentage of

18 Inside the Myth

the population in control of the country’s wealth and
land - people who, historically, ‘seized it by force,
afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with
title-deeds’, and whose privileged descendants are just
about as useful as so many tapeworms.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 2,
pp. 105-134; Vol. 3, pp. 241-2)

d) Orwell’s acceptance, along with ‘most enlightened
people’, of ‘the Communist thesis that pure freedom
will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most
nearly free when one is working to bring such a society
about.’ {CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 84)

e) ‘Those who now call themselves Conservatives are
either Liberals [the ‘wets’ of 1984], fascists or the
accomplices of fascists.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 2, p. 228)

f) Journalists who wish to retain their integrity are
frustrated by ‘the concentration of the Press in the
hands of a few very rich men’ [1984 revision: ‘... and
multinational corporations’]. ‘The freedom of the
press in Britain was always something of a fake
because, in the last resort, money controls opinion.’
(■ CEJL , Vol. 4, p. 82; Vol. 1, p. 373)

The Sun’s catalogue could also be extended by ‘human interest’
elements. The fact that Orwell’s father - the ‘minor civil
servant’ - was, more specifically, a Sub-Deputy Agent in the
Opium Department of the British Raj, involved in the narcotics
trade with China, legalized, since 1860, as a government
monopoly, adds a historical resonance to editorial comments
on the ‘lunatic’ Red Guards. 8 The list might also specify the
side on which Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, and the
confirmation of his socialism in Barcelona. It can, of course,
go on almost indefinitely. It ends with the Orwell of ‘Boys’
Weeklies’, well qualified to read another ‘Orwell’ out of this
now familiar type of propaganda, with the critic who could
distinguish a truly popular culture, in England ‘something that
goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less
frowned on by the authorities’ {CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 78) from an
administered ‘ prolefeed ’ - ‘rubbish entertainment and spurious
news’. 9

Malcolm Evans 19

6. For Orwell the aesthetic response was something of a
luxury, albeit one finally subject to democratic validation. If
you are hungry, frightened or suffering, King Lear is no better
than Peter Pan. {CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 258) At the best of times there
is no way of definitively proving that one writer is ‘good’,
another ‘bad’ {CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 334-5), and there is ultimately
only one test of literary merit. Against Tolstoy, who compared
the popularity of Shakespeare to such ‘epidemic suggestions’
as the Crusades, the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone and the
Dutch mania for tulip growing, Orwell argued the criterion of
survival, itself an ‘index of majority opinion’ confirmed by the
Shakespearean fragments scattered throughout vernacular
English. {CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 335, 345-6) In the case of what he
considered the major works of modem literature - Ulysses ,
Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, most of Lawrence’s early
writing and Eliot’s poems up to 1930 - he was prepared, as
early as 1940, to provisionally affirm that they had survived and
to remove the question of their value from the sphere of an
academic and journalistic debate which he viewed only in
terms of an insoluble struggle between a theory of ‘art for art’s
sake’ on the one hand and reductive evaluations of ‘ideas’ in
relation to formalized systems of thought such as Marxism or
Catholicism on the other. 10

* *

*

7. According to this test of time, particularly the shortened
version of it employed in ‘Inside the Whale’, the status of
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as ‘modern classics’ can
go unquestioned, adding Orwell’s seal of ‘majority opinion’ to
the great commercial and ideological feast centred on his work
in 1984. But the check on this aesthetic idealism endorsed by
what seems the most empirical and ‘natural’ of tests emerges
from the contradictions in Orwell’s own writing. ‘Anything
worth reading always “dates” ’, he claims elsewhere in
reference to Twain’s Roughing It {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 62), and the
literary language which gains majority approval by filtering
into the vernacular is not inevitably from work of the highest
quality: ‘The phrases and neologisms which we take over and
use without remembering their origin do not always come

20

Inside the Myth

from writers we admire.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 2, p. 224) Isaac
Deutscher’s extension of Orwell’s remark on Kipling to the
reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four makes it clear that, in certain
cases at least, survival may be related less to a spontaneous
majority taste than to the business of cultural and ideological
reproduction. A book that lends itself to ‘adventitious
exploitation’, Deutscher suggests, needs not be ‘a literary
masterpiece or even an important and original work,’ and a
great poet’s words are not easily transformed into ‘slogans’
and ‘hypnotizing bogies’. They enter the language ‘by a process
of slow, almost imperceptible infiltration, not by frantic
incursion.’ 11

* * *

8. The survival through four decades of Big Brother and his
vocabulary, and their apotheosis in 1984, represent, of course,
a very special case. Twenty-One Eighty-Four would, for obvious
reasons, have received less attention not only in political
speeches and tabloid journalism, on television and in the
pulpit, but in reviews, books and academic articles, and on
British O and A Level syllabuses. As ‘literature’ (or what gets
taught on literature courses), Orwell’s work survives in
defiance of his own estimation of it, ranging from the
acknowledged shortcomings of Nineteen Eighty -Four ( CEJL , Vol.

4 pp. 507-536) to the view of his oeuvre as a historically
determined abdication from ‘art’ and ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’ -
‘I am not really a novelist anyway’, ‘I have been forced into
becoming a sort of pamphleteer.’ ( CEJL Vol. 4, p. 478; Vol. 1,
p. 26) It also survives despite his conviction of ‘the impossibility
of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its
new shape.’ ( CEJL Vol. 1, p. 578) But as work which is only
marginally literary, writing not altogether ‘good’, 12 the
longevity of which is located outside the ‘aesthetic’ function, J
Orwell’s fiction, particularly in 1984, makes visible the principle
more easy concealed closer to the discursive centre of
‘literature’: that the test of time is also a test of the range of
ideological apparatuses and discourses whose work the more
naive formulations of literary survival, including those by
Orwell himself, would attempt to eclipse.

Malcolm Evans

21

9. This principle, which moves from an aesthetic idealism to
the material production within ideology of a body of texts
deemed ‘aesthetic’ and valuable, also emerges in another
Orwellian persona, that of the hard-pressed and hard-bitten
professional writer. As a critic Orwell is quite capable of
lapsing back into judgments that idealise ‘literature’ as a
universal dialogue of free spirits. Even Shakespeare receives a
mild reprimand for refusing to challenge the rich and
powerful, ‘flattering them in the most servile way’ and allowing
subversive opinions to be expressed only by fools and mad
people - points Kenneth Muir despatches succinctly with
reference to the conditions of production in the English
theatre, most notably censorship and the screening of all
play- texts by the Master of the Revels. 13 But Orwell’s
comments on his own experience of publishing and on the
practical determinants of reputation and survivability trace a
network of relations which is the obverse of this idealist coin.
Few modem texts have a more illuminating institutional genesis
than Animal Farm for example: rejected by Dial Press because it
was ‘impossible to sell animal stories in the USA’ {CEJL, Vol. 4,
p. 138) and by T.S. Eliot at Faber because ‘we have no
conviction ... that this is the right point of view from which to
criticise the political situation at the present time’, translated
into Ukrainian for dissemination in the USSR, then seized by
the American authorities in Munich (1,500 copies) and handed
over to Soviet officials. ( CEJL Vol. 4, pp. 433-4) These episodes
are an ironic prelude to the policy changes that sustained a
reverse censorship of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four , a
positive discrimination accompanying their incorporation into
Cold War polemic. 14 Orwell was also familiar with the detail of
more mundane forms of institutional boosting and neglect.
These include publishers’ advertising, its effect on reviewing, 15
and the negotiations of literary reviewers who are also authors
- You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ (Orwell to
Connolly) 16 They extend, more crucially, to the teaching of
literature, and its links with publishing and the arbitration of
taste. Gordon Comstock’s contempt for ‘those moneyed young
beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and
from Cambridge to the literary reviews’ 17 is only slightly
modulated in Orwell’s attack on ‘the Criterion- Scrutiny

22

Inside the Myth

assumption that literature is a game of back-scratching (claws
in or out according to circumstances) between tiny cliques of
highbrows.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 285) At St Cyprian’s the young
Eric Blair’s spare-time reading was determined by the j
requirements of the English Paper {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 386) and
one of Orwell’s last pieces of published jouranlism, a review of
The Great Tradition , hints at the tightening noose that binds
literature and pedagogy. Leavis, in this account, aims to induce i
in the reader ‘a feeling of due reverence towards the “great” I
and of due irreverence towards everybody else’, implying that
one should read ‘with one eye on the scale of values, like a
wine-drinker reminding himself of the price per botde at every
sip.’ Thus Austen, George Eliot, James and Conrad are ‘great’ I
while the remaining English novelists appear ‘not only inferior
but ... reprehensible’, and behind it all is the magisterial voice *
which says ‘Remember boys’ and ‘I was once a boy myself: I
‘But though the boys know that this must be true, they are not
altogether reassured. They can still hear the chilly rusde of the
gown, and they are aware that there is a cane under the desk
which will be produced on not very much provocation.’ 18
Given the expansion, and complexion, of English Studies in
the 1950s and 1960s, this is Orwell at his most prophetic, a
passage to be recalled by anyone who first encountered Animal [
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four , along with Golding’s Lord of the
Flies perhaps, amid chalk-dust, the innate corruption of
human nature, and the impossibility of significant change.

10. EITHER

(a) ‘Orwell is concerned to show how revolutionary ideals of
justice, equality and fraternity always shatter in the event.’
(A.E. Dyson)

‘With Animal Farm he led the wavering lefties out of the
pink mists of Left Land into the clear daylight.’
(Wyndham Lewis)

Do you agree?

OR

(b) ‘Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except
survival.’ (George Orwell)

Malcolm Evans 23

Discuss with detailed reference to texts which have not
survived.

*

*

11. The project that suggests itself then is to recover from
Orwell’s work the fragments of a theory of ideology focusing
on ‘literary’ and cultural production ; to re-centre the
‘distinctively Orwellian’ in the work on popular culture and
the moments in other essays where questions of interpretation
and form are fused with concerns relegated in the dominant
academic criticisms to a secondary, purely supplementary,
‘sociology of literature’. Such a project might emphasize the
relative autonomy of (and contradiction within) the institu-
dons, rituals and discursive fields of a cultural production
determined only in the last instance by the economic base. 19
Orwell’s comments on the distortion of his own preferences as
a writer lend support to this reformulation of the ‘centre’ of his
work, which coincides with the best means of describing it. In a
letter to Geoffrey Gorer (April 1940) he recommends ‘Boys’
Weeklies’, the Dickens essay and ‘Inside the Whale’, and adds:
‘I find this kind of semi-sociological literary criticism very
interesting Sc I’d like to do a lot of other writers, but
unfortunately there’s no money in it.’ (CEJL Vol. 1, p. 579)

* * *

12. But a marriage of Orwell and Althusser seems, in other
ways, preposterous and the objections to such a project are
manifold. Not least of these is Orwell’s apparent belief in
something like ‘the sanctity of the individual imaginative
response’. His view of the novel as ‘a Protestant form of Art’ *
inaccessible to Marxists and Catholics (CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 568)
parallels his compulsive need, in fiction and in criticism, to be
located outside ‘the smelly little orthodoxies.’ (CEJL, Vol. 1,

P* 504) His account of Practical Criticism, a book he
recommends to ‘anyone who wants a good laugh’, endorses the
rite which compels students to ‘respond’ without prejudice to a
text shorn of all marks of a political or historical context. His
analysis dwells not on the questionable assumptions of I.A.

24

Inside the Myth

Richards but on the success of his ‘experiment’, which reveals
the shortcomings of taste in Cambridge undergraduates who
have ‘no more notion of distinguishing between a good poem
and a bad one than a dog has of arithmetic.’ ( CEJL , Vol. 3,
p. 171) The business of ‘recuperating Orwell for the right’
involves, in many cases, no more than reasonable argument
backed up by a mountain of evidence. This process of
recuperation also has a distinguished history which goes back
at least as far as 1940, when Q.D. Leavis claimed that ‘nature
didn’t intend him to be a novelist’ but that Orwell’s criticism
was almost up to the Scrutiny mark: ‘potentially a good critic’,
‘without having scholarship or an academic background he yet
gives the impression of knowing a surprising amount about
books and authors’, ‘an alert intelligence’, ‘his pages are not
cluttered up with academic “scholarship” ’, ‘what he knows is
live information, not card-index rubbish’. 20 If there is a more
progressive discourse at work in Orwell’s text it is constantly
interrupted by this strain of conservative empiricism, which
emerges again in his love of a ‘transparent’ language (prose
‘like a window-pane’) of ‘the surface of the earth’, of ‘solid
objects and scraps of useless information’. {CEJL, Vol. 1,
pp. 28-30) It surfaces too in the adherence to a common-sense
aesthetic: the test of time as proof of literary merit; the state of
being most ‘alive’ outside theory; the form-content division
which generates insights of the ‘Dali, though a brilliant I
draughtsman, is a dirty litde scoundrel’ variety {CEJL, Vol. 3,
p. 185), while deploring the separation between ‘ideas’ I
criticism and ‘art for art’s sake’ which they implicitly
perpetuate.

13. Literary theory and questions of how we should read lead
inevitably back to the political issues. Four months after Frank
Richards, in the name of ‘Englishness’ and ‘decency’, cast his
antagonist in the role of a dogmatic left-wing theorist, ().D.
Leavis upheld the ‘responsible, adult and decent’ stamp of
Orwell’s work in diametrically opposite terms: ‘he can see
through the Marxist theory, and being innately decent (he
displays and approves of bourgeois morality) he is disgusted j

Malcolm Evans 25

with the callous theorising inhumanity of the pro-Marxists . . .
he isn’t the usual parlour-Bolshevik seeing literature through
political glasses.’ 21 Of the struggle against fascism Orwell
wrote, quoting Nietzsche, ‘He who fights too long against
dragons becomes a dragon himself: and if thou gaze too long
into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee’ {CEJL, Vol. Ill,
p. 267) - a remark amplified in the Wigan Pier Diary with
reference to the working man who becomes a trade- union
official or a Labour politician: ‘by fighting against the
bourgeoisie he becomes bourgeois.’ {CEJL, Vol. l,p. 198) This
principle of exchange has a peculiar force in relation to
Orwell. Nothing in the Critical Heritage volume devoted to his
work resembles Q,D. Leavis ’s vituperative tone, dependence
on jargon and conviction of grace more than the Pravda review
of Nineteen Eighty -Four. 22 And the ‘Frank Richards’ constructed
in ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ and the reply to it is in many ways more like
‘Orwell’ than Eric Blair himself.

* * *

14. Orwell too, in other places, is content to caricature
foreigners and is concerned with the nature of ‘Englishness’.
‘Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing
without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to
gambling.’ {CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 76) The ‘typically English’
characteristics are, in contrast, strikingly close to his own
‘not-really-a-novelist-anyway’ and anti -theoretical modes: the
English ‘are not gifted artistically’ and ‘are not intellectual’,
more specifically they have ‘a horror of abstract thought, they
feel no need for any philosophy or systematic “world view”.’
{CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 77) Where theory or an analytical system
suggests one course of action, an intuitive ‘Englishness’
inevitably intervenes. The English working class, for example,
has never been able to think internationally except for the brief
success of the ‘Hands off Russia’ movement in 1920. {CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 85) Orwell’s Englishmen are finally Bob Cherries,
sturdy individuals with a sense of fair play who oppose
twentieth- century political theories with ‘not another theory of
their own, but a moral quality which must be vaguely
described as decency.’ {CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 28) Here Orwell meets

26 Inside the Myth

Frank Richards again, also the magisterially ‘responsible, adult
and decent’ Leavises, and sets off on the trail of a notoriously I
vague and untheorized ‘decency’ which is the central thread of I
his more conservative discourse. Much has been written on this I
topic in general terms but it merits closer atention. ‘Decency’ is
fundamental to Byron’s poems ( CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 121) but I
‘thinking and decent people’ are generally not too keen on
Kipling. {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 225) Shakespeare’s wish to ingratiate I
himself with the rich and powerful is not quite decent, while
Dickens admires nothing but ‘common decency’. ( CEJL , Vol. 1, \
p. 457) For Orwell ‘decency’ is synonymous with what Marxists J
call ‘bourgeois morality’ {CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 22) but it also I
pertains to the ‘decent, labouring poor’. {CEJL, Vol. 1, p 77)
All ‘decent’ people want a classless society {CEJL, Vol. 4, t
p. 187) but the means for accomplishing this are difficult to .
imagine as it almost seems, to Orwell, that ‘men are only J
decent when they are powerless.’ {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 372) The ;
recipe that emerges is for political quietism coupled perhaps
with revolutionary fantasy, and the baggy definition of
‘decent’, in these instances and throughout Orwell’s work,
comes uncomfortably close to his definition of ‘English’. 23
Neither category entertains many prospects of change. In 1984
such terms are the preserve of a right-wing, right-minded
doublethink. Without them it would be difficult to escalate the
arms race and claim ‘ We are the Peace Movement’, 24 or to
accept (or rather disguise) a figure of 4j million unemployed
while justifying the institution of a small police-state in J
Nottinghamshire as a defence of the miners’ right to work. It
may be that Orwell was really a decent enough type while the
Thatcher/Brittan/Heseltine uses of ‘decent’ are, in fact, I
indecent. Small consolation. ‘[Language] becomes ugly and
inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the
slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have
foolish thoughts.’ {CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 157 ) 25 The Newspeak C
vocabulary would do well to limit ‘decent’ to accommodation
and cups of tea. 26

$ # *

15. Orwell and Frank Richards concur to some extent on

Malcolm Evans 27

foreigners and Englishness, they are joined by the Leavises for
‘decency’ and unease about theory, and they all assemble again
on the idealization of a lost past. The world of Greyfriars, Bob
Cherry and Billy Bunter is stuck at 1910, writes Orwell {CEJL,
Vol. 2, pp. 616, 518), a criticism muted by a nostalgia for the
Edwardian period which haunts much of his own work, fiction
and non-fiction. This is the time before mass -slaughter,
totalitarianism and the ‘horror of politics’ {CEJL, Vol. 2,
p. 39), the time of a genuine literaray criticism ‘of the older
kind - criticism that is really judicious, scrupulous,
fair-minded, treating a work of art as a thing of value in itself.’
{CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 149) This indistinct past also holds the very
possibility of the ‘literature’ denied to a present of partisanship
and pamphleteering. After his first dream of the Golden
Country, Winston Smith wakes up ‘with the word ‘Shake-
speare’ on his lips.’ {1984, p. 31) Orwell’s self-conscious
nostalgia differs markedly from the more earnest and cerebral
pastoralism of F.R. Leavis’s ‘organic community’. 27 But from
the two contrasting myths of the past there issues a common
rhetoric of independence, responsibility and the ‘concrete’, a
stewardship of ‘humane’ values and decency against a pressing
reductivism and dehumanization. Orwell’s ‘criticism of the
older kind’ is the conservative strain in his own criticism. It is
also Scrutiny criticism and the correct method of reading as laid
down by a British government report published in 1921.
Orwell, as Q.D. Leavis noted, was not an academic critic, and
his marginal status in this respect seems to have kept him
unaware of the fact that to be disinterested, untheoretical and
fearlessly unorthodox was becoming just about as orthodox as
you could get.

$ $ $

16. The Newbolt Committee’s report to the British Board of
Education on The Teaching of English in England (1921) is
beginning to receive the attention it merits, 28 and there is room
here only to give the barest synopsis. English appears as a
relatively recent invention, the first chairs in the subject having
been established at Cambridge as late as 1878 and at Oxford in
1885. The task at hand is to promote English literature in

28 Inside the Myth

education as a basis of ‘humane culture’, a ‘great source of
national pride’ and a potential bond of national unity. 29 To
this end, literature is to be viewed as a ‘record of the
experiences of the greatest minds’ (p. 149), one which has a
historical dimension but which is to be studied primarily for its
‘nobler, more eternal and universal element.’ (p. 205) In the
tradition of Matthew Arnold, the report’s ‘apostle of culture’
(p. 259), this body of work will ‘civilize’ in ways that transcend
theoretical and political considerations, being part of ‘a
disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is
known and thought in the world’, and ‘to see the object as in
itself it really is.’ 30 There is much here that might have engaged
the more conservative Orwell, with his nostalgia for an ‘older’
criticism which treats the work ‘as a thing of value in itself.
The Newbolt Report also bends the discourse which links
Arnold, the Leavises and the future of literary studies in
England up to the 1970s towards a construction of the
‘Englishness’ which preoccupied Orwell too, and which marks
in his work a limit of the theoretical, and a privileged site of the
empirical, the intuitive and the ‘decent’. 31 But the report’s
analysis of literature, pedagogy, and their relation to English
society strays into areas that acknowledge pressing historical
and political considerations, and touch on aspects of the
ideological determination of what ‘literature’ is and how it
functions which are lost in a blind spot in Orwell’s criticism,
between the sketchy comments on literature and schooling at
the edge of his ‘semi-sociological’, quasi-materialist mode,
and the more orthodox strain of ‘fearless distinterestedness’
and the imaginative response. By coincidence Orwell’s own
work and these areas of the Newbolt Report intersect at a
significant, if idiosyncratic, point - Tolstoy’s attack on King
Lear. Orwell makes Tolstoy’s essay the occasion for a
confrontation between dogmatic stringency and the organic
vitality of a uniquely gifted imagination. Shakespeare, typically
English, ‘was not a philosopher or a scientist, but he did have
curiosity, he loved die surface of the earth and the process of
life.’ (CEJL, Vol. 4, p. S45) 32 Tolstoy, in contrast, is a spiritual
bully, ‘a moralist attacking an artist’, one who fails to recognize
that Shakespeare ‘can no more be debunked by such methods
than you can destroy a flower by preaching a sermon at tt

Malcolm Evans 29

[CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 157) Behind this presentation of the central
conflict there is a triple renunciation - Lear’s, mirrored in
Tolstoy’s, 33 which reflects in turn Orwell’s self-professed
sacrifice of a disinterested ‘art’ (Shakespeare) to the pressure of
conscience (Tolstoy) and the fate of the pamphleteer: ‘Forty
years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected,
and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except
the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has
read ...’ ( CEJL , Vol. 4, p. 348) But one author of the Newbolt
Report had read Tolstoy’s pamphlet, 34 and exploited it with a
startling disingenuousness as an instance of the doctrinaire
rejection of art ‘now prevalent in Bolshevist Russia.’ (p. 254)
This attack on the Soviet Union, like the one in the Sun’s
celebration of Orwell sixty-three years later, is largely for
domestic consumption, aimed at ‘the enemy within’. ‘The
working classes, especially those belonging to organised labour
movements’ are, the report claims, ‘antagonistic to, and
contemptuous of, literature’, associating it with ‘antimacassars,
fish-knives and other unintelligible and futile trivialities of
“middle-class culture” ’, and rejecting academic literary study
as an attempt ‘ “to side-track the working-class movement”.’
The committee concludes that ‘the nation of which a
considerable portion rejects this means of grace, and despises
this great spiritual influence, must assuredly be heading to
disaster.’ (p. 252) For the class whose culture is represented in
the Newbolt Report as ‘Culture’ itself, this disaster came close
to arriving only five years later, with the 1926 General Strike.

* * *

17. In the blind spot of Orwell’s criticism there are at least
twenty things he never knew, or failed to interrelate, that
would have rendered problematic his unwitting affirmation of
the Arnold-Newbolt-Leavis line. These include the impact of
the ‘Hands Off Russia’ movement on the Newbolt Report’s
attempt to produce a focus of national unity in the
disinterested pursuit of literary culture; the origin of academic
English Literature as a ‘poor man’s Classics’ in the WEA
colleges; Engels’s comments on the role of such innovations in
establishing a ‘labour aristocracy’ which would co-operate

30 Inside the Myth

with the bourgeoisie in times of crisis; the 1926 sell-out when
trade union leaders capitulated to government at the moment
when the General Strike was gathering momentum and trade
unionists on strike committees up and down the country were ,
gaining control of towns and villages in the face of ‘every organ j
of local and central government, the police and army, radio
and press, scabs, employers and fascists united as one
instrument against the labour movement’; 35 the recognition on
the left, in the aftermath of the strike, of a failure to educate j
workers politically - in the theory and history of working-class
struggle; 36 and finally Sir Henry Newbolt’s direct appeal, in his
presidential address to the English Association in 1928 and in
the wake of ‘our nine days’ civil war’, for a sense of national
unity based not on social equality but on everyone forgetting
that classes existed. 37 In the event ‘literature’, as an ideological 1
formation centred in education, did not go the way of
antimacassars, now rarely seen outside the first-class
compartments on British Rail. Recent work by Renee Balibar,
Dominique Laport, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey
confirms the part played by literary study in the educadon
system’s reproducdon of the relations of production, a process j
which includes not only access to the riches of ‘culture’ for the
successful minority but also the perpetuauon, within the
dominant ideology, of a class ejected from the system at an
early stage which can experience the ‘national’ language and
culture only in terms of an exclusion and a state of being
tongue-tied to a ‘basic’ fragment. 38 This process of ‘literature’
remains, as Terry Eagleton argues, ‘a crucial mechanism by
which the language and ideology of an imperialist class
establishes its hegemony.’ 39 During this mechanism’s great
period of consolidation, Orwell appears in the guise of a
classically- trained Old Etonian innocent abroad, loosely aware
of the relationship between literature and state pedagogy but j
not of its extent and intricacy, nor of the concealed ideological
work of the personal and ‘disinterested’ response. He sees ji
Arnold only as a proponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, instrumental
in re-establishing links between English culture and the
European mainstream. (CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 151) Newbolt appears
only as the unintentionally comic minor poet of ‘play up and
play the game’. (CEJL, Vol. 1, pp. 561, 592) Leavis is the

Malcolm Evans 31

shadowy pedant, less implicated in the academy’s production of
‘literature’ than in impeding what Orwell sees as the literary
and critical imagination’s natural course. There are only
random observations and a failure, finally, to connect. The
Wigan Pier proles are commended for their ability to ‘see
through [‘education’] and reject it by a healthy instinct’, 40 but
elsewhere Orwell notes with approval that the standard of
public education in England has risen. (CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 97) He
recognizes, with Wyndham Lewis, that the English working
class are ‘branded on the tongue’ (CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 19), but
makes no connection between this and the hegemonic
construction of a ‘national’ language and literary culture.
Meanwhile, in another part of the Newbolt Report, the
Divisional Inspector of Schools is pleased to announce that
teachers of phonedcs and voice production ‘have gone some
way towards getting rid of undesirable forms of London
speech.’ (p. 165)

18. Blair's legacy to criticism is the two discourses, each
periodically displacing the other and offering no prospect of
synthesis beyond continuing his own project of constructing a
literary/historical subject ‘Orwell’ whose humanity and
integrity rest in a refusal of the openly theoretical - the man
who is more significant than his work, 41 the quirky
combination of ‘committed socialist’ and ‘conservative
eccentric’, 42 ‘the wintry conscience of a generation’, 43 the
mythic bearer of an ‘implacable honesty’ which is ‘an English
characteristic - an honesty which is humorous, obstinate if not
pig-headed, and, above all, somehow sweet ,’ 44 Whether this
sweet English decency is to be recuperated by the right or
reclaimed by the left is now largely immaterial. There are other
ways of contesting ‘Orwell’ which refuse to refurbish the
category of the autonomous subject in this way, and which may
acknowledge, with Foucault or Derrida, that the rediscovery of
writing, text, discourse implies a fading of ‘man’ as the
privileged, transcendental signified — an assimilation of Blair,
enneth Miles and P.S. Burton, perhaps, into the divided,

32 Inside the Myth

eternal and omni-directional ‘H. Lewis Allways , Orwell
unbound. 45

* * *

19. Such critical practices would negate themselves by seeking
Orwell’s posthumous approval. And there is no doubt that any
successor in Nineteen Eighty-Four to the liberal academy might
well have borne at least a strong superficial resemblance to the
multi-disciplinary field loosely defined in 1984 as contempor-
ary critical theory. The Lacanian and Althussenan subject
moves towards confirming Orwell’s fear that what he called
‘the autonomous individual’ was going to be ‘stamped out of
existence’ ( CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 576), questioning the integrity of
‘the few cubic centimetres inside your skull’ considered
inviolable by Winston Smith, ‘the last man in Europe.’ (1984,
pp. 27,234) A number of other key oppositions present
themselves: Orwell’s anxieties about the disappearance of an
objective history against the contemporary view of historical
discourse as inevitably a production of the past for the
present; 46 Derridean ecriture or Barthes’s view of writing as ‘an
intransitive verb’ against Orwell’s wish to move wridng closer
to speech and the prophetic reply of the insufferable youth in
‘Inside the Whale’ - ‘My dear aunt ... one doesn’t write about
anything, one just writes ' ; 47 ‘The Prevention of Literature and
the Macherey/Balibar prevention of just such a concept as
literature from functioning ‘naturally’ and obscuring its own
work as an ideological form; Orwell’s view of ideology as a
dogmatic system of ideas, against an ideology which pervades
the subject’s consciousness as a lived, imaginary relation to the
real conditions of existence. 48 Beyond these areas of contention
are the stereotypes that pop up in Orwell’s text like tin ducks in
a shooting-gallery, joining theory, intellectualism, socialism
and ideas of sexual aberration in the broad category of the
‘left-wing trendy’, which remains powerfully operative while
right-wing trendies from Scrutiny to Scruton pass theoretically
invisible and relatively unmolested. 49 This series of moving
targets includes ‘Pinks’, ‘pansies’, feminists, 50 Quakers,
‘shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables’, bearded
vegetarians, fruit-juice drinkers, proponents of birth-contro

Malcolm Evans 33

and homeopathic medicines, nudists, pacifists, ‘Labour Party
backstairs crawlers’, people who do yoga and live in Welwyn
Garden City, and those who wear pistachio-coloured shirts or
the ubiquitous sandals so detested by the man H.G. Wells
described as ‘an English Trotskyist writer with enormous
feet.’ 51 Somewhere in this list there will be a random hit against
anyone involved, however marginally, in the present transition
from an increasingly discredited tradition of ‘disinterested’
Eng. Lit. to the study of language, ideology and cultural forms
anticipated in Orwell’s ‘semi-sociological’ work. But the
damage is in the past, and this handing of ammunition to what
Orwell regarded elsewhere as the class-enemy is well
documented. 53 The best course after 1984 is to take what is
useful from Orwell’s more progressive criticism, use it to
contextualize the conservative strain, and look to your
footwear: ‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent
She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes - said
she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before ...
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’ (1984, p. 53)

$ * *

20. He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended
upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that
this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was
fairly sure that his age was thirty- nine, and he believed that he
had been born in 1944 or 1945 but it was never possible
nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. (1984,

pp. 11-12)

Perhaps it was 1985 after all, or 1986 - another year or two to
drag out the commercial and critical Orwellfest, a stay of
execution for tabloid Big Brother nightmares, and then? On
the leader page of the Sun for 2 January 1984, to the left of
‘What we must all do to keep Big Brother at bay’ and above ‘20
THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT GEORGE ORWELL’,
there is a cartoon. Three women gossip and drink tea, ignoring
a diminutive vicar. On the left, spread across a settee and
snoring, is an unshaven man in his vest, toes protruding
through the holes in his socks and left hand trailing between

34

Inside the Myth

beer-can, cigarette packet and ashtray. A fat woman in slippers
and apron is saying: ‘IF BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING MY
HUSBAND, HE’S IN FOR A BORING YEAR!’ British
workers are shiftless anyway, so if this one is unemployed he is
probably not too concerned. Women go on nattering and
drinking tea. These people would not repay the trouble of
communist police- state surveillance but, through the vigilance
of their betters, it will not happen anyway. This is England. Big
Brother is not watching. ‘While literary critics have been
cultivating sensibility in the minority,’ writes Terry Eagleton,
‘large segments of the media have been busy trying to devastate
it in the majority.’ 53 It is no longer enough to assume that a
reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four (or Animal Form, or Romeo and
Juliet for that matter) will refine the sensibilities and enhance
the critical awareness of English students - particularly the
large majority who will not enter higher education - or equip
them to read against the Sun, television commercials, ITN News
and the whole range of discourses mobilized within the culture
industry. And when Orwell’s annus mirabilis is finally over there
should be no further recourse to questions solely concerned
with what he ‘really meant’, the weakness of his characteriz-
ation, the tendency of politics to interfere with the story - the
sort of normative academic exercise which accomplishes its
own form of devastation. 54 1984 will intervene, the century’s;
most textualized year, and one which re-presents Orwell’s text
as an incrustation of discourses and practices constituted as
new objects of study for a post-post-Newbolt English: the
language of the Data Protection Bill and DHSS leaflets; 55 the
reporting of Cruise, the Greenham Common peace camps and ;
the miners’ strike; the final capitulation of the Soviet state
broadcasting system to the allure of ‘The Benny Hill Show ; j
and the historic alliance of the High Court, The Times and the
National Front to protect ‘academic order and disinterested I
teaching’ 56 in the Humanities Faculty of North London
Polytechnic. In this new, more fluid canon there will be room,
at least temporarily, for the cartoon on the Sun s first editorial
page of 1984, which has a density and intertextuality of its own.
At one level it blocks the saturnalian release and subversion
attributed by Orwell to truly ‘popular’ versions of this type of
art {CEJLy Vol. 2, pp. 193-4), simply reaffirming the dominant

Malcolm Evans 35

constructions of morality, class and political freedom. But it
also reaches into the areas repressed in the text around it - into
the twenty things you never knew about George Orwell that
you are never likely to read about in the Sun. The cartoon is a
pastiche of the style described by Orwell in ‘The Art of Donald
McGill’, with its ‘heavy lines and empty spaces’, ‘grotesque,
staring, blatant quality’, ‘overwhelming vulgarity’, and ‘utter
lowness of mental atmosphere’. ( CEJL , Vol. 2, pp. 184-5) The
same pot-bellied husband appears in any number of seaside
postcards of the 1920s and 30s, peering across the sand and
saying ‘I can’t see my little Willy’. His wife is one of McGill’s
‘monstrously parodied’ women ‘with bottoms like Hottentots’

( CEJLy Vol. 2, p. 184), idealized by Orwell in Nineteen
Eighty-Four as the indomitable spirit of the English working
class: ‘a monstrous woman ... with heavy red forearms’, ‘no
mind . . . only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly’,
‘powerful mare-like buttocks’, ‘ “She’s beautiful”, he mur-
mured’, ‘Out of these mighty loins a race of conscious beings
must one day come’ ( 1984 , pp. 123, 187-8). The cartoon
pursues these references relentlessly, in the stuffed seagull
which decorates the hat of one of the visiting women
(‘deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous,’ CEJL , Vol.
2, p. 185), the imbecile, midget clergyman (‘always a nervous
idiot’ CEJLy Vol. 2, p. 187), and the naming of Big Brother
himself within an inversion of the ‘warm, decent, deeply
human atmosphere’ of Orwell’s sentimentalized working-class
interiors:

. . . the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the
steel fender . . . Father, in shirt sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at
one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on
the other side with her sewing, and the children are happy with a
pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on
the rag mat. ( Wigan Pier , p. 104)

In the cartoon, Mother no longer knows her place, and the
sleeping Father, newspaper open at a page which bears a
remarkable resemblance to the one we are looking at, now
reads the Sun. Such self-reference may well bring a minor burst
° jouissance to the refined deconstructed sensibility, a pleasure

Inside the Mythl Malcolm Evans

36

in textuality or in the Sun as ‘literature’. But it is only the first 1 23
step on a path which leads back to the political imperative of
Orwell’s best criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, and then 24
forward to the conjunction of theory and sign -breaking his
work never fully achieved: *no denunciation without an
appropriate method of detailed analysis, no semiology which 2 b
cannot, in the last analysis, be acknowledged as semioclasm.’ 51

26

27

37

Notes

In S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters oj
George Orwell, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 516. Referred to
hereafter as ‘ CEJV .

CEJL,N ol. l,p. 26; Vol. 4, p. 167; Vol. l,p. 492.

CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 99; Vol. 3, pp. 431-2, Vol. 4, pp. 441-2; Vol. 1, pp. 366,
392 and 421.

CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 464.

C. Mercer and J. Radford (eds.), ‘An Interview with Pierre Macherey’, Red
Letters , No. 5, pp. 6-9.

‘Judy Wade’, Sun , 2 January 1984, p.6.

See P. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (tr.G.Wall), London, 1978,
pp. 85-90.

8 B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life } Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 45.

9 Nineteen Eighty- Four , Harmondsworth, 1983, p. 263.

10 CEJL, Vol. l,pp. 491-2, 557-61; Vol. 2, pp. 149 ff.

11 I. Deutscher, ‘1984 - The Mysticism of Cruelty’, in S. Hynes (ed.),
Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984 , Englewood Cliffs, 1971, p. 30.

1 2 See below notes 4 1 and 54.

13 CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 435; Kenneth Muir, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, in A,
Kettle (ed.), Shakespeare in a Changing Worlds London, 1964, p. 74.

14 See J. Meyers (ed .),George Orwell: The Critical Heritage , London, 1975,
pp. 19-20; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Writers and Politics, London, 1965,
p. 32.

15 See CEJL , Vol. 1, pp. 348, 366; Vol. 4, pp. 215-8.

16 Letter dated 14 March 1938 {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 343)

17 Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Harmondsworth, 1962, p. 13.

18 ‘Exclusive Club’, Observer, 6 February 1949, p. 3. Not included in CEJL.

19 See L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and
Philosophy, (tr.B. Brewster), London, 1971,pp. 134-136 , passim.

20 Q.D. Leavis, Scrutiny review included in Meyers (ed.), op.cit., p. 188.

21 Ibid., pp. 187-188. . . j

22 Q.D. Leavis’s venom is directed towards Stephen Spender and Cntenm
particular. See also I. Ansimov’s review ( Pravda , 12 May 1950) in Mey^
(ed.), op.cit., pp. 282-283.

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

45

See Conor Cruise O’Brien, review of CEJL in Meyers (ed.), op.cit.,
pp. 346-348.

Cf. Raymond Williams, ‘ Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984’, Marxism Today,
January 1984, p. 14; P. Chilton, ‘Newspeak: It’s the Real Thing’, in C.
Aubrey and Chilton (eds.). Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984, London, 1983,
pp. 36-41.

My intention here is to turn Orwell’s text against itself, not to endorse
this view of the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘thought’.

See Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 265-266.

See Francis Mulhem, The Moment of Scrutiny, London, 1979, pp. 57-63;
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology , London, 1976, pp. 24, 40.

See C. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Studies, Oxford, 1983, pp.
89-107; B. Doyle, ‘The Hidden History of English Studies’, in P.
Widdowson (ed.), Re-reading English, London, 1982, p. 17ff. T. Hawkes,
‘Telmah: To the Sunderland Station’, Encounter, April 1983, pp. 50-60.
Board of Education, The Teaching of English in England, London, 1921,

p. 202.

Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works , Vol. Ill, R.H. Super (ed.), Ann
Arbor, 1962, pp. 258, 282.

This does not exclude New Criticism. See T. Hawkes, Structuralism and
Semiotics, London, 1977, pp. 151-156.

cf., ‘Shakespeare was like most Englishmen in having a code of conduct,
but no world view, no philosophical faculty.’ {CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 155)

See CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 340-3.

John Dover Wilson. See Hawkes, art.cit., pp. 55-57.

J. Foster, ‘British Imperialism and the Labour Aristocracy’, in J. Skelley
(ed.), The General Strike 1926, London, 1976, p. 3.

H. Francis, ‘South Wales’, in Skelley (ed.), op.cit., p. 232.

P. Howarth, Play Up and Play the Game, London, 1973, p. 12.

E. Balibar and P. Macherey, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’, in
R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post- Structuralist Anthology, London,
1981, pp. 79-99; R. Balibar, Les Franqais Fictifs, Paris, 1974; R. Balibar
and D. Laporte, Le Frangais National, Paris, 1974.

Eagleton, op.cit., p 55.

The Road to Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth, 1962, p. 103. Referred to
hereafter as ‘ Wigan Pier .

See A. Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left, New Haven and London, 1974,
p. 143; R. Williams, Orwell, London, 1971, pp. 52, 94. cf. CEJL, Vol. I,

p. 23.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, op.cit., p. 33.

V.S. Pritchett’s New Statesmen obituary, in Meyers (ed.), op.cit., p. 294.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Esquire review of CEJL (March 1969), in Meyers

(ed.), op.cit., p. 360.

In November 1932, before the publication of Down and Out in Paris and
London, Blair offered ‘Miles’, ‘Burton’, ‘Orwell’ and ‘Allways’ to Gollancz
as a choice of pseudonyms. P. Stansky and W. Abrahams, The Unknown
Orwell, London, 1972, p. 254. See also M. Foucault, The Order of Things,
ondon, 1970, pp. 385-387; J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, (tr. A.

38

Inside the Mytf

Bass), London, 1978, pp. 279-280, 293.

46 See Homage to Catalonia , Harmondsworth, 1962, pp. 233-7. cf. C.
Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind , London, 1972, pp- 256-9, and Terry
Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, London, 1981, pp. 51-52.

47 CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 165; Vol. 1, p. 557.

48 Althusser, art. cit., p. 187.

49 There is only one reference to Scrutiny in the four volumes of CEJL , and
none to Q.D. or F.R. Leavis.

50 Readers interested in Orwell and feminism should take CEJL , Vol. lj
p. 160 and Vol. 2, p. 191, n.20 into account, also Nineteen Eighty-Four ,
pp. 110-112, 126-127 and Jenny Taylor, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, in
Aubrey and Chilton (eds.), op.cit., pp. 24-32.

51 See Wigan Pier, pp. 152, 195-196; CEJL, Vol. 1, pp. 245-6, and numerou!

index entries on ‘Pinks’, Intelligensia, left-wing etc. I

52 O’Brien, op.cit., pp. 32-33; E.P. Thompson, Out of Apathy, London,
1960, pp. 158fF. Orwell’s sceptical view of historical materialism, tht
‘pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesiv
antithesis and synthesis’ leads not to an escape from theory but to tht
conservatism of a cyclical view of history and the truism ‘power corrupts':
see CEJL, Vol. 1, pp. 489-9; Zwerdling, op.cit., pp. 27-28; and C
Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 128.

53 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford, 1983, pp. 215-216.

54 ‘ “The political message is constantly getting in the way of the story and

this diminishes its interest and excitement.” How far do you agree with
this view of 1984?' (London A Level English Literature paper, Summer
1972); ‘ “Characterisation in this novel is negligible: it is completely
subordinated to the political message.” Do you agree?’ (London A Level,
Winter 1973). This type of Orwell question, reaffirming a particular!
ideology of ‘literature’ rather than a directly political propaganda,!
predominates in public examination papers. jj

55 See Chilton, art.cit. and other essays in the ‘Communications’ and
‘Technologies’ sections of Aubrey and Chilton (eds.), op.cit.

56 See ‘Totalitarian Nursery’, The Times , 18 May 1984, p. 11 and Roger
Scruton, ‘The Enemy in the Classroom’, The Times , 22 May 1984, p. M.
This list covers only the first half of 1984.

57 Roland Barthes, Mythologies , (tr. A. Lavers), London, 1973, p. 9.

Alan Brown

Examining Orwell:

Political and Literary Values in
Education

A good deal of hard work has gone into producing the ‘George
OrwelF who has featured so large in the ‘macabre celebrations’
of 1984. 1 The earliest efforts were put in by Eric Blair, whose
choice of a pseudonym was one element in the construction of
a literary voice. From Blair into Orwell is a road well trodden
by biographers: a personal journey which traces the evolving
values of an individual. But biographical criticism can take us
only so far in an understanding of the ‘Orwell’ phenomenon.
Concerned with the ‘raw material’ of Orwell’s life and times, it
has little to say about how this material has been selectively
forged into a powerful instrument of political dogma.

There is a certain continuity between much that Orwell
wrote and the outlines of a later, ‘Orwellian’ voice, but the
latter did not become part of political culture without going
through the mills of mass media, of the education system:
institutions of ‘learning’ and ‘taste’. The significance of
OrwelF as a weapon of Cold War propaganda, as a means of
persuading a generation of the essential futility of radical social
change, go far beyond the intentions of a single biography.
Rather than seeking out the details of Orwell’s existence, we
need to look again at the necessity of his invention.

Focusing on the use of Orwell’s texts in education both
restricts and expands the topic of this essay. It cuts out a range
° me k ut it brings to the foreground questions about the

39

4 Q Inside the Myth

political content of teaching practices. This is particularly
important in dealing with a subject, ‘literature’, which works
through techniques of dialogue and persuasion. It may be
acceptable to convince year upon year of examinees that Shake-
speare’s tragic characters are brought down by a ‘flaw’ in their
nature, less so to teach Animal Farm as the artistic evidence of a
‘tragic flaw’ in political idealism. The politics of literature
teaching are not, in any case, confined to interventions on
‘political’ topics. In its very form, literary education can be a
subtle and coercive medium for instilling beliefs and values.

Discussions of literature in schools are tied to examinations,
This may not exhaust the possibilities of teaching but it always
defines them. Students are required to attain a certain level, to
succeed, as in any competitive environment. They are also
required to enter into a language of ‘personal response , self-
expression’, to have ‘opinions’ and ‘tastes’. They are at the same
time being instructed and being asked to supply the positive
content of their instruction. This can be an exciting and creative)
process — equally it can be a manipulative form of thought

policing’. ... J

At their worst, the masonic rituals of literary criticism work to
persuade students to reproduce acceptable ideas as personal
response, to internalise attitudes received from above as subjec-
tive points of view. Certainly, there is enough outward mouv
ation for examinees to perform this doublethink , and if thj
ideas and values are themselves presented as simple common
sense, resistance becomes hard to imagine.

It is characteristic of the ‘Orwell’ persona that it conveys a
neutral, received wisdom, of ‘objective and human tru&sj
Ideas of Orwell as ‘the man of good will’, ‘the conscience of an
age’ 2 are supported by a vocabulary of belief which passes lot
self-evidence and everyday language. If the techniques of per
suasion familiar to literary criticism can be termed ‘masontc,
this is not because they rest on arcane symbols understood onl)
by an elite. The very opposite, popular critical wisdom is spoken
in a language which ‘goes without saying’. Its apparent prox-
imity to common sense invites us to adopt it, uncritica y> as0 j

Orwell’s popularity as material for school study makes^M I
unique amongst his contemporaries. In the present, excepuo

Alan Brown 41

year, his work appears on all of the Examining Boards at O or
A Level, but his presence throughout the post-war decades has
been constant. In putting together a profile of Orwell in the
education system, I have relied on two main sources:
examination questions drawn from the different Boards over
the past thirty years and a wide selection of Study Aids,
primarily on Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. 3 I would not
claim that the Study Aids reproduce the details of teaching
Orwell in any given or likely situation. What they offer is an
uncontroversial reading of plots and themes, a fund of
typicality in a language without questions. The remarkable
unanimity of views across these different books is the strongest
reason for taking their arguments seriously. They provide an
adequate complement to the preoccupations of exam
questions on Orwell as they have emerged across the Boards
and over the years.

There is no suggestion here of a ‘conspiracy’ in the
production of an ‘Orwell’ myth. To believe in a conscious,
hidden intention behind the consensus of views would lead to
totalitarian fantasies of the kind which Nineteen Eighty-Four
deals in. A vital part of the development of political myths in a
democradc, pluralist society consists in the form of debate: not
in the willful suppression of contrary views but in the
persistence of shared and unexamined assumptions.

There is a wide plurality of views on Orwell from conflicting
political stances. The most popular account, amply expressed
by Lionel Trilling’s introduction to Homage to Catalonia , 4
presents the writer as a personification of moral values. But
there is no shortage of other, more sceptical, iconoclastic
versions.® Should these latter accounts of Orwell succeed in
dominating the literary-polidcal consensus, another version
will be passed on to successive generadons, as the truth about
Orwell, as ‘Orwell’ himself.

At the basis of the myth, it is taken for granted that we are
dealing with a single personality. In so far as we reflect on the
poliucal world in which Orwell wrote, this is in order to judge
the veracity of his account. By placing the ‘personal’ before the
political’ in this way, by stressing from all sides the primary
significance of Orwell as individual, the consensus of views
receives its grounding. Arguments about Orwell’s ‘honesty’,

I

42 Inside the Myth]

‘realism’, ‘stamina’, 6 all work to strengthen the politically:
debilitating assumption that social conflict is secondary, I
beyond the individual. This cheap transcendence is the
mundane work of literary criticism. It sets the agenda for
debate and ensures that our perceptions of history and
subjectivity are mediated by unchanging, timeless truths , of j
human nature, morality and fate. The price of such wisdom is a
studied ignorance of the ways in which timeless truths are
themselves fabricated through political culture.

Inside the Myth

As a proportion of the exam questions on Orwell at O and A
Level, those which deal with the author himself are in a
minority. The largest group deals with Animal Farm and, at 0
Level, the emphasis is more on the characters of donkeys and
dictators than on the author as such. Nevertheless, I begin with!
a reading of the author as character because the myth of
‘Orwellian’ values bears directly on the teaching of primary I
texts.

Questions about the author derive from a limited selection
of essays and autobiographical accounts which have appeared!
on syllabuses: Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Homage to
Catalonia, Selected Writings . 1 The following are taken from the
Associated Examining Board, 1971-2 and deal with Inside thi
Whale:

What impression have you formed of George Orwell from your I
reading of this book? Illustrate your answer by careful reference I

to his work... > II

Orwell has been called ‘the social conscience of his age’. Explain
this remark and comment on it . . .

Orwell has been praised for his ‘wide sympathies’. Illustrate this I
by comparing two essays from this collection.

The second and third questions help to suggest the right way of
answering the first. Orwell is an embracing figure ol
‘conscience’ and ‘sympathies’. This is not simply °P^ n .
discussion. The last question asks for illustrations ol wi
sympathies’ which are assumed to be in evidence. The cone

Alan Brown 43

with Orwell as representative of an epoch is paralleled by
interest in his personal qualities:

Do you think that Orwell emerges from Homage to Catalonia as a
brave man or not? 8

The oscillation between individual and social characteristics
has a purpose. If Orwell is to act as the representative voice for
an entire generation, his credentials must first be established:

He was an observer, keeping as fair-minded as possible about
what he saw, remaining responsible to objective truth. (York Notes ,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 8)

In short, throughout his adult life and work, George Orwell
remained a fiercely honest man, even with himself. (Coles Notes ,
Animal Farm , p. 5)

Orwell was sociable and home-loving, believing in family life ...
Orwell was selfless, naturally mild and gentle ... Orwell loved
animals ... Exaggeratedly perhaps, but significantly, one of his
friends called him a ‘saint’. (Brodies Notes , Animal Farm, pp. 12-13)

The ‘Orwell’ myth involves a type of canonisation. A version of
the individual as embodiment of human values leads inevitably
to his status as a ‘trustworthy guide’. 9 It is a curious rhetorical
mixture: moral values of ‘bravery’, ‘honesty’, ‘sympathy’ are
linked directly to criteria of ‘objectivity’ and ‘straightforward
fact’. Implicit here is the belief that moral purity is inseparable
from truth as such. If we want to know the ‘facts’ of an era we
must seek out its saints:

The writer, as Orwell sees him, especially the prose writer, is the
guardian of simplicity, objectivity and straightforward fact, and
so, in our age, he becomes the protector of the human spirit. (York
Notes, Nineteen Eighty -Four, p. 8)

The binding together of morality and objectivity works to erase
our sense of a point of view in reading Orwell. Given the
mixture of truth to fact and truth to self, statements attributed
to the author take on an oracular and incontestable value. In

44 Inside the Myth

the following extract, the neutrality of this ‘Orwellian’ voice is
put to a political use:

Basing his argument on personal experience and commonsense,
but mostly on observed fact, Orwell comes to the conclusion that
the socialism of his time was mosdy unrealistic and irrelevant.
(York Notes , Animal Farm , p. 8)

Who can contradict ‘commonsense , fact , experience ? The
author’s authority is conveyed by an insistence on personal
experience and impartial knowledge. We are led back to Eton
and Burma, Wigan, Spain and Paris, across the curriculum vitae
of the writer’s ‘experience’. The authenticity of what is lived is
counterbalanced by a language of detachment - observed
fact’. Orwell ‘lived’ the socialism of his time, applied his
normative mind to its traits and ‘comes to the conclusion ...’
Led along by the empiricist appeal of this argument it becomes
hard to refute Orwell’s verdict. This at least would be so for
students approaching the politics of Orwell s generation for
the first time. The total absence of doubt or qualification must
incline them to swallow opinion and even bigotry as acceptable
truth. The following notorious extract from The Road to Wigan
Pier is a reminder of Orwell’s manner of discussing the socialist
‘type’:

that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal -wearers
and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the
smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat. 10

A further aspect of the personality myth stresses ‘realism , the
pain of truth. Experience is not merely travel; it k also, in its
religious sense, suffering through knowledge. ‘Orwell is
characterised across the range of biographical glosses in Study
Aids as a stoic figure, seeing the truth (the worst) and refusing
to flinch from it:

Orwell never deluded himself . . . His burning love of truth, 25 ^ I
saw it, made him an uncomfortable goad to the indiffer^j
complacent or malevolent. (Brodies Notes , Animal Farm , pp- H

Alan Brown 45

... when in 1941 many people were praising the cleverness of
Stalin’s foreign policy ... Orwell condemned it as treacherous and
opportunistic. Nor would he silence his criticisms when the Soviet
Union entered the Second World War on the side of the allies.
This was precisely the moment when he wrote Animal Farm.
(Longmans Study Text , Animal Farm , p. xxii)

There is no suggestion here that words such as ‘treacherous’
and ‘opportunistic’ might be insufficient, even misleading as
an account of Soviet foreign policy. Everything encourages us
to read history as a morality play, a melodrama of extremes:
honesty versus treachery. Adjectives such as ‘burning’ colour
the picture of Orwell’s commitment to truth as religious in
nature and intensity. His speaking-out of unpalatable truths is
an imperative, a vocation. There is no pause to reflect on the
politics of his interpretations; we are led back once more to the
individual source from which they stem.

In this way, the ‘eternal’ role of the artist as truth- teller is
harnessed to a political function. Experience, common sense,
realism and honesty are each facets of a total and
manufactured personality. Taken together, they provide a
platform from which political attitudes can be put across in
education without suspicion of bias or indoctrination. Putting
‘Orwell’s’ point of view (that of reason and decency) is not
really putting a point of view at all. It is a way of seeing behind
the transience of polidcal conflict to the more basic truths of
human nature and morality.

The reduction of politics to personality moves from
comments on specific historical moments to embrace Orwell’s
wider ‘philosophy’. Here, the individual is all-pervasive:

The chief theoretical difficulty for Orwell was caused by his
awareness of individual human differences, which interfere with
the abstract group philosophy of socialism. He was himself a
courageous individualist, and he feared the loss of freedom that he
knew socialism involved. (Coles Notes , Nineteen Eighty-Four , pp. 7-8)

Reading through the pathos of the ‘Orwellian’ dilemma we
may not pick up the damaging assumptions on which the
argument rests. Socialism as ‘abstract’, as ‘the loss of

46 Inside the Myth

individual freedom’ is presented as ‘known’ and ‘feared’. The
value of elevating Orwell to heroic and mythical proportions is
nothing so much as this: politics are reduced to the stage on
which the writer performs and, following the writer, we make
few complaints about the scenery.

Seeing the world through the eyes of an individual creates a
world of personal values. At the extreme, these values are used
to embrace the whole political field. Orwell as the
representative voice of an age is shown to contain the differing
and contradictory strands of his time. The conflicting elements
achieve a precarious harmony in the ‘Orwell’ persona:
socialist/critic of socialism, idealist/realist, subjective
participant/objective observer. It is left to the figure of
‘Orwell’, finally, to resolve the great debates of left and right,
to assert a middle way between ideologies and conflicting
forces:

... creativity for him [Orwell] was first and foremost a matter of
being able to see things as they are. Because socialism often
considered that freedom was a possible danger to the movement,
Orwell came to feel that socialism could easily have a kind of
fascism inside it ... To Orwell the freedom to be different within
society was what mattered. It is the main theme of Nineteen
Eighty- Four. (York Notes , Nineteen Eighty-Four , p. 1 1)

Orwell came to believe that socialism could easily have a type of j
fascism in it ... to Orwell the freedom to be different within one’s
society was all important. This feature of socialism, of having an
inbuilt fascism inside it, can be seen in Animal Farm . . . (York Notes,
Animal Farm , pp. 10-11)

Orwell thus revealed the psychological sameness of communism I
and fascism and did not shrink from criticising the abuse of
socialism ... (Longmans Study Text, Animal Farm, pp.xxii-xxiii)

Violently opposed political theories and practices are here
reduced to a ‘psychological sameness’, that is, to a dismissive
value-judgement based on no more than a hypothetical model
of human nature. Having dissolved the contradictions between
‘communism’ and ‘fascism’ in either a historical or theoretical

Alan Brown 47

form, the way is open for a socialism itself devoid of content.
Orwell’s socialism can be reduced to a Victorian value of
‘concern’ and charity towards others, to a moral subjectivism
which calls for no more than a sentimental response:

Typically, Orwell related every experience back to his overriding

concern for the poor. (Longmans Study Text, Animal Farm , p. xvii)

Socialism as moral piety is perfecdy acceptable inside the
Orwell myth. But any attempt to conceive of society and*
subjecdvity as susceptible to organised change must be
perceived solely as ‘threat’. Socialism is assimilated to fascism;
‘Orwell’ does not shrink from the ‘fact’, nor do the ‘facts’
prevent him from being a socialist. The moral fable within
which history and ideology are suspended applies equally well
to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty- Four. 11 The song remains the
same: human nature is constant and its finest embodiment in
the ‘Orwell’ persona serves only to remind us of this
intractable truth of the status quo.

I am not attacking the ‘lived life’ of Eric Blair at this point.
How much he actually personified the virtues attributed to him
in popular myth seems to me a question both impossible to
answer and unhelpful to pursue. My concern is with the
political work carried out beneath the banner of ‘Orwellian’
values. The fantasy of his human attributes, refined to a point
of perfection, provides an absolute standard against which
political events and beliefs can be judged. The reader is urged
to identify his or her self with the innate values of ‘Orwell’, and
to espouse the belief in the primacy of the individual which he
represents. All roads lead back to the human subject in
isolation, above history and (in Orwell’s case) above criticism.
Questions of Soviet history, of the Spanish Civil War, the
Depression, the ‘nature’ of communism, socialism, fascism,
can then be answered from a viewpoint which systematically
erases the tracks of its own political bias. Teaching Orwell for
examinations will not be a matter of overt dogma, but rather a
process of filtering the political field through the categories of
orthodox literary criticism.

t as the ‘Orwell’ persona asserts, the good writer is the
true writer, then an appreciation of literary qualities will be

48

tied to a view of political reality. This reality is not presented in
political terms. Devoid of conflict, of theoretical content and
historical detail, it is expressed as the fund of established
truths, natural and unchanging: truths of character, morality,!
of irony, of ‘life’ itself:

It is the business of the satirist to expose the follies of mankind!
and to remind us all of our essential humanity. 12

The art of satire, of common sense, of the ‘Orwell’ industry, is
to remind us of what we know already and to resign us to its
inevitability. If political change is an illusion, we must derive
our comfort from an aesthetics of constancy and inertia.

The ABC of Apathy

Animal Farm is the most popular of Orwell’s texts with
examiners. It is set almost exclusively for O Level study,
Nineteen Eighty-Four being largely reserved for A Level study.
Animal Farm , so the story goes, can be read either as political
satire or, on its own terms, as a ‘thoroughly entertaining
story’. 13 This might seem to recommend its use as an
introductory text for O Level literature students, the qualities
of ‘simplicity’ and ‘charm’ making the book inherendy
readable. However, any student who approaches the exam
with knowledge only of the plot and pleasure in the story is
unlikely to fare well. An ability to regurgitate the equations of
a Cold War wisdom is taken for granted in most exams. The
demand is either stated overtly or couched in a language of
‘symbolic meaning’ and ‘satirical purpose’. Below are four
questions on Animal Farm taken consecutively from the London
Board, O Level, summer and winter 1964:

Summer 1964:

a) A fable is defined as ‘a story especially with animals as
characters, conveying a moral by indirect means’. By reference
to three episodes or characters show how far Animal Farm fits this
definition of a fable.

b) Give an account of the building of the Windmill and its
interruptions; show how far this affected the animals and what,
in real life, it is meant to represent.

49

Winter 1964:

a) Describe the origin of the seven commandments, and give an
account of the changes they underwent later. What was Orwell’s
satire directed against in this part of the book?

b) Write an essay defending Animal Farm against a reader who tells
you that it is ‘merely anti -communist propaganda’. Illustrate
your answer with detailed reference to the book.

It is possible to answer the first of these questions without
specific reference to Russian politics; the fable can be stressed
as about ‘revolution in general’. This reading, which relies on a
prior knowledge of the Russian ‘example’, is looked at more
closely further on. The second question asserts that ‘real life’ is
behind the book and might be answered by reference to Soviet
industrialisation and the Five Year Plans. The third question is
looking for details of propaganda techniques and the rewriting
of history, as attributed to the ‘communist state’. With the final
question, the student’s grasp of ‘real life’ is taken as read and
the task is to say what more than ‘anti-communist propaganda’
the book is. Students are not invited to advance the
‘propaganda’ argument, but only to refute it.

The political effectiveness of Animal Farm derives largely
from its allegorical form. If, as is assumed in much educational
material on the book, an allegory is a simple equivalence
between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’ (Napoleon=Stalin,
Manor Farm=Russia), then the student’s task will be primarily
one of rote-learning. The ticking off of relations is at the lowest
level what is required. What is simply asserted is that the
correspondences are valid, that

Old Major’s speech corresponds to the thought of Marx . . .

Battle of the Cowshed: corresponds to the counter-revolutionary

war which raged in Russia . . . The sale of timber to Fredrick of

Pinchfield: corresponds to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 ... (York

Notes , Animal Farm, p. 30)

But this entire exercise, heavily documented across the
different crib’ books, heavily encouraged by the form of

Inside the Myfl)

Alan Brown

50

Inside the Myth I ^| an grown

51

questions, is not in itself adequate as an instrument of political |

do^na " The skeleton of Correspondences needs to be

supported by a wider critical account, of Marx,
communism, of revolution in general.

Marx was an idealist, dreaming of a paradise on earth in which all
men were free and equal and enjoytd a good standard of living.
(Coles Notes, Animal Farm, pp. 9-10)

... communism is idealistic. Its ideas are mainly the inspiration of
Karl Marx, a German economist, and he was an idealist, dreaming
of a utopian paradise in which all men should be free and equal.
(Longmans Study Text, Animal Farm, pp. xx-xxi)

The characterisation of Marx operates at a very crude level of
argument. Words such as ‘dreaming’ and ‘idealistic carry the
weight of what argument there is. But the caricature becomes
more effective when embodied in episodes from the text. The
coherence and detail of the fable create an impression of
substance. Early in Animal Farm, Old Major the prize Boar
recounts his ‘dream’. He calls on the animals to struggle for
their freedom and reminds them of their equality:

His [Major’s] speech is a wonderfully concise account of Marxist
socialist theory. The idealistic nature of this theory is cleverly
pointed to in the tiny episode of the rats. While Major is speaking
four rats appear from their holes and the dogs rush at them ...
( York Notes, Animal Farm, p. 14)

The student is urged to identify Marxist theory with a sho
speech in an animal fable and to appreciate the skill ot m
refutation in an incident from ‘Tom and jerrr • The stupidity
of this account should not blind us to its effective orce ,
is something very reassuring in this oscillation bet ™ ee ",
and animal ‘nature’, and, with no further context of judgem
likely, students may have little incentive to go beyon eV j

of their instruction. j

Why is Animal Farm taught in this way? It could be argu
that if questions are centred on a version of Russian history,
a critique of communism, of revolution in general,

should be. Its author intended it as such. How else than as a
damning allegory of Soviet communism could the book be
taught? The apparent fairness of this appeal to the author’s
intentions begs several questions about teaching practices and
the idea of an author’s ‘purpose’.

If Orwell’s intentions are cited as justification for the
political slant in teaching Animal Farm , they must be admitted
to bear on an external, historical world. This must certainly be
the case for an author who, by all accounts, was concerned to
‘expose the myth’ about recent Soviet history. If Animal Farm is
read, with its author’s assumed purposes in mind, as an
attempt to counter the widespread pro-Russian feeling which
was then current, 14 the context has manifestly changed since
1945. If the book was designed to present a different
viewpoint, the difference no longer exists as such. In a Cold
War world, Orwell’s polemic reproduces rather than counters
popular myth and, in the absence of its polemical context, the
author’s intentions cannot be treated as simply portable.

Lacking an alternative viewpoint against which to be read,
the book’s argument reads as soliloquy, its ‘truths’ as no more
than a reinforcement of views which can be gleaned from most
tabloid papers, most of the time. No attempt is made in the
range of Study Aids (nor encouraged by the form of exam
questions) to debate the account of history portrayed in Animal
Farm. The relation between book and reality is conveyed as a
simple parallelism, with the student required to pick off points
of correspondence. This practice, which cannot be called other
than indoctrination, is unjustifiable in terms of authorial
intention. Nor can it be claimed that it would be too much for
0 Level students to wrestle with the complexities of Russian
history and Marxist theory. This might be an argument against
setting the book at all, but if the students are ‘old enough’ to
be indoctrinated, they are old enough to be permitted to think.

The wholesale rejection of Marxism which is set out in
readings of Animal Farm reduces to a basic formula: Marx was
an idealist, nature is unalterable, Marx was wrong. So what is
\n i ong with idealism ?

So what is wrong with idealism? Why should Orwell want to
condemn these dreams of a utopia? The answer is that this very

Inside the Mytl

Alan Brown 53

ld „ W edfor.h<e m e^^^

eSuWb" iito*.™ Mussolini ... limp*™ SlU, r« conflict. The 'Orwell’ myth pacifies readers; contradioory
estabiisnea Dy ni theories, factions, values and vocabularies are mediated by a

Animal Farm, p. xxi) strate gy Q f mutual exclusion and emerge as a harmony of

Effectively, Marx's “^SedUmlth^ll ^egyTnm^nedm 'crib' books on Orwell. The

tyranny C '(pracdcel. 1S An occasional paragraph is reserved fo following extract from a Guardian article on Orwell develops a

Marx’s economic analyses but these marginalia are swept asidj similar argument.

bv the continuous assertion that Marxism-communism is botli
y . , . , • / • 1 a. fhic arrnnnt n

naive/cynical and idealistic/violent. The logic of this account i
paradoxical and this is a vital part of its persuasive power.

In the discussion of ‘Orwell’ as personality, it was arguec

that oppositions are set up and mediated by the authorial
persona. Individualism/socialism, pessimism/idealism, subjec

The year which he made famous is now upon us, but nowhere in
the democratic world has his monstrous vision of it come to pass.
Instead, the kingdom of ends has lost some of its sway, the
totalitarian temptation has receded with the imaginative grip of
the socialist idea. 16

arc

persona.

five exoerience/obi ective fact: these category pairs . . . . . .

established an d then harmonised in the overarching persona ol The rhetoric carries us beyond a otahtanan/sociahst
individual. A parallel technique develops here: thj equivalence towards a post-ideological world. Means are

assimilation of opposing forces, communism to tascu
idealism to tyranny, prepares the ground for a middle wad
The simple negation and transcendence of artificially presentej
oppositions draws on a rhetoric of ‘experience , realism ant
‘nature’, implying that above and beyond extremes there is*
realm of political common sense, of day-to-day living. TO
neutrality of this implied position is presented as the poj
from which the writer writes and the reader reads: a stands
back from conflict, an overview from which the lndividia
human subject looks down on but is not defined by politia

$t Tfrfpersuasiveness of the ‘Orwell’ myth rests then on*
logical strategy. Political myth as described here is a type
machine for suppressing social contradictions. This argu i
bears resemblance to a structuralist account of myth »
differs in its approach to the logic at wor ^ ' J ^
structuralism, as associated with Levi- Strauss, ten
principles of logic as the reflexive object of th« e nj
themselves. It is the logical organisation of huma ".^ A
which is reified in mythical forms. Rather than placing
above or prior to society, we can see it emerging^
specific forms of political and ‘aesthetic language.

substituted for ‘ends’ and the threat of radical social change is
warded off. The attractions of this argument stem from its
capacity to reduce the conflict of ideas and forces to a language
of political realism. Yet this realism is sustained by little more
than the negation of theories as ‘extremes’ and the refusal to
consider its own theoretical basis. In its literary context, the
argument stresses the now familiar values of ‘human nature’,
‘fate’ and the cheaper aesthetics of irony:

Animalism, Communism, Fascism - what you will - so far as the
mass of people is concerned, turns out to be a hollow progress, a
barren achievement. ( Brodies Notes , Animal Farm , p. 24)

The time will come when the details of Russian history that
aroused Orwell’s anger will be forgotten, and Animal Farm will be
remembered for its bitter, ironic analysis of the stages all
revolutions tend to go through. ( York Notes , Animal Farm , p. 31)

h probably will not matter if the anti- Communist satire of Animal
Farm remains intelligible. Already the specifics of its protest
against Stalinism require considerable explanation for the
younger generation, but its satire on corrupted revolution and the

55

54 Inside the Myfl

misuse of power remains completely clear. Given human nature, i
will unfortunately remain clear as long as society resemble
anything in the world today. ( Coles Notes, Animal Farm , p. 8)

To the student required to say what more than anti-communisi
propaganda the novel is, here is the model answer Moving
past versions of Soviet history and Marxist theory, reducing ai
‘isms’ to a meaningless continuum, the argument leans bacll
onto a language of timeless disillusion and home truth . Jj
There is some irony in the final assertions that Russian,
‘history’ is ultimately irrelevant: mere detail. A good deal o!
effort goes into stressing detail as to the content and accuraci
of Animal Farm’s account. All the same, it is a necessary step fo.
a literary-critical approach which works to erase the marks ol
its political interest. History and politics must be dealt with,
but in a form which appears as neither politically not
historically limited. This is achieved by a logical twist in which
politics are both discussed and not discussed, being merely the
context in which wider ‘non-political’ truths are found.

The success of this formula makes the activity of Iiteran
criticism appear as an endless sequence of pyrrhic victoria
The same values are ‘discovered’, reiterated across the widest
range of texts. Words such as ‘irony’ fill the vacuum created
when political struggle has itself been emptied of meaning.
What is offered is an intellectual Nirvana: political struggles
represented as an eternal contradiction (idealism=tyranny), die
reader is invited to step back from the friction of thought anc
to survey a ‘human comedy’ of critical judgement. This uneas)
marriage between literary and political values appear-
innocently, but effectively as a language of ‘make believe.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting

against. 17

Moving from educational material on Animal Farm to ®
counterpart on Nineteen Eighty -Four can give a sense of
to the reader. The broad outlines of an attack on commu
socialism and the idea of political change remain arge y 1
the formula which sets human values against the imag

Alan Brown

totally alien political process is expressed in terms so general
that it passes easily from one text to another. There are
however, major differences in critical discussion of the two
works. These can be treated in part as a response to inherent
differences in the works themselves, in part as the result of a
switch from O Level modes of criticism to the requirements of
A Level. 18

Tasks at O Level consist mainly in recording details of plot
and character within a tightly drawn critical framework. Value
judgements are often invited, but rarely in a form which makes
them problematic. At A Level, issues of critical discrimination
come to the fore. Students must assess the conformity between
set texts and literary standards. They must define terms and
relate these definitions to instances of interpretation.

The more overt preoccupation with value-judgements at A
Level emerges in the treatment of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a set
of problems related to the book’s structure and purpose.
Where Animal Farm ‘can’ be regarded as a unified, morally
didactic fable, raising few problems of form or meaning,
Orwell’s final novel presents immediate complications of
structure, meaning, characterisation. Nineteen Eighty-Four
combines the conventions of realist fiction with those of the
scientific romance; it includes a lengthy extract from
Goldstein’s ‘book’, as well as the appendix on Newspeak.

The unorthodox construction of Orwell’s novel presents a
problem for critical response. If rigid critical expectations as
regards the unity of a work of art, the requirements of plot and
character, are brought to bear, then Nineteen Eighty-Four must
be regarded as a ‘flawed’ work. Exam questions show a marked
tendency to reproduce these standards and thus to pose the
question of the novel’s failure. The failure in turn is seen in
terms of a conflict between ‘literary’ qualities and political
purposes:

“1984” is unashamedly a book with a message’. Do you consider
that this diminishes its merits as a novel?

The political message is constantly getting in the way of the story,
and this diminishes its interest and excitement.’ Do you agree with
this view of * 1984 ’?

57

Inside the Myth

‘Characterisation in this novel is negligible. It is completely
subordinated to the political message.’ Do you agree? 19

Although it is possible for examinees to refute these verdicts,
they are inevitably forced to organise their answers within the
framework of debate which the quesdons establish. This means
that they must discriminate between conflicting values; they
must be able to differendate between ‘literary standards and
an implied threat from the polidcal ‘message’. Yet it is quite
unclear how this distinction should be made. j

If we take the third of the above questions, on ‘character’,
this could be answered in a number of ways. It could be argued
that indeed, the figure of Winston lacks credibility, Julia is
presented as a crude, sexist stereotype, O’Brien is no more
than a personificadon of the totalitarian fantasy. This might
suggest a weakness in the novel but does little to show why the
weakness results from excessive focus on the ‘message’.
Equally, it could be said that characters are weak: and
undeveloped because, in a totalitarian society, that is how
‘characters’ are . 20 This would require us to accept the literary
weakness as an accurate representation of an imagined
polidcal truth; an argument which is impossible to verify and
which, again, does little to clarify the supposed conflict
between political and aesthedc values. In the absence of any
decisive criteria for distinguishing between the two areas,
arguments like the above can be reproduced in various forms
without touching the nub of the question.

The failure of examinees to make the necessary judgements
and discriminations is recorded in the following extract from
an Examiners’ Report. The relevant books are Nineteen
Eighty -Four and Brave New World,'.

Essays on Onvell and Huxley tended to be historical or polidcal
or sociological or psychological rather than literary in at
approach. Both writers are, of course, interesting from
points of view, but it is surprising that when they have beta
prescribed for papers on literature, their literary qualities *1
been ignored. 21

Yet it is not so surprising. On the one hand, questions <*j

Alan Brown

Orwell repeatedly stress the importance of polidcal over
aesthetic considerations in the novel. On the other hand, the
broader background of discussion of Orwell’s work does little
to promote an understanding of the issues involved.

There are two specific ways in which the relation between
artistic and political value is presented in exam questions and
Study Aids. The first is to see the two terms as complementary.
In discussions of Animal Farm and the ‘Orwell’ persona, this
involves stressing the ‘truth’ and ‘clarity’ of a writer’s account.
The artist who tells the truth honestly and in plain language
satisfies the demands of both aesthetic and political standards.
This approach rationalises the two elements but it does so by
effectively cancelling out the latter term. Political reality is
conceived as a superstructure, built on moral and psychologi-
cal values and reducible to them. Literary qualities, by
comparison, are regarded as the necessary counterpart of
personal qualities. There is no need for a theory of aesthetics to
map out the technical aspects of literature; artistic excellence is
simply moral virtue translated into ‘prose ... like a window

>92

pane. 11

Reducing polidcal meanings to subjecdve norms creates an
impasse, not only for an understanding of history and theory,
but for any coherent description of literary value. Values are
located in the pre-verbal realm, inaccessible to anything other
than tautological accounts. It follows that any work which
direcdy questions the sacrosanct status of the individual
human subject will be seen in negative terms, as a deviation
from implicit standards.

Nineteen Eighty -Four, with its lack of distinctive ‘characters’,
its reduction of subjectivity to coercive norms of behaviour, is
a case in point. The problems which this novel poses are more
than those of subject-matter; the novel’s form proves to be
inseparable from the ideas it contains. Intentionally or not, the
novel undermines the political assumptions of realist ficdon:

For realism is not just a matter of literary form. It is the
common-sense expression in aesthetic terms of an ideology in
which the unified human subject ‘makes sense’ of his/her world by
negotiation with external forces - Nature, Society, etc., which
presupposes a world that can be made sense of and an always

—

Inside the Myth 1
58

potentially self-determining human subject. 23

B, seeking to give ^ plausible account of : dead, of tfj

A/an Brown 59

dismande theories of change as intrinsically authoritarian, and to
redefine socialism by locating it inside his experience of the
northern working class ... 25

‘individual’, Orwell necessarily moves into areas wniui i c j

the premisses of realist ficdon. In order to understand why this
violation should be seen in terms of the ‘political message , we
need to look at the second way in which art and politics are
conceived in educational material on Orwell.

In contrast to a stress on the harmony of literary/political
values there is an account which asserts their absolute division.
The political field is characterised as inherently alien, abstract,
Is an essential threat to human freedom. Ifpolmcs camm fc
assimilated to subjectivity, it must be regarded as a threat
subjectivity itself. The seeds of this extreme viewpoint are
f nrl for example in earlier accounts of Animal Farm, where
political struggled portrayed as a timeless futility and the State
L an extemaffaa'. They can be traced through ‘^ccountot

descriptive account of modern political reality.

Between the two extremes of political and aesthetic vald
there is little to choose. To reduce politics to an aesthetic of
personal values, or to treat politics as a totally ahen ^
amounts to the same. In dther case it becomes possible.

SS ^ .hese

The resistance to theory predictably opposes personal values
(‘experience’) to abstraction. More than this it sees theory as
‘intrinsically authoritarian’. In effect, theory is personified as
‘totalitarianism’; as an attempt to confine the individual within
an autonomous, alien frame.

The association between these two terms, ‘totalitarianism’
and ‘theory’, may well be ‘false’ but it continues to produce
effects. A theoretical treatment of subjective values would
indeed spell the death of the ‘individual’, if by ‘individual’ we
mean that self-determined subject which haunts the pages of
‘Orwell’ criticism. The fantasy of totalitarianism expresses this
threat. Change can only be seen as for the worst - of all
possible worlds. Unless, that is, it is confined to the ‘change of
heart’.

In the absence of any theoretical shift in the approach to
Orwell, students will continue to be systematically confused by
‘literary’ and ‘political’ values. The standards of orthodox
literary criticism reproduce rather than clarify this confusion
and it is an essential element of their existence that the
problem should remain. It is a mark of the distance which
literary criticism has failed to travel, that Orwell’s resistance to
theory should be presented to students of his work as a positive
virtue.

• mystify the nouons of value in reading oiwu. r

this mystification as a ‘fact of life • theorise the

Notes

Any attempt to go beyond this impasse, to dieonse
relation between subjects and society according to a d flere
mode” would be regarded as a threat to the ‘individual . Th
bSSSU for oLll himself and for -dmon —

reproduces him. In his account of change in Orwell j

Frank Gloversmith makes the following point.

Any change that is backed by articulated theory is anathema to

Orwell. He attempts to dismiss intellectuals (of any >■

1 Raymond Williams, ‘Orwell’s 1984 and Ours’, Morning Star , 3 January

1984.

2 Frank H. Thompson Jr., Orwell's Image of the Man of Good Will , College
English xxii, No. 4, January 1961. Reprinted in Coles Notes, Nineteen
Eighty-Four , Toronto, 1982.

3 The following Study Aids have been used: Brodies Notes, Animal Farm ,
Suffolk, 1978; Coles Notes, Animal Farm , Toronto, 1982; Robert Welch
(ed.), York Notes, Animal Farm , Hong Kong, 1980; Robert Wilson (ed.),
Longman Study Text, Animal Farm , Hong Kong, 1983; Brodies Notes, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, Suffolk, 1977; Coles Notes, Nineteen Eighty -Four, Toronto,

61

IMS;* I

1983; Coles Notes, Notes on Georg po/to 0 j Tru th, reprinted in

4 Lionel Trilling, George ’ CoZ/ion of Critical Essays,

Raymond Williams (ed.), George urw

Englewood Cliffs, 1974. ^ fata&m of George Orwell, in Boris

5 £oT(edT™“ Gutd£ Lt ^ U "’ ’

Harmondswor*. 1983. stamina in Raym ond Williams, Po/.fc

6 Discussion 01 urweu ;> m I

and Letters, London, 198 ’P^'from a selection drawn from die

7 Examination questions are bb Board Associ ated Examining

London Board, Oxfbr , am pi e of Boards over the past decade.

Bo " ds in 1984

9 Robert ilSchtdXYorh ^^H^ondsworth, 1983, p. 160

s sr‘ss*

socialism in York Notes, Am phrasing. Across the Study Aids

are noticeably similar m argument and phr ? borTOwing . This is
there are similarities of this type, 1 5 ^2" g betwee n texts on Orwell's
most apparent where “njpjtnso ^ mns from one Study Aid

wUh ,on ” h ' n ‘

Animal Farm. , Tpxt Animal Farm , p- xxv.

13 Robert Wilson (ed.), taPJ f wilderness’, speaking out against

14 The idea of Orwell as a voice bi aphica l accounts in the various

°«i “i" CtaKl. 1*M»»

15 sszz&S; p— sr 5 ' j

x ' ■ S ff‘ p « 3 r- “ "“■*

Other Essays, Harmondsworth, 1 , A Leve l material up»

'* STp^Tear" ™ *»*>“” “ "

, 9 S questions « *££?£ JSSSk'S.

20 This argument is followed in David^miu

£ B oSo E S n i/£iM„j' v YY SiSSSS

Journalism and Letters oj ueorge

Alan Brown

1970, p. 30.

23 Peter Widdowson, ‘Hardy in History: A Case Study in the Sociology of
Literature’, in Literature and History , Vol. 9, No.l, Spring 1983.

24 Coles Notes , Nineteen Eighty -Four, pp. 7-8.

23 Frank Gloversmith, ‘Changing Things: Orwell and Auden’, in Frank
Gloversmith (ed.), Class , Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s ,
Bury St Edmunds, 1980, p. 120.

Alaric Jacob

Sharing Orwell’s ‘Joys’ -
But Not His Fears

George Orwell had much o" my life because

early manhood when « seetned both entangled,

the British Empire m whose tcna ^ j( was dear to m
I did not envy Omell his s same teachers at

from the very first when we were taugh y of abiUty

St Cyprian's **>*«££a ^ch. Much as 1 admit,
would always have been y n£ ^ e j s whic h display him as a
the best of the essays an ‘George Gissing - Keep the

worthy successor to his ’ ^ _ j can not admire

Aspidistra Flying and Co T^J e j find u flawed b , , those
Orwell’s work as a w detect ed in himself, and which he

defects of character which lie challenging his admirers to

proclaimed to the world as g enthuse about. The

go away and find ^ of which he was unaware,

overriding defect, owe ^ ’ wa$ * to ma ke political writing
His dominant aim, as h > bng to purify his style,

into an art’. In this, f f S^^ffpofsible to adnure *e
he ultimately succeeded. J rer the political blin

art of Machiavelli While „ directe d, so one ml

alley into which the reader is i arttm y d yet st*^

admire the clarity and condustons d- >

SSL' ?£uu S thTs e tha. Orwell lacked political judgnten
quite astonishing degree.

62

Alaric Jacob 63

Notwithstanding his rebellious beginnings in Burma, the
days of Bohemian struggle in Paris and his gallant expedition
to Spain, he was not a widely travelled man. Russia and
America were unknown to him. He was at heart an Edwardian
Little Englander, basically uninterested in the life-styles of
other peoples, so it is hardly surprising that his politics were
often naive. His lifelong, unrequited love affair with the
English working class also contributed to a lack of balance as
did his six wretched, friendless years at St Cyprian’s School.
Those six years and the six months that he spent fighting in the
Spanish Civil War marked him for life. The first turned him
into a drop-out, the first of the ‘angry young men’. The second
experience contributed to his early death.

Orwell, or Eric Blair, as he then was, had preceded me at St
Cyprian’s School and there can be no doubt about the
considerable impression he made there, for soon after I
entered the school I was encouraged, as it were, to understudy
him. The headmaster and his wife, Mr and Mrs Vaughan
Wilkes - ‘Sambo’ and ‘Flip’ as they were known to succeeding
generations - were looking for high fliers who would bring
credit to the school by winning scholarships to Eton. When
‘Flip’, the real driving force at the school, picked out Orwell
and Cyril Connolly as the cleverest boys of their generation she
proved to be an astute talent-spotter. At that time scholarship
boys started Latin at eight and Greek at ten (science was
scarcely taught at all). The burden of two dead languages lay
heavily on most young shoulders, including mine, but when
Flip discovered that my History, English and French were as
good as Orwell’s she concluded that Sambo would be able to
drum a sufficiency of Classics into me to bring me up to
Orwell’s exceptional overall standards. So I was set down as a
potential Eton Colleger. But Flip over-estimated me. Orwell
won not just one scholarship but two — Wellington as well as
Eton - while I proved to be weak in Latin and utterly resistant
to Greek, and finally went to King’s School, Canterbury
without winning a place there as a King’s Scholar.

Superficially, Orwell and I came from the same stable, our
athers having served for years in India, but as Orwell soon

Covered, the standards which the Wilkeses had imposed on
r sc h°°l did not in fact permit us to be assessed on equal

Inside the Myth

Alaric Jacob

65

1, Over

children of aristocratic or n J ^ ^ QWn we re seated as
while boys from modest home h Flip an d beaten

‘underlings’, to be bul1 ^ ^oScould' not* have gone to
by Sambo for every minor feuk. <*£ at ha lf.fees, for the
St Cyprian’s at all had he not P that time about

full fees were £180 a year and in the Opium
to retire from an undistingp 1 a year . After A ugust

Department in ^ ^senC joined the Army at sixty years of
1914, however, Orwell sen J . f did war wor k in

age as a a„d might weU ta,

London: this eased the lam y ^ their pat riousm. But
caused their son » ta Qrwel i never referred to this

contemporaries at Eton J on the contrary, he is said

honourable service by ei h p . cha rles Dickens

so hirsh and

unforgiving as Such, Such was no t the dominant

In my experience, money maintained. You did not

influence at St Cyprian s. Empire was well

have to be rich w „ be fXtke^n romantic places such as
regarded, especially i u Constantinople or in the tents

the North West Frontier, Cai ro Comta p attractiv e

of the desert Arab. Orwdl s ™ fath er had done

woman much younger t an , minor posdngs. He had

but he had eked out a dull exls ^V tQ ass on to his son;
no legacy of scholarship or of her colour f u l girlhood in

rather it was his wife s m win his caree r m the

Rangoon that incline Ooium Department and the

Imperial Police in Ttom. ■***££ Leem, and » •
Burma Police were both serv SQ sha ttered b

arguable that if Orwell had ^ -^ ced him that he would
experiences at prep schoo w 1C rebelled against a career
As be a failure he -^0 io n to his father’s j
*££ EZ wastT-l in Burma on,, ^

imperial guilt to the sense of social and personal inadequacy
that had plagued him since childhood.

Escaping from British imperialism at last, he wrote that he
carried hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths . . .

Failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of
self- advancement, even to ‘succeed' in life to the extent of making
a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of
bullying.

So he set foot upon the lonely road that led to Down and Out in
Paris and London.

In Such , Such Were the Joys Orwell depicts himself as an
unattractive, cowardly little boy. If he was cowardly, then so
was I. In the weeks before I went to St Cyprian’s I cried myself
to sleep night after night. It is, of course, a monstrosity to send
a child to boarding school at the age of eight (my younger
brother followed me there when only six because my mother
had joined my father overseas). Ours was a happy home, so
long as one parent remained available. I feared to leave it
because I had read Tom Brown's Schooldays and did not want to
be beaten or roasted on a fire. On the other hand I had been
taught that those who served the British Empire must submit
to a stem apprenticeship before they would be worthy to
exercise dominion over palm and pine. My father had not told
me this because I hardly knew him; like my grandfather,
Colonel George Augustus and his forebear, the celebrated
cavalry general who had created Jacob’s Horse, equipped the
regiment with a revolutionary rifle of his own design which
enabled it to play a large part in the conquest of Sind and had
then founded the city of Jacobabad, my father had rarely been
seen in England since he left it as a lieutenant in the British
Army. His career developed in the Political Service and later as
the acknowledged expert on south-west Arabia and a leading
Arabist of his day. My mother was of Danish birth but she had
been educated in Edinburgh before joining her parents in
Arabia where they ran a medical mission.

Having looked upon the British Empire when it was red, my
pother had never been sober about it since. She really believed
1 at the concomitants of Empire - the public schools, the

Inside the Myth

ancient universities, Sandhurstand^theSuffCoU^ ^ India

be cherished and t at tfi at dominated Arabia, hgyptj

and the even smaller n tire d of saying it - the salt of

and the Sudan were - and she school f ea ring the worst

the earth. Consequent y w Q f s hock when I found that

and entered public school in 1 d of Kipling’s //into

my mother had slipped an ilium A a U ttle of my

my tuck box. Yet, haym I found myself able to
father’s gift for Oriental dip ^ than j had ant i C ipated.
cope with St Cyprian s with d loped a stammer from my
Not that I was fr f e J rom p £ singingkssons eventually freed
childhood friend Kim r ^ us f have foun d his affliction

me from this d ‘ sa . bll ^’ h ^ s subsequ ent career. To have time to
uV interrogation - what spy con.d asK

for iT™ited from certain "ts of snobben, £*
Orwell had overlooked.! t ^ Western Front had not
commanded an army P who encouraged us to stick
escaped the nonce °fSamb , ^ front c i au d went on to
Union Jack pins into maps ^ ^ brQther con tnbuted

become a held ^ a ^ he) J h e unloaded part of his stamp

unwittingly to my prestige when addressed t0

collection upon me at sen • CIE C BE DSO can

Major-General le Grand Jaco sQns Q f hard-faced men

have done me no harm arno g ^ war Qn his first and

who did no more than do well ed in co i on el’s uniform

last, visit to the school my PP j b the sam e colour

bearing, if I remember aright, ^ ^ Legion of

as his Star of India. He precise contribution to

Honour, and looked it. s e a f ter t h e Arabs.’ And so

the war effort was I house beneath the c od

he did. First from that . tm . b , £ ere he was attended by 20
tower at Steamer Point m Ade ’ in Cairo where h»

servants, and then at the Sir Ronal

friends and colleagues ^er favourite of Ibn SaU

Eastbourne “ d . ”^“ he S dlughters of Flip and Sam a

Alaric Jacob 57

were to do the same. While Orwell insisted that Sambo never
missed an opportunity to remind him that ‘You are living on
my charity’, the fact that my brother and I had also been
accepted at reduced fees was never mentioned, much less held
against us.

The celebrated opening sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four must
be engraved on many a memory: ‘It was a bright, cold day in
April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Scarcely less
arresting is the opening of Such, Such Were the Joys : ‘Soon after I
arrived at St Cyprian’s (not immediately but after a week or
two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of
school life) I began wetting my bed.’

It was this accident, Orwell maintained, that set in train the
systematic persecution and humiliation that Sambo and Flip
inflicted upon him over the ensuing six years.

Some critics have concluded that the masochistic horrors of
Nineteen Eighty-Four were derived directly from Such, Such Were
the Joys. In August 1946 Orwell began work on Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and in May 1947 he sent Such, Such Were the Joys to
his publishers, pointing out that it had been planned as a
pendant to Cyril Connolly’s own memoir of the school which
Connolly had included in Enemies of Promise in 1938. Orwell
was desperately anxious to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four
before the tuberculosis which then threatened his life should
overwhelm him, so it is likely that the school memoir had been
produced in earlier years. Whatever the precise date of its
composition, the memoir is the most astonishing document to
have been penned by a mature man thirty years after the events
described.

Whoever writes about his own childhood must beware of
exaggeration and self-pity,’ Orwell began and then, disregard-
ing his own advice, added:

I do not claim that I was a martyr or that St Cyprian’s was a sort of
Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I
did not record that they are largely memories of disgust. The
overcrowded, underfed, underwashed life that we led was
isgusting, as I recall it . . . there was the slimy water of the plunge
a th - it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school was
supposed to go into it every morning and I doubt whether the

68

Inside the Myth

, „ frenuently - and the always-damp towels

water was changed at all V sineU „f the changing-room

w.th their cheesy smell . . . *e sw d di , apid a t ed lavatones

with its greasy basins ’ ;*' r ° nd on , he doors, so that whenever

which had no fastening Y ^ to cotne crashing in. It is

you were sitting there someone without se cming to

not easy for me to think ^ smenin g - a sort of

breathe in a whiff of S 1 ^ faecal smells blowing

compound of sweaty stocking* ty ^ ngs> n eck of

along corridors, forks w«h old foo^ ^ ^ and the

Shofog chamber pots in ^^“"g^ous, and the WC and
It is true that I am no y essar jly more obtrusive when

dirty handkerchief si <fe° ^ crushed together in a small

space ^'boyhood is" the age of ^st ... one seems ways*
walking the tightrope over a cesspool.

I knew that Orwell 1 think it

boys who had entered with foh_^ ^ the respect and

was only after ^ ea f d j S f * 0nve ll over many years finally

admiration I ^ ad / e ^u e aee of disgust? For me it had been |

crumbled. Boyhood a i the g G n the cricket fields andm

an age of friendships, of exat«n a t concerts o

’having ^«pr"n J in U* school magazine, ofwmning

Townsend Warner r i K htly concludes that Boys

In another passage ° ^ misfortune is disgraceful an

are Erewhonians; they think that m^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ta i en ts,
must be concealed at all , : n so craven a manner. I

had Orwell succumbed to misf ■ ^ bu[ had bott l e d up the

'"uUitd Sau *ose Involved in it were dead. Induing,
it happened, himself. ‘what a needless misery P

be able to enjoy the fruits of it.

Alaric Jacob 59

Yet I had to admit that my pity for him was darkly tinged
with contempt.

The gravamen of Orwell’s charge against Sambo and Flip
was that they took advantage of his half-fee status to treat him
with calculated cruelty and contempt. He knew he ought to be
grateful to them because they were going to make it possible
for him to go to one of the great public schools which his
parents could not otherwise have afforded. But he could feel
no gratitude, any more than he could feel love for the father
who had handed him over to their care.

I knew very well that I disliked my own father whom I had rarely
seen before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a
gruff- voiced elderly man for ever saying ‘Don’t!’

From the start Sambo impressed on him that if he failed to
win a scholarship he would have to leave school at fourteen
and ‘become a little office boy at forty pounds a year.’ And he
quotes Flip as saying:

It isn’t awfully decent of you to behave like this, is it? Idling your
time away week after week. You know your people aren’t rich,
don’t you? You know they can’t afford the same things as other
boys’ parents.

According to the Wilkeses’ standards, he says:

I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was
unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt. This
picture, I should add, was not altogether fanciful. I was an
unattractive boy. St Cyprian’s soon made me so ...

He concludes:

I have never been back to St Cyprian’s ... for years I loathed its
very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough
detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to
me there ... Except upon dire necessity I would not have set foot
to Eastbourne. I even conceived a prejudice against Sussex, as the
county that contained St Cyprian’s . . . Now, however, the place is

70

Inside the Myth

c A I have not even enough animosity

out of my system for goo • Sam bo are dead or that the

Was U indeed

budding s.ood. No. a sione of u

remains.

* *

*

It was precisely at this pomt mmy “^"''c^rial’s by looking

Pocket Kodak more thtm sixty y Mildmay, Eddie

Cyprian’s playmg field f°° f - ends G f those distant days.
Obrien and Rory Macleod , ' y were one or two essays that

Interspersed among the picm of Aem had doubtless

my mother must ^ ave . family magazine I used to run in
appeared in The Red Circle & f hack^to school for fear of
the holidays but had never had written at

ridicule. As I read again for ^^Lte how justified that
the age of twelve I wmeed d P been fair-copied for

fear had been. T he piec< e . for the adhesive edge of a

submission to some local newsp p^ , ^ adhered t0 the

stamp for the return of *e m ^ ^ , A s choolboy .

?eT»mpXd n co d quo.e from i. because U demands to be
alongside Such, Such Wer, thejys.

I, was a cab of .he

shall always remember it. .wasp peacefully along*

stripes dra, had once been gr at a red bnc»
loose gravel and 1 “ ch ' d “Jld announced .ha. »

rlM".o°rS;M: j ,nd,.drawi„ 6 rcm|lo-

T« o*? depLmd »d’l «« ta

Alaric Jacob

71

please! This lady addressed me in tones of compassion and having
wrung from me my name, age, social standing and past history,
conducted me through a maze of white- washed passages and
proceeded to tell me where I must keep my coat, hat and shoes.
My guide then took me into ‘the Dinin’-room’ to have ‘Somfin’ to
eat.’ I selected a particularly sticky variety of Bath bun and took a
large bite from it. What was my surprise on looking up from this
task, to see my hostess staring at me in blank astonishment -
‘What awfu’ cheek!’ she gasped. ‘It’s a Sixth Form bun and you’ve
eat it all up: what will the Sixth say when they arrive?’

As I had no idea what they would say I discreetly held my tongue
and tried to look penitent. Presendy a plump person in white -
whom I afterwards discovered to be the Matron - entered the
room followed by a convoy of boys. ‘Hallo, young man’ said the
plump person, ‘when did you arrive?’ ‘At half past five.’ ‘Hum,
you’re an early bedder, so you’d better be on your way. Miss M —
will show you your dormitory.’

M — and I departed, followed by envious glances from the
boys. I lost no time in unpacking and getting into bed. I was just
falling asleep when a sdcky little hand was thrust into mine.
‘You’re er ... rather nice’ said a voice, ‘so you’d better hold onto
these.’ Next morning I awoke to find myself stuck fast to the
sheets. I had lain on top of several Bath buns.

Impossible to believe that Orwell could ever have put his
name to such a composition, anticipating as it does that
winsome style of writing which was to be popularised a few
years later by Godfrey Winn and Beverley Nichols. I would
have denied authorship myself if irrefutable evidence to the
contrary was not lying before me as I write. I have no
recollection today that such an incident ever happened, but I
do not think I invented it. Marigold Wilkes was real enough,
and if she is alive today, the Bath buns may have stuck in her
consciousness as firmly as they seem to have done in mine. In
any event, here surely is confirmation of Orwell’s Erewhon
theory; here is a boy using a frivolous anecdote as a means of
concealing the real pain of going to school. It is a practice that
some boys carry forward into adult life. George Orwell,
emphatically, was not one of them.

I Did Orwell tell the truth about St Cyprian’s? It is not the

72

Inside the Myth

t u n ce who followed soon
truth which his contemporanes ^ exper ienced by Cyril

after have attested to ‘Milksop Mildmay’ as we called

Connolly, Cecil Beaton , y 0rwe ll who, on becoming a peer,
him, a child quite as a s ° e Grand National. Even Gavin

astonished us all by ndmg d ^te like a hermit in the

Maxwell, the author from ^ school by

Highlands of Scodand after being rem^ ^ ^ deeply> even

an indulgent mother u^dult^ life to be ruined by it. When
Maxwell did not allow his a ^ career in cons ervative
E.D. O’Brien, who built a writing his memoirs ten

journalism and public relauo, oldest g friend > ) to tell me

" prov “

there was a good one. family, for all their

The truth a S I sat. it was that the w, n ^ offaed

faults, were not mons “” a ? d s * f tha t time, admirable. Wha,
was, within the crampe made him claim that this

was it in Orwell’s his whole life?

rather absurd little school had dab ^ , hose , atter .da,

ad'mS X hat

Mot U streTpon Ms pedestal; Salieri soil lives though no
one is obliged to take bun .^ f U ^ y etched hea lth while I have

Orwell had to face a 1 _ His temperament was

scarcely known a day be bat ed sports, I enjoyed

depressive, mine was saI ^^; tand in the shooting eight. I
being in the first eleven but j d i d not expect to find

was no more happy t ai _ - tudona i uf e was never to roy
happiness in any scBo ° ' s I possibly could and went

taste. I left public school soona ^ P ^ ^ a passio n to
to France to study and wn ‘ - ned f Q live in America and
try everything once. I was mY self the extremes of

SL in Russia in order to «* ^ dppe |

SnTSrr ior me the ideal M bt

^r^SrS^beforedieresnainn.

Alaric Jacob

73

that famous ‘pram in the hail’ - Cyril Connolly’s chief ‘enemy of
promise’ - closed in upon me.

After coasting gently through Eton, earning no laurels but
making no enemies, Orwell went tamely to Burma at the age of
nineteen for lack of anything better to do. I could not under-
stand how anyone of even moderate intelligence could have
taken so retrograde a step. My father had left India to make a
new career in Arabia, partly because he felt our family had been
in India long enough, and pardy because, even before the 1914
war, it was clear to him that India must soon have self-rule. He
also disliked the second-rate men in first-rate jobs who already
predominated there. Nothing would have induced me to go to
India; I had been there and in Arabia as a child, and wanted no
part of either world. I had no wish to rule subject peoples. I
would rather make a thin living in the arts at home than strive
towards a knighthood in some imperial outpost.

So Orwell and I came to be in complete agreement about how
we were going to live. But what a very long time it took him to
reach that point. He was, in truth, a very slow developer. Even
after his Burmese days and his apprenticeship in Paris, some of
the English friends who tried to encourage his free-lance writing
doubted his capacity to succeed. Ruth Pitter, a family friend who
was to win the Queen’s Prize for Poetry and become a Com-
panion of Literature, has said that his early writings were so
inept that they made her laugh. She did not believe that he had it
in him to make a living as an author, let alone to become a
master of English prose.

The woman who played Ruth Pitter’s part in my early life was
Margot Asquith. She was sixty- four and I nineteen when we met,
but even before that I had made an impertinent beginning as a
writer. My first play was produced at Plymouth Repertory
Theatre when I was seventeen. My second followed it on the
same stage soon after my eighteenth birthday. Its very title, The
Cmpleat Cynic : a piece of persiflage in one act would be enough to
wring derisive laughter from any aspiring playwright today, and
yet the memory of an audience laughing at some of the lines I
bad written became a consolation to me in the theatrical
disappointments that soon followed. Margot Asquith perceived
that I needed a creative sedative rather than encouragement.

I am sorry you have done a novel so young’ she wrote just

Alaric Jacob

Inside the Myth

before Methuen published my firs^ novel^ whe^

twenty-one. ‘Better to watt “ 1 “ Titrate an ft-'

hand don't leave tt too late ^or one t may.P

(her own sohtary toon upon me came to be as

So it was that Margot si ^ Qwn youth . she

strong as Benjamin Jowetts friendship had I been one of
could not have shown me vou th of vague promise

the great men of her fufto go to a

and negligible achievem ^ her all evening than to

ball with Margot ai ^ . facing as in conversation, Margot

frequent young women, i g i unc heon table in

outclassed any debutante I evermet.m ^ ^ offef a$

Bedford Square one mig tm , ma de their appearance in

well - Edward^ who had

the history books. He now \ had acquired the

practical as well as entertai g ■ per j n Plymouth and

basic skills of journalism o ^ P P was on Reuters

thought myself Telman as well as French to qualify. Margot
where one needed Ger - . ■ r at her house before I

saw to it that I met the Rente « the delicacy t0

applied for the job, and w g success. So I became

suggest that she ha ^ P a ? e ™ of we nty-one and went to

A , rhis time my Having
to inspire a pla, nothing whatever abom

written it, I realised th friend and, much to my

socialism, so I borrawed ^ ^ ^ honger

surprise, read it. This sto ° living illustrations

marchers arrived i", London '^Xon with *cm though
to Mane’s work. I felt an spoke. From to

I could hardly understand was ninety per cent

That was the year he went to Spain. H

75

When Orwell arrived in Barcelona he was enchanted by what
he found there. In the opening chapter of Homage to Catalonia
he wrote:

It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working
class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had
been seized by the workers and was draped in red flags . . . almost
every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here
and there were being systematically demolished by workmen.
Servility and even ceremonial speech had disappeared. Everyone
called everyone else ‘comrade’. In outward appearance this was a
town in which wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. I
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a
workers’ state and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been
killed or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side. I did not
realise that great numbers of them were simply lying low and
disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Nevertheless Orwell was intoxicated by the prevailing sense
of freedom. He had come as a journalist with a group from the
Independent Labour Party but he soon determined to fight,
not merely to observe. His first thought was to join the
International Brigade in Madrid, which was Communist-con-
trolled, but he was persuaded to join the local militia that had
been armed by the party nearest to the ILP - the POUM, or
Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista , a group which favoured
Trotsky’s line in opposition to Stalin — that is, world revolution
as opposed to revolution in one country.

When Orwell got to the front he was dismayed to find that
the militia spent much of their time in political argument. He
used to urge them for God’s sake to stop their disputation and
concentrate on beating Franco, for if Franco were to win
neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor even Attlee would count in
Spain - it would be death and destruction for all of them. This

was the line of the Spanish Communist Party: first win the war
and then decide your form of government and at first Orwell
ound this reasonable. But, when the POUM began to resist
the government’s plan to train a regular army with an officer
corps and a general staff in order to make better use of the
arms which the Russians were supplying, Orwell changed his

Inside the Mi/th

mind- The POUM warned to fight on as

even though then arms wer ^ e P apons for the,

give them up in excna g M i • j was secretly hosule

believed the system

government would betray France who were enforcing a

buy the goodwill of Britain and France, who ^ ^ ^

policy of non-mterwntion^ ^ st and most popular

Communists were at th pouM w ho never numbered more
force in Spain ^ *at the POUM , who ^ ^ and boy$ at

than 30,000 and who h them He knew that the

the front, could Trotsky’s private

POUM leader Andres Nin had ^ whole PO UM

secretary but beheved it was . un ^ w hi c h posed a threat

S3‘ ^Sd » ^ accepted dre revolution stance

of the POUM a I’outrance.

This is how Orwell defined it.

Bourgeois is t0 fi ? ht

is fascism; to fight agai , h ir Q f a se cond which is

against on. form ^'"an, The o„l, tea,

liable to turn into the hrst y , If set up any

alternative to capitalism ls Wor victory to Franco or,

iesser god than this you srfUtther the worto

at best, let in fascism Y ■ c ^ yield anything to

mu,, cling to even scrap the, have won, tfr they J n b * ng

she semi -bourgeois „ lic ’ force, must be presented

p"™ and every ~

are inseparable.

At the time . «d » «*■ "on^O^-

risttag'S life in the from line ' uTed'"^^'

friends Z to whether . oughtno.»|

Alaric Jacob

77

resign and join the International Brigade. Most of them urged
me to wait for the much bigger war we were certain was
coming. Still, I felt that Orwell could have given me the right
answers to innumerable questions if only I could have put
them to him. But when Orwell published his considered
tesdmony in Homage to Catalonia two years later I was amazed
that anyone so experienced and intelligent could have misread
the situation so completely. The gist of his argument was that
the Spanish Republic had been betrayed not by Britain, France
or the United States, who by refusing all aid were ensuring
Franco’s victory, but by Russia - the only country which was in
fact sending help. Had I been in contact then I would have put
the case against him thus:

You used your experience in Spain in an entirely subjective
way, without thought for the wider issues. It was wildly
romantic of you to suppose that the 30,000 men of POUM
could ever have produced a Marxist revolution in Spain while
fighting Franco at the same time. They would have produced
an isolated Trotskyite republic that would soon have been
overthrown. The Western Powers would have seen to that —
even if it meant siding with Hitler and Mussolini to do it. Set
up a Communist regime in Spain and you justify Franco’s case
up to the hilt and invite the rest of Europe to join his glorious
anti-Bolshevik crusade! You say the Soviet Union has betrayed
the Spanish working class by calling for a Popular Front rather
than a Communist state. I say that in this particular the Soviet
Union is entirely right. Even if Franco is defeated it will be only
one battle in a much bigger war. How do you think we can ever
deal with Hitler without a Popular Front to confront him with
the danger of a war on two fronts - Britain and France on one
side and the Red Army on the other.’

But of course what Orwell called ‘the Popular Front
baloney’ was the last thing he wanted. In a letter to Geoffrey
Gorer after his return from Spain he wrote: ‘I do not see how
one can oppose fascism except by working for the overthrow of
capitalism, starting, of course, in one’s own country.’ He
predicted that a form of fascism would be imposed on Britain
ss soon as war against Nazi Germany began, and that
Communists and Labourites who should have struggled to
stop a war between two rival imperialist systems would meekly

Inside the Myth

78

side with their own conse ^auve^gov e rnm ^ ^ hope of any

His Spanish experience r Hi ri on and his last two books

improvement in the human c ° . Three years before he
were the fruit of accumu^ed despair. Three^ ^ ^

died from tuberculosis he but hopeless case. As a

the position of a doaor trea ^ aUye and therefore to

doctor it is his duty to P P chance Q f recovery. But as

assume that the pauent a an d admit that the

a scientist it is his duty to tace tne

pauent will probably die. November 1943 and

Orwell began to wn « ^ year it had been

EE&SS "bL memoirs what happened neat:

, „ r ha H received a gift more precious than
I realised at once tha ^ however, did not want to

rubies - a masterpiece. om thought, to publish this bitter

publish the book. Was it ng > its armies were

satirical attack on our great ally the USA had

rolling back the o“ *"e. coas.P M, „,fe

established a mere br g published the book she

, c , p himse if was worried and he reveals a

Warburg says he himseii
curious aspect of his think, ng at this time.

, rvKt The German armies were falling
I was obsessed by one fought The Gmn^ [hat Sta] , n

back but their will to resist was Qr ev ,. n turned

made a second to, wi* ^ *

d:"r.“als, plausible to me. |

To me - in my post as a war ^conceivable. An<j

Front - it would have seeme f Germa n-Je«' s j

79

Alaric Jacob

been slaughtering six million of his own people, and an even
larger number of Russians, and the army which was engaged in
liberating the murder camps. However, Warburg decided to
take the risk. And just ten days before the book came out the
Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Warburg’s comment on this coincidence is also worth
recording:

The technical breakthrough that had made the bomb possible had
taken just 5 years - about the same time Orwell had required to
conceive, work out and write Animal Farm. Though the A-bomb
was dropped on Japan it was considered as a warning to the Soviet
Union. A-bomb and A-Farm thus had the same target - the Soviet
Union. Each contained a threat to its existence. Orwell, of course,
had not foreseen the atomic bomb but he had foreseen that the
world had become one in which such weapons could be produced.
As early as 1937 he had proclaimed that ‘progress is a swindle’ ...
at the same time he had concluded that the Soviet Union was the
most dangerous threat to liberal values the world had ever seen,
and it was against the Soviet Union that his book was aimed. Since
1936 he had concentrated his effort to atack and if possible to
destroy the myth of Soviet Communism which between 1936 and
1946 had deluded millions of working people and fatally infected
the minds of the left intellectuals who dominated the arts at that
period.

This portentous analysis demonstrates, to my mind, that if
Orwell’s political balance was unstable, his publisher’s
judgment was downright silly. Orwell can never have
anticipated the enormous commercial success of Animal Farm.
He had conceived it out of his lifelong admiration for Swift - a
satire within the framework of a children’s story aimed at the
politically sophisticated, not a mass readership. Thus it is likely
at only a minority of the millions who came to read Animal
fJJ full y appreciated its author’s intentions. Equally, the
0 _ was misused for political purposes in a manner which
l mi g lu have foreseen had his own political antennae
Iris M* 10 ^ 3ensitive than they were. I recall that my first wife,
fen SK 6 k WaS ^ USt as ^’squieted by it as Warburg’s wife had
e ad come to Russia with me in an Arctic convoy to

Inside the Myth

80

a « as correspondent of the Obsnve to whtch Orwell also

contributed. that ma n when I get home I

‘If Ivor Brown asks m Hetrree of wit, even a certain

shall refuse' she satd. 1 Slier books had lacked. I

would have acTepteTruch an inwtauon If only »
doT h^l^toTfel, compiled » write something very
different from Animal Farm. different matter. When

wSTbSSu Hesum^ d his feelings about *
book for circulation among his start.

Alaric Jacob

81

eh. most terrifrine books I have ever read. Orwell
This is among * e he ^ ws his rea der no tiny flickering

has no hope, o a stud of pes simism unrelieved ... I

candlelight of hope. . s J istic attack on socialism and

take it to be a de seems to indicate a final breach

socialist parties genei y. not the socialism of equality and

benveen Orwell and ,„nge, exp.cti fro.

human brotherhoo w ic f MarJ n s m and managerial

socialist parues. but dre soaalnm « » ^ ^ ^ ConsmJtWt

revolution. It is worth a c a preface by Winston

Part,; i, ,s imaginab'e *a. ^1^^ ^ ^ —

Churchill after whom book but i pra y I may

^“Xtother like^t for years to come...

In his biography of r'SkOTitesthat Oroellwas "albeit

Warburg in 1980, Bernard C realising that Nineteen

incautious, at worst

Eighty-Four could be read M Had he forgotten wha.

such by reactionaries all over th Q f course, Orwell

“ ^™ent clarify,^

“ TaSnt pubUshS 3 'I WO V- ° f

he published -

from a Bourgeois Life, an autobiographical book of mine with a
print-run, I believe, of 3,000. The irony of our respective
situations seemed to me to have been underwritten by the
Gods. Apart from one or two reviews that characterised
Nineteen Eighty-Four as a crude anti-communist polemic, the
literary establishment as a whole greeted it as a profound work,
destined to become a classic. My book was calculated to
present socialism with a smiling face yet I cannot complain that
the critics were unfair to me; perhaps they gave Warburg the
credit for having balanced his books so evenly. While the Daily
Worker’s massive notice of my Bourgeois Life sent the faithful
scut tying to Collet s Bookshop, the conservative press
produced quite a run at Hatchard’s by presenting me as a
naughty yet entertaining iconoclast. Scene after glittering
scene flashes into life was how Time and Tide put it.

A veritable shower of gold descended upon Orwell from vast
sales in America and from translation rights all over the world;
so much so that he had to be turned into a limited company to
safeguard the future of his estate.

Not for anything would I have been in Orwell’s shoes nor
he, of course, in mine. He was a heavyweight (size 12 in boots);

I a lightweight (size 8 shoes).

For me Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most disgusting
books ever written - a book smelling of fear, hatred, lies and
self-disgust by comparison with which the works of the
Marquis de Sade are no more than the bad dreams of a sick
mind. Only a very sick man could have written it, and six
months after it appeared Orwell was dead. Apologists for
Nineteen Eighty-Four maintain that it is not only a prophecy of
what is bound to happen if socialism is misdirected, but an
atmck on fascism and Nazism as well. We know that neither
Hitler nor Mussolini abolished the capitalist system; on the
contrary, private wealth continued to accumulate. But in
Nineteen Eighty-Four Ingsoc has triumphed, the old system of
private enterprise has gone for ever, Big Brother rules over a
•qua id, poverty-stricken society in which only the Party bosses
m some semblance of what had once been the good life.
rh,Z 1S , ! n , fact no more tha n a projection of the kind of
as pvicM WhlCh ^ xtreme anti-Communists have always envisaged
W* £ ln the USSR since 1917 and which anyone who has

82

Inside the Myth

oc t have done knows to be a travesty of
lived in that country, as ’ and crimes that

the ms*. Despite all the it is absurd to

I"' tmppiness are as common In Moscow as

they are in Manchester- , , • history of betrayal.

The history of socia ism h< T‘ Exchequer who observed in
The Labour Chance Uor ^ ^ ^ ^en’t used for many

recent days that Soci working-class politicians who,

years’ typifies generations of workmg^ bo P Aered to rea j

beginning as rev °' ut ” n House of Lo rds. But a socialist of
Marx, ended up in t judged by higher

°™d"ds P To U wAe “‘took like NmeUm Eighty-Fm, is to
standards. To write a hate socia i lsm

present a gift of ‘"T'^jS^ce did, to strangle it a,

and who would wish, a Orwell died several

birth’, in the thirty years the idea that

generations have been 1 ^ horrors described in that

socialism leads me^cK y be i ie ved, and the man who

launctiedTt SI die sle wretched little boy who was so unhapp,

at St Cyprian’s School although he produced

Orwell’s basic def wor ld he knew, he was quite

convincing reasons to? hating happiness of

unable to put forward any i to ^^f pjra l working life
mankind - save for a s mQSt rea i workers have been

before the 1914 war from have moV ed gratefully into the

£ Pfip" wh"o be”han^ and take, pride in being
resolute enough to press the nudea^b ^ ^ d£test thc
Had Orwell lived, he mig him honour,

generality of readers wl jhelhtsyn first came to light i -
One recalls that Alexander Solz y honest Marxist who

dianks to Khrushchev -m the role of an hon« ^

wished to see Communism wirh a^h ^ ^

"S SinTmlJe - as Khmshchev first though -

83

Alaric Jacob

but of Lenin, Marx, Engels and all the founding fathers of
socialism - even poor old Oliver Cromwell. Like Tolstoy in old
age, Solzhenitsyn seems to aspire to be the saviour of the entire
Western world. Orwell owed his rise to fame not to fellow
socialists but to the conservative establishment in Britain and
America who seized upon his last two books with delight. Forty
years ago they first heard Orwell s voice telling them just what
they wanted to hear, and they were overjoyed. In their eyes,
here was a truly honest socialist who had come to hate
socialism — not just Russian socialism but socialism of any
kind. Because Orwell concentrated on the dangers that are
certainly inherent in socialism, rather than the benefits such a
form of government can bring, it was possible to read him in
this light. And of course, from Animal Farm onward, the time
was absolutely ripe.

President Truman proclaimed his doctrine and began to set
up bases in Turkey, at Russia’s back door, in 1947. The
conference of the Big Four was meeting in Moscow at the time,
trying to reach agreement on the future of Germany. I was
coming to the end of a four-year stint as Beaverbrook’s
correspondent in Russia, and I well recall the disastrous effect
Truman s speech had on its meetings. Within a week the
conference curled up and died. John Foster Dulles was also
there. Secure in the knowledge that America alone possessed
the bomb, he laid it down in a private talk with me that
Communism must not only be contained, as Truman had
stated, but ultimately destroyed. When I asked him if I had
heard him aright he said: ‘Well, they must be pushed back.
Uut ot Europe and back to the Urals.’

I should have reminded Dulles that this was what Hitler had
just failed to do when he shot himself in a Berlin bunker.

nstead, I distanced myself forthwith from the nuclear

evangelist.

1S L aS Wel1 that 0rwel1 died w hen he did, at the

ght of his achievement. I don’t think he would have enjoyed

fiju, f the P und its say that Animal Farm and Nineteen
l SeheicrhT Tu W ° rth several divisions to the ‘free world’ at
eniovinl °k the C °, d War ' And in 1984 he would scarcely be

u2 happy ° ld a S e -

e to cherish his memory, yet unable to get him out of

84

Inside the Myth

my mind. ^ ^

* ° f - “ deid '

Bill Alexander

George Orwell and Spain

Every school student taking O or A Level examinations in
modern history is told to read George Orwell’s Homage to
Catalonia in order to gain an understanding of the Spanish War
of 1936-1939. This is as useful as studying the Second World
War from the story of a small group of soldiers in some quiet
comer, far from the main fronts of El Alamein, Stalingrad or
Normandy. Even Hugh Thomas, no champion of the Spanish
Republic, has said that Homage to Catalonia is a better book
about war itself than about the Spanish war.

Orwell went to Spain largely ignorant of the background,
situation and the forces involved. He admits ‘when I came to
Spain I was not only uninterested in the political situation but
unaware of it. ’ Unlike many European intellectuals he had not
understood the essential clash between liberty and fascism.
Hitler’s brutal destruction of democracy in Germany and even
Mosley’s violence against opponents in Britain in 1934 must
have passed him by. Crick, his biographer, could write that
belore March 1936, when Orwell saw Mosley’s blackshirts
beating up questioners at a Barnsley meeting, ‘there is no
indicauon before this incident of any great concern in Orwell

ADril ,17^ and Spread of fascism -’ Orwell himself wrote in
Mm lT 361 1 would Iilce to know whether Mosley is sincere in
fc ( . e or if he is deliberately bamboozling the people. ’
at a hi C ° U P le of weeks after the brutal treatment of anti-fascists
^■fprote^t at ^kert Hall had provoked a storm of

e Spanish Popular Front government, formed after the

85

Inside the Myth

elections in 1936, won a

seats but only just over half of^e began ^

government drawn fro P of socia i an d liberal reforms,

implement a limited prog* ^ entrenched reactionary

forcero^Spani^^°c^ty^- Uprising

sr* and p,epired

paramilitary Civil Gu “ f S “ mnent . The loyalty of those not
flvil service and organ* of govmnnent ? DKisiv ely, the

openly joining *e revolt wasjen q ^ after ^

^‘g IZ Hid^ « and Mussoltnfs Italy - die »

openly fascist powers of Western urop^^ ^ new feature in

MiUtary coupes an J^“ onfident they wou ld win a quick,

«as not to . be Jhe P-P^ “"TnTta

and middle classes foug j barracks and took weapons

spite of heavy '-^XlSst days five out of the
in many towns and loca •, f b government. But

seven mam cities were ir i the ton* by bluff

General Queipo de Lla , | ured in t h e trained and

massacred the workers \ of Africa through the airport in

disciplined troops of the Army ^ was an anarchist

planes provided by Hit • S passivity, giving

stronghold, but centre between

the rebels control of t , y ment had exercised a firm

the South and North. If the g have taken

united command, workers and loyal lore

these centres and the critical days before

But the government delayed without central

releasing arms to the worker - Th P P ^ for offenslv e
leadership at this stage, did > not : re elements,

action. The MadnienM, hdprf spontaneously to

control of Ca*nia an6 -

Bill Alexander gy

of Aragon, but when they met firmer resistance, almost at the
gates of Zaragoza and Huesca, halted their advance. Though
their arms were limited a planned concentration of forces and
weapons could have taken both towns. As it was, John
Comford, a Cambridge student who joined the POUM militia
in eaily August, complained of boredom and inactivity in front
line positions just outside Huesca. Later the group of
Independent Labour Party (ILP) volunteers, including George
Orwell, sat in roughly the same positions outside Huesca from
January tojune 1937 and then returned home to Britain.

Another reason which brought the advances into Aragon to
an end was the dominant political outlook among the workers.
The CNT, led and inspired by anarchists, and the POUM a
breakaway group from the Communist Party of Spain, though
wanting to defeat the fascists, believed that a revolution should
be made. Having defeated and driven the enemy from their
own immediate area they concentrated on building a
revolutionary society.

The people of the Extremadura, Andalucia and Madrid had
no such opportunity for speculation. Their harsh reality was
the rapid advance northwards of Franco’s Army of Africa,
supported in all ways by Hitler, aiming to capture Madrid and
link up with the fascist-held areas of Navarre and the North,
i W3S ^ tt ^ e sco P e ^ or thinking of the form of society in the
future - the one task was to stop and defeat the fascists. The
bodies of the butchered peasants, workers and progressive
people, the screams of the raped women and orphaned
children, were the political arguments that the defeat of Franco
and the foreign invaders claimed absolute and complete
priority. Though always ill-armed, often in confrision and with
weak leadership, the workers’ militias fought with tenacity.

^ that if the fascists reached Madrid its capture would
mean e defeat of the Republic, the end of any hopes of a
M ° rev °lution. Franco was stopped in the streets of
• Meanwhile, the Aragon front was dormant.

War S e f ve and anti-fascist people throughout the world

fascism? w Pa, u U be yet another country falling to

Would Hitler and Mussolini, using their front man

•Storfh ' t °n t the / resh h S hts of freedom in Spain ? Could the
e a owed to send trained units of their forces to help

Inside the M^th

88

fascism while the Spanish people smiggW a ^ wayi men

A> firs ‘ SP S"‘mTover“e worid made their wa, to help die
and women from all over lnte mational Brigades, which

Spanish people. Most jomed AeJntema^ ^6 ^ ^

were formed officially in tQ Madrid and joined the

first hastily formed Briga f which ha d got into

bloody fighung, stopping Franco

the city itself. fascists joined the CNT and

A few hundred foreig Barcelona. They went to the

POUM-influenced units, based on Barcelon I

fronts in Aragon, outside Zarago « .and Huesca. ^

In Britain the Communist International

influenced Ae ^ forty-odd volunteers who

^d'withte POUM and ana"Us in Ar^on. ^ ^

There were ^Spanish struggle. FetJ

organisations in thei ^ P ? etician of the ILP, accepted the
Brockway, leader and c M that the need was to prepare
views of the leaders of POU ™ contro l in the crisis;

Soviets of workers an P eas ,j e d the working class to a

that the Popular Front agreem d ir f to storage 1

non-socialist government command took the

and that the demand for m the war when *
initiative from the wor _ ar fo foe Republic faced

fascists had made ^ eat ..f lating that if the socialist

defeat, Brockway ^ aS f^ Xr Ae fafcists were defeated the

revolution was to tak eP la revo i u tion must be prepared

forces to carry out the soc . when it arrived. (It

and stimulated to PP his ^biography Tomtit

must be said that Broc J ^ nesso f his attitude then.)
Tomorrow (1977) recognises ch ^ wea ^ of fo e Communist

Harry Pollitt, the General Secre “,7 °. ue was t0 defeat
Part,, urged con, .and y that *e ■rnnedut^ ^

fascism and, calling for help fo P fo e mselves but for aj

are defending democracy, not only to 0 nly P alh

Bill Alexander gg

volunteers from Britain - those in the ILP groups and those in
the British Battalion of the International Brigade.

Progressive people everywhere in Europe expressed their
support and desire to help. They had seen the persecution of
writers and artists because of their views on race, the burning
of the books by the Nazis. They were concerned that the ‘lights
of freedom’ would go out in yet another country. Felicia
Browne, an artist graduate of the Slade School, joined the
militia in the first days and was killed on 25 August 1936.
Writers such as Ralph Bates, Ralph Fox and Charles Donnelly!
and students like John Comford, Bernard Knox, Sam Lesser
and James Albrighton went to fight. Sylvia Townsend Warner
and Valentine Acland saw the plight of the wounded and then
campaigned in Britain for Medical Aid. Sir Richard Rees,
Julian Bell and the Boulting brothers drove ambulances.
Others like Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden and Edgell
Rickword visited Republican Spain and wrote about the
struggle.

This was the atmosphere in which George Orwell decided,
in December 1936, to go to Spain to write or to fight. Orwell,’
under his real name Eric Blair, went to see Pollitt at the
Communist Party’s London headquarters to ask his help in
getting to Spain. Pollitt refused to help Orwell by using the
organisation of the International Brigades. He may have done
so because he knew that Blair had served in the imperialist
police force in Burma, and Ralph Fox and Dave Springhall,
Political Commissars in Spain, had been stressing that all
volunteers must have firm anti-fascist convictions. Pollitt then
had a close relationship with Victor Gollancz, the publisher,
and may have heard of the contents of Orwell’s manuscript The
Road to Wigan Pier. (When this did appear as a Left Book Club

oice Pollitt wrote a scathingly bitter denunciation.)

So Orwell went along to the ILP who were preparing to send

unteers to Spain and secured their help.

Onl'n iat ^ re L scing to speculate what would have happened if
iifefr. _ - ad , n a ll° w ed to join the British Battalion of the

fiehP^T 3 B L ngade ' In the intense political life and arduous
|( ghis physical bravery might have been steeled and

Ettceri k mt ° steadPast courage, his basic misanthropy
y comradeship and trust in humanity, his political

90

Inside the Myth

„ anrl naivety turned into understanding, so giving
him^ C purpose an(/cause

representauve and as Orwell' writes in j newspa
had come ^"^"““^dia.ely because'a,

arddesbucIjomed*em,toalmo« ^ ^ ^

that time an in McNair possibly concerned that a

conceivable thmg to do. MtN» o»U Inttmadonsl

well-known recruit sho “' d 8V" ‘ ° 0 Sl to a POUM unit.
Sif^ueThere tepke his knowledge of the rifle mechtmi™

POUMistas and, exp ^^ a short periodwith^ne
joined thdnternationa g ^ ^ poUM militia, Orwell
other British vo.u volunteers who, organised by the

Sought they werejoimng th^ ^d^^shedT join' fe
BridsS BafuliomThe group jotned die 29th Division unde,

political control of POUNJa all the political

s£S==s.s=;=3

the realisation of the need for an orgamse l army an of

command. On the central ^and southern P Buton

heavy fighting, this was achieve . largely aloof

the quiet Aragon front the POUM and CNT kept larg y ^

from reorganisation and un f ed XTfluence of the POUM

political control under new titles. Tne Then

Tal declining and they could only »

29th Division with Orwell and the . lj. [ n Orwell 5

on the mountains often far from the fascist lines.

Bill Alexander

own words ‘I saw very Iitde fighting. Nobody bothered about
the enemy.’

At this time the fascists, having been beaten in their attempts
to capture Madrid, were concentrating to take the coal, iron
and engineering centres of Asturias and the Basque provinces.
Pressure on their flanks from the Aragon front would have
made this more difficult. Orwell complains that action was
impossible because of the lack of rifles and artillery, but,
because of the ‘Non Intervention’ agreement, this was the
general lot of all Republican forces.

Whatever arms the government was able to obtain naturally
went to the active fronts. But Orwell himself describes what
could have been done in his account of the one offensive raid
his group made. George Kopp, the Company Commander,
was a Russian brought up in Belgium with no previous military
experience. He describes, in a page-long story in the ILP paper
New Leader, how in a raid by 15 men, and with only one
casualty, they captured 2,000 rounds of ammunition and some
bombs and ‘their action compelled 20 lorries carrying 1,000
troops to be sent from the Alasso front.’ Kopp’s precise
knowledge of the troop movements is very open to question,
but the story shows that aggressive action would have
weakened the fascist concentration on the North. As it was, the
same day the ILP group left the front to go on leave to
Barcelona the Nazi planes bombed and obliterated Guernica.

Brockway, the New Leader and Orwell stress that the ILP
group were entitled to go on leave - being allowed five days
leave for every month at the front. This certainly did not apply
to any other unit in the Republican Army, since it would have
meant that one sixth of the army were on leave at any one time
-while the fascists were pressing on many fronts. The British
Battalion of the International Brigades, despite losing
two-thirds of its strength in three days’ fighting at Jarama and
spending five months in the front line trenches, had only six
days out of the line, and then only three miles behind the front.

Barcelona and Catalonia had maintained a quite separate
'entity from the Popular Front government - partly because
Kie CNT s anarchist philosophy and partly because of
Aak I" r at ‘ ona ^ st separatism. The anarchists did not accept
e fascists could only be defeated by unified, organised

Inside the Myth
92

effort and that without their defeat any talk of revoluuonary

change was futile dreaming^ majority of the Spanish

The government ^ * ust V defeated before

^""“needed centralised effort in dte mili^,

industrial and political fields. analysis of the conduct of

This difference in the fa ^ ea ders of the two
the war led to tension UG T and CNT, agreed

main trade unions in J-ation for fear of clashes. But

not to hold a May Day em d the wor kers ‘to begin

the POUM Bulletin of 1 May d La Batt dla, the

the struggle for '«^ v ^^Si^at«h e ready'.
POUM newspaper, urg g d Q f a ll the arms which

The S o— tor^d*— ^ of ^ pollllcal
had been ihdd back mBarc^ ^ control * e Genual

parties. On 3 May y cnT Then elements of

Telephone Exchange - soli 1 leld .y Cm ^ ^ ^

CNT (then- leaden were gw h . dden and fighting

took to the streets wi armed police forces and

began. The gove ,^ e " t ds U f rom Valencia. The fighting lasted
brought m Assault Gu government established

four days, with casualties, umtl *'S° ve |rf[ the froM ,

control. Though Orwell says no POUM unn^ ^

Broue and Termine, Frenc , | S on 5 groups from the 29th

sssrp from ^

^k”*na°"ot proceed beyond Binefar 13.
miles from the front). raueht up in this difficult,

He [Orwell] came to the ctoric £<*£*

tutelage of a group possibly [ Negr ing f ree ly from one

agents (read what he says about Germans stated after the war
side to the other and what the lNegrln h italtol

about their activities on our side) ’ Wan (this' «

controlled by elements very allergic, not only

Bill Alexander 93

more often than not a pure pretext) but to anything that meant a
united and supreme direction of the struggle under a common
discipline.

(Negrin’s litde-known relationship with Orwell is discussed by
Herbert L. Matthews in an article in the New York magazine
The Nation, 27 December 1952.)

Only a very few of the group were old members of the ILP,
understanding and supporting the political position of POUM.
Hugh O’Donnell, a British Communist working in the
Foreigners Department of the PSUC (United Socialist Party of
Catalonia) met Orwell (Eric Blair) and a number of the ILP
group when they arrived in Barcelona on 30 April. He wrote to
Pollitt in London that many of the group were discontented
and frustrated with being in the POUM unit and he listed nine
men, including George Orwell, who said they wanted to join
the British Battalion in the International Brigades. O’Donnell
wrote: ‘the leading personality and most respected man in the
contingent at present is Eric Blair. He has little political
understanding and said he is not interested in party politics
and came to Spain as an anti-fascist to fight fascism. As a result
of his experience at the front he has grown to dislike the
POUM and is now awaiting his discharge from the POUM.’
Orwell himself bears this out in a letter to Frank Jellinck in
1938, after writing Homage to Catalonia - ‘I’ve given a more
sympathetic picture of the POUM line than I actually felt,
because I always told them that they were wrong and refused to
join the party.’

Yet Orwell went voluntarily to the POUM headquarters
when the fighting began on 3 May. He was given a rifle from
iheir store and helped to guard the building, though he did
not fire his weapon and went down to a hotel for meals. Most
of the ILP group kept away from the events, staying indoors in
iheir hotels; some then made their own way back to Britain,
and others joined non-POUM Spanish units.

Orwell explains his action thus: ‘When I see an actual flesh
and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the
Policeman, I do not have to ask which side I am on.’ Strange
Masoning given his own past, and when one recalls he had not
01 part in the unemployed and anti-fascist demonstrations

1

94

Inside the Myth

in Britain, the targets of fascil" Chap's

saw the fighting was opent g £ found in lhe comme nt

the clue to Orwell s ben , literary executor, on

by Sir Richard Rees “ * Aragon front - ‘written almost

SX U s^e C of Schoolboy’s abouTthe

S^rwirAe^ay bullets flying overhead like red

shanks whistling.’ ,. f the wor ld-wide significance

Orwell had no undersmndmg o the w ^ effom of

of the struggle m Spam, e achieve a united front

the Popular Fr ° nt h ^?™ e ^ seen the Republican flag, he did
against fascism, he h poUM - he took the rifle in

fOT differe " ,

convincing those who wer continuation of the fighting

action, only La Batalla u g May Orwell and what

and spoke of ‘the glorious days . On 10 May ,

a political leader of the A fo ace te to establish contact

International Brigade B , , to j 0 fo the British Battalion,

with lhe group d£ussion, with them,

but McNair would not let 0rwell says ‘there was not
Again of this at'lhis lime 4,00.

much happening at the - sed \ n Bilbao to be sent to

Basque children were being g (jated forces smashed

safety in Britain, while ranc Ten days later Orwell

V as : fnlirroal by a bulle. and after treamtem in several

hSpitals arrived al a POUM convidesceM h °” e p Ur Fr0 „,

After the May events m pQuM u$ paper was

government took S ^P S ag ** arresce d, and its military units
suppressed, many of its leaders arreste , home

disbanded. Most of the ILP group^had al^ ^ McNair an d

Britain. At the end of crested and left Spain.

Cottman decided that they might be arres- writing of

Orwell went to his home ^ linking about the

Homage to Catalonia, though he had been H

BUI Alexander

95

book in Spain. Warburg (of Seeker and Warburg — the eventual
publishers) says that Orwell saw him in December 1936 saying
‘I want to go to Spain and have a look at the fighting . . . write a
book about it. Good chaps these Spaniards, can’t let them
down.’

Bob Edwards, leader of the ILP group at the front, wrote
about Orwell s attitude to the war: ‘I got the impression that
he was allowing his needs as a writer to override his duty as a
soldier. He was wanting, I thought, as many experiences as
possible as background material for the book he was writing.’
On 9 May 1937, almost before the fighting was over in
Barcelona, Orwell wrote to Gollancz, ‘I hope I shall have a
chance to tell the truth about what I have seen. I hope to have a
book ready for you about the beginning of next year.’ Gollancz
refused to publish it, but Homage to Catalonia appeared in 1938
and today, in 1984, it has appeared in twenty reprints.

How does Orwell himself appear from his own writing of his
life as a soldier? There is a strong sense of remoteness and
detachment from his comrades-in-arms - both in the ILP
group and the Spaniards and other nationalities in his
company. He appears as a loner. This characteristic is in reality
confirmed by the fantasised, romanticised account - both in
his book and in his near-doggerel poem - of his very brief
encounter with an Italian volunteer in the Barcelona barracks.

The conditions of muck and filth in the shallow trenches,
expressive of primitive life in most of Spain, are scathingly
described. There is no account of efforts to change conditions
and so, by example, help to break Spain from its primitive,
backward past. He states that the floor of his unit cookhouse
was deep in wasted food. It must have been unique among all
the Army cookhouses. The shortage of food was general - mess
tins and utensils were scraped clean by the ever hungry
soldiers.

His aloofness from the common spirit of Popular Front
Spain is strikingly exposed in his cynical dismissal of the fact
jnat wounded soldiers demanded to return to the front. It

a ppened ! Without this spirit the Republican forces,
outnumbered and outgunned, could not have fought on for
®gnteen more months after Orwell had gone home. Resistance
0 ranco would not have persisted despite forty years of terror

96

Inside the Myth

on the Madrid, Malaga or , Basque fronts, ne^ ^ olympjan

in pronouncing on m' ^ Spaniard sare good at many things

people, despite n*.

but not at maiM g • nver to Franco, depnved of

of the re ^ * r b * r ™ Y no S t OI fi y the Spanish fascists but large
weapons, held d Ita H a n forces for thirty- two

22E SongefTn^ch and Beigian forces d,d in
19 He pronounced that 'the anarchist militia, in spite of their

ss£ fo o? —

advances negate y u ga rce |ona went to Madrid in the

W0 ° Sesrrt defecT- " times they fought as fiercely

in battle, recogn, i ed *e jneed ^ ^

Kbe^et

eye to a future book, the down-and outs ^ ^
Commissioned to write a boo , ^ Eng land. But there

distressed industrial areas o wo men caught

was no sense of identification withthemen family

in the capitalist crisis -no h^-o^^f^fascisna in Italy and
background go I. Th angry, emotional!'

Germany do not appear to ave m ^ ^ ^ feeling, almost
concerned to do something. , his writing- The man

one of neutrality, shows itself throughout h down

Orwell refuses to shoot at because he had his M

97

Bill Alexander

might have fired machine guns to butcher 4,000 in the Badajoz
bullring. The same man would certainly have tried to kill
Orwell when he had fastened his belt. Orwell feels no anger at
the man who wounds him - indeed wishes to congratulate him
on his good shooting. He is certainly not concerned at his own
absence from the battle line. Orwell saw the war as a game
material for a book.

After a brief two months in the North of England Orwell
wasted little time before writing The Road to Wigan Pier. But he
used his description of conditions there to attack those drawn
towards socialism and communism as a caricature composite
figure of fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex maniac,
Quaker, Nature cure quack, pacifist and feminist.’ A
description ill-fitted to his guides, leaders of the National
Unemployed Workers’ Movement, one of whom, Tommy
Degnan, was to become a tough fighter in the International
Brigades and a leader of the Yorkshire miners. No! Orwell had
qualities as an observer but his conclusions have little relation
to what he had seen.

So retiring from the Spanish War, admitting that he knew
little before he went and saw little there, again he wasted no
time in studying the complex situation before expounding his
opinions. It is true that after the ILP group went home the New
Leader largely ignored the Spanish war, but the News Chronicle,
Daily Worker and Tory newspapers all carried reports showing
the tenacity and determination of the People’s Army. But
Orwell used his skill as a writer to mask his prejudices and
ignorance.

Throughout his writing his sheltered life-style coupled with
his ignorance of the realities of Spanish life led him to many
pronouncements hostile to the people. ‘The latrine in the
arcdona barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my
own illusions about the Spanish civil war.’ He was familiar
■pi water closets in his middle-class English surroundings,
w they were unknown outside the bigger Spanish towns. His

anH ^ ou 6 ht was <the de tail of our lives was just as sordid
egradmg as it could be in prison let alone in a bourgeois
e ln tfie Republican Army was hard, often very hard.

rewT e °T eS ° f danger and diarrhoea when men had to
Rthemse ves in the slit trenches. But the soldiers, coming

98

Inside the Myth

from mainly peasant botkgrountls^cr ted w ‘ that the

to read, wrote home sang and dncussed trenchet.

fuller life they were StfJ* ""ted pronouncements Orwell
In another of h.s epical,' alt quote. ^ b usually tM

says: ‘a soldier anywh< er aboye all too t i re d to bother

hungry or frightened or war > Orwell, despite his very

about the political origins gd tQ acqua i n t himself with

limited experience, had Modesto, Campesino

the behaviour of the men of ^ nding fighting

“alto W be2i"knew what Utey were fighting for and

'^iTctrwell was sincere and wridngHt^^
been aware of his “t^Tnumber of ccl sions in
to Catalonia. When h< J ™ he hac [ fought in Spam and

1940 he did not tell him that he^ had ^8^ of 0nveU > s

written Homage to Cata o ■ & _ < he was very eager t0

book at the time, ^d wrote o^O ^ in line with

enquire about polici , impres sion that Onvell was

conduct of the war. I H him without rese rve.

satisfied with my explanations giv and his failure,

Orwell’s silence about his experiences in ^ ^ yiews and

given this unique °P£° r .^ question his honesty. But there

""irk

^onrand 3 ^. *aThr'haI pronounced without

understanding. Snanish War have expanded on

Many other writers o P frequent incompetence

the difficulties, confusion , muddle andfrequ^ merit of

in the Republican ron a ^ ^ establishment is h'*
Orwell’s writing in y rvnicallv betrayed, and tha

contendon that the K™ 1 ""”" ^ in ‘ y f acd ons. Orwell is

SSS^gX^ of Orwell’s U, stiU wan. to leam w a

almost inevitable as a stage m

Bill Alexander

99

Daily Mail and his supporters in Britain were confident that
democracy and the working-class movements would be broken.
Spain and its defenders destroyed such ideas when they held in
check the fascist war machines for nearly three years. Orwell
sneered at the Popular Front slogan ‘It is better to die on your
feet than to live on your knees’ but it entered the consciousness
of the democratic armies in the Second World War, and it was
the philosophy of the resistance fighters throughout occupied
Europe.

The German, Italian and Austrian democratic movements
were defeated by fascism because they could not agree to sink
their differences and did not accept that the defeat of the fascist
menace took priority over all else. From 1934 the Spanish
people understood and worked for united action against reac-
tion. The Popular Front pact of January 1936 was an electoral
agreement, but the bitter experiences of the war brought the
political groupings together as they saw that reaction threatened
them all. This meant changes in political ideas. The anarchist
philosophy crumpled and retreated when faced with better
armed and organised fascist units. The communist and socialist
ideas - organisation and priority to defeat fascism - were proved
right in practice and gained ground. The Communist Party, in
particular, gained influence because the Soviet Union was the
only power to give active help to the government, and because
the Communists had shown in policies and by personal example
the ways to victory.

When Orwell left the front for Barcelona he deplored the fact
that civilian clothes had replaced the uniforms seen in the city in
January. True, for the Spanish people the red scarves and the
euphoria of the early days had been replaced by the grim, sober
realisation that the defeat of fascism was going to be very
difficult. Orwell did not understand or even know about the
general organisation and training going on outside the towns to
form a Popular Army. He did not understand the general
demand by all groups in the government that Catalonia and
Aragon should also end romantic, adventurist talk and inac-
. § et industry working for the war and the men organised
mt0 effective military units.

Jhe POUM slogan ‘The war and the revolution are insepar-
J e had already been shown as hollow phrase-mongering — an

Inside the Myth

°We d dn“ worry much about the enemy.' Far from warning
„Lor, for revolutionary change, there was growrng
more support formers and land workers to the

opposition by sma ; mD osed by POUM and anarchists in
‘libertarian’ experiments imposed oy rw

much of Aragon. Barcelona events and his

nr-w^ll n his version ot tne Dditcmna
Orwell, in n <, • b scene, directs his anger at the

Communte™ d°the Soviet Union, saying that ‘the one thing
fbrwhkh die Commurns^waewmahrg^vas^not topmstpone a

Spanish revolution till a more smtable^ ^ ^

never happened j* none at Aat time i„ the ILP

™T“he could have read very litde of their policies and
attitudes' (the ILP group < 2 ^

li]^ I^asicmaria, Lister ami’Mmfesto were ignored in La Batalin

'“"amsh government £« steps to h™g

Aragon and Caudoroa into the war efto^ ^

Communist ’ biograp her, continued to suggest in a

even Crick, Orwell s d S F a right-wing sociahst and

recent television programme. P . fr ^ m the war Council,
certainly no crypto-commu , > ■ Barcelona. The

initiated the military moves to end t Garc ; a Oliver and

two anarchist Ministers in the government, Garaa uu

53£w3SsrjS=ss=

forces to make a revoluuon did p ia r Front even

shown their determination to e Britain and even the

before the Generals revolted. The U . f asC ists and

Popular Front government m ^ e ^f n ^ e m of their
hindered the Republic, especia J y , P wor kers were held
right to buy arms. The German and Italian wor

101

Bill Alexander

in subjection, while in Britain the TUC had gone alone with
‘Non Intervention’ until September 1937. There could be very
little support from outside for a revolution in Spain. By
November 1936 the fascists had conquered nearly half Spain
and had a foothold inside Madrid, being checked only by
bloody batdes. Even the Barcelona Regional Committee of the
CNT said on 4 May - while Orwell was guarding the POUM
headquarters with a rifle — that ‘It is fascism which must be
defeated.’

The Soviet Union had become very popular in Spain because
it was were the only power to fight in the London ‘Non
Intervention’ Committee and the League of Nations for the
legal right of the Republic to buy arms. Their words were
backed by supplies of arms and food. In the early days they
sent a few pilots, tank crews and military instructors and
advisers to help the Republican Army. According to Soviet
sources only about 2,000 military men went to Spain and there
were never more than 600 to 800 there at one time. The
delivery of Soviet material was very difficult and hazardous;
their ships were attacked by the Germans and Italians in the
Mediterranean and the French government blocked supplies
by land. Chamberlain was manoeuvring to isolate the Soviet
Union diplomatically while encouraging the fascists. The
Soviet Union had every reason - morally and politically - to
work for the victory of the Republican government. But they
did not have the power and influence either to start a
revolution or equally to delay one.

Orwell’s political estimation of the position in Spain and of
the Barcelona May events have small foundations in reality.
His position as an outsider is confirmed in his description of
England as he retired from the Spanish struggle - ‘all sleeping
the deep, deep sleep of England’. His London-bound train
may have passed another carrying British volunteers to help
me Spanish people fight on for another two years. In the poor
1 eets of Wigan and Barnsley unemployed men and women
Jr “Uectmg food and medical supplies. In Stepney and
neetham anti-fascists were resisting Mosley’s blackshirts. In
■ r ?^ s> organisations and demonstrations the people were

^■Wsing Chamberlain’s sell-out and appeasement and
Hp mg real opposition to the fascist powers and their

102

Inside the Myth

2Jm ^Barcelona or rhey may fall on London and Paris
t0 OmeThad not learnt the true lessons of Spain.

Robert Stradling

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War:
A Historical Critique

The object of this essay is to examine George Orwell’s writings
on the Spanish Civil War from the standpoint of the
professional historian and that of the student of History. The
texts which form the subject of this exercise - Orwell’s Spanish
curriculum vitae - comprise a full-scale book, Homage to
Catalonia, four discrete articles of varying length, and reviews of
eleven books on Spam which appeared in the three years
following his return from service in the Republican forces . 1 It
is thus a sufficiently large and variegated body of work upon
which to base an appraisal of Orwell’s contribution to our
knowledge of the Civil War, and an evaluation of his role in
forming subsequent opinion about its central issues.

It might be noted at the outset that Orwell’s own judgement
of work on this subject other than his own was distinctly
i unfavourable:

The immediately striking thing about the Spanish War books, at
any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and
badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them ...
are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you
what to think . 2

Some years later, he commented a propos of Homage itself, that
Epjj&s a frankly political book, but in the main it is written
'"h a certain detachment’; adding that ‘I did try very hard in
| whole truth. 3 In this, as in so many other places,

103

Inside the Myth

omdl invites (nay challengz ^ Uk r«d*r wt
writings with the l °° s When we ask such

tuest“ian°r

suffice for working purposes. ■ prepared an undergraduate

Not long ago the present wn pj ^ jn ^ 1930Si

teaching option on reading list. Leaving

automatically including Q j- tdis act> the conscious

aside the subhmina im P / r orward . In the English-reading
reasons were quite straig f iliar contemporary account
world Homage is by far the most

of the Spanish War, and wa * ealily L cheaply

Unlike hundreds of others o ssingly lucid a nd

available. Its ^ ^. adve drama tic, the analysis strong and
approachable, th nse \ perfectly transparent. It

sham the i argument (,n every --djjj ^ ^

seemed likely that n realities of the war, or

student wi* - ^ £iogiS alosphere of die

expose so clearly the c context of the universal issues

T^ 9 1 o"rOrSl - “‘open about his «.
of the 1930s. Fu ™’ ers of detail, that it may be

fallibility, especially in than utterly

considered, puma facie *at ™lnc*d thzn diminished our
^n»^ho'o& both good History and

wrote to a friend that he tmd his pubhstoM g. ( __ u

because they cou d not think of anyth, ^ ^

impossible to tell whether , ( ”, ™ Tf cer tainly made no

disingenuous, or mtell^ a cQuld hardly be

sense commercially, si • . anv rate it is a

regarded, in 1938, as a good « In-! „f die

bizarre fact concerning one o about die

age, and points up the absurd fact « , or «

ostensible subject at all. I ’ OV '' w O[ to Catalonia’? Your

react to the semiodcs of the tide Homage <o describe a

average habitui of Hampstead might imagine

Robert Stradling 105

piano piece by a musical son of Catalonia - Albeniz or
Granados, say - incoiporating the rhythm of the national
dance, the Sardana. A more specifically academic mind would
probably envisage a festschrift of some kind, presenting essays
on the folklore, literature and history of the Catalan people.
Surely a book with such a title should address itself in part to
I the suggested subject, or even (since ‘Catalonia’ is more
| intensified than otherwise by the word ‘Homage’) place it at
the centre of its cogitations?

In fact ‘Catalonia’ is about as meaningful a guide to the
contents of this book as ‘Wigan Pier’ is to those of his previous
one. I m afraid I must tell you’, replied Orwell to an enquiry
during a BBC broadcast, ‘that Wigan Pier does not exist .’ 5
Similarly, Catalonia has no observable existence in Orwell’s
book about the Spanish War. It displays awareness of no aspect
of the history of the country, nor of its culture and society,
either sui generis or in the context of Spain as a whole. Although
he does refer to Catalan, only two words of the language
appear in the text, and one of them is persistently mis-spelled . 6
In no other way does Orwell distinguish between the Catalans
and other Spaniards. This is not surprising in itself, because he
spent only two of his six months in Spain inside Catalonia’s
borders. Most of the Spaniards he met, whether at the front, or
behind the lines in the villages, were Aragonese. Moreover, the
Catalan language was then not widely spoken amongst the
working class of Barcelona, and during the war their
organisations were actively discouraging its use . 7 Of course
Orwell does devote some of the most memorable sections of
his book to Barcelona, and aspects of its topography and daily
life are mentioned en passant. But the Catalan capital is for his
purposes any large industrial city in the world where the
revolution of the proletariat happens to be taking place. The
city is essentially a site of socialist struggle, and only
accidentally Barcelona. And even here, nothing is said about
Barcelona antedating the moment — six months before
Orwell s arrival — of the defeat of the military uprising. In
* ort, anyone who turns to Homage to Catalonia in the hope of
being informed about its apparent subject is totally wasting his

The evidence (as we shall see) strongly suggests that Orwell

Inside the Myth

106

did no background reading on matters Iberian before he went
to Spain. None of his writings on the war mutate that h <j
earned anything subsequendy about Spain which he regarded
as relevant The events he describes and analyzes therefore take
place in an almost complete historical and cultural vacuum. As
Ssual Orwell composed his book in a terrific hurry - about
£e months of the second half of 1937 - but whilst he was
doing so he read and reviewed E. Allison Peers book Catalonia
Infelix the first modern scholarly study of Catalonia to appear
in English. 8 This contained a graphic account of the anarchist
terror along with scathing condemnation of the Catalan
revolutionaries in general. Peers’ conclusions agonizing
enough for a man who was a sincere friend of Catalonia
nationalist aspirations, were of the ‘better Franco than Durruti
variety For Onvell, who was at this point more attracted to the
anarchist than to the POUMist cause, this was sufficient to
reject evening about Peers’ book, except for one useful
and-Communist quotation which he quietly expropriated.

It is a remarkable paradox that Catalonia owes its very
existence in the consciousness of nine out of ten people in die
non-Hispanic world to the title-page of a book in which it has
no tangible existence. This is the strange kind of publicity
which the autonomous government of Catalonia celebrated in
February 1984, when they and Barcelona s two University
sponsored an international conference, which might have been
tftled ‘Homenatge a George Orwell’. During this prolong^
act of gratitude, the High Priest of Orwelliana, Professor
Bernard Crick, solemnly attended a Catalan rock opera a ,

“"whafs ™ of Catalonia is only slightly less so of Spain as a
whole. Orwell was remarkably ignorant of all thin 8 s ™“ ot
terms of ‘background’, either regarding it as ummpo ’ As
(more probably) being unable to spare the time to fi ■ ^

Crick says, he ‘seems to have ^..^^tith physical
was’ 11 at the front his mind was fully occupied *u F

Comfort (or rather the lack of it) and

moments when he was not menta ye au > manner-

and reported his .mmediate surroundmgSs bu^jh^ „ y

so often encountered in his work of t . log j ca l

guileless naif. For the academic, Orwell s epistem

Robert Stradling

innocence, which he rather proclaimed than disguised can
cause embarrassment and irritation. If Foucault’s theory that
knowledge-systems are the fundamental medium of social
conditioning and the exercise of power has validity, then
Orwell is what he wanted to be, one of the most nearly
independent of writers. Because he represents that compara-
lively rare thing in Western society, the untutored intellectual
(despite, oi perhaps because of, his Eton education) he has
achieved something of the status of the Holy Man It is
interesting that ,n the 1950s both Stephen Spender and Lionel
Trilling saw the Onvell of Homage as a uniquely virgin soldier
,n the army of truth. 12 Strange as it may seem to the lay reader
such apparently striking references are of little help to the
historian, any more (as can be readily observed elsewhere in
this volume) than to the modern philosopher and literary
cntic Let us leave aside his disdain for all the obvious sources
of study in his subject, with the possible exception of the POUM
newspaper, La Batalla. It seems likely that Orwell understood
spoken Spanish (or rather, Castilian) badly - if at all - and
there is an element of doubt concerning his ability to read it
with any real fluency. At times, of course, he is quite frank
about this, referring several times in Homage to difficulties with
the language and admitting that his spoken Castilian was
■villainous . Elsewhere, however, he is more ambiguous
allowing the impression that for practical purposes he was an
abk conversationalist. Let us explore some instances.

I nf rS h “ l entry ' duty on the cinema rooftop, at the height
of the May Events in Barcelona, he reports an elaborate

Knversation with a Civil Guard opposite his position. This
mdividua 1 was stationed over fifty yards from Onvell, on the

I ftcha Slde ° f thC R ^ mbla (the Clt y’ s main boulevard), and the
arms fofif 6 ™ C ° haVC taken p,ace above the cra ckle of small

from a'lm, tempt l ° SaVe h ' S unit comm ander, Georges Kopp,

CtmentHO^' 5™°? ^ daims he Went C ° 016 ™ ar

situation to thiw d m P am rl a Very com P ,ex and delicate
lapsing. intr> duty officer. If (on his own part) occasionally

iC ?’ C n nd T St00d the technical queries ofh.s
Was seeking' 15 f dCtua ffy obtained the specific document he
n 8- tve n those who speak Spanish like a native will

108

Inside the Myth

readily appreciate tl^ namr^of^this^achieveiTient-^^^ ) ( P 1939),

In the course of his minor responsibility within

POUM ^rnpany ^

coTerrdTwaT^ply a question of chocs, ng among the few

men who spoke Spanish. . be was lying on the

Finally, and most r ^ ar ^ J,’ s bullet had palsed through
ground, moments a tei ^ P ^ haye been consc i OU s, but

conscious' enough to have heard and understood every word of

what an excited Spamsh comrade was sajrng. __

The * foS's hoTes® and'consistency. Such doub) must
be p ,aced interpret what he

assessment of his cap ty corroboration from those

° bS '7o e nal passage in Homage where original Spanish phrases
occasional passages & Given the author s

and snatches of ^nversa^ book ’, th ese passages

description ol it as a tramuy p ive Homage an

m„stLrega^3smore^at = efS the Spfnish

unavoidably be seen as .^sag* oL fail

for comment. Yet, u degree. 18 In a specialist

to sustain such a claim to am & (without

study of Orwell’s road to Catalonia ^ non . po litical

supporting evidence) tha > ^ ^ Qther work G n Orwell

reading knowledge of p sufficiently important even

that 1 have seen takes this m . see Y ms fundamental

to merit mention, far less discussi ’ J hin s described and
in conditioning our acceptance of many things [0

remaxk^hat M

out basic^esearch, he was not qualified to
perform it in the first place. , f History? The

Did Orwell intend his book as 3 W °f Utde d oubt that
question is otiose, since ere always perceived and

thousands - wholly or partly - have always P |

Robert Stradling ^09

received it as such. In any case, even when clearly accessible,
the intentions’ of the author, although not irrelevant, are not
definitive either. Despite his statement that books of the genre
to which Homage obviously ( inter alia) belongs - eyewitness
accounts or memoirs — have a useful life of about six months,
he evidendy did not see his own work as ephemeral, and later
came to suspect that it might be perennial. 20 As a piece of
‘inside’ documentary reportage and commentary, Homage
shares characteristics with two of its author’s earlier works,
Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. Is
it, therefore, to be classed as a work of ‘superior’ journalism?
Most Orwell experts - including his biographer, Bernard Crick
- contradict his own (repeated) insistence that he went to Spain
to write, and not, necessarily, to fight; but their reasons for so
doing are by no means convincing. 21 In later years, he was
obliged to join the NUJ in order to earn a living, but his
suspicion of journalists as a professional species was hardened
into contempt by his Spanish experience. If there is one
category of humanity which emerges from Homage with less
credit than Soviet agents and international capitalists, it is
surely the Fleet Street hack. For many years thereafter, Orwell
excoriated journalists as a gang who deal exclusively in fraud
and swindle, who are disciples of Satan, in the sense of the
Devil s alleged fatherhood of lies. If we may interpret his aim
‘to make political writings into an art’, 22 it seems likely that he
looked upon Homage as an artistic document of the historic
reality of the Spanish War, akin in significant respects to the
outstanding memoirs of the Western Front (which he knew
well), but also - mutatis mutandis - to the poetry of the Spanish
Civil War and to Picasso’s Guernica.

Orwell was an emphatically non-academic writer. But this
does not invalidate the academic’s task of exploring the
potential taxonomic locations of a book like Homage: herein,
after all, iies one key to the plurality of meaning in a text.
Highly relevant here is Orwell’s own attitude to history as the
thing to which he wished to contribute his ‘artistic document’.

His time in Spain gave him an intense awareness of the
necessity of history, which he saw as inseparable from artistic
l ireedom. But his perception of history differed markedly from
pat of the student of the academic discipline of ‘History’, in a

110

Inside the Myth

usually inched

an“ all) -Looking Back on Re Span^Wa£

Rerecorded pasc One of the most chilling of the horrors of
SnSch®faS,“sV»riter -U Re profasSI delightTaken

he most precious of humanity’s resources - the histonca
the ,Tt„!, c ; n an essay composed whilst in the throes of
truth . T - j -vvrite’) he included as one of the

CSa^s oTws tpSon, ’Hisiorical Impulse. Desire to
see things as Rey are, to find out true facts and store Rem up

^^S^ide^ble problems for Re hU.onan,
who musf be on guard agamst being seduced by Orwell s

h!”“ "Re pr«n^ seen "f tom Re future’, and ^Re

Cide S R? ^S^S->e transposed
Ranke’s famous principle of historical writing (wte es eigenthch

future^ to which the articulate layman and many P olm " a ™

often give rhetoricaj^toice^n ^he firs 1 ormcal^apprars^ ^

day wiR peculiar intensity beca “ 5 ' co „cem

past.’ 14 Second, it will be apparent that Orw 11 h

was with the concrete, atomic facts ot mstory, . b ,

preserved and guarded against the

yield a harvest of literal and universal truth. L « S b

historian’s profound reservations on this assumP ,
more important to note Re serious Hefelt himselfli. is

in Orwell’s method of writing in o g • r hronology
commonly agreed) free to interfere w.R Re chronology

Robert Stradling j H

the detail of his Spanish experiences in the interests of aesthetic
balance and artistic emphasis. It follows that by Orwell’s own
standards, art is not in harmony with ‘history’ but, on the
contrary, in conflict with it. This inconsistency is so salient and
creates such an audible discord in Orwell’s intellectual
principles, that it is difficult to believe that he never recognised
it.

We have seen how unimpressed Orwell was with the
literature of the Spanish War. It was not simply an aesthetic
judgement. He was filled with horror and foreboding at the
promiscuous distortion, manipulation, suppression, and
invention of reality; untruths which were disseminated in the
interests of established power-systems, and thus oppression.
Not only was ‘the truth’ itself being thus annihilated. In
addition the course of the war and of the revolution, and with
them the aspirations and lives of Spaniards - perhaps as a
prelude to those of all humanity - were being literally dictated
by the written and broadcast word. It is necessary to bear in
mind that, as a man of the 1950s, Orwell’s reaction to all this
was necessarily more emotional (and more moral) than our
present, culture-conscious ‘detachment’. He reached maturity
in the first age of mass-communication and mass-reception,
the first generation of near- universal literacy in Great Britain.
Most families by the mid-1950s had access to a radio receiver
and a cinema screen which completed the preconditions for
the first era of overt and ubiquitous propaganda. 25 Yet again, it
is not difficult to detect a contradiction at the core of Orwell’s
attitude to this question. The conjunction of the media-matur-
ation of this decade with his own suffering, persecution, and
near-death in Spain, gave Orwell a missionary sense of truth
and socialism’, which was as all-pervading as it was
self-righteous. ‘Every line of serious work that I have written
since 1956 has been written ... against totalitarianism and/or
democratic socialism, as I understand it.’ 26 In other words, he
was a self-confessed propagandist, indistinguishable in one
respect from the outstanding victim of his onslaught (in
Homage) against left-journalists, ‘Frank Pitcairn’. 27 All the
same, it is ultimately to his credit that Orwell deplored the use
ot history as a tool of power, and that we find this salutary - if
Unoriginal — message inscribed in all his Spanish writings.

Inside the Myth

In general comment by historians on these texts has been
appreciative. Most commentators at least accept that -they
provide reliable, (thus essential) material for the history of the
Spanish War. The outstanding exception, however, is the

OULbUlllUIllg

author of .he most widely-utilised ~n«dhe^ of

most wiaeiy-uunacu Lumpiv**- — — ~ 7 -
the war in any language, Hugh Thomas . 28 In all editions of this
work to date, a dismissive footnote on Homage has been

uaaiv'- c

included; and the year following its first appearance, Thomas
published a longer nouce in the New Statesman The latter is

intended as a demolition job on a competitor, but in practice
, 1 . 1 r ^ rrr\ ^ ff Thomas admits that

intended as a demolition juu un * ’ , 1 .

the charge completely fails to go off. Thomas admits that
Homage is ‘the best’ of over 3,000 contemporary effusions on
the subject, yet asserts that it ‘is very misleading about the
Spanish Civil War’! Having neglected to illustrate this
contention, Thomas goes on to state that the book is simply an
account of Orwell’s experiences, written almost in diary form ;
adding the observation that ‘since he (Orwell) got on very well
rhe POUM at the front he assumed that the POUM s

with the POUM at the front
policy behind the lines was correct. None of these statements
is valid. Homage is by no means a straightforward account of its
author’s experiences. Two of the longest chapters - about a
quarter of the whole - are devoted to political analysis and
polemic, and much of the remainder is punctuated by
commentary passages. Though the fundamental structure is

1 UUU^ii —

narrative, it is pretty far removed from diary form. Moreover
Orwell insists "that he resisted the POUM arguments abut,

war

veil insists that he resisted me rou...

-policy with which he was pressured at the front, finding
F _r I. r* — far more convincing. (This claim is

Wdl X .

those of the Communists far more convincing.

. . , tin T_ 1081 nun

those or u ic , ^ . , j

sustained by others.)*" In May 1937, durmg the jlays

SUSiailicu uy 7 J < »

immediately preceding the Barcelona events

_ 17 fVia P I

ding me Ddituuna . 7 u

transfer from the POUM militia into the
91 Tr 1 — several

strenuous efforts to l± anon-i
Communist-run International Brigades. 1 He later, on
occasions, stated or implied the admission that, desp.

, achieve them, PCE/PSUC policies were

as 1 n 11 * IhP

means utilised to auucvc *• F -

capable of winning the war for the Republic. Given
of his own book, and his other dicta on the subject it seem
conclude that Hugh Thomas is so mistaken in

necesary to conclude that Hugn muiud> » - ^
assessment of Homage that one suspects he had eit ^

read it, or had just spent a good lunch- time at h
both), when he wrote his New Statesman review.

Robert Stradling ^3

Several Catalan historians have commended the value of
Orwell’s account in the years since the lifting of censorship in
Spain. (Some of these, it is true, are declared POUMistas, like
Alba, and Coll and Pane .) 32 In a recent study of Barcelona,
Joan Villaroya states that Orwell ‘has synthesised marvellously
and in a lucid and economical way’, the atmosphere in the first
European city to come under repeated aerial bombardment . 33
One of the most distinguished historians of Republican Spain
if with reservations, writes of the ‘vivid and sympathetic
account of the May events given in Homage. 34 Finally, the
classic description of revolutionary Barcelona, encountered
early in the book, is given its place in the first selection of
documentary readings on the Civil War made for use by
students, which recently appeared . 35

Though not overwhelming, this consensus is justified, for
much of Orwell s detail can be corroborated from other
sources. Nevertheless, when he did make a mistake, he was
often inclined to be both persistent and dogmatic in his error
A few examples must suffice.

In his essay on the Spanish militias, Orwell wrote that ‘a lot
of harrn was done by the lies published in the left-wing papers
to the effect that the fascists were using explosive bullets. So far
as I know there is no such thing as an explosive bullet, and
certainly the fascists weren’t using them .’ 36 In fact the
Nationalists were using explosive bullets during the time that
Orwell was in Spain, though probably not on the Aragon
front. Jason Gurney, who arrived on the Jarama battlefield
within days of Orwell’s arrival at Huesca, had his right hand
destroyed by such a bullet at much the same time as the latter
received his injury . 32 The memoirs of the mercenary
fighter-pilot Oloff de Wet, and those of the American
Communist Ralph Bates, also confirm the frequent use of this
weapon on the Madrid front at this period . 38 Here, Orwell is

merely the victim of his own prejudice against the’ ‘left- wine
papers . 6

In Homage itself there is a fascinating trail of confusion
oncermng the distinction between the two corps of
paramilitary police, the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard

TV ‘A/r ^ r — r : dim uie assault Lruard.

■L ^ h VCntS * n ® arce ^ ona ~ four days of street fighting

wen the government forces and the pro-revolutionary

Inside the Myth

organisations, which formed the crisis of inffa-Republican
Dolitics - were sparked off, according to Homage, byth C tl
Guard 39 In fact the provocative attack upon the anarchist-held

insistent correction:

You say the fighting in Barcelona war started b, the Assault
Guards Actually it was the Civil Guards^ Titer, weren , an,
Assault Guards there lin Barcelona) then, and there ,s a difference,
because the Civil Guards are the old Spamsh gendarmerie daung
from die earl, nineteenth century . the Assault Guards are a new
formation (and) pro-Republican.”

When Gorer’s review appeared, it contained the somewhat
arkward correction 7 1 would sem os Hough the starting pom, of
the fighting was the attempt of the ,,-mtaUi geudarmm., the
eL Guards ... to take the Telephone Building .*>

Before his death, Oiwell himself correcce this error m hi,
►.a n,np« rlaimine to have been misled by the tact tnat
Assault Guards wore a different uniform fmm
, : n iT fer bv the Valencia-based Republican

go°,"nmen. m mall, n order.” When Seeker and Warburg
Published a collection of extracts of contemporary Civil War

tulto'Lo^ng-classliatred of the ■ Civd Guard

saiiSssssKSSSssi

their disbandment was resisted, y J > , d the 0 lder

Guard (Guardia de Asalto ) who had y P The Asaltos

bod, as the chief objector proletanansuspmionThed^

were mainly loyal members of the > Their vendetta

Socialist Part,, dominated by Common,, ts. Then

Robert Stradling

115

with the anarchists originated from the notorious affair of
Casas Veijas (1933) when the Asaltos had massacred CNT
prisoners m Andalusia. 45 If the Generalitat, or its Communist
members, did want to provoke a showdown in May (and the

CaS ,!ri n0t pr ° Ven) the Asalt05 were the obvious instrument
With one exception, writers on the May Events in Barcelona
do not follow Orwell’s ascription. 46 It is further clear from
such sources that contrary to his assertion the Civil Guard did
not take part in other attacks (since none took place) on
anarchist strongholds, and that the Guardia unit holed up in
the Cafe Moka next door to the POUM offices, were also
Asaltos, not Civiles. Thus the ‘Civil Guard’ who was Orwell’s
partner m the conversation earlier discussed (if he ever existed)
was not a Civil Guard at all. It seems probably, therefore, that
Orwell had never set eyes on a Civil Guard, the police body he
writes about so much, and with so much affected distaste in
Homage. The uniform of these men is so distinctive - as will
have been universally appreciated since the abortive golpe of
Colonel Tejero received worldwide television coverage in
February 1981 - as to be quite unmistakble. Orwell’s whole
approach to this matter is redolent of the apostate policeman
the natural enemy of the working class’, who in attempting a
complete transference of his allegiance to the other side, has
succeeded m preserving a certain myopia.

During the Sucesos de Mayo, the revolutionary parties were
accused by the PSUC of hoarding weapons in Barcelona which
officially should have been sent to the front. This was an
important nem m Communist propaganda against their rivals,
PmiM Ped L° JUStlfy l he ,ater su PP r «sion of the ‘Trotskyist’

Ifhus fhvT d e . grounds tkiat the Y were preparing a coup and
whlk b) , ° glcal extension) were effectively fascists. In Homage,

it on hehT tl ?i th ^ arge a$ rCgards the CNT > 0nveI1 denies
POl i M ° n the basis of his observation
wtthm die latter’s HQ / 8 Whatever Onvell saw - and we must

recendvhad^h 1 ^ had FefuSed “ j ° in the P art Y. and ve ry
ently had been in contact with the Barcelona agents of the

Nin W° na Bngad !f " the fact seems established that Andreu

in store aSinsTa"’^ 6 ° th , ers ’ ke P t lar S e quantities of anus
Catalan g r , day of reckoning. A recent article on the
J&lan militias which concludes thus, also argues that the

116

Inside the Myth

need to defend sectarian interests in Barcelona was a major
reason for weapon-starvation at the front, and therefore for
the failure of loyalist operadons in the Aragon theatre of war «
Morreres also confirms that POUM units in Aragon
temporarily abandoned the line m May, intending to march to
the relief of their comrades in the Catalan capital (an intention
they did not, in the event, pursue). Once again, Orwell is
unusually emphatic in denying this incident, which he alleges
he specifically verified by inquiry when he returned to his unit
after the May Events. 50 (Presumably, even his English
comrades were prepared to deceive him on this point.) Orwell,
in a striking passage about the 1930s was later to write that
atrocities took place even though estabhshment worthies (like
Lord Halifax) and rightist newspapers (like the Daily Telegraph)
said they took place - in other words, that something can be
true even though it is also propaganda. 51 He did not always
retain a full enough awareness of this principle; but what

directly political writer ever did?

Attention must be drawn to a further example, which may
be regarded as something of a darker shade than a mere
mistake. In his essay ‘Inside the Whale’ ( 1940) Orwell attacked
WH Auden in a famous remark about the latter s poem
‘Spain’. If not in so many words, he accused Auden of
espousing - in the phrase ‘the necessair murder - the maxim
of P ‘the end justifies the means’, lumping him by implication
with Stalinist executioners. It is astonishing that Auden was
cowed by this into disavowing his poem, for sure y th
construction that Orwell placed upon it was deliberately and
crudely literal. Moreover, he underlined his moral condem-
nation by the claim ‘it so happens that I have seen the bod ^s°
number! of murdered men - I don’t mean killed in bade J
mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of h
murder means ,.’ 52 In the circumstances it seems reasonable
“"when and where did OnveU

There is no other reference to it in his pubhshed work,^ ^
Crick’s biography forthcoming on the poim. .

context in which he was writing on this

obviously intended to assume that * e ,^ C !he assassins^ If
Spain. But who were the victims and who in i y have

latter were Communists or fascists he would certainly

Robert Stradling ny

I reported it at some place in his Spanish writings. If the
anarchists or the POUM then he was guilty of suppressing a
part of ‘the whole truth’ harmful to the interests of his own
side. The alternative explanation, that he invented this story to
gain a moral advantage over the hapless Auden, although even
more damaging to Orwell’s reputation, seems nevertheless the
more likely. He had, and was not slow to display (even after
becoming friendly with Spender) a prejudice against ‘the pansy
poets of the left’; and was himself, of course, a palpably failed
poet. 54 If this explanation is correct - and proceedings cannot
be conclusive - then his act was all the more dishonest because
Orwell, unlike Auden, had actually espoused the principle that
‘the end justifies the means’. In Homage, and elsewhere, he
stated unequivocally that he wished to see Franco defeated ‘by
any means whatever’, 55 which may be held to cancel out
everything he ever wrote about the ethical dimension of the
Spanish War, and which in Nineteen Eighty-Four he reasserted a
fortiori as the fundamentally self-annihilating principle of
political consciousness. Victory resides only in becoming like
the enemy, coming to love the enemy, becoming the enemy.

Finally, we may turn from Orwell’s treatment of an
individual to his treatment of a people.

During the first year of the war the entire British public is thought
to have subscribed to various ‘aid Spain’ funds about a quarter of
a million pounds - probably less than half of what they spend in a
single week in going to the pictures ... To the British working class
the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or
wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important
than yesterday’s football match. 56

It IS not difficult to appreciate that, for many, such insensitive
remarks - even from a man who volunteered, and came close
to death - are impossible to understand or forgive. Hywel
Francis has described, in perfectly unsentimental terms, the
jiacnfi ces for Spain made in the poverty-stricken communities
I n° Ut ^ ^ a ^ es ‘ Tffi s example was by no means unique. 67
On the broad level of overall interpretation of the Spanish
In**’ ^ )rwe ^ s ^tbigs are seriously limited by his exiguous
toent of the Nationalist side. Little more than a page of

118

Inside the Myth

Homage, with a couple more pages in ‘Looking Back’, are
devoted (if that is the right word) to the Francoist movement.
Where not utterly dismissive, Orwell’s comments are
essentially speculative, since he knew very little about the
enemy. He had no ideas on what caused millions to fight
against the Republic beyond what he tamely accepted from the
left-wing sources that he distrusted on almost every other
matter. As Douglas Woodruff, reviewer of Homage in the
Catholic magazine The Tablet acutely (if predictably) pointed
out ‘it is curious that a man who tells us that for a year or two
past the international prestige of fascism had been haunting
him like a nightmare, should not display more intellectual
curiosity ’ 58 The movimiento is (to Orwell) simply a horde of
drones and coolies driven to destroy the workers by the bosses
- whether capitalist, landowner, army officer or priest makes
no difference - and supplied and paid for by international
fascism There could be no altruism or idealism on the other
side indeed nothing that was not inspired by vested interest
and ’regimented by power. In this sense, despite its determined
onslaught upon the Communists, perhaps in part because of it,
Homage remains a classic contribution to the vaguely liberal
myth of the Spanish War; a myth now so hegemonic that
remorse over Franco’s victory is part of the guilt-complex o
the western intellectual, a stock-in-trade of a whole ethical

^Throughout these texts, Orwell invariably refers to the
enemy as ‘fascist’ yet makes no mention of Jose Antonio and
the Falange, nor indeed of any other figure or party amongst
the rebels apart from Franco - an interesting tribute to the
success of the caudillo ’ s political tacucs. But the fact that
currently many scholars of Politics and History - mcludig
some Soviet writers - acknowledge that fascism was an
authendc and popular revolutionary movement, a heresy
perhaps simply a variant of Marxism, is n l ore
irrelevant . 59 For the Franco movement was not fascist Y
strict, or even meaningful sense, however it was P er< ^') e b |,
a European power/ideology standpomt. The nat.onahs^^^'
were a hugely heterogenous collection of ma con f ionan
welded together by army and church, in pursuit of reacuo^rY
objectives in which the interests of the two latter

Robert Stradling

119

pM . an ? ount /y anco cymcally exploited the dangerous ideas
and the useful accidentals of fascism - above all to attract
foreign support - with the full intention of suppressing them
after victory, a feature closely analagous to the Republican
government s view of the anarchists. In spite of his facile usage
of the current leftist vocabulary, and some other ideas about
the war that a historian would regard as eccentric, Orwell
perceived clearly enough that Francoism was a phenomenon of
the nineteenth century, not of the twentieth. With equal
acuteness, he foresaw that, whichever side won the war, the
ensuing regime ‘would have to be a dictatorship of some kind of
fascism ; but that, Spain being Spain, this ‘fascism’ would be
considerably less totalitarian, and more humanely inefficient,
than the Italian, German, or Soviet models . 60 Rarely can a
political idealist’s disillusion - the very Iberian desengaho - have
been so complete, for Orwell came to realise not only that he
had not been fighting for socialist revolution, (rather,
bourgeois democracy) but also not even against fascism, (rather
a pseudo-fascist reaction). Nonetheless on many central issues
his intelligence did not let him down, neither did he fail to
manifest some elemental understanding of Spain and its

. ~ aim lUGUlUHILcU ISSUeS

ot the war - if again by his own admission - Orwell operated
constantly on superficial knowledge and subjective experience.
To his own satisfaction, at least, sincere emotional
commitment and common sense compensated for vulgar
pragmatism on the one hand and fancy theory on the other,
erhaps he made a virtue of necessity, for previous to Spain his
ignorance was so profound that he was obliged thereafter to
subsist as a writer on what he picked up as he went along. His
innocence of Marxism-Leninism affected his judgement of all
P ries of the Spanish War, and since he was unaware of
BamT" S £ Cia ist dialectic and its tropes he was unable to
*11 .l ne em L via a cr 'bcal comparison with empirical reality.
tft[m Same .’ his Particular works, for the most part, contain a
doubt C a 0 n L 1StenCy of view 311(1 argument: that is to say, where
ccmscioi.r^ 1 ^ 01 ^ pluralif y do exist the author is usually

CEf By , COnerast ■ 11 is wdl ^ was

V ot mercurial, and sometimes radical, shifts of opinion

120

Inside the Myth

from one piece of writing to the next It is historical practice
(and would be a reasonable procedure for any critic) to
approach this phenomenon diachromcally rather than

^Omen jofred the ILP - the British group equivalent and
affiliated to the POUM - in June 1938. 61 For about a year
before and after this date, some thirty months in all, he
generally followed the Trotskyist line, if more faithfully on
matters not directly related to Spain than otherwise His
earliest Spanish essay, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans (June 937)
represents the most uniformly bitter anti-Communist polemic
he ever wrote. He argues here that the purpose of the
Republican government’s formation of the Popular Army
(Eiercito Popular) in 1936-7 was not to win the war, but to
suppress revolution. The Communists, to the fore in its
organisation and command, were agents of capitalist reaction
ereo ‘fascists’. 62 These charges were no less (if no more) absurd
than those forwarded by the Cominternists against the POUM.
Thereafter, as can be seen from Homage, the red mist cleared a
little from Orwell’s eyes. By October, during the composition
of Homage, he was able to display an almost irenic detachment.
A book review appeared in which he characterised two authors
as ‘Trotksyists’, pointing out that ‘their prejudice is against the
official Communist Party to which they are not always entire y
fair.’ 63 By the end of 1938, he actually admitted that in his
book he had ‘given a more sympathetic account of *ePOUM
“line” than I actually felt ... I always felt they were wrong.
Yet all this time, and down to the eve of the Hitler war, he
continually subscribed in print to the Trotskyist-paafist vie
the coming European conflict, acting explicidy as a parly
propagandist. Thje more chan a bin, here of an Omdh*
was schizoid, or perhaps simply a charlatan. For
merely a somewhat wayward comrade but a disloyal on.
the middle of his honeymoon with the ILP he had .
affair with the more orthodox socialist ™ st £ ess ’ l939 h f
Warburton’s famous maxim on its head. Early 19 ^

wrote a little-known article on Spai ’ h ay J The
commission, for the WEA o ditor,

occasion was a special issue designed (in the dalities 0 f

W.E. Williams), ‘to reveal the vitality and th p 1

Robert Stradling

democracy/, to hearten the timid and confound the Fifth
Column. 66

At this time, as all his other public and private writings
illustrate, Orwell could hardly find adjectives strong enough to
convey his suspicion of democracy in general and his disgust
over the Spanish example in particular. In response to this
commission he was nevertheless capable of a piece of official
labourist optimism. The essay praises the Spanish Republic’s
preservation of ‘both the forms and the spirit of democracy’
passing lightly over its ‘internal power struggles’. It asserts’
clean contrary to Homage, that ‘any government which
triumphs over Franco will be of liberal tendency’, and in
several other matters spiritlessly retails the Popular Front-
liberal line on the Spanish War. A generous extract is necessary
to impart the full utopian and paternalist flavour of this
perplexing article. The war, claims Orwell,

was acting as an educational force ... If men were suffering, they
were also learning. Scores of thousands of ordinary people had
been forced into positions of responsibility which a few months
earlier they would never have dreamed of. Hundreds of thousands
of people found themselves thinking with an intensity which
would hardly have been possible in normal times, about economic
theories and political principles. Words like fascism, communi-
cism, democracy, socialism, Trotskyism, anarchism, which for the
mass of human beings are nothing but words, were being eagerly
discussed and thought out by men who only yesterday had been
illiterate peasants. There was a huge intellectual ferment, a sudden

expansion of consciousness. It must be set down to the credit side
ot the war . . .

, It fias on ly been possible here to prise open slightly the lid of
the Pandora s Box of experience, ideas, and reflections which
are Orwell s Spanish writings. They are by turns real and

PprT^’ L° n l Vinang and naive ’ perceptive and plain silly,
erhaps ^ bes t summation of him was that made by the last

London^ Lr? RepubllC ’J uan Negnn, who met him in
K& in 1940. He seemed to the Spaniard

I decent and righteous, biased by a too rigid puritanical frame,

122

Inside the Myth

Robert Stradling

123

gifted with a candour bordering on naivety, highly cridcal but
blindly credulous, morbidly individualisdc ... and so supremely
honest and self-denying that he would not hesitate to change his
mind once he perceived himself to be wrong.

Orwell carried honesty as a badge, more self-consciously and
prominently than almost any other English writer. He
continually seeks to confront the reader unavoidably, and
often embarrassingly, with his emblem, like someone who
displays prominent evidence of a radical inclination on his or
her person at a social gathering. In Homage, perhaps unusuaUy,
he clearly intended his ubiquitous self-awareness of fallibility
to be an incontrovertible index of his veracity. To the
historian, this often works on one level. To be reminded of the
writer’s prejudices, exhorted to accept his statements only
provisionally, and to check them against other ewdence ,s
somehow disarming and comforting^ 8 For the student, too,
Orwell’s translucent approach is a refreshing change from the
complex certitudes of so many scholarly works^ To remove
Homage from the bibliography of the Spanish War therefore
might be discouraging to discourse in a subject which, in any
case incapable of objective certainty, ought to Arlve ° n
permissiveness and plurality. At the same time, students must
be invited - if the Orwellian style may be adopted tor a
moment - to consider that he may be wrong even where he
says he may be wrong. ‘Honest George was a writer not a
bookmaker! but he is no more to be regarded as the horse s

mouth.

Notes

appear passim between pp. 309 fc 453 of S. Orwell and I. Angus MOT

Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters °f e ° rg fe ’ rences to the three

dsworth, 1970, referred to hereafter as CEJL . Full references

other articles appear below.

2 ‘Inside the Whale’ ( 1940), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 549.

3 ‘Why I Write’ (1946), ibid. p. 29.

4 Letter to J. Common (5 February 1938), ibid. p. 330.

5 ‘Your Questions Answered’ (2 December 1943), ibid p 296

6 Orwell writes ‘Generalite’ for ‘Generalitat’ - the Catalan word for the
autonomous government - throughout Homage. When in hiding from the
police m Barcelona, he says he daubted 'Visca POUM!’ on the walls - his
own adumbration of ‘Down With Big Brother!’, Homage, p. 215.

7 ^ raSer ’, Bl ° 0d °f S P Mn: An 0ral History of the Spanish Civil War, London
1979. p. 532.

8 London, 1937 (reprinted, 1970).

9 Homage , p. 51. Cf. Peers, op.cit., pp. 290-91.

10 B. Crick, Homage to Catalonia and the British Council’, Times Higher
Educational Supplement , 24 February 1984, p. 12.

11 Ibid.

12 J. Meyers (ed.), George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, London, 1975,
pp. 134-37 (for Spender); L. Trilling, ‘George Orwell and the Politics of
Truth , m R- Williams (ed.), George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays
Englewood Cliffs, 1974, pp. 62-79.

13 Homage, pp. 14 Sc 210. It ought to be said that Orwell’s account of the
May Events m Barcelona is dose enough to that given by La Batalla to
suggest that he may have had some kind of access to it. See the extracts
from the editions of 4 and 13 May 1937, printed in F. Diaz-Plaja (ed.), La
Guerre Espariola en sus Documents, Barcelona, 1974, pp. 306-07 Sc 318-19

14 Homage , p. 128.

15 Ibid., pp. 209-12.

16 CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 355.

17 Homage , p. 178.

18 Orwell (as die above Catalan example in n.6 illustrates) seems to have
often spelled as he heard. He did not realise, therefore, that the letter H is
not pronounced in Castilian ( Homage , p. 38, several examples) and that
the letter P is never doubled (ibid., p. 14). He transforms a widely used
four-letter word - which he is unlikely to have seen in print - into a
five- letter Italianate hybrid (ibid., p. 97). As often as not he gets his
accents wrong, and never uses the inverted preliminary interrogation and
exclamation marks characteristic of written Castilian.

19 P. Stansky and W. Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation , London, 1979

p. 189. Neither this, nor any other major Orwell source indicates any
encounter with Spanish before 1936. 7

20 See below, n.42.

21 B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, 1982, pp. 308 8c 317.
Jansky and Abrahams are equivocal on the point, op.cit., p. 176. Cf

ornagr p. 8, and (especially) ‘Notes on the Spanish Militias’ (?1939)
CEJL, Vol. 1, pp. 351-52.

‘ ‘Why I Write’, CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 28.

2S Ibid., p. 26.

25 L H ° pki ?° n ; George 0nudl ' London, 1953 (reprinted 1977), p. 7.

and e .° f B j' USh Newsreels in the Civil War, see A. Aldgate, Cinema
and History, London, 1979.

124

Inside the Myth

7

26 As for n. 22 above.

27 Claud Cockbum. See Homage , pp. 158-59.

28 H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London, 1961.

29 Reprinted in Meyers, op.cit., pp. 150-51.

30 Homage, pp. 57, 62 & 66. Stansky and Abrahams, op.cit., p. 201 (evidence

31 Ibid.', p^TnUge, p. 113; B. Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty.

Stain 1936-39 , London, 1982, p. 108. ,

32 V. Alba, Catalonia: A Profile, London, 1975, p. 150; J. Coll and J ane

losep Rovira: una vida al serves de Catalunya, Barcelona, 1978, pp. 128-41

33 J. Villaroya i Font, Els Bombardeigs de Barcelona durant la guerra civil,

1936-39 . Montserrat, 1981, pp. 86-7. ^ _ .

34 G. Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War , 1931-39 , Princeton,

35 H. Browne, Spains Civil War , London, 1983, pp. 102-03.

36 CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 253.

a 7 I Gumev Crusade in Spain , London, 1974, pp. lo -

38 R. Payne (ed.), The Civil War in Spain, 19J6-J9, London, 1963, pp. 163 &

350.

39 Homage , pp. 117-18, 144, 156 et seq.

40 Letter to G. Gorer (18 April 1938), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 349.

41 G. Gorer’s Time and Tide review (30 April 1939) as reprinted in Meyers,
od cit p. 122. (The emphases in the quotation are mine.)

42 Orwell’s own ‘errata in Homage to Catalonia’. I owe this information to
Professor P. Davison, who kindly provided me with a photocopy of the
material from the Orwell Archive in University College, London.

S The P Smo°teSH<^ge(p. ts2)lhich .draws attention to *e6ctdjt*
the outbreak of war the Civil Guards had everywhere sided with the
stronger party’, whilst omitting to specify Barcelona, rather strengthens

45 Thomas^ ? p “t°“ondsworth, 1965, p. 93; Jackson, op.cit.,

46 The 1 exception, interestingly enough is Thomas, die only specialist
scholar actively to denigrate Orwell’s historical reliability (loc. cit
p 544 and p. 654 in the 1977 edition). Several others, it is true, carefuy
refrain from specification. See Jackson, op.cit., p. 369 for the core
version.

47 Crick, A Life, p. 332.

48 Homage, pp. 151 & 159-60. r , - 1936-37’, Historic

49 J. Morreres i Boix, ‘Las Milicias Populares en Cataluna, 193b ,

16, No. 55 (1980), pp. 27-38.

50 Homage, pp. 155-56. ,

51 ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War , ibid., p. 230.

52 ‘Inside the Whale’, CEJL, Vol. 1, p- 566. incident in some

53 Crick U life, pp. 313 and 615) deals with the Auden modent

detail, but records no opinion on the issue q

54 Ibid p. 244.

Robert Stradling

125

55 Homage , p. 69.

56 Ibid pp. 68 8c (‘Looking Back’) 239.

57 H. Francis, Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War ,
London, 1984, esp. pp. 119ff.

58 Meyers, op.cit., p. 133.

59 See, for example, A. Beichman’s survey of recent work on fascism. Times
Literary Supplement , 19 February 1982, p. 180.

60 Homage , pp. 48 8c 173.

61 CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 373.

62 Ibid., pp. 301-9. For the PCE view of the Popular Army, see E. Lister,
Memorias de un LuchadorVoL 1, Madrid, 1977, pp. 1 19-61. For the Catalan
view, V. Guarner, Vaixecament militar a Catalunya i la guerra civil
( 1936-1939 ), Montserrat, 1975.

63 Ibid., p. 231. For evidence that Orwell was sympathetic to the anarchists
during the composition of Homage , see also pp. 323 8c 325.

64 Caesarean Section in Spain’, The Highway, March 1939, pp. 145-47. This
piece has escaped notice in any of the literature on Orwell, or on the
Spanish War, that I have seen, save for J. Garda Duran, Bibliografia de la
Guerra Espahola , Montevideo, 1964, p. 401. In the Introduction to their
‘complete’ Orwell, {CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 15) Sonia Oiwell and Ian Angus
claim to have included anything that he (Orwell) would have considered
as an essay’, but not everything which ‘is purely ephemeral’. The actual
contents of the collection suggest that this article qualified for inclusion
by these criteria. The conclusion must be either that it was unknown to
the editors or that it was suppressed as inimical to Oiwell’s reputation. I
am given to understand that it will appear in the forthcoming dejinitive
complete Orwell to be edited by Professor Davison for Seeker and
Warburg.

65 Editorial, The Highway , loc. cit., p. 127.

67 Meyers, op.rit., p. 149.

68 In six pages of Homage , for example, (144-149) there are no fewer than
nine different expressions of uncertainty!

Beatrix Campbell

Orwell - Paterfamilias or Big Brother?

If we are to measure George Orwell s success in the durability
of his two later novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four
then what we need to examine is his projection of Big Brother
— the modem authoritarian state.

Big Brother has become the metaphor for the modern state,
and although its success is formidable, since the term has
become part of our political vocabulary, it is also a problem.
Orwell’s state is not just a spectre of secrecy and surveillance,
because the whole thesis also depends on a notion of absolute
power which depends on the condition of mass powerlessness.
In this context it is significant that Orwell feels comfortable in
the temperate climes of English capitalism before the Second
World War, only decades after the working class had won the
franchise and before it was a major power in the land.

It is post-revolutionary power which inflames his nightmare
of the future state - his critique of the modern state is
unmistakably directed against the socialist state. But Orwell
equally nightmarish vision of absolute power essness
not from some future defeat, but his own feehngs about the
working class who were his contemporaries. The horrors o
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four extend not only o h
misuse of state power, but to the failure of
failure derives from Orwell’s big-brotherly view of the working

Cl 7want to argue, as Raymond Williams has in his exceU^
book Orwell, that the problem with Orwell is hi P
ation, or rather misrepresentation, of the working clas .

126

Beatrix Campbell j£7

than that, there is also a problem in the way that masculinity,
femininity and the family feature in his representations of class.

While Orwell’s invincible edifice of the state may seem
modern, his view of the working class isn’t - it’s the quaint,
old-fashioned chronicle of a self-confessed snob. Despite his
wish to invest his revolutionary optimism in the people, what
he feels for the common people edges on contempt. Actually,
he thinks they re dead common. He may think the working
class is the revolutionary class, but he doesn’t feel it.

Nowhere in Orwell do the working class make history. And
in his quest for an authentic English socialism it is not the
working class, but a sort of hybrid southern suburban species
which becomes the revolutionary class - not because of its
capacity to struggle, but because in some way it fits Orwell’s
notion of quintessential Englishness.

Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four the off-stage appearances
of the working class are remarkably resonant of The Road to
Wigan Pier. The power of the state in Nineteen Eighty-Four seems
perpetually stabilised in its very instability - but the instability
is only a chimera. There is no real challenge to the state from
its own people, and particularly not from the proles.

George Orwell s fife and times with the proletariat began
with The Road to Wigan Pier when, in keeping with a long
tradition of English literature, the quest for the ‘state of the
nation , he set off on an expedition into the natural habitat of
the working class. The tradition itself depends on a relation of
otherness to this class. In the first place, normally such
journeys could only be undertaken by people with the time and
money to make them, in other words with resources not
possessed by the working class itself. But more importantly,
that relationship always inscribes the author in a relation of
exclusion from the working class. The odd thing is that this
quest for Englishness necessitates the discovery of that working
class, as if it were hidden and mysterious. And of course,
coming from Orwell’s class position, that is exactly what they
were. And remained. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell
depended on the activists for his access to the working class.

ut as Williams shows, Orwell insists on a separation between
the working class and its activist intelligentsia. He cannot
conceive of the working class itself as a thinking class with its

128

Inside the Myth

own history, with a history of making itself. The result is the
representation of a class which is thoughtless and leaderless, a
class in its natural state.

Again, as Williams shows, Orwell’s omission of working-
class activists and organisations leaves him with the slate clean
for his own observations. What Orwell brings to his journey is
primarily himself, an observer who takes no counsel, an author
with all the arrogance of innocence. Insofar as he is concerned
with working-class politics as an organised force, he represents
it as showing a flair for organisation but not for thinking. This
separation is achieved because Orwell kidnaps working-class
thinkers out of their class: ‘I think, therefore I am’ apparently
doesn’t apply to the proles; to think is to become middle class.
It is this which enables us to track a continuity between Wigan
Pier and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is as if the documentary
material of Wigan Pier provided him with his source material
for Nineteen Eighty-Four : the proles are the same in both.

In Wigan Pier, Orwell seeks to sum up the working class in
the archetypal proletarian group — the miners. For all that his
description of miners’ labour and their poverty is sympathetic
it is hardly radical. How does he describe these archetypal
proletarians, and why did he single out the miners P

Orwell’s graphic description of the work of miners facilitates
his representation of workers as elemental creatures,
work-horses. Williams reminds us that this is how they appear
in Animal Farm, and so it is again in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As I
have argued in Wigan Pier Revisited, I think Orwell s choice of
miners is significant. As the mysogynist he is, it is not
surprising that he has chosen the most masculinised

profession. „ . .

Undoubtedly, his celebration of the miners was in part an
attempt to restore them to a respected place in the ranks of the
working class. He challenges the denigration of miners as
noble savages because they are dirtyby descri ing
conditions of their work and their bathless homes, and by
establishing trenchantly the necessity of their work For
coal, he says, that makes the world go round. And at the
time he, too, casts them in the role of noble savages y
panegyric on their physique. He loves their lean, SU PP ’
bodies And so his celebration of the miners is both an

Beatrix Campbell ^29

affectionate discovery of their heroism and their masculinity —
their work is a manful struggle down there in the dark and
dangerous abdomen of the earth. It is of course essentially
physical work, and what Orwell is not concerned with is the
history of that masculinisation of the work of miners. Mining is
only men s work because women were banned from the work of
hewing coal in the nineteenth-century struggle to expel women
from hard physical labour. The feminisation of women
demanded that expulsion. But that feminisation had an
answering echo in the masculinisation of men. This is important
for several reasons. The selection of the miners in this way as the
most exotic martyrs of the working class is itself part of the
process of masculinising the history of the working class.

Orwell visited Wigan in the 1930s when it was still one of the
outposts of women’s work in the mines. After the expulsion of
women from the underground in 1842, there were campaigns
throughout the late nineteenth century to purge women from
the pit top, where it was believed by some that they were
de-sexed by their strength. The campaign failed in Wigan,
where women were only finally pushed ofF the pit top in the
1950s after nationalisation and a deal between the National
Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers. Wiga n was
famous for its ‘pit brow lasses’. Not as you’d know from The
Road to Wigan Pier .

Wigan was also as much a cotton town as it was a coal town.
Indeed, it is significant that Orwell spent a substantial part of his
journey in Lancashire around the cotton belt, towns which
employed women in the mills, towns which where the crucible
of the English industrial revolution, towns were working-class
history cannot be written other than as the struggles between
men and women and capital. Not as you’d know that from The
Road to Wigan Pier either.

So, women do not appear as protagonists in Orwell’s working
class. And neither does capital. And what we are left with is a
sense of a class which suffers, but not of a class which struggles.
And certainly not a class which wins. It’s a class summed up in
me anthem of the washerwomen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

They sye that time ’eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

130

Inside the Myth

131

But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years
They twist my ’eart strings yet!

True to the tradition of such representations of the working
class, the imagery contains pathos, isolation, inertia, defeat: it
incites pity and philanthropy rather than protest and politics.
The washerwoman in Nineteen Eighty-Four has her parallel in
Wigan Pier in a solitary image of an exhausted, but noble,
woman, poking a stick down a drain. Both figures are used by
Orwell to gather and focus his fondness for these poor people.
But they are silent women, even when they are singing. They
are sad, but above all they are solitary. And Orwell is about to
entrench them in their solitude: in Wigan Pier he sees her as he
is on his way, leaving town. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he discovers
his affection for his washerwoman just before Winston is about
to be arrested. The isoladon of these figures in their
proletarian landscape is about to be completed in both cases
by the observer’s departure. The only feelings we can be left
with are grief and impotence.

Among the middle class and the upper class, women are
targets of his acidic class contempt, expressed in the same vein
as the mother-in-law joke. It’s the ‘Brighton ladies’ and rich
women lolling around in Rolls Royces whom he can t abide,
presumably because they are the quintessence of the idle rich.
They’re an easy target, of course, given their unstated but

enforced idleness as women. „ r , , f .

It is women whom he identifies as the fifth column of the
upper classes. In Wigan Pier Orwell briefly considers the lack of
political solidarity among the middle class, not as a funcuon ot
its dominance - for the upper classes are organised in a web ot
political associations of which there is no account in rwe
but as an expression of women’s backwardness.

You cannot have an effective trade union of middle-class workers
because in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be
egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow s job.

The unity of the working class, on the other hand, »s
assumed and cemented in the unity of the family, the fa
the working class combine and the middle class

Beatrix Campbell

probably due to their different conceptions of the family ’
Orwell is clearly innocent of the tension within working-class
households m precisely the case of that litmus test of intra-class
solidarity, the strike.

The history of the working class is, however, a minefield of
negotiated settlements between men and women, not least in
the c assic case of the strike. Men’s strikes have always carried
the proverbial risk of the complaining wife who was never
consulted - it is classically represented in Salt of the Earth , an
American film of a Mexican-American miners’ strike in which
the women s communal demands were never given political
priority by their men. The men’s strike is lived by women as an
economic hardship that they were never consulted about But
when the women propose taking over the picket line after the
coalowners take out an injunction against the striking miners
die men balk; the men vote against it, but the women - having
first fought for their right to vote - all vote for it. The women’s
tenacity becomes the source of the strike’s survival, demanded
from them initially as individuals and yet opposed when it
takes the form of a collective intervention. Individual
solidarity, of course, is always in the service of the men.
Collective action among the women always carries the threat of
an organised power beyond the men’s control. Orwell’s
observations about class loyalty between the genders are just
another example of his unsubstantiated sentiments.

Take a look at the gender breakdown in voting patterns. The
gender gap is dramatic within the working class. It is among
middle and upper-class voters that there is a remarkable
political symmetry. The fact is that the upper class is united
across gender and class in ways that the working class isn’t. It is
conventional wisdom that the reason for this is that the labour

Z3 Cm . the L abou >- Party have faced women with a
contradiction: it demands their class solidarity while it
sanctions their sexual subordination.

on P Z ° f £ e problem « that Orwell’s eye never comes to rest
the culture of women, their concerns, their history their

des^o^H HC ° nl 7 k° lds women to the filter of his own

the bearer, nfK StC ^ 7 SCen h ° W he makes women

work the * P 1S ° Wn C aSS J ha L tred ' In his avowedly political
snarling innuendo he reserves for his ‘Brighton

232 Inside the Myth

ladies’ and ‘birth control’ fanatics is rarely directed towards the
figures of real power in capitalist societies the judges, the
parliamentarians and the capitalists. In fact, you are left with a
sense of a society run, not only by the national family’s old
buffers, but of a society run by a febrile femininity, an army of
doddering dowagers.

The point is that given his own centrality, and that of
masculinity in Orwell’s work, women are congratulated only
when they suck to their men. The sexual filter surrounds all his
female personae.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four we have working-class women
represented by poor Mrs Parsons and a prole washerwoman.
Mrs Parsons is a ‘woman with a lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with the waste pipe’, an infuriating person,
always in the slough of a housewife s ruinous mess. And then
there is the washerwoman whom Winston discovers during his
fugiuve flights into proletaria. He only begins to reflect on her
with any respect when he inexplicably discovers the
revolutionary potential of the proles. Her ‘indefatigable voice’
sings on, as she endlessly hangs out her washing. He watches
her ‘solid, contourless body, like a block of granite’, quietly
admiring ‘her thick arms reaching up for the line, her
powerful mare-like buttocks protruded. She s as strong as a
horse, an image which has echoes in Animal Farm, where as
Raymond Williams reminds us, ‘the speed of his figuradve
transition from animals to the proletariat is interesting -
showing as it does a residue of thinking of the poor as animals:

powerful but stupid.’ ;

As Orwell’s Winston watches the ‘over-ripe turnip’ of a
washerwoman reach for the line ‘it struck him for the first time
that she was beautiful.’ Her ‘rasping red skin, bore the same
relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why
should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?’

So we start with the strong but stupid work-horse and move
to a vision of a woman in labour: both as she labours solitan y
and stoically, and as a symbol of fertility. As Winston muses on
how he and his lover Julia will never bear children he reflects
on this washerwoman-mother: ‘The woman down there had
no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a ferule
belly.’ Just like Orwell’s panegyric on the miners, all brawn

and no brain 'S”r' ,nKSS “ | tlal proletarian woman i s all belly
comempWnV h3S "° CultUr ' a " d consciousness wordi

His lma g e of this woman echoes his more noetic

there S fr n more • °h the . n ?’ ners as the archetypal proletarians, but
there is more, her labour is solitary. Like the miners her

Ther^X ' baSk ' “ “ 3 f “" d “cntal. natural fore?

CTaft and r h? aCCOUntS no re P r «entadon of subtlety, of
craft and the consciousness associated with workers’

combination This representation of heroic manual labour is

stTfrom r t o S h Cde f rati ° n ° f h 7 bi0l °^ * 15 only ashort
step from this to his formation of Julia’s rebellion. Julia is

essentially sexua^he’^^ ™ Sedltion ’ Her rebellion is
essentially sexual She s promiscuous, she’s had hundreds of

men and her subversion is sealed in an equation between

comiption and sexuality. ‘I hate purity, I hate goodnS I

don want any virtue to exist anywhere,’ shouts Julia That’s

the extent of her opposition to totalitarian puritanism Tm

corrupt to the bones.’ Winston loves that/not merdy he^

capaaty for love, ‘but the animal instinct, the simple

pa"~- d “ ,re: tha ‘ WaS the fOT “ »u.d .eaX

In a curiously sexual politics, he counterposes Julia’s
revolutionary rapaciousness with his former wife Katherine’s
puntamsm. Her party loyalty is expressed in her friSd^
Juha s delicious revolt is consummated in her illicit collection

& p ofS™ g off d “ of £2Z

But of course the consequences of this reduction of Julia to

ee r th C rr, b101 ^ r t0 render her rebel,ion as somedring
seething below the threshold of political consciousness T?

spontaneous only, and only so because it is only sexuS She’
her ST m P °! ltics as such ’ even she’ll lay down

w r on finally e ets his han i -

1 24 Inside the Myth

facilitates the elision between work and politics — the workers
work in their natural state and they have their social existence
still in a kind of natural state. The working class is
pre-conscious, tasteless and mindless, child-like in its quest for
immediate gratification. Yet for some reason, which Orwell
never explains, the working class is the material of revolution.
Perhaps because of some quasi-religious notion that the meek
shall inherit the earth. The people store in their hearts, muscles
and bellies the power to change the world. All body but no
brain - and yet without the collective brain of politics, the
Machiavellian ‘prince’ of the party, how is their strength to
turn into consciousness? This is perhaps the greatest lacuna in
Orwell’s work: Williams declares that ‘in a profound way, both
the consciousness of the workers and the possibility of
authentic revolution are denied. There is no sensitivity to the
repertoire of tactics and strategies which the working-class
movement, despite its many weaknesses, has deployed. The
very absence of the problem of ideology and consciousness
produces an assumed leap from brute strength to the power of

the will. , . . .

That leaves him without anything to say about working-class

politics as such, and its metamorphosis into revolutionary
culture — you are always left with the feeling of contempt for
‘the masses’ and for the left intelligentsia. A thinking worker is
never allowed to remain a member of the working class. It
leaves him with insuperable contradictions - the workers are
the revolutionary class and yet they aren’t. Thinking workers
are part of the intelligentsia and therefore irrelevant. It s as it,
like so many members of his class, he can t forgive e
working-class thinkers for their capacity to think. For all that
Orwell in Wigan Pier owns up to the partiality of his class
perceptions, he never shares the privilege of thought with his

new class allies. ,

If the working class are the material of revolution, they are

never the makers of revolution, despite his rhetoric And so he
compromises. Slumped in his own contradictions, he gives tne
middle class the ticket. They’ve been elbowed out of then
revolutionary credentials by pansy intellectuals on e
hand and by their rough neighbours on the
the other. They become the radical Englishness, WASPs t

Beatrix Campbell

loo

last, moderate in all things. Not surprisingly, Orwell’s

rro°p U ecms a 7nnr S,t ' 0n “ a , remarkabl y anglo-saxon

prospectus. Looking now at his Six Point Programme in The

Lion and the Unicom , it is hard to see how it really differs from

militant social democracy. English socialism, he says will

nationalise it will equalise incomes, it will have its own catchy

mne, it will leave the Christians alone, it will be sensible. Whal

his progi amme doesn t have, however, is any sense of struggle

The working class have created programmes like these^of

course, but in Orwell’s scenario they haven’t produced his’ At

fiX’fo^He’ U , W H Uld K glVe C , he W ° rking Class s °methmg to
fig t for. He excludes the working class from history and fails

to give it any place in the revolutionaiy cast, otheVthan the
supporting role, the proverbial extras.

In Wigan Pier , having exploited the sendees of the
movement s activists, Orwell thanks them with :

Tne English working class do not show much capacity for
leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for organisation The
whole trade union movement testifies to this; so too the excellent

r; 7 7,7 d “ b! ' ' “ f S'-ified co-operativepub’

and splendidly organised ... ^

Elsewhere in Wigan Pier Onvell muses on the contradictions in
Engfish culture, between its polite respectability and its boozy,
y post-card culture. It all works towards an image of

ZbZoLTZ ^ training Pige ° ns ’ “mg and
of Th! w g ' °7 tbus summ arises the working-class culture
the warm-hearted, unthinking socialist, the typical working

W°Se :L m a f ind ° fba / taIk - **• produces a vision ofZ

lef^out and w>h PreSCnt ^ SOdety with the Worst abuses

™t_r r?r ,n r es v cenn ' ing ° n Ae same ^ngs as af

p sent family life, the pub, football and local politics. ’

discove^° tS f are /j eady in Wigan Pier for wi nston’s shocking

tZ Foul ^ d r P ' JOintm “ t - ■>* P-les in N,ne,l
gtity-Four when he sees a clutch of men peering at a

WinstorBu7n kin th e f rnest ^' Something must be up, thinks
Onvell Zh ’ v 7 ^ ° n,y ,0 ° king for the lotte ry results.

Lion and the llZZ hl f antI - econ °mism in a critique in The
Unicom of the trade-union politics which dominate

1 36 Inside the Myth

English Labourism. In this he was hardly original, as socialists
and Marxists have always been pre-occupied by this English
disease. But in Orwell, anti-economism is associated with a
sense of the working class as not only myopic but degenerate.
Just as Orwell finds no point of resistance rooted in the
working class itself in Wigan Pier, so is there none in Nineteen
Eighty-Four.

There is more to say about the problem of economism,
however. For Orwell is not alone in stumbling across it only to
be mystified by it. As he eloquendy suggests, for the working
class men’s movement, socialism is capitalism with the worst
abuses left out. I have to confess that Orwell’s own political
prospectus, outlined in The Lion and the Unicom, seems barely
any different. What neither he, nor the men’s movement on the
left seem to have registered is that this problem of economism
may be associated with the masculinisation of working-class
politics, its reduction to a men’s movement. Orwell is a
participant in this because he, too, writes women out of
working-class history and politics. It isn’t because working
men are thick that they’re economistic, as Orwell seems to
suggest, but it may be that the historic settlement between
capital and the men’s labour movement over the role of
women reinforces economic individualism and defuses the
social dimensions of socialist struggle. Certainly, that economic
individualism is associated with the economic subordination of
women, and not surprisingly it produces a politics which
evacuates the terrain of private life, on the one hand, and issues
outside the parameter of the wage contract on the other.

Orwell argues for a cultural revolution as the necessary
ignition to political revolution in England, and his great virtue
is his attempt to anchor that vision in the continuity of
commonsense culture. But far from that taking him towards
the culture of those constituencies marginalised in the
hierarchy of WASP socialism, he seeks to radicalise those
components of consensus claimed by the right — the steadfast
pillars of family and patriotism.

As Williams shows, Orwell’s starting point is his quest to
belong, a quest which leads him towards an attempt to
produce a unity called England and Englishness. His metaphor
for nationhood is the family, the collectivity in which all know

their place in relation to each other, in which all are intelligible
o each other. In the family, as in the nation, we all share the
same concerns, the same interests and the same language It is

!o res t r° rkmg ' C kSS fanU,y ’ ab ° Ve a11 ’ 11131 we a11 home

you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which is
not easy to find elsewhere ... His home life seems to fall more
naturally mto a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck
by the easy completeness, the perfect symmetry, as it were, of a
working class interior at its best ...

It hangs together he suggests, as a middle class family does
but the relationship is far less tyrannical. ’

nflhefWl m . the fi context of feminist politics that the critique
i y c anfies it as a site of contradiction between men
and women as a settlement, always negotiated between
unequals. Orwell s suggestive symmetry is exactly the
simmering seething volcano which has always, explicitly or
3 1Clt y ’ fuelled movements for women’s economic, social
and sexual independence. Feminism falsified the Oiwellian
romance with the proletarian family as an institution. It is not

with- em / niS f m S< r eks u to damn the strong bonds and loves lived
within the family, but rather the conditions in which men and

women negotiate their encounter with each other, their
children and the rest of the world, based as they are on the
principle of dominance and subordination. If, for feminism

patriotism? 1011 ^ Challenged ’ then Whither Odell’s appeal to

Britmn, however, was, and now is more than ever before a
richly cosmopolitan society. Orwell’s ‘patriotism’ is an anneal

aftermath 0 (tf - S° S f <fai | nilies ’: the En S lish working class. In the
tuarTri ?h fami y - OUQng t0 the Elands there is no
^There • ^ ^ patnot,sm would have a progressive hue.

Here is an easy equation in his social democratic
programme between giving the workers something to fight for
and his sentimental construction of nationhood within the

workTbecause h ^ a ™ ,y f Hls thesis °f progressive patriotism
essen ft a ° f ^ nati ° n is that of the family, an
y mfied whole, speaking the same language, united

138

Inside the Myth

by kin, not divided by class. Because the socialist family would
have the right people in control, the working class would
presumably remain as they are — the children.

Deirdre Beddoe

Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women
m the Writings of George Orwell

<SnS S1 ThfT’ K P° rtra V al of women in his

. ' . slr ucture which I have adopted is firstlv ro

Kruunise his fictional female characters, as portrayed in his

In Se° found ‘° '° 0,; 21

can be found - m his documentary works. This division into
fiction and fact is parallelled by another division i e the
separation of women a'ong class lines: middle-clas's womt
are to be found almost exclusively in his fiction and

documeniry S wrUfiig. en ' *

Before turning to Orwell’s representation of women a few
points need to be clearly stated. Firstly, a pensive

1 f .^ mi ^ llsm 1S evident in Orwell’s writing. In 1934 he wrote
to a friend, Brenda Salkeld, 8 wote

i.Ms'Zfif?" rd * y W “ h ^ " 2 bil ° fa f^tuinist and

* ? was brought up exactly like a man she

d be able to throw a stone, construct a syllogism keen a

due to Sadism! I have never read the Marquis de Sade’s novels I
they are unfortunately very hard to get hold of. 1

dLTribed h^ 6 ^’- a / nend ° f 0nve11 from Southwold days,
didn’t reallv tik^ C C ° W ,° m f n ln S eneraI very succinctly. ‘He

broad^ascin^l^O.^ 0111611 ** Said in 3 Third P ™^™e

139

140 Inside the Myth

But one does not need other people to testify to Orwell’s
anti- feminism and to his contempt for women: he does a
splendid job quite unaided. He cannot mention feminism and
the women’s suffrage movement without scorn. Writing of the
period following the First World War he states,

England was full of half baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism,
internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free
love, divorce reform, atheism, birth control - things like these
were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal
times. 3

Writing on socialism, he expressed his fear that it was a refuge
for every ‘fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex maniac,
Quaker, Nature-Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.

Secondly, Orwell was not only anti-feminist but he was
totally blind to the role women were and are forced to play in
the order of things. His prejudice severely hampered his
analysis of capitalism and its workings. He saw capitalism as
the exploitation of a male working class by a male ruling class.
Women were just men’s wives - middle-class nags and
working-class housekeepers, to be judged simply as good or
bad in keeping a ‘decent’ home. He failed to see how
capitalism manipulated both men and women, middle class
and working class, alike. He seems to have been totally
unaware of the integral role played by the family unit in
capitalist production, i.e. male bread-winner with dependent
wife (who serviced the male bread-winner and produced the
next generation of workers) and dependent children. He was
unaware too - or chose to ignore - the role women played in
the waged work-force, either as poorly paid workers who could
depress wages or as a reserve army of labour, to be brought in
and out of the work-force to suit the changing needs of
capitalism.

In short, Orwell as an Eton-educated, middle-class man,
had little or no understanding of the role and predicament of
women in the society in which he lived. His fiction presents us
with a series of nagging middle- class wives whom he saw as a
brake on the radicalism of their husbands: ‘you cannot have an
effective trade union of middle-class workers, because in times

Deirdre Beddoe

141

of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her
husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow’s job.’ 5 While
there may be an element of truth in this, Orwell did not see the
reasons for it, i.e. the dependency of middle-class wives, lack of
employment opportunities for women, the operation of
marriage-bars in many professions. His non-fiction ignores
women workers and judges working-class wives by their
abilities as home-makers. Orwell’s awareness of class divisions
in society went alongside his lack of understanding of gender
divisions, and is summed up in his discussion of women’s
magazines He was perceptively aware that these magazines
project a fantasy of ‘pretending to be richer than you are’ for
the bored factory-girl or worn-out mother of five, but totally
unaware of how these magazines reinforced gender divisions in
society and promoted the dominant female stereotype of the
interwar years - the housewife. 6

George Orwell’s female fictional characters contain within
uieir ranks some of the most obnoxious portrayals of women
in English fiction. I have in mind pardcularly the grasping
husband-seeking, ‘low-brow’ Elizabeth of Burmese Days (1935),’
who is prepared, when something better comes in sight, to pass
her erstwhile beau lying wounded on the ground ‘as though he
had been a dead dog’, 7 and finally to throw him over because
he is tainted with scandal and a birthmark. Hilda Bowling in
Coming Up For Air (1939) is similarly depicted as a totally
appalling character. She is the nagging wife who ties down that
potential free spirit, George Bowling, by pestering him with
household cares and bills.

By contrast, Orwell’s remaining female characters are much
more attractive. Dorothy Hare, the title character of A
Clergymans Daughter (1935) and Orwell’s only female
protagonist, is a padietic drudge whose life is rendered
ky h er service to others and by the tyranny of her
se s c ergyman father. One can at least feel sympathy for
oro y m her plight as unpaid curate, and excitement for her

00 when a blow to the head brings about amnesia and a total

1 an ^ e m !* er Iifest Y le - But Dorothy simply does not have it in
ner to attain happiness and freedom, and the novel ends with
to retarmng “ th< ; Pathetic role of middle-class spinster

vmg m her fathers rectory. If Elizabeth and Hilda are

142 Inside the Myth

stereotypical portrayals of dreadful middle-class women,
Dorothy is merely pathetic.

Rosemary, the leading woman character in Keep the Aspidistra
Flying (1936) is quite the ‘nicest’ of all Orwell’s female
characters. She is cheerful, outgoing and smart: she rescues the
whining Gordom Comstock from the abyss of poverty by
marrying him and making an honest man of him. She is,
however, the witting ally of money and of capitalism, against
which Gordon has declared unremitting war - the sort of
intellectual conflict a woman could not possibly understand.

Finally, there is the youthful, lithe Julia of Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), Winston Smith’s ally in the fight against Big
Brother and totalitarianism; but whereas Winston’s fight
against the system is inspired by a desire for intellectual
freedom, Julia goes along with him for illicit sex, black-market
coffee and finally for love of Winston. In short, this is a list of
stereotypes - with the possible excepdon of Rosemary.

Some general rules underpin Orwell’s female characters.
They can be summarized roughly as follows. Women like
money and tying men down; women are incapable of
intellectual pursuits and enthusiasms; women are either young
and attractive and hundng for husbands, or they are nagging
unattractive wives; sporty women and women’s rights
campaigners are particularly unappealing types. Orwell’s
methodology is to portray a particular individual woman and
attribute a set of characteristics to her: from her he is then
prepared to generalize about all women. In order to
demonstrate Orwell’s jaundiced and unsympathetic view of
middle-class women, I shall look firstly at the main female
characters in a little more detail and then, briefly, at the
subsidiary characters.

Elizabeth, the central female figure in Burmese Days , is an
obnoxious character. She is depicted as a young woman who,
after the death of her feckless, pseudo-ardsdc mother and after
several years hard grind in poorly paid jobs in Paris, joins her
only remaining relatives, the Lackersteens, in Burma. During
her girlhood Elizabeth had been led to expect better from life.
During the period of her father’s short-lived prosperity she
had attended for two terms a girls’ boarding school. ‘Oh the
joy, the unforgettable joy of those two terms! Four of the girls

Deirdre Beddoe

143

at the school were “the Honourable ’ Orwell, who on
other occasions takes swipes at the bad influence of girls’
schools upon their inmates, remarks that this short interlude
had firmly fixed Elizabeth’s character. ‘There is a short period
in everyone s life when his (sic) character is fixed forever, with
Elizabeth it was those two terms during which she rubbed
shoulders with the rich.’ Her schooling had taught her two
general principles, i.e. all that is good or ‘lovely’ in life is
synonymous with the expensive and all that is bad, or in her
words, ‘beastly’, is the cheap. There was only one way in which
Elizabeth might attain the money to enjoy the ‘lovely’ things of
life and shun the ‘beastly’, and that was through marriage. To
this end, encouraged by her aunt, Mrs Lackersteen, she sets out
to find herself a husband from amongst the small European
community of Kyauktada in upper Burma.

The central theme of the novel is the relationship between
Flory, a jaded, disfigured, middle-aged employee in the service
of a timber firm and the young, attractive Elizabeth. Flory, in
contrast to Elizabeth, is portrayed with a measure of sympathy.
He is presented as an intellectual who loves reading, as a man
with a true appreciation of Burmese culture, who speaks
Burmese and who enjoys the close friendship of the Indian civil
surgeon, Dr Veraswami. In the first part of the book, after his
initial meeting with Elizabeth, Flory deludes himself that
Elizabeth shares his intellectual, cultural and humanitarian
interests. In fact, Elizabeth reads only popular fiction, feels ill
at ease with and disdainful of natives and has no time for
highbrow ideas . Real, people, she felt, decent people —
people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes -
were not brainy.’ In short, the two main characters totally fail
to communicate with each other. At the moment when Flory,
who is about to propose to her, talks sincerely of his loneliness
in exile, she is not even listening. The only moments in which
she has any admiration for him are when he talks about tiger
shooting and when he actually shoots a leopard. Elizabeth
warms to Flory when he is behaving in an accepted masculine
way, which suggests how women’s crude expectations of men
confine men to boorish activities and desensitize them.

Throughout the rest of the novel Elizabeth behaves quite
a ominably. She abandons and ignores Flory in favour of an

144 Inside the Myth

aristocratic young police officer who is temporarily stationed
at Kyauktada. Even though Flory at last sees her as she really is
- ‘silly, snobbish, heartless’ - he desires her physically. Men are
slaves to their sexuality in Orwell’s writing, whilst women
manipulate theirs. He is eager to win her back when the upper
class policeman deserts her, and she too entertains the thought
of returning to Flory because he emerges as the hero of the
hour when the Burmese attack the European club house. In the
last pages, however, Flory is discredited by the appearance of
his erstwhile Burmese mistress at the church service, and
Elizabeth once again scorns him. Flory shoots himself and
Elizabeth marries the older leader of the white community,
which enables her to become a true ‘burra memsahib’ who
terrorizes her servants.

Elizabeth is made to appear especially pernicious because
she is portrayed as being representative of all women. When
she acts evasively and refuses to talk to him in a straightforward
manner, i.e. ‘man to man’, ‘she was going to leave him in the
dark, snub him and pretend that nothing had happened; the
natural feminine move.'* Orwell does offer some explanations of
Elizabeth’s predicament, including her experience of poverty
and the need to move from her uncle’s bungalow because of
his lecherous advances, but he conveys no real understanding
of her situation and merely produces a cruel parody of a young
middle-class woman.

Dorothy Hare is the title character of A Clergyman’s Daughter.
She is the only female character in Orwell’s writings who is the
protagonist of a novel, but unfortunately it was a novel of
which Orwell was far from proud, describing it variously as
‘tripe ’ 9 and ‘bollox ’. 10 Despite his low opinion of this work
which was written hurriedly when he was very hard up, it is a
sympathetic portrayal of one group of middle-class English
women, spinsters.

Dorothy is the ascetic, unpaid drudge — daughter of an
aristocratic but impecunious clergyman, who leaves all the
cares of his parish as well as of his household to Dorothy. For
her life is a round of shame-facedly avoiding tradesmen
(creditors), of parish visiting, jumble sales and Sunday school
pageants. The futility and loneliness of her existence are
emphasized as she sits late at night making costumes from glue

Deirdre Beddoe

145

and brown paper for Charles I and Oliver Cromwell in the
forthcoming pageant. Dorothy’s sexual anxiety traps her in the
lonely world of the spinster. ‘If only they (men) would leave
you alone. For it was not that in other ways she disliked men.
On the contrary she liked them better than women .’ 11 She is
repelled by the bluff neighbour, Warburton, who tries to kiss
her and will later propose to her. Sexual anxiety is the block -
more than her father - to her escape into marriage.

Part of Mr Warburton’s hold over her was in the fact that he was a
man and had die careless good humour and the intellectual
largeness that women so seldom have. But why couldn’t they leave
you alone ? 12

A fall from her bicycle, a blow to the head and amnesia remove
Dorothy from life at Knype Hill. Unaware of who she is, she
tastes life among the London down-and-outs, in the hopfields
and finally in the appalling Ringwood House, a private school
for girls owned by the grasping Mrs Creevey. Orwell’s account
of the school, with its useless education for middle-class girls
and his description of the exploitation of its stafF of spinsters
make good reading. Dorothy, even though starved by Mrs
Creevey, emerges as an innovative and progressive teacher who
is motivated by concern for ‘the poor children’. Mrs Creevey,
backed by the oafish parents, soon puts a stop to that.

From Dorothy Orwell moved outwards and expands, very
sympathetically, upon the loneliness and dejection of
middle-class spinsters.

If you have no family and no home to call your own, you could
spend half a lifetime without managing to make a friend. There
are women in such places, and especially derelict gentlewomen in

ill-paid jobs, who go on for years upon end in almost utter
solitude . 13

The end of the novel comes with Dorothy’s return home to her
se sh old father and to a bleak future of spinsterdom. It is an
unsatisfactory but inevitable ending. Unless Dorothy were to
take up with a man she would be doomed. Women in Orwell’s
hction are not capable of happiness without men.

146 Inside the Myth

Rosemary is the jolly, outgoing, kindly and exceptionally
nice girl-friend of the whining, poverty-stricken poet Gordon
Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The main theme of the
book is Gordon’s war against money and the forces of
capitalism. It is a losing battle and he sinks lower and lower
into the abyss of poverty, only to be rescued by the fact of
Rosemary’s pregnancy, which stirs him into marrying her and
returning to a reasonably paid job in an advertising agency, the
very hub of capitalism. Rosemary has of course eventually
trapped him - but it is a trap into which he is willing to fall,
despite his earlier rantings against marriage and against
women’s adulation of the Money-God.

‘Women! What nonsense they make of all our ideas. Because one
can’t keep free of women, and every woman makes one pay the
same price. ‘Chuck away your decency and make more money’ -
that’s what women say. ‘Chuck away your decency, suck the
blacking off the bosses’ boots, and buy me a better fur coat than
the woman next door .’ 14

But Rosemary is depicted as a charming character. Her charm
lies in the fact that she is not like other women. Rosemary is a
girl a man, a poet even, can talk to: Rosemary could discuss
similes and metaphors. Rosemary is not like other women: she
doesn’t harp on to him to go back to the advertising agency
until he is absolutely destitute. In short, Orwell uses Rosemary
to point to the faults which exist in all the other middle-class
women: a desire for money, security and a total inability to
appreciate ‘ideas’.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying also contains a portrait of Gordon’s
spinster sister Julia, who is exploited by a female ‘friend’ as an
under-paid worker in a teashop. It is a sympathetic depiction -
as is the description of Dorothy Hare’s exploitation at
Ringwood House. It is in these depictions of middle-class
spinsters that Orwell comes nearest to understanding the
plight of women workers; there are no similar depictions of
single or married working-class women workers.

Hilda Bowling in Coming Up For Air is a crude caricature of a
lower middle-class wife. The central character of this novel is
George Bowling, a five to ten pound-a-week insurance clerk

Deirdre Beddoe

147

who decides to ‘escape’ to his childhood home of Lower
B infield. It is as much a retreat from Hilda as a search for a lost
past. Hilda, once young, pretty and a social class above him
turns, upon marriage, into a nagging wife, pestering George
about bills and spreading gloom in the household; she is
totally without joy and without interest - she only attends
left-wing meetings because they are free and felt to be vaguely
improving. She is the Elizabeth of Burmese Days ten to twenty
years on, if Elizabeth had stayed in England.

Orwell’s portrayal of middle-class women - of sexually
attractive young women who turn into old, grim nags - is the
convention of the seaside postcard. When Orwell discussed the
postcard art of Donald McGill he pointed out the two
fundamental conventions of depicting women in postcards,

a. Marriage only benefits the women. Every man is plotting
seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever
remains unmarried voluntarily.

b. Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty- five.
Well-preserved and good-looking people beyond their first youth
are never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple
reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, mustachioed,
red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for . 15

They are precisely the conventions on which Orwell himself
drew.

Julia, Winston’s mistress in Nineteen Eighty-Four , is
distinguished from Orwell’s other female characters in that she
shows courage. She flouts the minor and then the major rules
of this future totalitarian society. It is she who initiates contact
with Winston: she has the enterprise and experience to arrange
liaisons with him . 16 She is prepared too to follow Winston in
joining the Brotherhood, the opposition to Big Brother. But
the protests of Winston and Julia against the regime are
inspired by totally different motives. Whereas Winston is
inspired by intellectual concepts like the integrity of history
and the notion of freedom, Julia is only ‘a rebel from the waist
downwards’. The sexually attractive and sexually active Julia
objects to the regime because it stops her having a good time.
She is totally incapable of understanding the motives which

148 Inside the Myth

drive Winston to revolt. ‘Any kind of organized revolt against
the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.
The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the
same.’ When Winston talks to her of the Party and its
doctrines, she invariably falls asleep. Her response to his
reading of Goldstein’s subversive text is the same. Julia is as
brainless as Elizabeth Lackersteen or Hilda Bowling.

Orwell’s portrayal of the main female characters in his
novels encapsulates his opinions on women. He is con-
temptuous of women’s intellects; he reduces married women
and spinsters to stereotypes and in the portrayal of both he
draws on the conventions of seaside postcards. But it is not
only the main characters who reveal Orwell’s outlook.
Subsidiary characters and passers-by who are singled out for
derision are often feminists - for example Elizabeth’s feckless
mother in Burmese Days; 17 the whole Pankhurst generation in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying ; 18 sporty and horsey women in Burmese
Days , 19 and Nineteen Eighty -Four. 20 Working-class women make
few appearances in the novels - when they do it is as
half-brained readers of Ethel M. Dell 11 (why are we not treated
to equally contemptuous asides on the male readers of Zane
Grey and war novels?) or sluttish landladies. 22 But the
haunting archetypal figure of a working-class woman is the
prole washerwoman of Nineteen Eighty-Four , of whom more
anon.

If Orwell’s fiction provides the clearest indication of his
attitudes towards middle-class women, it is necessary to turn to
his documentary writing and his journalism to find out his
views about working-class women. The most important work
for this is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), read together with the
diary which lies behind it. Yet in The Road to Wigan Pier there
are relatively few references to women. To understand why this
is so it is necessary to understand Orwell’s male prejudices.

Orwell’s world view was male: all the important things in
life were done or thought about by men - work, politics,
revolution. It was typical of him that in going north he should
have gone to a coal-mining area - coal-mining is a heavy
extractive industry, and in the twentieth century an almost
entirely male preserve. He could just as well have concentrated

Deirdre Beddoe

149

on the effects of the Depression and of unemployment in the
cotton industry, but women workers predominated there and
that would not have accorded with his world view and his
concept of the working class as male. By concentrating on
Wigan coal he could glory in the male strength of miners with
noble bodies and see working-class women only as wives.

Orwell’s male arrogance and his selection of what is
important, judged only by male standards, make The Road to
Wigan Pier not only a poor source for the history of women in
this period but a positively misleading one. Margery Spring
Rice’s Working Class Wives, originally published in 1939, 26 and
numerous other social surveys give far more information. 24

Given Orwell s prejudices, the areas of discussion which
arise from The Road to Wigan Pier are most crucially: the
working-class family, domestic work, the impact of unemploy-
ment upon men and women, waged women workers and
women and politics.

Orwell had a great affection for the English working class
and in particular for the institution of the working-class
family. He approved of male dominance within the family: ‘in
a working class home it is the man who is the master and not,
as in the middle class home, the woman or the baby.’ 25 He held
an idyllic view of the working class family, provided that the
father was in well paid and regular work. He held in his mind a
picture of the family sitting around the fireside:

Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the
open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father,
in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire
reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her
sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint
humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat . 26

(It is noteworthy that Mother is the only one working in this
picture!) All this is threatened not only by the mass
unemployment of Orwell’s present but by visions of a Utopian
future in which there will be no manual work and there won’t
even be as many children — if the birth controllers have their
way. This last point is significant. It was made at a time when
irth control campaigners were fighting hard to set up clinics

1 50 Inside the Myth

throughout Britain. Orwell, who seemed to have regarded
birth control as some Mathusian plot to limit the lower orders,
shows a lack of understanding of the impact of successive
child-bearing on women’s lives. He was aware that the number
of children in a family was the single most important factor as
to whether a home could be kept ‘decent’ or not, but he
retained an image in his mind of the fruitful working-class
woman. She is represented clearly by the prole woman in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The woman fills her washing line with
nappies: she was a woman of fifty ‘blown-up to monstrous
dimensions by child-bearing, then hardened, roughened by
work’ - but to Winston (and Orwell) she was beautiful.

Orwell’s observations on working-class women in The Road
to Wigan Pier are concerned almost exclusively with women in
the home. He provides us with illustrations of what many of
these homes were like. His notes on the cramped and
insanitary dwellings in Wigan, Sheffield and Barnsley conjure
up the horror of the conditions in which many working-class
families lived, and his writing brought this home to a wide
public. Women spent even more of their lives in these wretched
houses than did men, and as Orwell realized, ‘In such places as
these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling along among
an infinity of jobs.’ He records that domestic chores continued
to fall exclusively on the woman despite the fact of male
unemployment. ‘The man is idle from morning to night but
the woman is as busy as ever - more so, indeed, because she
has to manage with less money.’ Even Orwell noted that this
practice ‘on the face of it seems a little unfair ’. 27 Orwell wrote
that the women as well as the men believed that housework
should be done exclusively by women. ‘I believe that they, as
well as the men, feel that a man might lose his manhood if,
merely because he was out of work, he developed into a “Mary
Ann”.’ The inclusion of this discussion on household chores in
The Road to Wigan Pier apparently results from an argument
which occurred when he was staying with the Searle family in
Leeds. Orwell had helped Mrs Searle with the washing-up, and
her husband and another man who was present strongly
disapproved. Interestingly Mrs Searle seemed only ‘doubtful’
and had, after all, accepted his help. In the diary he notes that
she took the fact that even unemployed men did not help in the

Deirdre Beddoe 151

house for granted but she ‘did not see why it should not be
changed ’. 28

Although Orwell takes note of the ceaseless round of chores
which women had to do in the home - ‘No sooner have you
washed one child’s face than another is dirty: before you have
washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked’
- he displayed little patience with ‘bad housekeepers’.

Of course the squalor of these people's houses is sometimes their
own fault. Even if you live in a back to back house and have four
children and a total income of thirty two and sixpence a week
from the PAC, there is no need to have unemptied chamber pots
standing about in your living room . 29

He admits however that ‘it is equally certain that their
circumstances do not encourage self respect’, but does not
seem to grasp how depressing and demoralizing mass
unemployment was for women. There is, he wrote, ‘no doubt
about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment
upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon
women .’ 30 A social investigation in the South Wales coalfield in
the same period was more perceptive. The Carnegie
Foundation report found as follows:

The outstanding fact about many of these homes was that the men
in them appeared to have higher standards of personal cleanliness
than those reflected by their living conditions. It seemed, very
largely, their womenfolk who had lost all pride in personal
appearance and the appearance of the home. Men folk were
obliged to go out of doors, even if only to the Employment
Exchange; this was a reason for washing and dressing up. The
women had not this incentive. Their outings extended litde
beyond the small shops at the corner of the street, and to these
they could 'slip-down’ without washing. To them there seemed
litde point in washing the children, as they just got dirty anyway.
All this is highly regrettable and, quite apart from unemployment
and bad housing conditions, many of the women, even if given the
opportunity and money for improved standards, would find it an
exceedingly difficult task to break away from their acquired habits.
But we must face the fact that to live constantly on a depressed

152

Inside the Myth

standard of living, where life is a hand-to-mouth existence, is,
except for the bravest souls, to experience the bitterness of
defeat. 32

When Orwell wrote about women in The Road to Wigan Pier ,
he wrote about women as wives. In his fiction there are many
references to middle-class single working women: there is no
corresponding concern shown for working-class women,
single or married, who were employed outside the home. The
book opens with a reference to the sound of the mill girls’
clogs on the cobbled streets, but there is no discussion or
further allusion to the condidons of women in the cotton
industry. There is likewise only a single reference to women in
coal-mining: Orwell mentions that there were a few women
still alive who in their youth worked underground. 32 He
ignores totally the fact that at the time he was writing there
were still women working at the pitbrow - they were still there
in the 1950s. 33 Nor does he write of that great army of
exploited women, the largest single category of women in
waged employment - domesdc servants. Orwell simply failed
to see the vital role that women both as unpaid home workers
and poorly paid waged workers played in the workings of
capitalism. He failed to perceive that the unpaid work of the
miner’s wife was as vital to the mine-owners as to the miners
themselves. His whole discussion of socialism in The Road to
Wigan Pier and elsewhere is devoid of any reference to that key
analytical tool, the sexual division of labour.

When Orwell wrote about politics, which for him meant
trade-unionism and socialist thought, he wrote about men and
he wrote for men. As usual, he ignored women. He seems to
have thought women incapable of thinking on a political level.
He was genuinely surprised when Mrs Searle, the Sheffield
woman who had let him wash up, displayed a ‘grasp of the
economic situation and also of abstract ideas’; he hastened to
add that in this she was unlike most working-class women and
that she was scarcely literate. 34 This reference comes from his
diary and does not appear in the published text of The Road to
Wigan Pier. Similarly there is an account in the diary, but not in
the book, of his attending a social evening organized by the
National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) to raise

Deirdre Beddoe 153

money for the defence of Thaelmann, the German Communist
leader. His diary notes read,

About 200 people, preponderantly women, largely members of
the Co-op, in one of whose rooms it was held and I suppose for
the most part living directly or indirectly on the dole. Round the
back a few aged miners sitting looking on benevolently, a lot of
very young girls in front. Some dancing to the concertina (many of
the girls confessed that they could not dance, which struck one as
rather pathetic) and some excruciating singing. I suppose that
represented a fair cross-section of the more revolutionary element
in Wigan. If so, God help us. Exactly the same sheeplike crowd -
gaping girls and shapeless middle aged women dozing over their
knitting - that you see everywhere else. 35

In this account Orwell’s overt sexism and contempt for women
gushes forth.

In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell omitted any reference to the
political activities of women in the North of England. It is
precisely this sort of omission which wipes women from our
history. For the record, I am impelled to note that Lancashire
women cotton operatives had been very active radical
suffragists in the years before the First World War, and that
they were strong trade unionists. 36 Lancashire women had
participated in the National Hunger Marches to London
organized by the NUWM, 37 and Lancashire women were active
members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, which in the
1930s was campaigning, amongst other things, for contracep-
tion, better health care, international peace and for full
employment by the reorganization of industry on a
co-operative basis. 38

Orwell altered the record of the past, so far as women are
concerned, as efficiently as if he had been in the employ of
Mini true. He was part of a conspiracy of silence.

Notes

1 Letter to Brenda Salkeld, 27 July 1934 in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.),
The Collected Essays } Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , Vol. I,

154

Inside the Myth

Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 160, referred to hereafter as ‘ CEJV .

2 B. Salkeld, ‘He didn’t redly like women’, A. Coppard and B. Crick (eds.),
Orwell Remembered , London, 1984, p. 68.

3 G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier , Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 121.

4 Ibid., p. 153.

5 Jbid., p. 103.

6 G. Orwell, ‘Boys Weeklies’, (1940) in CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 505.

7 G. Orwell, Burmese Days , Harmondsworth, 1983, p. 179.

8 Ibid., p. 184. The italics are mine.

9 Letter to Brenda Salkeld, 7 March 1935 in CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 174.

10 Letter to Henry Miller, 26 August 1936; ibid., p. 258.

11 G. Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter, Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 75.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 227.

14 G. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 122.

15 G. Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill,’ in CEJL , Vol. 2, p. 186.

16 G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four , Harmondsworth, 1983, pp. 96-7.

17 Op.cit., p. 85.

18 Op.cit., p. 123.

19 Op.cit., p. 69.

20 Op.cit., pp. 14, 326.

21 Keep the Aspidistra Flying , pp. 15-17.

22 Ibid., p. 221.

23 Margery Spring Rice, Working Class Wives , London, 1939 (reprinted
1981).

24 See John Stevenson, Social Conditions in Britain between the Wars ,
Harmondsworth, 1977.

25 G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth, 1969, pp. 72-3.

26 Ibid., p. 104.

27 Ibid., p. 73

28 CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 195.

29 Wigan Pier , p. 53.

30 Ibid., p. 73. The italics are mine.

31 Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Disinherited Youth, Edinburgh, 1943.

32 Wigan Pier , p. 30.

33 For the history of women in the Wigan coalfield and attempts to oust
them from the industry see Angela V. John, By the Sweat of their Brow:
Women Workers in Victorian Coalmines , London, 1980. For the continued
employment of women in Wigan mines to the 1950s see B. Campbell,
Wigan Pier Revisited, London, 1984, pp. 100-1.

34 CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 220.

35 Ibid., p. 207.

36 See J. Liddington and J. Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the
Women's Suffrage Movement, London, 1978.

37 See P. Kingsford, The Hunger Marchers in Britain, 1920-1940, London,
1982.

38 See Jean Gaffrn and David Thoms, Caring and Sharing: The Centenary History
of the Women's Cooperative Guild, Manchester, 1983.

Stephen Sedley

An Immodest Proposal: ‘Animal Farm’

‘No, I don’t think he was ever a socialist, although he would have
described himself as a socialist.’ (Fredric Warburg, publisher of
Animal Farm) 1

Imaginative literature does not have to justify itself politically.
On the contrary, part of its value may be to enhance or modify
its readers’ political comprehension. Marx’s well-known
preference for Balzac, a royalist, over Zola, a socialist, makes
the point well enough, but it is or ought to be the experience of
every socialist that it is not shared assumptions but shared
experience that makes good literature a humanising and
encouraging force.

Re-reading Animal Farm a generation after I first
encountered it - as you my reader probably did - on the school
curriculum, I am struck by its distance from any of these
considerations. It lacks, deliberately, any effort to draw the
reader into a convincing fiction, to invite a willing suspension
of disbelief. Instead it demands assent to its major premiss that
people in their political lives can be equated with domesticated
animals, and to its minor premiss that civil society, like a farm,
will be run for better or for worse by those who by birth or
force inherit power. From these premisses the story and its
moral follow; without them there is neither story nor moral.

The book is still required reading in most schools. Its
presence on the curriculum does not disturb Sir Keith Joseph,
Dr Rhodes Boyson or the Daily Mail in their crusade to
eradicate political bias from the classroom, but I was interested

155

1 Inside the Myth

that my eldest child, a good reader who was given it at the age
of thirteen, was bored stiff by it. The reason, it turned out, was
that she was too new to political ideas to have any frame of
reference for the story: she literally couldn’t see what it was
about. There was no invitation to enter into the fiction, no
common point of departure for reader and writer.

This is certainly not a necessary condition of political
allegory or satire: one has to go no farther than Orwell’s next
major work, Nineteen Eighty-Four , to see that. Nor is it a
necessary condition of animal fables: our literature is rich in
examples. It is an abdication of imaginative art, and one which
makes the critical and pedagogic success of Animal Farm a
sobering example of the substitution of political endorsement
for critical appraisal (a vice of which the political right does not
have a monopoly).

Orwell’s lineage from Swift is frequently spoken of. In
background and personality there are similarities, and in some
of their writings too, but not in Animal Farm. It is not only that
Swift has humour as well as passion, which Orwell does not.
Swift’s satirical method is practically the reverse of Orwell’s.
Through the picaresque fantasy of Gulliver's Travels or the
solemn reasoning of A Modest Proposal Swift draws the reader
down a convincing false trail. The fiction stands, as his
contemporaries would have said, on its own bottom. It is only
when his readers have passed the point of no return that they
realise that they are reading about themselves. But you cannot
get into the fiction of Animal Farm at all without accepting as
your starting point the very thing that Orwell has to prove -
that in politics people are no better than animals: their
traditional rulers may be feckless but ungovern them and a
new tyranny will fill the place of the old. Naturally if you are
prepared to accept that conclusion as your premiss, the story
follows. You can demonstrate that the earth is flat by a similar
process.

The use of animals to make a point about people is as old as
art itself. Folk literatures abound in animals which are not only
human but superhuman. Through them the human endeavour
to understand and control the natural and social environments
is expressed and developed. You find it in English folk
tradition in the ballad of the Cutty Wren, the hedge-king; in

Stephen Sedley 157

Irish tradition in Reynardine, the man-fox; in Scots tradition in
the Grey Selchie , the man-seal. In modem English literature we
have at least two exponents who show up the poverty of
Orwell’s creativity, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. The
best of Beatrix Potter’s stories are so well made that it is easy to
lose critical perspective in evaluating them. It is enough
perhaps to observe how meticulously she invests her animals
with sufficient human qualities to enable them to be real
characters without ceasing to be animals. Mr Jackson is a
revolting old toad with a toad’s predilections in food, but he
mimics human character in ways which wryly enlarge your
appreciation of human character. The quiet analogy between
the amphibious and the human Mr Jackson neither demands
assent to the proposition that there is not much to choose
between people and toads nor invites that conclusion. In its
small way it is a piece of humane imaginative literature,
drawing on the links between human and animal life without
straining them.

Perhaps the most indicative contrast is between Potter’s and
Orwell’s versions of the scatter-brained and least rational
members of their animal societies - in Potter’s books the ducks
and rabbits, in Orwell’s the sheep. The puddleducks, especially
Jemima Puddleduck who nearly gets eaten by the fox in her
desire to establish her independence (an interesting parallel
with the Animal Farm story), are again small mirrors of
humanity, pompous and opinionated in proportion to their
foolishness. The extended rabbit family is what Beatrix Potter’s
successors would have regarded as a problem family,
delinquents and all, held together by a long-suffering mother.
The human presence, Mr McGregor the grumpy old market
gardener, is simply another element of risk in their world: they
eat his lettuces and, when he can, he eats them.

In Orwell the silliest of the animals are the sheep. They are
the essential and unwitting allies of the tyrant pigs, endlessly
bleating the slogan ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ in any
controversy and drowning all serious discussion. They have no
reality as characters, but they do represent the British upper
class’s opinion of the working class: mindless creatures who do
what others direct and bleat what others devise. The remaining
farm animals, apart from the pigs, are more or less stupid and

158 Inside the Myth

more or less good natured. The pigs are cunning and evil.

It is in the pigs that the political allegory takes its most
precise form. The dream of revolution is dreamt by the old pig
Major, who dies before it happens. His manifesto speech to the
animals is couched in terms of self-evident absurdity:

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene,
and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever
... No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell
you that Man and the animals have a common interest, and that
the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all
lies . 2

So it is, we are to understand, with civil society: only a fool
could talk like this. (The sidelight this passage throws on
Orwell’s brand of socialism is interesting.)

To Major’s Marx, Napoleon plays Stalin and Snowball
Trotsky: the allegory becomes a simple set of personal
disguises. The brightest of the other animals, the dogs, are
finally bribed and bred into a private army at the pigs’ service.
The rest, from the willing cart-horses to the fecund hens, are
put upon endlessly to keep the pigs in idle comfort.

No honest socialist or communist ignores or underrates the
structural and political problems and distortions which have
characterised the Soviet Union and other states that have taken
a similar path. ‘More equal than others’ is a barb which has
stuck painfully in the consciousness of the left, for the existence
of a privileged elite in any socialist state is a fundamental
contradiction in political terms. For some on the left it argues
that Marxism is not the way to socialism; for some, that
Marxism has been betrayed; for some, that Marxism has been
vindicated by the state’s survival. Not one of these viewpoints,
nor any variant of them, is explored or enriched by Animal
Farm. Orwell’s argument is pitched at a different level: it is that
socialism in whatever form offers the common people no more
hope than capitalism; that it will be first betrayed and then
held to ransom by those forces which human beings have in
common with beasts; and that the inefficient and occasionally
benign rule of capitalism, which at least keeps the beasts in
check, is a lesser evil. That proposition is Orwell’s alpha and
his omega.

Stephen Sed/ey 159

So it is that the allegories of Soviet history in Animal Farm are
just that - translations of the fall of Trotsky, the failure of the
electrification programme, the enforcement of collectivisation;
of a ruling elite looking for scapegoats for its own errors or for
other catastrophes. Nothing in the use of an animal society as
the vehicle of allegory particularly illuminates or enhances it or
the points it seeks to make. It certainly does not make the case
against Soviet socialism any more convincing. In fact it appears
to confirm the underlying hostility of its opponents to any
suggestion that the working class can emancipate itself. It does
nothing to cast light on what for any socialist is the real
question: what has gone wrong and why? If anything it has
tended to fix the left in its own errors by aversion.

Is this essay then a criticism of Animal Farm for what it is not,
for lacking a stance which was never Orwell’s anyway? It would
be less than candid to deny that both its assumption that
people and animals are alike in their social or political
existence, and its use of that assumption to insult the belief that
ordinary people can put an end to want and privilege, make
Animal Farm , to this writer at least, a pretty unattractive book.
But that is not what makes it a poor piece of literature.

To take a second contrast from modern animal fiction, The
Wind in the Willows is redolent of a particular social and
political philosophy, all of it growing into and out of a
beautifully told tale. Enough has been written about the class
microcosm which contains the aristocratic playboy Toad, his
yeoman friends Rat, Mole and Badger, and the feared (because
unknown) Wild Wooders - the commoners, rogues and
vagabonds. One can see and appraise Grahame’s thoughts and
feelings about class society and the stratum in which alone he
feels secure, and one can have one’s own views about them and
him, without ever falling out with the fiction through which his
idyll of contemplation and loyalty is conveyed.

The same is true of the misanthropy with which Gulliver's
Travels is shot through. More to the point, both stories,
because they work as stories, earn a measure of understanding
for their authors’ viewpoints. They enlarge intellectual as well
as emotional horizons. For similar reasons more socialists have
probably been made in Britain by The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists than by the Communist Manifesto .

1 60 Inside the Myth

Between its covers Animal Farm offers little that is creative,
little that is original. Those who are interested in the links
between politics and literature have far more to learn from the
circumstances of the book’s success. It is an extraordinary fact
that it was written in the latter part of the Second World War,
when the defeat of Nazism depended upon the Soviet Union’s
survival and military victory, and published (after three
rejections) in the year of Labour’s historic electoral victory. It
was therefore certainly out of joint with its time, and it was no
doubt in keeping with Orwell’s penchant for heresy. But it was
admirably in line with what rapidly became the political mode
of government and press - a virulent and often unreasoning
anti-communism. The prophet, to his own surprise, rapidly
achieved honour in his own country.

When in 1947 Orwell wrote the preface to a Ukrainian
edition of Animal Farm he explained that his aim had been to
disabuse ‘the workers and intelligentsia in a country like
England’ of their naive notions about the USSR (his Ukrainian
readers were not there). He blamed their naivety on the relative
liberality of English political life:

Yet one must remember that England is not completely
democratic. It is also a capitalist country with great class privileges
and (even now, after a war that has tended to equalise everybody)
with great differences in wealth. But nevertheless it is a country in
which people have lived together for several hundred years
without knowing civil war, in which the laws are relatively just and
official news and statistics can almost invariably be believed, and,
last but not least, in which to hold and to voice minority views
does not involve any mortal danger. In such an atmosphere the
man in the street has no real understanding of things like
concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests without trial,
press censorship etc. Everything he reads about a country like the
USSR is automatically translated into English terms, and he quite
innocendy accepts the lies of totalitarian propaganda . 3

This view of English political life in the mid- 1940s does not
now simply appear breathtakingly foolish; nor does it simply
betray Orwell’s socialism as a pose unsupported by analysis,
experience or comprehension: it underscores Animal Farms'

Stephen Sedley 161

message that ordinary people are too simple-minded to
a pp re ci a te about Russia what is appreciated by a man who a
page earlier has written:

I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of
what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.

He goes on in the preface to explain how, years after Spain, his
thoughts were crystallised by seeing a small boy driving a huge
cart-horse with a whip :

It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their
strength we should have no power over them, and that men
exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the
proletariat.

I proceeded to analyse Marx’s theory from the animals’ point of
view. To them it was clear that the concept of a class struggle
between humans was pure illusion, since whenever it was necessary
to exploit animals, all humans united against them: the true
struggle is between animals and humans. From this point of
departure, it was not difficult to elaborate the story.

The muddle is remarkable. Where, for instance, does Marx
argue that there is a class struggle between members of the
ruling class (‘a class struggle between humans’)? More
important, whether the idea that ‘the true struggle is between
animals and humans’ is being attributed to the animals or to
Orwell himself, the book begins and ends by debunking it, as
of course it asks to be debunked. I have mentioned Major’s
fatuous early speech to this effect. The book goes on to argue
that through revolution a human (that is a capitalist) oppressor
will simply be replaced by an animal (that is a proletarian)
oppressor. And remember how it ends ?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to
pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to
say which was which.

If Orwell in his preface is trying to say simply that human
beings, however divided among themselves, are united in their

^ 62 Inside the Myth

exploitation of animals, this is not the point of departure of
Animal Farm. Its point of departure, like its conclusion, is the
proposition that human beings and beasts share characteristics
of greed and ruthlessness towards their own kind.

Orwell concluded his preface:

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for
itself, it is a failure.

He was of course right: but it is an interesting comment on the
ideological argument of Animal Farm that its author was so
unable to give an intelligible account of it.

Notes

1 Fredric Warburg, in a BBC interview in 1970, quoted in A. Coppard and B.
Crick (eds.) Orwell Remembered, London, 1984, p. 194.

2 Animal F asm, Harmondsworth, 1982, p.l 1. , . .. ,

3 S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, Vol. 3, Harmondsworth, 1970, p.458. The original English
text is lost. The citations are from the unattributed retranslation from the
edition distributed in 1947 by a Ukrainian displaced persons organisation
in Munich.

Lynette Hunter

Stories and Voices in Orwell’s Early
Narratives

George Orwell has always been a singular figure for
speculation within literary criticism. A main thesis of Raymond
Williams’s influential book Orwell was to present the man as a
paradox of conflicting attitudes to the duality of dominated
and dominator in all situations social, historical and political.
Of course this presentation also raises the parallel problems of
authority in writing. But rather than look at any of the
supposed tensions in an exemplary light, as attempts at stances
for dealing with the conflict, much recent criticism has tended
to concentrate on the negative aspects of the conflict itself. This
odd emphasis on the content of Orwell’s writing - one that
occurs less often with other writers - may have to do with the
continuing relevance of the topics he discussed; but it also
appears to have derived from rather ungenerous readings, of
the early fictional writing in particular.

Throughout those early works Orwell is learning. The
fictions have aspects that he would later come to consider
flawed, such as the ‘purple passages’ that he dismisses in ‘Why I
Write’ (1946). 1 But these novels are by no means polished
products of a mature artistry, and the writer is taken to task by
critics time and again for poor plots, ‘weak’ characterisation,
and especially for the relationships that exist between writer
and character. 2

Critics have perhaps been too ready to assume that Orwell
was just not aware of what was going on in his writing, to
regard the skills that his documentaries and later fiction

163

^64 Inside the Myth

evidence almost as fortuitous, and even to devalue those skills
by insisting on readings that carry the weaknesses of the ear y
work into the later. 3 I would also suggest that when the early
novels are read as product rather than origin, the paradoxes
that have led to a widespread condemnation of Orwell become
more open, so that their complexities engage rather than

estrange. 4 „ r

During the years 1932 to 1935 Orwell wrote four narrative

works, all of which explored the possibilities of voice, ot the
stances of writer, narrator and character. Despite initial
appearances, Down and Out in Paris and London is not a naive
story, but a study of varied ways of telling and writing in the
first person. The same experimentation with voice is found in
Burmese Days, but within this attempt at a classical naturalistic
novel the presentation of voice is far more subtle. A Clergymans
Daughter, written immediately after Burmese Days, is by
comparison an obvious experiment with techniques that often
lie outside the naturalistic novel, such as caricature, report and
‘stream-of-consciousness’. Rather heavy-handedly, it tries to
strip away expected elements and examine what results in
terms of writer, narrator and character relationships. Written
in 1935, the year before The Road to Wigan Pier, Keep the
Aspidistra Flying shows a far more confident handling of v ° ice >
in which the writer is moving toward an interaction with the
writing that will inform all his later works and provide much o

their enduring appeal. . ....

From the beginning Orwell is obviously fascinated by the
tensions that arise between the dominated and the dominator.
Not only does this fascination run through the themes ot the
early novels, but it also informs his handling of stance and
therefore the way that the writing is structured. Doum and Out in
Paris and London is ostensibly the work of a narrator who has sat
down to ‘write what he sees’, but learns that this is impossible.
Although all the characters tell stories of one kind or another,
within the first part of the book an index to the narrator s
growing consciousness of the difficulty of writing is found in
the character of Charlie, who recounts three very i erent
tales. The first is a first-person, melodramatic account ot one
of Charlie’s sexual forays. Its cliched semi-pornographic
patter, complete with dark alleyways, blood-red furnishings

Lynette Hunter 165

and whimpering girls, is part of the stance of the narrator at
the start of the book. He speaks in a patronising tone, counting
on assumptions that both he and his magazine-educated
readers will presumably find familiar. For example the book
begins with a ‘typical’ French scene of street argument, using
scattered French words to authenticate the telling, but it is an
event that the narrator thinks needs little explanation and he
concludes with a comment that ‘It was quite a representative
Paris slum.’ 5 The narrator’s confidence in the common ground
he shares with his readers is further reflected in his preface to
Charlie’s story itself and the proprietory manner in which he
promises to ‘give’ us Charlie as one of the ‘local curiosities,
talking’.

Charlie’s second story is an anecdote that is recounted in a
rather different manner. The narration is explanatory,
interspersed with humorous comment and contains a great
deal of reported speech. The anecdote provides a view of some
of life’s little ironies, and reveals much not only about
Charlie’s life but also about the narrator’s changing attitude
towards him as a written character. Although criticising the
‘peasant girl’ that he lives with, it is apparent that Charlie cares
enough for her to think of a way for her to get food, asking at
one point ‘has not every woman something to sell?’ Yet the
implication of prostitution has been set up specifically so that it
can be subverted to indicate character. In the event, what
Charlie is referring to is his more innocuous plan to disguise
the girl and send her to a kitchen that has been set up for
pregnant women. But for Charlie the point of the story is that
he can tell of his witty remark that saves the girl from discovery
when she is met by someone from the kitchen a year later.
Again the unspoken evaluations are clearly there in the
rearranged expectations of the reader: Charlie is still with this
girl a year later, and while there was no need to protect her he
does so anyway. Charlie may be self- glorifying but because of
the internal commentary it is now difficult to take his egoism
too seriously.

For this second story the narrator moves from the direct
speech of the first melodramatic tale to reported speech within
direct speech. He is more distanced, no longer claiming to
‘give’ us Charlie and becoming aware of the impossibility of

^66 Inside the Myth

exact description. Charlie’s final story is narrated entirely in
reported speech, with the narrator emphasising the second-
hand nature of the story by saying Charlie told me and
‘Charlie said’, and even commenting, ‘I should very much like
to have known him’. The story is prefaced with the remark.
‘Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story ;
and the entire tale may be seen as a formal and conventional
parable beginning with the traditional ‘One day .... The two
men involved in the tale, Roucolle and an acquaintance,
arrange to buy some cocaine and the police get wind of the
matter. When the police raid their rooms, they pretend that the
cocaine is face powder; but on examination in a laboratory,
the police find that it is indeed face powder and the joke is
turned the other way around. Yet at the end the humour is
undercut. The narrator says, ‘Three days later he [Roucolle]
had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead - of a
broken heart, Charlie said/

The parable concerns being taken in by something that
appears to be the real thing but is not. In this the narrator
makes it clear that in this first part of the book, not only has he
learned about the dangers of observation, but also he is
beginning to recognise the activity of convention and fiction in
expression. The parable is placed immediately following a
chapter of discussion in which the narrator has claimed that
the middle class only hate and fear the working class because
they do not understand them; they allow their prejudices and
assumptions to govern their response rather than actively
examining the situation. Just so: the parable provides, by
analogy, a way of reading the book and involves the writer in
examining his own writing. At the start there was the
familiarisation through a bourgeois narrator, which was
followed by naive attempts at confrontation and alienation
through Charlie’s first story and other recounted events, and
which then moved on to a re- familiarisation with the narrator
on a different footing. The ‘average’ reader, the middle-class
magazine consumer who was led to identify with the initial
voice through vocabulary and received idioms, is here asked to
become distanced and to examine the background of
distorting assumptions. The juxtaposition of social discussion
with Active parable is being suggested as a more valuable

Lynette Hunter 167

reading than cliche, melodrama and stereotyping.

Throughout the second part of Down and Out in Paris and
London , an index to the narrator’s awareness of writing is
provided in the two types of tramps that he meets: Bozo and
Paddy. Here the consciousness of the effect of ‘story’ is
stronger and clearer: there is specific reference to language and
literature and the writer is moving the topic directly into the
crisis of authorial writing which raises the issues of dominator
and dominated. Bozo is articulate, intelligent and interesting.
He is one of the few tramps the narrator meets who are neither
ashamed nor self-pitying, and the narrator associates this with
Bozo’s ‘gift for phrases. He had managed to keep his brain
intact and alert ... he was, as he said, free in his own mind’.
Soon after this description comes the narrator’s chapter on
slang, swearing and insulting. The discussion indicates a
curious two-way process in effect, for words sometimes define
their users and yet are sometimes defined by them, ‘being what
public opinion chooses to make them’. Yet in both these cases
there is a sense of fixity that Bozo’s activity and alertness has
little to do with. Where they are seen in action is in the stories
that the rest of the tramps, including Paddy, tell to each other
on the road.

The tramps have stories about each particular ‘spike’, about
the managers and about individual characters on the road, all
of which establish points of reference and contact, put them at
their ease and allow them to cope with the various situations
they are faced with: the consoling value of their stories is
underlined explicitly when the narrator comments, ‘The
tramps liked the story, of course, but the interesting thing was
to see that they had got it all wrong . . . The story had been
amended, no doubt deliberately . . . giving them happy endings
which are quite imaginary’. Although they define their stories
in this way, every action they perform has a story attached to it
as if these fictions are needed to keep them alive, to define
them. But it is not the stories themselves that are criticised, it is
the way that the tramps use them to maintain their self-pity
and shame by accepting their prejudices and assuming that
there can be no change in the status quo, in contrast to Bozo’s
humorous and often deflating stories about himself.

The activity of defining and being defined by raises direcdy

168

the topic of dominator and dominated. The tramps’ stories
have a self- deceptive narration like that of the initial narrator
of the book, one that creates a circular tautological world. But
the narrator develops for himself a stance that moves away
from his ini dal unspoken control by means of a particular class
idiom, to the point of consciously situating himself within a
class structure through telling the story about his educated
accent. He also changes his mode of narradon into one that
inquires, compares and assesses. He suggests in the latter part
of the book that we can learn to evaluate through close
attention to language, and he does so by presenting himself as
learning to differentiate between ways of narrating and
developing new skills to activate responses.

However, the penultimate chapter shows him trying not to
dominate by reporting rather than recounting his experience. He
moves to discussion of the issues in terms of statistics and
pragmatics without realising that these techniques are
unwittingly manipulative. Just because they are no longer
‘subjective’ or ‘abstract’, as was the discussion following part
one, it certainly doesn’t follow that their grounds and
assumptions are somehow ‘true’. The final chapter indicates
the unreliability of this stance by underscoring the
second-hand nature of the experience and the narrator s
essentially trivial understanding of the issues. The writing
suggests that the content of what is said is of less importance
than the process of the narrator’s understanding.

Down and Out in Paris and London is an uneven fiction, but
one that illustrates the movement of all Orwell’s writing
towards greater interaction between reader and writer. The
narrative is uneven particularly because the second half
concludes far more ambivalently than the first: as if the first
half reveals his conventions and prejudices, and so in the
second he attempts his famous ‘plain style’ for the first time.
Yet he concludes by being obviously dissatisfied with the
limitations of that same ‘plain style’, limitations which derive
from a lack of explicit stance.

The concerns of Down and Out in Paris and London with
language and literature as ways of establishing stance, either of
interaction or of the isolated tautology of dominator and
dominated, are further developed in Burmese Days not only as a

169

theme, but also as an aspect of the narrator-and-character
relationship . 6 This relationship is presented within a
conventional, authorial structure that the writer foregrounds
through pointing his ironic comments. From the start the
narrator is shown observing and typifying, fixing characters
into a prejudice. In the opening scene a Burmese official, U Po
Kyin, is presented by an authoritative, ironic voice as a man
who sees spiritual life in terms of success, and is surrounded
with ludicrous images of food such as ‘satin praline’ clothes
and more ominously, a shape ‘swollen with the bodies of his
enemies ’. 7 Yet the reader is ale r ^ to the difference between
narrator and character, because the former thinks in words
and the latter in‘pictures’. All these details are a translation.
The reader reacts more directly to the official’s reported speech
yet this too is a translation from the Burmese: when he shifts
into English he develops ‘the base jargon of the Government
offices ...’ The contrast in communication - within the
character and between the character and the narrator -
indicates the concern with the elusiveness of language that the
writing will pursue.

The authoritative irony that the narrator initially uses asks
the reader to make judgments according to unspoken but
understood assumptions. Just because the narrator does not
have to make these clear, his presentation may appear
balanced, and it is all too easy for the reader to forget those
underlying assumptions and fall into the trap of accepting the
proffered prejudices. The first person that the main character,
Floiy, meets is Westfield the District Superintendent of Police.
Westfield is described with ‘his hands in the pockets of his
shorts’, speaking with a catalogue of boys’ magazine epithets:
the archetypal sahib, made ludicrous with ‘abnormally’ thin
calves and eyes too far apart. And there is the casual
observation that ‘Nearly everything he said was intended for a
joke’, where the word ‘intended’ indicates the continual failure
of his sense of humour. All of this typifies him, makes him into
a comic character that many readers would recognise: but in
order to recognise that comedy, one has to enter into the
conventions on which it is based. One is led to criticise the man
(albeit gently), but to do so within the terms of the world he
represents.

Inside the Myth I Lynette Hunter

170 Inside the Myth

The analogical point being made is that this is Flory’s central
dilemma, and awareness of the authoritative irony of the
narrator makes it possible for the reader to experience it at first
hand. But the narrator also attempts other voices. During an
incident where Flory goes off into the jungle to work out his
confusions, we discover that he cannot do so effectively in
language but only through the direct action of casting off his
corrupt life and swimming in a pool. He literally loses his way,
and when he returns he has regained his perspective. At the
same time the narrator takes on the burden of expression for
him in an observing voice. During the experience the narration
gradually detaches itself from Flory’s frustration and moves
into distanced observation of colour, shape and sound. As it
does so the reader follows Flory’s own gradual detachment, yet
the expression of it is strictly the narrator’s. When Flory does
overtly verbalise he says ‘Alone, alone, the bitterness of being
alone!’; the melodrama clashing sentimentally with the
restraint of the observation. Later the narrator takes on a voice
of commentary that re-phrases Flory’s melodramatic sigh into
a different mode: one that could possibly look at and assess the
basic issues and assumptions. He says:

Since then each year had been lonelier and more bitter than the
last. What was at the centre of all his thoughts now, and what
poisoned everything was the ever bitterer hatred of the
atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain
developed - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one
of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when
they are already committed to some wrong way of life - he had
grasped the truth about the English and their Empire.

Because this commenting voice of the narrator can find
expression for Flory’s predicament the narrator can go on to
examine it, to discuss the social and political dimensions, the
enclosed worlds of individual and public despotism that are
both generated by and yet also maintain the imperial rule in

Burma. J

While Flory is unable to express himself, he is aware of the
need to do so, to discuss and interact in the way that the
commenting voice makes possible. His relationship with

Lynette Hunter 171

Elizabeth Lackersteen is a desperate attempt at communi-
cation, but their private worlds can only touch through the
mingling of a superficial vocabulary which restricts itself to
speaking of the ‘beastly’ weather. On the occasions that he
does break through to her, she rejects his individual world. In
doing so she not only undermines the bases for his escape into
this world, which have been constructed in isolation and which
cannot stand cridcism, but also points to its corrupdon. Flory
has always been able to pretend that he lived cleanly and
differendy in his secret world, away from the compromises of
the public sphere. However, it is impossible to exist without
some contact with the public, and Elizabeth’s presence
highlights those moments of conflicting contact, focusing on
them as the source of Flory’s ambiguity and confusion. But
Flory is not completely enclosed. He comes to recognise the
corrupting nature of his escape, yet can see no alternative
except to conform to the escapes offered by the public.

The split between the melodramadc and the detailed
approach that distinguishes Flory from the narrator is similar
to that between the initial narrator and the second narrator
who is learning, in the earlier work. Turning back one or two
years to the short story ‘The Spike’ one finds an interesting
development in narrative technique. The narrator of ‘The
Spike’ over-reacts using melodramatic vocabulary and
sentimental description. The governor of a spike is referred to
in Down and Out as being ‘renowned as a tyrant’, but in the
short story he is ‘a devil ... a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling,
blasphemous, uncharitable dog’. 8 In the latter story, the
tramps ‘shuffled in’ to the house, which is itself ‘gloomy and
chilly’ as if part of a gothic horror tale. The narrator
distinguishes himself from the tramps as a ‘gentleman’, but in
contrast with the same distinction in the longer ficdon he does
not make it clear that no one usually notices his difference.
This gives rise to the generally patronising and condescending
air of the short story writer.

Underlining the lack of sympathy or connection between the
earlier narrator and the tramps is a clear difference in
vocabulary. The language is literary, using similes such as
‘looking like the corpse of Lazarus’ or the comment that his
spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle

172 Inside the Myth

classes.’ This narrator is longwinded and officiously explan-
atory, using large numbers of adjectives and excessively
complicated constructions. In contrast, the narrator of Down
and Out is more concise, straightforward and colloquial. And
whereas the tramps are allowed to tell their stories in the later
version, pointing up their world of self-enclosure, these
anecdotes in the earlier version are merely dismissed as
outrageous.

While 'The Spike’ does evidence clear reporting of dialogue
and occasional succinct phrasing, it is written overwhelmingly
as if to ingrauate the writer with his magazine audience. It is a
game, an adventure story, closely paralleling the approach to
the French slum of the inidal narrator of the novel. That it has
so much in common with the style of the initial narrator, and
that it also contains scenes identical with those in the second
secdon of the novel, indicates that the narratorial change in the
latter part of Down and Out is purposeful and necessary. But it
also suggests that Flory’s similar vocabulary and observadon is
unreliable. 'Why I Write’ noted that Burmese Days probably
came the closest to the early ‘purple passage’ aims of the
writer, yet it may also be read as self-cridcism of those aims. It
conveys the message that melodrama, cliche and the language
of the public are only effecdve modes of expression in the
short-term. They leave you enclosed, with no way of reladng to
what lies outside.

The main technique in Burmese Days is a study of language:
of how far the vocabulary and construcdons of each character
measure up to or deviate from the officialese, the slang and the
stereotyped expression. Apart from Flory, the only characters
who have specific problems in saying what they mean are Mrs
Lackersteen, Elizabeth’s aunt, and Verrall, who for a dme
becomes Elizabeth’s boyfriend. Mrs Lackersteen’s problem
arises from her complete restricdon to public language; her
communication becomes a standard that other characters
adapt to their own mode of officialese, but which isolates her
within its barriers. Verrall on the other hand is anarchic; he
uses virtually no public language at all. But whereas Flory’s
anarchism simply drives him to suicide because he cannot
realise his individual world within the public, Verrall is a
member of the ruling class. Unlike ordinary members of

Lynette Hunter

173

society he can live out his fantasies in actual life for he has
physical and social power. Here, change can only occur
through force from the ruler or from within the system itself.
This despotism, this tautology of dominator and dominating,
and the democracy from which it derives, maintains itself by
denying the possibility of an alternative, by discounting the
possibility for discussion and commentary outside the
conventional forms of expression. What Flory fails to recognise
is that although he appears to be trapped within a language
that offers no alternatives, he could still engage in the
self-examination of his individual world that the narrator’s
commentary implies is needed.

These enclosed worlds are very much a part of the authority
and autonomy of the novel. While the writer is direcdy
criticising the social and political, he is also commenting on
writing that imposes upon its reader. On a thematic level
Burmese Days offers no solutions, but its structure explicitly
indicates commentary and active discussion as alternatives.
And within the relationship of reader and writer there lies the
implicit commentary of the writing which suggests not just that
authorial novels have no right to impose, but that readers have
choice of activity. Flory’s suicide is often condemned because it
is seen as an indication of the negativity of thematic aspects in
the book, yet it has a far more valuable side to it. 9 Instead it
may be read as the culmination of a passive, victimised and
dominated reading of his political situation. If you condemn
Flory’s suicide in this way, you also condemn all passive
readings of the book. Here there is the beginning of a shift of
emphasis away from the extraordinary power of the duality of
defining or being defined by, of dominating and dominated, to a
recognition of possible alternatives. Hence the difference
between the controlling ironies of the initial narrator and the
open, more extensively constructed and varied narration of
commentary. But it is not yet explicit, and it is a drawback in
the writing not to have moved far enough out of the authorial
stance that it criticises.

cwiLauvt ui li ic dULoiioiny ui me naturalistic

novel are more fully explored in A Clergyman's Daughter where
the writing is disastrous in terms of the generic expectations of
the reader. Nor is the writer particularly generous to the

174 Inside the Myth

reader: the experimentation is far too controlled. However, at
the same time, what is being attempted is a variety of narrator
and character relationships that provide analogies not only for
the interaction between individual and public but also for that
between writer and reader.

At the start of the book the reader finds Dorothy, the
clergyman’s daughter of the title, imprisoned in a series of
social, sexual and religious stereotypes. The process of the
book through its five distinct parts is to present her education
in the recognition of the delusive assumptions she lives by. She
speaks in a mixture of colloquialism and cliche, stirring herself
into action with hearty girls’-school exhortations . 10 The
narrator’s voice is, by contrast, more observing, less hectic and
makes use of far wider vocabulary. As the narratorial voice
emerges it becomes apparent that it has many authorial
features. If the narrator is not making judgments he is usually
reinforcing prejudices with the presentation of accepted
stereotypes or the use of unquestioning irony. Nearly every
character but Dorothy herself is caricatured through a
generalised commentary that leaves nothing to counteract the
narrator’s opinion, so that he simply voices the conclusions
that his presentation has already made obvious. The
relationship between narrator and character in Part One is
strictly authorial and reflects the closed world of authority
presented in the fiction.

Under extreme pressure from her work and situation,
Dorothy breaks down. She suddenly loses her memory and
‘comes to’ on a street corner somewhere in a large city. What
the writer has provided is a situation in which the character has
no previous assumptions; she must reconstruct herself, her
language and her history. At the same time, the narrator is not
allowed to interfere with the process. He tries to speak as
Dorothy sees, as far as possible without bias. He moves into the
past historical tense, a reported past which clearly represents
his function. There is far more use of dialogue and less of the
dominating, generalised voice that controlled and spelt out the
reader’s reactions. This stance dwells on precision of detail,
qualification of description and explanation, rather than
judgment, and is similar to the narrative voice in the second
half of Down and Out in Paris and London : the ‘plain prose style’

175

Lynette Hunter

of ‘factual’ documentary is again being attempted.

However, Dorothy’s resumption of history, language and
self in this part of the book belies the possibility of any such
‘neutral’ presentation. Her first realisation is that language
exists outside her; more strictly, that an ideology of language
surrounds and defines her. Once she recognises this she
becomes ‘aware of herself... discovered her separate and
unique existence’. The use of words represents a set of assumed
rules, an ideology that is basic to man’s concept of everything
else he views. Awakening to that use re-establishes a past in all
the assumptions it carries, and choosing to use words in this
way places one irretrievably within the bounds of the history
that that use signifies. Just so, the narrator’s voice, for all its
limited self-questioning, carries the weight of an ideology with
it. But it is very easy to take these assumptions for granted, and
that is exactly what, under the weight of physical exhaustion,
Dorothy does. She ‘accepted everything’ and was ‘far too tired
to think’, and so becomes again one of the unconsciously
dominated. When her memory returns fully, she tries to return
to her old life, but because she is not actively taken back, she
becomes locked into the passive structure of her new life,
reduced to the escape of reading magazines that become
‘strangely, absorbingly interesting’.

The third part of the book consists of a scene of
down-and-outs keeping company in Trafalgar Square for the
night. These people, and Dorothy with them, are at the bottom
of the pile. Completely passive and of no use to society because
they are not even aware of their domination by it, they have
stepped outside the tautological world of individual and public
fantasy, into an entirely private, anarchic world of their own.
Almost by corollary, the narrator is detached and external, at
first presenting only the dialogue of the beggars; but as
Dorothy becomes part of their world, finds out its conventions
and sinks passively into them, the narration resumes some of
its observing familiarity and its air of report.

Dorothy has moved from the unwitting compromise of her
early life, to the compromises induced first by physical and
then by mental exhaustion. While compromise of some kind is
shown to be necessary and although it is made clear that
exhaustion stuns’ one, confuses the real with the unreal and

176 Inside the Myth

makes it almost impossible to act in any way at all, in each case
Dorothy is in part responsible for her situation because she has
entered that compromise. In Part Four a deus ex machina in the
form of a rich uncle is provided to get her out of the situation;
she returns to civilisation, to the public world of recognised
authority and goes to work in a school. For the first time in her
life she has both the awareness and the energy not merely to
compromise but to participate actively in the life around her,
and she does so. The girls’ magazine vocabulary slips away, she
observes and learns, creating an active idenuty.

At the same time the narrator becomes far more involved
with the character. Many of the techniques of the narrator in
Part One are taken up once more but with far greater openness
about the inbuilt limitations they carry. For example,
caricature again abounds, but this time it is a very obvious use
of stereotype. The names are almost epithets: the alcoholic
Miss Strong, earnest Miss Beaver and incompetent Miss
Allcock. Mrs Creevy, the hypocritical and grasping headmis-
tress, is presented as an out-and-out caricature of all that is
wrong with the private school system. But the important thing
is that the central character is shown to be aware of the
caricatured nature of these people. It alerts her to deficiencies
within the school system and she is able to assess the situation
and develop an acdve role in how she thinks it should work.

However her new approach to teaching, which is based on
‘making something instead of merely learning’, is stopped by
the head mistress who tells her that she must educate by
memorisation and rote-learning, thus preserving the social
status quo. And Dorothy capitulates: she prostitutes herself to
fulfil someone else’s fantasy of education. Creevy even tells her
how to worship, and it is in the comparison between religious
authority and Creevy’s educational despotism that Dorothy
begins to understand the nature of her dilemma. The dangers
of complete personal freedom have been underlined, not only
by the negative anarchy of the beggars in Trafalgar Square, but
also by the vulnerability of that freedom, by its potential for
control in the freedom of Creevy to dominate her in the name
of an anonymous public. Dorothy comes to think that it is
‘better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in roodess
freedom’.

Lynette Hunter yj'j

In the fifth and final part of the book she returns to her
father and resumes her duties, but this time with an awareness
of the domination involved. The conflation throughout much
of this part between the narrator’s and character’s voice
reinforces this awareness as the reader watches the
commentary taking place in Dorothy’s mind rather than being
expressed for her, and the final pages of the book present her
assessing mind reaching its compromise. Yet while we have
learned the need for compromise we have also learned the
need for continual reassessment. At the end, the narrator tells
us that Dorothy’s final compromise is not yet ‘consciously’
formulated, and the result is a highly unsatisfactory ending. If
it had not been for the careful and extensive education that the
reader is put through in this novel, one could simply take
Dorothy’s compromise as it stands. But the entire movement of
learning by both character and reader contradicts her express
conclusions. The problem may lie in the fact that, though the
writer has withdrawn the comforts and escapes of permanent
compromise from the reader, the alternatives are ambiguous
and diffuse because the narrator is cut out of consideration.
Despite the blatantly different voices that the narrator takes on,
and which do involve the reader in evaluating the issues, the
final conflation of narrator with character leaves one with no
way to assess the basis for his commentary. As Orwell was later
to say, the one thing wrong with a first person novel was that it
made commentary impossible; the reader could never
adequately evaluate the stance of the writing.

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying the narrator and character are
carefully separated from the start. The narrator reveals his
prejudices by relating the novel closely to the topics of
literature, literary cliches, and the way one goes about writing.
And here the narrative ethos is directly related to the literary
ethos of the writer and more explicitly to the facades through
which the individual relates to the public. Keep the Aspidistra
t-iying makes explicit the process of a mind that escapes by
giving the prose over to the main character, Gordon
Comstock, at the beginning. The character starts with a voice
at types, generalises, uses conventions and pretences, and
wnich rationalises from incorrect grounds. By contrast, the
narrator is more observing, he generalises only after going into

178

Inside the Myth

detail, concentrating on concrete particulars; he also
undercuts, qualifies and places his own statements in an ironic
perspective that yields even-handed judgements. Yet the
interaction between the two very different voices, the one being
escapist and enclosed and the other more open and active, is
often very close.

Throughout the first chapter Gordon’s mind ranges over a
series of issues as he muses on a few lines of his own pessimistic
verse: books, advertisements, the state of civilisation and
money. He condemns ‘the extinct monsters of the Victorian
age,’ 11 and although he is at first aware that his condemnation
arises because ‘the mere sight of them brought home to him
his own sterility,’ he passes this off with yet more sweeping
generalisations that reduce all such questions to money. Later
classifications of literature as ‘dead stars’ and damp squibs ,
with only the occasional writer like Lawrence or Joyce rising
above the abysmal level, are revealed as devices to provide
further justification for his own book ‘Mice’ having been
remaindered after the sale of one hundred and fifty-three
copies.

Initially in contrast with the pessimism of his atdtude to
literature is the ‘goofy optimism’ of the advertisements across
the street from the bookshop where Gordon works. The
slogans are established by a series of repetitions on Gordon’s
part as he looks at them ‘mechanically’; yet even these ‘pink
vacuous faces’ become distorted through Gordon s mind. The
movement is associational, beginning with the rat-faced man
in the Bovex advertisement who is turned into ‘Modem man as
his masters want him to be. A docile little porker, sitting in the
money-sty . . .’, and culminating at the end of the chapter in the
‘humming of aeroplanes and the crash of the bombs that
Gordon hopes will destroy the civilisation that he sees.

To Gordon money makes possible both literature and
advertisements. Given life ruled by a money ethic, they both
reflect back a meaninglessness that leaves his modem world
empty and ripe for destruction. Yet the process by which he
arrives at these conclusions is superficial. They are generated
by a mind flitting unthinkingly from associated image to
associated image. Gordon’s mind works the way the
advertisements do; both create types, present cliches an

Lynette Hunter 179

invent desirable fictions. They and he manipulate logic to
invent a world in which people can evade responsibility.
Gordon, like Flory, is trapped in a personal world of escape
that can only wait passively for the destruction of what lies
outside it, rather than envisage anything positive.

In direct contrast the narrator’s mind is more detached and
prosaic, slightly ironic, and while generalising does so without
caricature. The balance is made possible by the history the
narrator provides for each character or event, and the history
he provides for Gordon’s life that establishes the distanced
backdrop for Gordon’s private attempts to escape. The
narrator is not given to cliches, and he tries fully to explain
situations, pointing wherever possible to the faults in the
reasoning that lies behind them. The narrator knows his
account cannot be absolute; it must be ‘as the biographers
say’, fictionalised history. Throughout the chapter on
Gordon’s history the narrator indicates his stance in relation to
Gordon, as someone who understands why the character has
created his personal escapist world, and because of that can
provide a perspective on it. While Gordon ignores the fact that
his attempt to evade compromise is in itself a compromise, the
narrator s voice is that of someone aware of the compromise.

And it is to the question of compromise that the external
issues of money, civilisation, literature and advertising are
relevant. Money is the ultimate compromise of Gordon’s life.
He wants to escape it, yet he can only escape it fully through
having it. The history he is provided with hints at Gordon’s
background in Victorian materialism and the possible reasons
for his obsession; but whatever the cause he wants to escape
the money-world, reject the belief that ‘Money is what God
used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except
failure and success.’

The economic compromise is direcdy parallel to that
between poetry and advertising. Gordon, while working highly
successfully on advertisements, was able to produce a book of
poetry. The poetry was made possible by that compromise. But
having written it he leaves the firm. The key point is that he
does not especially want to write, but thinks that it will get him
out ol the money-world’. Literary ‘taste’ may also simply be
personal habit, and Gordon watches this in action in the

180

Inside the Myth

bookshop where he goes to work. He suggests that the woman
who prefers Galsworthy to Ethel M. Dell is neither better nor
worse than her friend who prefers the opposite. Taste is often
socially condoned selection, satisfied by similarly self-enclosed
worlds. He and Rosemary, his girlfriend, discuss the weakness
of ‘Burne-Jones maidens’, ‘Dickens heroines’, ‘Rackham
illustrations’ and James Barrie’s fantasies. These artists are as
able to stupefy the mind, prettify and make acceptable the
world they present, as the romances and adventures that satisfy
the library-goers.

Later, just like Dorothy, Gordon tries to find solace in the
magazines, comics and twopenny newspapers of the sordid
little library he is reduced to managing after he leaves the
bookshop. They are ‘ “escape literature” ... Nothing has ever
been devised that puts less strain on the intelligence.’ The
narrator notes that in this state Gordon thinks he is in the ‘safe
soft womb of the earth’, ‘failure and success have no meaning’,
and he lies beyond responsibility. Tied up in the ambiguities is
the importance not of compromise but of one’s attitude
toward it. In the same way advertisements, which are initially
held up against literature, are later directly compared with the
effect of Burne-Jones maidens. Each has its skilful and
involving aspect, something that Gordon only understands at
the end of his attempted escape into low-life, and which makes
possible his return to advertising.

The compromise in literary terms is not between good and
bad taste, but between an involving or a mindlessly accepting
attitude to writing. The writer may see some need for
compromise at some time, in some areas, but if he goes ahead
and produces an active participatory writing this is of little
practical importance. Similarly, there is a responsibility on the
reader not to read as if all assumptions were being reinforced,
but actively to assess and reassess them. Gordon comes to read
the trashy novelettes with the ironic emphasis of ‘romances’,
rather than as mindless escape. Irony indicates discrepancies,
and the narrator’s early irony points to the character’s
evasiveness and denial of discrepancy. When Gordon takes up
the ironic voice at the end of the book, the irony lies in the
reading of irony itself for here its conscious use by the
character indicates not Gordon’s evasiveness but his awareness

Lynette Hunter jgj

of compromise. Immediately one has an indication of his
change of attitude. He has to discard his enclosed, womb-like
world before he can break the vicious circle that unconscious
compromise imposes on people. Unconscious compromise is
utterly selfish. It is entirely private and makes impossible
public communication, genuine interaction with an external
world. But having reached this conclusion, there are no
guarantees for the reader. Gordon may give way to the escape
into domesticity, and the irony become negative. Again, it is
not the compromise that matters but one’s attitude toward it.
The mutually exclusive voices of narrator and character have to
condnue to engage the reader. Orwell is not providing specific
answers, but a stance toward activity.

A major topic of these early works is indeed the complexity
of the interdependence of dominated and dominator. But
Orwell is fully aware of the complexity. He portrays the
self-perpetuating, often vicious circle at work in social,
religious and sexual spheres, and makes explicit analogies with
the linguisdc and the literary. But the complexifies of these
topics are not overdy resolved. To do so would be to
perpetuate the problem by moving into an authorial stance
that imposed upon the reader. Instead, through the direct
analogies with writing, Orwell tries to suggest in the changing
structure of his narrator-character relationships the value of
establishing a clear stance for the narrator. This goes hand in
hand with the more fundamental need to provide a practical
text in which reader and writer meet and engage, for by
clarifying the stance of the narrator the reader has a basis from
which evaluation and assessment may proceed.

Notes

1 S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of
as°CEJV W< ’ VOl ‘ *’ Harmondsworth > 1970, p. 23. Referred to hereafter

2 See for example Tom Hopkinson, George Orwell , London, 1954, p. 7; L.

ond n the l',?t e Z ge °v el1 ' L ° n j don> 1954 ’ PP’ 21 °- 2 = or A - Zwerdling, Orwell
and. the Left, New Haven and London, 1974, p. 147.

cZrZf le F ' ? l ° Ver r ikh ’ ‘ Chan g in g Things: Orwell and Auden’, in
- lure and Social Change , Brighton, 1980, in which he says that

182

Inside the Myth

Orwell was unable to cope with presenting the working classes. Hence he
‘types’ characters in The Road to Wigan Pier as in his early novels. But this
observation is used to denigrate the later work, and misses the point that
types are used specifically so that readers should recognise the injustice of
their limitations.

4 See the introductory chapter of L. Hunter, George Orwell : The Search for a
Voice , Milton Keynes, 1984, for a detailed account of this background.

5 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London , Harmondsworth, 1984,

p. 6.

6 See for example R. Lee, Orwell's Fiction , Notre Dame, 1969, which
proposes that Burmese Days is primarily about the study of
communication.

7 George Orwell, Burmese Days, Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 14.

8 CEJL y Vol. 1, p. 58.

9 See for example T. Eagleton, ‘Orwell and the Lower Middle-Class Novel’
in R. Williams (ed.), George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Englewood
Cliffs, 1974, where he comments on Flory’s ‘passive compromise’. He
recognises Orwell’s complexity but leaves little place for the reader’s
interaction with the text.

10 George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter , Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 5.

11 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 12.

Andy Croft

Worlds Without End Foisted Upon
The Future - Some Antecedents Of
Nineteen Eighty-Four

Not another essay on Nineteen Eighty -Four? Readers may be
forgiven if their enthusiasm for the novel has faded of late
1984 began with a six-part TV biography of Orwell, a televised
dramatisation of life on Jura, and countless TV discussion
programmes, profiles and chat-shows, all acutely conscious
that this was the year. At the time of writing there is a film of
Nineteen Eighty-Four currently in production, starring Tohn
Hurt; the National Theatre has just presented its controversial
version of Animal Farm ; and the RSC have bought the rights to
Down and Out tn Paris and London. Earlier in the year the
Barbican ran a ‘Thought Crimes’ exhibition, and Orwell now
“ 2 Pe T it f in Madame Tussau ds - while something
bvRirfw?” °° kS °T hi$ shou,der - There is a rock album

WamhTnr ^ T n m ** Sh ° PS ’ a t0p - ten sin S le Somebody’s
ODerac v MC ’ u an aS 7 Ct ^performed musical and two
either ‘RiaV^R T ' sbl ™ s announcing, according to taste,
It’ Wicr^*^ Brother is Watching You’ or ‘Doublethink About

have^rrec 1 ",^ *** dow "- d -°ms in Paris and London
national wS*^ revisited in P rint - There can be few
Papers that S' ’ ^ m ° nthIy magazines, daily and local
dus ve ; r L j CanT 3rtlCleS ab ° Ut the novel and its author

Maglzme from l ° Encounter an d the Barclaycard

“g ne, from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph and the

183

184

spoof Not the 1984 Times, there was little doubt about the
subject of the moment. Even the British Tourist Authority
journal In Britain, beginning the year with an article on current
livestock husbandry in Suffolk, felt justified in announcing on
its front page, ‘The Orwell Animal Farms in 1984’ . . .

When Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published Seeker and
Warburg gave it a print-run of 25,000 copies; it sold twice that
within the year in the UK alone. Since Penguin first published
the novel in 1954 they have sold 250,000 copies each year; in
1984 they expect to sell 500,000 copies of what they are calling
‘the ultimate family gift book of the year’. Richard Orwell
expects to earn £250,000 in the royalties from UK sales this
year, and £100,000 from overseas sales. If you have a spare £25
you can buy a facsimile of the original manuscript, or for a
mere £400 Seeker and Warburg will sell you a de-luxe edition
of the Collected Works . . .

The commercial success of the novel has been exceeded only
by its critical success. When first reading the manuscript
Frederick Warburg described it as ‘amongst the most terrifying
books I have ever read ... a great book’; ‘a brilliant and
fascinating novel’ wrote Diana Trilling. The novel’s place in
Orwell’s oeuvre is rarely doubted. For Dame Veronica
Wedgewood it was ‘the most valuable, the most absorbing, the
most powerful book that he has yet written’; for Herbert Read
it was ‘undoubtedly his greatest’; for Philip Rahv ‘far and away
the best of Orwell’s books.’ Its place in the genre of political
fiction appears unchallenged in the same way. For the critic
Ruth Ann Leif it is simply ‘the political novel par excellence'-, for
Philip Rahv ‘this novel is the best antidote to the totalitarian
disease that any writer has so far produced.’ Anthony Burgess
believes that it is ‘the most nightmarish of all the fictional
prophecies ever written’, that if we ‘regard his Nineteen
Eighty-Four as competing in the Worst of all Imaginary World
Stakes (it) has won by many lengths.’ Bernard Crick argues that
Nineteen Eighty-Four is to the twentieth century what Thomas
Hobbes’ Leviathan was to the seventeenth’, and J.A. Morris that
it is ‘the most political of the major anti-Utopias’. Critical
claims for the novel don’t end here. The blurb on the cover of
one recent edition describes the novel as nothing less than ‘the
classic novel of our time’. For one writer Nineteen Eighty-Four

185

has earned its place — alongside Animal Farm — ‘in the scenery of
every civilised mind’; the novel demonstrates how the
materialist and rationalist idea of progress, the ‘hedonist
utopia’ had been ‘shattered’; for another ‘from the perspective
of literary and intellectual history, Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four mark the close of an era that has lasted since the
end of the eighteenth century . . . Nineteen Eighty-Four changed
the world by representing the past and present so as to modify
people’s expectations of the future.’ 1

What are we to make of all this? Is it explicable, or
justifiable, in merely literary terms? Or is it just a book-seller’s
dream run riot? In particular, what response should the left
make to this commercial, cultural and political phenomenon,
quite without precedent in British literary history? The
questions raised by the novel, and by its popular and critical
success, cannot be disregarded by the left, since the novel was
written by a declared ‘democratic socialist’ and supporter of
the Labour Party, and since it deals with the ‘perversions to
which a centralised economy is liable’, dramatised through
something called ‘Ingsoc’ and addressed primarily as a
‘warning’ to the ‘English-speaking’ left.

Much of the left’s response to Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to its
political marketing has been simply hostile, going to great
lengths to attack both the novel and its author. 2 Understand-
able though this may be, particularly during the worst years of
the Cold War when many reviewers were recommending
Nineteen Eighty-Four precisely as an anti-socialist novel and an
attack on the Atdee Government, this has meant in practice
abandoning the novel to the literary right. And there is no
doubting their enthusiasm for the novel, or the political uses to
which it has been put. 3 There is a genuine tone to the outrage
which has greeted various belated attempts to ‘reclaim’ aspects
ot Orwell’s linking, even Nineteen Eighty-Four, for the left
Thirty-five years after the publication of the novel, the work of
Raymond Williams and Bernard Crick in particular must
appear to many as unlikely and impossible attempts at political
body-snatching.

Just possibly Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer worth fighting
_ r f, r ’ at east r not m 1116 poetical terms that have defined the
guments so far. Those arguments were fought and lost a long

H

Inside the Myth I Andy Croft

186 Inside the Myth

time ago. 4 If only we can take our eyes for a moment away
from the transfixing political influence and importance of this
one novel, it may be possible to offer some comparative literary
assessment of it; it may even occur to us that we don’t actually
need to keep on re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is this
essay’s contention that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a much less
original novel than it may seem today; that rather than being
‘the most nightmarish of all fictional prophecies ever written’
(my italics), it was only the tail-end of a more original and
important literary and political development in this country in
the late 1930s and 1940s, and that the novel’s extraordinary
reception and reputation have more to do with commercial
and political considerations than with literary ones. Arguing
endlessly about the political ‘message’ of this one novel only
serves to confirm its exceptional status. This at any rate is one
essay about Nineteen Eighty-Four which doesn’t intend to say
anything more about it.

2. Fantastic Realities and Fantastic Novels

There was nothing new, of course, in dramatising imagined
systems of government some years in the future, hot even in
dramatising the polidcal worst. Orwell himself was, in
Anthony Burgess’s words, ‘an afficionado of cacatopian
fiction’. 5 H.G. Wells was a favourite boyhood author of
Orwell’s, and A Modem Utopia his favourite Wells novel.
Samuel Butler, Jack London and Swift he read at school. Other
‘scientific romances’ that Orwell certainly knew, and which
may have influenced his writing Nineteen Eighty-Four at least in
some details, were Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday
(1917), John Mair’s Never Come Back (1941) and Robin
Maugham’s The 1946 MS (1943). Above all, as he made clear in
a comparative discussion about Huxley’s Brave New World
(1932), Orwell’s greatest conscious literary debt in Nineteen
Eighty-Four was to Zamyatin’s We (1920). 6

The 1930s was an especially rich period in the development
of utopian and dystopian writing in Britain. All sorts of writers
turned their hands in this period to writing at least one utopian
or dystopian novel - Malcolm Muggeridge, Eric Linklater, C.S.
Forester, R.C. Sherrif, Harold Nicholson, Herbert Read, C P
Snow, Hilaire Belloc, John Buchan, J.B. Morton, Stephen

187

Andy Croft

King- Hall, and of course, Wells and Huxley. 7

The sheer ideological variety of these novels is significant
enough. They range from Christian utopias like EC
Taunton’s If Twelve Today (1937), feminist utopias like
Gresswell’s When Yvonne was Dictator (1935) and G. Cornwallis
West’s The Woman Who Stopped War (1935), to pro-fascist
utopias like The Shadow of Mussolini by Wilfred Ward (1931) and
Dennis Wheatley’s Black August (1934). The bulk of this fiction
was however negative in tone, imagining their author’s worst
fears, from R.A. James anti- Catholic While England Slept
(1932), Julian Sterne’s anti-masonic The Secret of the Zodiac
(1933), Huxley’s anti -Taylorist Brave New World to a great
many anti -socialist, anti-communist novels, like William le
Petre’s The Bolsheviks (1931) and Morris Sutherland’s Second
Storm { 1930).

Clearly something happened to the British literary
imagination in the 1930s, to turn so many novelists’ heads
towards the future. The fear of another war, especially a
technologically-advanced one that would not exempt civilian
populations, the enduring economic crisis and long-term
unemployment, the increasing polarisation of European
politics, the seizure of power by fascism in so many continental
countries, the developing size and influence of the Communist
parties - all these factors seem to have stimulated, in various
part, this sudden and diverse imaginative effort to set
contemporary events in a long-term perspective.

Peter Widdowson has argued that

explains the literary judgement which disregards it) lies in the
uncertainty of direction, the tense irresolution, the novels so
commonly reveal. At the formal level this uncertainty expresses
■tself in the diverse modes of fiction employed and their operation
practice, the structural and textual discoveries of modernism
tonnal realism, documentary reportage, fable, allegory, satire and
aystop'a ... Faced with what Christopher Isherwood once called

probler St,C ’ ° f thC ‘ eVeryda ? WOr,d ’’ 1116 novelist’s

Problem, acutely in the 1930s, was how to address them.

Moreover Widdowson asserts that this fictional dilemma of

188 Inside the Myf/i

how to come to terms with the ‘fantastic realities’ of the period
is a manifestation of the ideological crisis of liberal
humanism. 8 While this may go a long way to explain this
literary development, it disregards the most sizeable, subtle
and important part of this development - those novels
produced on the left.

3. Socialist Fantasy

It was in the 1930s of course that British socialists wrote and
secured publication for imaginative literature - poetry, plays,
short-stories, novels - on a scale never seen before or since. In
particular it was a time when the left began to produce fiction to
increasing commercial and critical success. Almost two
hundred and fifty novels appeared in print between 1930 and
1940 with clear (though of course different and often
conflicting) socialist concerns. There were socialist-realist
novels, historical novels, comedies, thrillers, detective-stories,
fantasies, fables, allegories, experimental novels, romances,
satires, bildungsromans , family sagas - and utopias and
dystopias. 9 Over thirty of these titles chose non-realist
locations, fabulous, mythical, futuristic or time- travelling;
over twenty were specifically set in the political future.

The first thing to note about these thirty or so non- realist
and fantastic novels is the variety of their authors, their
wide-ranging social and literary allegiances. Some were
already published writers with existing reputations, like Storm
Jameson, Patrick Hamilton and Kennth Allot. Some had never
published fiction before, like Rex Warner, Barbara Wootton
and Ruthven Todd. Some were well known for other activities,
like the poet Cecil Day Lewis, the nutritionist Frederick le Gros
Clarke, the art-historian Anthony Bertram. For some like
Joseph Macleod, Fenner Brockway and ‘Murray Constantine’
it was their only contribution to the canon of socialist fiction.
Harold Heslop and Leslie Mitchell were working-class writers;
Terence Greenidge was a close friend of John Betjeman; Philip
Toynbee and Amabel Williams- Ellis both belonged to great
families of the English ‘intellectual aristocracy’. Some, like
Storm Jameson, Barbara Wooton and Rex Warner, were active
in the Labour Party; Fenner Brockway was a leading member
of the ILP; many were Communists, like Maurice Richardson,

Andy Croft jgg

Frederick le Gros Clarke and Edward Upward, or close
sympathisers, like Joseph Macleod, Amabel Williams- Ellis and
Bruce Hamilton. Some were published by the publishing
houses of the left, Gollancz and Lawrence and Wishart. But the
overwhelming majority were published by mainstream
London firms, large and small - Constable, Collins, George
Allen and Unwin, the Fortune Press, the Bodley Head, the
Hoga, th Press, Cape, Boriswood, Faber, Heinemans, the
Cressett Press, and Penguin.

Despite the frequently recurring ideas, arguments, settings,
even details, in this body of writing; despite its size, its authors
seem to have had little sense of being part of any sort of
common literary phenomenon. Ruthven Todd, for example,
whose fabulous satire Over the Mountain ( 1939) contains a great
many specific correspondences with Rex Warner’s The Wild
Goose Chase (1937) (not least the hilarious and brutal 'laughing
policemen’) claimed that his novel was

conceived and written before I had read Rex Warner’s ... and I
was, I think, a little chagrined to realise that they were scions of
the same ancestry, and that they both bore the same evidence of
the political atmosphere of the period of their adolescence ... 10

The second thing to note is the small number of these novels
that specifically dramatised a critique of capitalism. The only
real example of this sort of writing was Amabel William-Ellis’s
To Tell the Truth (1933), written after a visit to the Soviet Union.
Set in the 1940s it turned the conventional anti-Soviet
travelogue on its head, by imagining the comic consequences
, a Soviet defector who visits a Britain of continuing
° n f te ™ unemployment and large-scale poverty, and who
gradually sheds his illusions about bourgeois democracy. In
London s Burning (1936) set in 1940, Barbara Wootton forsaw a
time when unemployment might reach such terrible
proportions that rioting erupts in British cities, when the
g vernment of the day loses control, and revolution is in the
SIgnificant however that in her autobiography Barbara
cotton remembered the novel as an anti-fascist one, depicting

libeMl m' 1 !?^ mg m London and its effects upon a nice,
-mmded, peaceable, moderately intellectual and

190 Inside the Myth

socially- minded business man and his family.’ 11 This trick of
memory is symptomatic of the way in which the political
emphasis shifts in socialist fiction during the 1930s. For it was
anti-fascism above all that informed the majority of non-realist
fiction in the middle and late 1930s, and largely contributed to
the development of socialist fiction as a whole. 12

The third point to note is the small number of attempts at
socialist utopias in these years. It cannot be incidental that over
half of those that were written appeared before 1935. By then
the full implications of events in Germany were clear to most
people on the left - the suppression not only of the
Communists, but also of the Social Democrats and the trade
unions. The utopian spirit was , for the time being , on the defensive.
Even Robert Young’s The War in the Marshes (1939) and Richard
Heron Ward’s The Sun Shall Rise (1933), both vaguely socialist
novels about attempted revolutions in this country, end with
their failures , their military suppression.

It could also be argued that the millenarian vision of many
socialists in the 1920s and 1930s found a concrete political and
geographical location in the Soviet Union. For British
Communists there would have been little reason to project
their political aspirations into fantastic literary locations.
Indeed the one pro-Soviet science fiction novel of this period,
Frederick le Gros Clarke’s Between Two Men (1935) concluded
by turning against political fantasy, with a sharp reminder of
contemporary political realities, and of the utopian quality of
the international working-class movement. Here utopia is to
be found in the actions of those people struggling to achieve it.
A ‘biological fantasy’, it described the birth of a new
super-species which threatens to replace humanity as the next
evolutionary step. At the end of the book the embriologist
Sandraval, who is responsible for killing the new creature,
travels on the continent, doubtful of the rightness of his
decision. There he realises he acted properly, and that there is
after all a new kind of humanity,

the men who toil at their machines and on the earth. German
workers with their throbbing ache of revolt against the shadow of
the swastika - Russians with their Bolshevik energy that forged
creation beneath the naked sky - they were the very pulse of

Anc/y Croft 191

creation itself; and in whatever sphere life burst forth, they would
have received it gladly . 13

A.L. Morton observed in the Daily Worker that the novel was
exciting ‘because it breaks through in a new place, leaving a
broad gap through which later assailants may march.’ 14
Though there were a number of other ‘biological fantasies’
written on the left in the 1930s, few exhibiting this sort of
optimism. If the example of the Soviet Union continued to exert
a utopian pull on the political imaginations of many of the left
in the 1930s, this had little or no analagous literary
representation. After all, if fascism posed a threat liberal
imagination, it constituted above all a threat to the continued
existence of the Soviet Union.

One utopian novelist worth mentioning is the Scottish writer
Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the
author of A Scots Quair ), who produced two utopian novels in
the early 1930s, Three Go Back (1932) and Gay Hunter (1934). In
these Mitchell used the device of time- travelling to catapult a
political cross-section of contemporary society 20,000 years
into the past and future respectively. In both the time- travel-
lers discover a golden age of primitive communism, unspoilt
by class, property, religion and marriage. The eponymous
heroine Gay Hunter finds her experience of the future
confirms her worst fears for her own times. She remembers

books of speculation she had read on the future - books of the
early Wells, of Flammarian, of their hosts of imitators: books that
pictured the sciences mounting and growing, piling great,
crystalline pyramids of knowledge and technique unto alien skies,
with men their servitors, changing and altering with them,
physically and psychically ... or the younger Huxley, with a
machine-made world of machines and humans undergoing a
fantastic existence, conditioned by the bleak lunacy of their
author’s anthropological beliefs ... worlds without end that had
been foisted upon the future.

(So much for the left’s ‘hedonist utopia’.) The old democracies,
Gay learns, collapsed with atomic war, to be replaced by a
ascist Federation and centuries of permanendy warring fascist

192

Inside the Myfh

‘Hierarchies’ ruling vast numbers of ‘sub-men’. In the end an
international revolt by the ‘sub -men’ and global civil war has
all but destroyed humanity. Although the novel is largely a
celebration of the primitive communist society of the hunters
(‘neither prophecy nor propaganda ... though the Hierarchs
may never happen, I have a wistful hope for the Hunters’), it is
significant that the other two time- travellers are fascists (one in
Three Go Back is an arms-dealer) who try and introduce warfare
to the hunters, to re-establish ‘civilisation’. Even Mitchell,
whose (partly Trotskyite) Marxism was mixed with Diffusionist
anthropology, and whose fiction always contained a shining
vision of an inevitable communist future - even Mitchell could
not disregard the factor of fascism, its implications for ideas
about inevitable human progress. Gay realises the danger
posed to the hunter society by Major Ledyard’s appeal to
‘Service, Loyalty, Hardness and Hierarchy’.

Some seed of desire for safety, security, to poison the minds of
men and set them to climbing the bitter tracks to civilisations’
bloody plateau, lit by the whorling storm- shells . . . war religion,
blood sacrifice, all the dreary and terrible mummery of temple
and palace and college. Kingdoms would rise again on the earth,
poets sing batde again, the war-horses stamp on the face of a
child, the women know rape and the men mutilation ... 15

The growing threat of fascism, the challenge it posed not only
to socialism, but to the liberal idea of ‘progress’, may explain
the small number of straightforward socialist utopias in the
1930s. The appearance of fascism constituted a decisive
interruption in the imaginative literature of the British left.

Another exception to this is worth noting, Fenner
Brockway’s Purple Plaque (1935). In this highly romantic novel
Brockway depicted a revolution on a luxury liner, quarantined
indefinitely because of a ‘purple plague’. The third-class
passengers abolish the class distinctions, the work, food and
cabins are shared according to need, a newspaper, a university
and currency are established (and nudism permitted).

The mutiny of the dancing-girls which precipitates the
revolution was based on a real incident on a trans-Atlantic
liner in the early 1930s, when, on Brockway’s instigation, a

193

Andy Croft

troupe had refused to dance only for the first-class passengers
Brockway’s trips to the USA in these years were in part to meet
with the Trotskyite Jay Lovestone, recendy expelled from the
leadership of the CPUSA. The ILP at this time, after a brief
attempt to work with the Comintern, was moving rapidly into
an ultra-left position, and Brockway in particular was
developing a critique of the workings of the Comintern along
the lines of Lovestone’s. 16

In the novel therefore, the leadership of the ship’s
revolution is split between ‘Nathan, the Revolutionary Socialist
and Wells, the Moscow-minded Communist’ (‘a difference not
so much of principle as of spirit and method’.) It is Nathan
who concludes that the ship is

only a microcosm of society. America and Britain had their
first-class and tourist-class, their third-class and crew - the
possessing class, the middle-class and the working-class. America
and Britain had their luxury for the possessing class and their
overcrowded poverty for the working-class. A revolution in America
and Britain ... 17

In the same year that Purple Plague was published, the
Comintern at its Seventh Congress finally shed the last
remnants of its Class Against Class’ policy, and urged the
creation of ‘People’s Fronts’ against the threat of fascism. In
Britain the Communist Party temporarily dropped the slogan
For a Soviet Britain’. At the Soviet Writers’ Congress the
previous year the cultural implications of the new policy had
been largely anticipated, in the final suppression of the
sectarian proletcult tendencies within Soviet literature, by
adek s conflation of the categories of ‘revolutionary’
progressive’ ‘working-class’, ‘proletarian’ and ‘anti-fascist’
writers, and by his call for ‘revolutionary writers’ to study

■iiilly and specifically, the fate of literature under the rule of fascism
- the late of literature under the fascist sceptre (sic) constitutes the
very gravest warning, the ‘writing on the wall’ for all writers."

in Ae British Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded

nd ° n m December 1933, and part of the proletcult-

294 Inside the Myth

dominated International Union of Revoludonary Writers,
became by its second meeting in February of the next year the I
Bridsh Section of the Writers’ International (WI), a much more
broadly-based non-Party organisauon. The writers whom the
Section hoped to attract were primarily those who saw fascism I
as

a menace to all the best achievements of human culture . . who are I
opposed to all attempts to hinder unity in the struggle, or any
retreat before fascism or compromise with fascist tendencies.

This statement was published in the first issue of Left Review ,
founded later that year as the organ of the British Secdon of
the WI, and a replacement for the proletcult Storm. In its first
six months the editors of Left Review decisively defeated an
ultra-lefdst attempt to influence the magazine. As one of the
editors, Tom Wintringham, put it,

our main work as revolutionaries is to get a ‘united front’ for
common action among all those who are not revolutionaries , but feel the
need to defend culture and literature against the effects of modern
capitalism, against fascism, war from the air, throtding of free
discussion . 20

This was a strategy that could have no place in the
increasingly ultra-lefdst argument of the ILP, and one that was
repeatedly criticised by ILP writers — including Orwell - as
‘reformist.’ So simple a ‘revolutionary’ novel as Purple Plague
could only have been written from someone in Brockway s
increasingly isolated posidon. 21

4. ‘A Really Satisfactory Way of Writing About the Age’ I

The first of the great many anti-fascist novels written in this
country in the 1930s was Montagu Slater’s Haunting Europe
(1934). This was a careful realist account of German
working-class life from 1929 to 1933, of the inescapable
involvement of one Berlin family in the political turmo ^ J
those years. When the novel appeared Tom Wintringham was
generally enthusiastic about it in the Daily Worker. He w®Sl
however, unhappy about the novel s rather triump I

ending, when an underground Party cell is established in the
street. The final chapter seems odd and strained’ he wrote
‘because it implies the conversion to Communism and
acceptance into a Party cell of such unlikely people as an old
comfortable reformist secretary and a little Nazi nark.’ 22 There
is another ending to the novel, even more triumphalist, which
Wintringham did not mention, set ‘some time hence’ when a
Soviet German Republic has been established, China has gone
Communist, the Vatican has been turned into a museum, and
the middle classes survive - only in Britain. Both endings, and
the terms of Wintringham ’s criticisms mark the novel out from
subsequent anti-fascist and anti-Nazi novels, and date it from a
time when the Comintern still expected the KPD to survive
underground, and the Hitler government to over-reach itself. 23

Yet at the same time the second ending of Haunting Europe
shows how far Slater caught, possibly helped to create the
dominating imaginative feature of anti-fascist fiction - its
long-term fantastic and dream-like quality. While he was
working on the novel Slater also wrote two anti-fascist plays
Domesday (1933) and ‘Cock Robin’ (1934). The first was a
three-act picture of the future establishment of fascism in
Britain ( indebted to London’s Iron Heel'), in the second the
hero relives the struggle against (British) fascism while under
anaesthetic. 24 The combination of anti-fascism, a sense of
impending political defeat, a commitment to the (verv)
ong-term defeat of fascism, the location of a native fascist
threat, and the non-naturalistic form are all important and
recurring features of anti-fascist British writing. What is most

mhrh^ C ab ° Ut pkyS however > is that they were never
(DoS \ nCV f performed - Somehow in these two plays
fascism/ ^ firSC B , nt ‘ Sh dramadc attempts to deal with
non rT a |, U sf n T n ""J by SeVCraI years ’ Slater antic ipated the
an t i-Mo s T4 Uttature OM SUt>Se<)Uem anti ' f ». and-Naai,

In the following year Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been

named Zl ? ubllshed , This long panoramic novel, with its 82
Bishnn , mdexed characters was severely criticised by Reg

those with which* W' ^° T ^ er ’ in significantly different to

Despite it rl/t Wlnt " ngham had criticised Haunting Europe.

P'te us clear pro-Communist sympathies, Bishop could

196 Inside the Myth

find few positive things to say about the novel. For its first 547
pages the novel dealt with the contemporary political situation
in a fictional parliamentary constituency, its various political
activists and their domestic lives. The last six pages however
suddenly took on another quality altogether, when one of the
female and very pregnant characters has a vision of the future
of ‘Sallington’ - a fascist one.

First three armed Specials came out, and then the prisoners
bunched together, their eyes blindfolded already, and their hands
tied behind them. They were strung out along the wall. Nearest to
her was Taylor, the man who disbelieved in violence. Then Sam
Hall, with a scalp wound plastered with dark blood. Then
Dorothy’s Bill. Then Reuben Goldberg. Then Mason. But they
hadn’t ued his hands because his arm was broken; his coat was
buttoned over it and he shook a little. Then Tom. With his trouser
cut off at the knee and his leg bandaged. Beyond Tom were two
women. ‘Tom!’ she yelled suddenly. ‘Tom, we’ll remember, we’ll
- ’ And then there was a hand over her mouth, she staggered and
was shoved back, gagged ... 25

Reg Bishop was quite clear about the novel’s ending - ‘The
best thing in the book, a picture of England under fascist
terror’. 26 And when was this last chapter written? According to
the novel’s foreword, ‘before the events of summer 1933 in
Germany, and before the counter-revoludons of 1934 in
Austria and Spain.’

Why did anti-fascist novelists invariably turn to non-realist
ways of writing? Firsdy, non-realistic writing was the easiest
way for Bridsh writers to deal with a subject of which they had
little personal experience. Realist anti-fascist fiction was
generally written by those who had direct contact with fascism,
either German - Edward Fitzgerald’s Crooked Eclipse (1938),
Patrick Kirwan’s Black Exchange (1934), Phyllis Bottome’s The
Mortal Storm (1937), Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes
Trains (1934), Goodbye to Berlin (1939) - or British - Simon
Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy (1936), They Won't Let You Live (1939).

For those whose acquaintance with fascism was largely
derived from books and newspapers, the realist novel was
clearly a difficult medium in which to write about fascism. Da)
Lewis described this phenomenon thus:

Andy Croft 197

the slump and the rise of European fascism compelled writers to
look over their garden walls ... to divert some of their attention
from the bed, the subconscious and the drawing room to the
impact of unemployment, political and economic insecurity, upon
the lives of ordinary people. And since most middle-class writers
lacked any idea about life outside their own class, this dearth of
experience outside a class they have rejected has turned
Communist writers to allegory. 27

Even Isherwood, the most understating of naturalist
novelists, wrote in 1939:

Like many other Europeans, I have come to feel that Franz Kafka,
alone among modern novelists, discovered a really satisfactory
way of wriring about the age in which we live. As, amidst the
thickening shadows, we wander farther and farther down the path,
from the Reichstag to Madrid, from Madrid to Munich, we
recognise in him the Virgil who will be our guide through the
unfolding horrors of the contemporary inferno. Prophetically, he
has described it all - the vague, overpowering sense of terror; the
dream-events vividly and simply remembered but only later seen as
inverted and insane; the crisis indefinitely delayed. His is the
nightmare world of the dictators. 28

Michael Roberts in a study of T.E. Hulme had argued that
the tragK: vie w’ was the only possible one to take in the late
1930s, and that Kafka’s The Trial (published in English the
previous year) was one of the best examples of this ‘tragic
view . Samuel Hynes has argued that this essay in particular
3 ,. . e interest in Kafka in general reveals a shift away from
political commitment to despair in the late 1930s.

' ■ — — mi must writers,

ntenable, and the tragic view one that history and observation
confirmed In such a time polidcs - men’s efforts to govern
rationally - becomes a tragic activity; and so political parables are
tragic parables, ending in defeat and death. 3

that 5 hn^hT 1 "^ a . not , her i variation on the Onvellian judgement
the whole the literary history of the 1930s seems to

198

Inside the Myth i

justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of
politics’. It is also to limit our understanding of who ‘most
writers’ were (Hynes refers of course to the plays of Spender,
Isherwood and Auden), and it is to misunderstand the
presence of Kafka and socialist fiction of the time. No matter
how ‘tragic’ and superficially pessimistic were the anti-fascist
dystopias of the late 1930s, almost all were written as political
interventions , as warnings about what might happen. This is for
example clearly the sense of Naomi Mitchison’s title.

In the 1940 Left Book Club edition of Swastika Night (1937) I
by ‘Murray Constantine’ - a dystopia imagining Europe after
seven hundred years of the Third Reich — a publisher’s note I
indicated that the

.

picture painted must be considered symbolic of what would
happen to the world if Hider were to impose his will (as he must I
not) upon it ... While the author has not in the least changed his
opinion that the Nazi idea is evil, and that we must fight the Nazis |
on land, at sea, in the air, and in ourselves, he has changed his
mind about the Nazi power to make the world evil . 31

For others a certain authorial disingenuity served to point
their readers in the right direction. Terence Greenidge noted at
the beginning of his dream-story Philip and the Dictator (1938)

‘It should hardly be necessary to state with a story of this kind
that the characters and Institutions contained in it are
fictitious’, though just in case any of his readers might miss the
similarities he added, ‘General Carstairs has nothing to do
with General Franco’. 32 ‘Shamus Frazer’ prefaced his satirical/!
Shroud as Well as a Shirt (1935) with the admission that having
finished the novel

it was brought to my attention that there already existed in Great
Britain a fascist party. I should like to take this opportunity of
saying that there can be no possible resemblance between the
Cricketshirt Party and those ardent, patriotic souls who are ai
present striving to make this country - ‘that we love so well
worthy of the Blackshirt policy . 33

As well as being a self-consciously imaginative response to

199

Andy Croft

fascism this sort of writing was secondly a highly intellectual
response. There seems to have been a strong perception among
British intellectuals of the implications of fascism for
intellectual and academic life." This was demonstrated most
dearly in Rex Warner s The Professor (1938), the story of one
liberal intellectual s fate at the hands of fascism, loosely based
on the events in Austria of that year. The eponymous hero, a
classical scholar of international standing and a well-known
liberal, is asked to serve as Chancellor of his small landlocked
state, poli tically divided and lying in the shadow of a powerful
fascist neighbour. The story of his betrayal by the fascists
within the country his flight, capture, torture and execution is
full of long speeches, political and philosophical arguments,
classical soliloquies, yet it also contains a lot of physical action
The Professor refuses his son’s advice to arm the
working-class districts of the city, he trusts his Chief of Police
Colonel Grimm, and he believes that the conflicting interests
of the social-democratic forces in the country will be resolved
m the face of the external enemy. In the end Colonel Grimm
takes power and asks for the assistance of the troops from
across the border, the National Legion is given its lead to burn

*^7™* ,fc ! rar 7 and ™ Und U P the opposition; the
social-democratic leaders are forced into hiding; the Professor

from ^ pSon^ hlS WlfC ’ and he 1S finally Sh0t aS he is released
It is a study in liberalism as much as fascism, a critique of the
ofessors failure to understand the implicadons of fascism
™ m0 f C K aCy ' The “^logical climax of the book is a long

luliuT Vander Ween l ^ his ° ld academic

f , Vand f ’ " ow a ,eader °f the ‘National Legion’. Vander
attacks the Professor’s ‘ethical idealism’. This, he argues fra

dass-based set of values that never had real universal mpport.

“ wLSmo' 1 >-T' r Wha ‘J° U t ' te t d0ing ‘bout

‘Reallv h! 1 ^ , C 1S the hlghest value we ^ow.’

‘Indeed ^ d ° y ° U '° Ve? ’ ‘ Ml men are Mothers.'

comfortably L ,S rh T ^ Y ° U Uving S ° much more

books ofyiurs f members of the great family? Those

keep a rigger’ for *** d fetch a good P rice - Enough to

gger for several years, I daresay. Oh, come off it

200 Inside the Myth

Professor. Why not admit that you’re living off other people just
as I am, and that you like it? . . . You have succeeded in imposing
on the man in the street, your “wider” or “higher” morality, and
the man in the street, who is not a half-baked philosopher, loathes
it . . . however, the ordinary man has a natural and healthy distaste
for all this business of love and brotherhood ... In fact only one
thing has, in the past, saved people like you from being husded off
the stage of history for good and all, and that thing has been your
characteristic timidity and hypocrisy. You have never made any
serious effort to carry your principles logically into practice, and
very lucky for you, too.’ 35

The novel, and Vander’s character in particular, is the most
sustained fictional examination of fascist ideology in this
period. The argument between the Professor and Vander
serves the same horrifying purpose in the novel as the interview
between Winston and O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four and
much of O’Brien’s argument is couched in Vander’s terms.
The difference between the two novels and the two scenes is
that Warner gives Vander a specific political location, gives the
‘National Legion’ a social, cultural and philosophical content,
and that Warner offers an alternative to fascism’s too-easy
success. At the end of the novel the Professor is recovering
from a bout of ‘interrogation’.

Then he remembered that abject and broken moaning of the
prisoner in the next cell, and he thought of the coundess innocent
and obscure men and women who at this moment were being
tortured and lacked any means of hope or relief. His mind went
out to Jinkerman and his son, and he wished them success, even in
enterprises that would involve violence or civil war, so long as
there was any hope of abolishing what to him seemed now the
worst thing of all, a lawless and irrational oppression ... 36

5. A New Sort of Thriller

A third reason why anti-fascist novelists chose to write about
the political future rather than the present, in fabulous rather
than immediately pressing settings, is that this permitted many
of them to write in popular forms, to introduce comic or
thriller elements to their work. It would have been difficult,
possibly even in bad taste, to describe the real anti-fascist

201

Andy Croft

struggles in East London, Berlin, Vienna or Madrid in these
terms, s, nee this might trivialise the risks and dangers run by
the men and women involved in those struggles
A number of writers clearly sought to popularise socialist
polmcs m the early 1930s by setting them in the form of
popularly-readable novels, for example, Ellen Wilkinson’s The

(1932) ' Har ° ld Heslop's The Cnme of P,u,
Ropner (1934), Montagu Slaters Second City (1931) Graham
Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934), and some of the Coles’ noveT
This is worth remembering, since the thriller, country-house
mystery and detective-story genres in the 1920s and 1930s were
ovemhdmingly used by deeply consemative, often 'anti-
Bolsherdt vn-iters^And there was, at the same time, a suspicion
on the left towards these sorts of writing. 37

A popular novelist who used political ideas and events to
give his writing greater immediacy and urgency was the prolific
Rupert Grayson. Gun Cotton - Murder at the Bank (1939) was his
fifteenth novel. In many respects it is of a piece with the other
twelve Gun Cotton novels, pitting the predictable hero
against predictably impossible odds. What is remarkable about
the novel however, is that the villain is of a new kind:

Gun had been watching Relff carefblly, and he realised that the
man was something more than a mere criminal. His self-restraint
was admirable; his geniality a splendid cloak - but beneath all that
Gun could see m the glint of his eyes and the note behind his voice

ftat^Nn h W 7 S " C FanadCal in WS hatred England,
h / S F deV ° tIOn CO ’ as Gun feIt P^tty certain, the cause of
International Fascism ... And all the more dangerous for that
Gun thought to himself. ’

‘We have behind us almost unlimited resources. For, though it
may not be generally recognised, practically eveiy capitalist in the

system aTdti, ^ has been tottering for some years as a
though r!f e y mg , that Can Save ic is world fascism. And so,

A^d IT T SeCTet ’ m ° St eVei7 Ca P italist is a fa3 cist at heart.

^ ° f ^ WCakhieSt ° f them - ™ <iuite

say about that Whh aUSe ^ ^ m ° ney - No more «>

anythin® n f h J man P ower almost

England°... '3* d “ be conquered “ even the Bank of

202 Inside the Myth

That even a professional thriller writer like Grayson should
choose to characterise his villain as a fascist, that it is a British
fascism he depicts, that Relff should connive to articulate a
basically Marxist analysis of fascism - this is all testimony to
the extraordinary developments within the thriller genre in the
late 1930s, and the penetration of anti-fascism into our literary
life.

Cecil Day Lewis’ (as ‘Nicholas Blake’) in The Smiler with the
Knife (1939) pitted his well-connected heroine Georgina
Strangeways against the dastardly Chilton Canteclo, leader of
the fascist ‘English Banner’ stockpiling arms beneath
Nottingham Castle. In Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier (1936)
the quiet and non-political physicist Henry Barstow, himself
reading a spy- story about ‘Conway Carruthers’ suddenly
becomes ‘Conway Carruthers’ and dashes off to the Ruritanian
country of Ixania, and he engages in the anti-fascist struggle
there. Amabel Williams-Ellis set her Learn to Love First (1939) in
a similar geography, in ‘Carolia’ in the mid 1940s. There her
aristocradc heroine Renata zu Lichtenhof is driven by love to
murder the fascist leader Stecker and make contact with the
Communist-led resistance. In Andrew Marvell’s science-ficdon
Minimum Man (1938) a fascist coup by the ‘Party of New
Freedom’ in Britain in 1950, is only resisted by the socialist
underground joining forces with the telepathic and flying
foot-high mutants, the ‘minimum’ people. The narrator of
Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1936) is on the run from
fascist ‘National State Party’ police in Britain 1941. Bruce
Hamilton’s The Brighton Murder Trial: Rex v Rhodes (1937)
purports to be a case history of a trial of an anti-fascist in 194-.
The story is written in 1950, in ‘these days of expectation and
activity’ when ‘the eyes of Soviet Europe are turned towards the
future’, and when die fascist tyranny of the ‘Nadonal Youth’
government has been overthrown at last.

Finally in Bruce Hamilton’s Traitor’s Way (1938) and Graham
Greene’s The Confidential Agent (1939) the left produced two of
the best chase- thrillers of the decade. Greene’s novel was set in
Britain during the (unspecified) Spanish Civil War, where
agents for the Republican and fascist forces are competing for
a crucial coal-contract. As the Republican ‘D’ is racing against
ume, and his opposite number ‘L\ he is on the run from the

203

Andy Croft

British police on a framed murder-charge Through an
exciting plot that doesn’t stop turning till thf last paA“
never sure whom he can trust. P 8 ’

You could trust nobody but yourself, and sometimes you were
uncertain whether after all you could trust yourself. They didn’t
trust you, any more than they had trusted the friend with the holy
medal they were right then, and who was to say whether they were
not right now? You - you were a prejudiced party; the ideolosrv

Wt C °ThV ffai K hereSi “ CTept in • ' ' He Wasn>t certain *at he
hX f , Ched at , thls moment ’ he wasn ’t certain that it wasn’t
right for him to be watched. After all, there were aspects of

r hiCh ’ if he searched h,S heart ’ did not
p ... And the watcher - was he watched ? He was haunted for
a moment by the vision of an endless distrust ... 39

In Traitor’s Way, set in the early 1940s, the hero Noel Mason
escapes from Parkhurst, only to find himself in unwitting
possession of evidence about a fascist plot to embroil Britain in
a war with the Soviet Union. n m

I sat down on the edge of the bed and sweated. It was to come at
last, the second great world war which had hung like a cloud over
urope for a decade and more. That Great Britain should be

woTld have bef m ^ ^ ° f ' ** CyramS su T >rised me than it
would have before I went to prison, for things had changed since

EWorld C T ** ^ ° f Pit ‘ In sho « months
£d » °ve ' I h 3t r ' •: h32ard made me ’ an esca P ed convict
secret Tr w r \ $ mC ’ a P artid P ant in this deadly

Zen iLe thehT ’ * * faVOUred me ’ a chance of

one andfn f ° US COnsummation - The idea was a terrifying
one, and for a few moments I felt dizzy and shaken ... I ran to the

basm and immersed my head two or three times in icy cold water
The terror passed, and I could think once more."

unlr d the P ° Iice ’ hidin S from ^e large fascist

»<> uSZ" 1 not \ nowing whom ,o trust ' reaiis| "s

let slip more th, „ T ‘u W, !T,. he h “ given P a P^ ha?

reached the safe ml H ^ J ^ known ’ Mason fi nally
the safe address he has been given - only to realise that

204 Inside the Myth

he has come to the fascist headquarters ...

There was of course, a good deal of comedy in all this, as the
authors could not always resist drawing attention to their sense
of the genre, and characterising the fascists as stage devils.
There were at the same time a number of anti-fascist novels
whose main emphases were comic. Shamus Frazer’s picaresque
A Shroud, as Well as a Shirt’ ( 1935) was a sustained satire on the
absurdities, vanities and brutalities of British fascism. The
‘True Bom Britons’ model their uniforms on cricket shirts,
their idea of political ethics are based (at first) on public- school
games, and they come to power on a wave of nationalism
created by a Test Match at the Oval.

Easy targets for the satirists were the uniform fetishes of
fascist organisation. In The Virgin King (1936) by Francis
Watson, a whole Ruritanian fascist movement is inadvertandy
started by a dress-designer with a passion for yellow shirts and
jodhpurs; in Terence Greenidge’s Philip and the Dictator (1938),
the dandy Francoist party on the island of St Michael are
known by their dress as the ‘Silver Coats’; in The Rhubarb Tree
(1937) by Kenneth Allot and Stephen Tait, the absurd British
Nazi ‘Sons of Empire’ wear red, white and blue shirts; Joseph
Macleod ended his Overture to Cambridge (1936) with a vision of
the world permanently divided into antagonistic but identical
fascist camps, the ‘Blues’, ‘Yellows’, ‘Oranges’, and ‘Purples’.

The inanities and contradictions of fascist rhetoric were a
recurring joke too. In The King Sees Red (1936) Anthony
Bertram inverted the race theories of Nazism in his Ruritanian
dictator Rosenbaum. A new salute has been introduced in
Steinbergen, ‘shoulders raised ... the arms being kept close to
the sides ... the hands were bent outwards with the palms
raised.’

‘Oy, oy, oy,’ Rosenbaum had begun. Thunderously the
Steinbergians had answered ‘Oy’. ‘Men of the Lost Tribe of
Steinbergen, what have you done with your birthright? Where is
the freedom your fathers won with their shining swords and that
we shall win again with our indomitable will to victory. Where is
it? It has been given away. It has been given to effete parliaments
of uncircumcised dogs. Who gave it? Who are the traitors? You
cannot answer. But I can. I will tell you. I, your leader, who am

always right. I am right in what I think; I am right in what I say I

If; What 1 do - ( °y- oy)- I speak with the voice of die
people You are my people. I am your leader. I am you In
mysucal union from my cradle in Whitechapel my soul has burnt

One oeo 7 ^ ^ S ° UlS ° f ^ pe °P ,e of Steinbergen.

fndTT ° nC Tr 0116 bl °° d: s ^dard-bearers ofcukure

and the sharp sword of the hero and the irrevocable will to victory

I tell you that it is the men of the impure race who have betrayed

In Steinbergen it is not Jewishness but virginity that

crime.

is a

The day after next will be a National Fertilisation Day. After that
a virgins, or anyone having more than one grandmother who
was a virgin, or any man committing racial disgrace with a virgin
would forthwith be deprived of their civic rights 41

None of these novels however lost sight for a moment of the
seriousness of their subject matter. As Bertram put it ‘apart

Jf 0m . the , sh ° 0tl D ng ’ bating, mutilating, imprisoning or exiting
of individuals, Rosenbaum had so far avoided usinj force ’ ?n

T ^V,° keS mni $OUr before the end. In Maurice
Richardsons The Bad Companions (1936) two con-men leave

prison with a plan to establish a bogus fascist organisation

Thdr^id^a 3 dlStmgU1S u ed ' l00kmg lunadG the y have found.’
Their idea is to make money out of all the retired

cqpto-fascists in the Home Counties. Unfortunately the plan

is more successful than they had ever imagined and the real

fatec move in ... The comedy of Lady Sybtl TathaS

polmcal equivocations in The Rhubarb Tree l she change her

fcrl/^T °„ Ven, gh ' “ a ‘ Life ' ° f Hit'er, according^ d,"

£eto^

is bi “* d s rss

206

Inside the Myth

marble Rupert Might stood in front of the Horse Guards at
Whitehall - its arm raised in eternal salute. It was one of the
few things in London that remained standing after the Great
Air Raid ...’ 42

6. The Sources of Fascism

Part of this writing about fascism and a possible fourth reason
why anti-fascist writers should chose non-realistic, ‘prophetic’
forms, is that it permitted them to make connections between
existing political practices (of the BUF or the National
Government) and events on the continent. In other words, to
satirise what they saw as the latent fascism of elements in British
society.

This, for example, was clearly the intention of Ruthven
Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939). In this short novel, the hero
climbs an impassable mountain to arrive in a strange and
terrifying, but familiar country. Its inhabitants ‘seemed to be
emphasised versions of the sort of people that I could vaguely
remember in my country. Everything they said seemed to be
slightly in excess, they seemed to be caricatures of their types
and professions.’ 43 The police in this place are dangerous
mental defectives, the press and the Church entirely in the
pocket of the nakedly fascist government, and public schools
run on paramilitary lines. He eventually escapes, climbs the
peak and returns to his own land, only to realise of course that
he has never in fact left it ...

By putting fascism in power in Britain in 1940, Storm
Jameson in In the Second Year (1936) was able to make a series of
such connections. As the tide indicates, Jameson examines the
consolidadon of fascism in its second year of real power, the
concentration camps, the purging of the Universities, the
public and-semidsm. In pardcular she describes the govern-
ment’s clash with its more radical supporters, clearly based on
the events in Germany in 1934, when the idealists within the
‘National State Party’ are brutally exterminated. The novel
proposes a pattern of events likely to lead to a fascist
government in Britain — the failure of industrial militancy
without political leadership, the collapse of the trade-union
movement, large-scale unemployment, the acceptance by the
Labour Party of a patriotic and fiscal consensus, t e

Andy Croft

207

continuing ineptitude of the National Government, the
lsunity o the left, and a growing disillusionment with
parliamentary politics. Moreover Jameson suggests some of

SirThomas 6 Ch "T i^' 7 l ° SUCC ° Ur fascism “ fanciers like
I Thomas Chamberlayne, young idealists like Ernest Sacker

by-standmg intellectuals like Tower, careerist social democrat
ike Sir Alexander Denham, anti-Communist trade-union
leaders uke George Body, men of action like Richard Sacker
and not least those like Hebden,

die violent and vicious sub-life depicted in ... a certain kind of
American novel and film steps off the page or the screen and plays
its horrid part in what is called the regeneration of his country A

disgusting cinematograph psychology becomes actual, as in a
nightmare, 44

In The Brighton Murder Trial, Bruce Hamilton used the device

T dn A( r ° m,he fiiture to P a “ comment on his
n, n t, t't 'y al hlstorlan w ho is ostensibly the author of
7>W explains that British fascism failed in
the late 1930s because it had its thunder stolen.

The final retirement of Mr Baldwin, the purging of the National
Government of the taint of socialism’, the introduction into the
Cabinet of the Churchills, Amerys, Lords Lloyd, Rothermere and

eaverbrook, had seemed to provide an administration of
sufficient strength

unnecessai 7- The case Rex v Rhodes

is a nurde ^ f th,S g ° vemment is in P°wer, and although it

speech for thi 13 ’ “ 1S appare L m from the Attorney General’s

ecu t/Zr P T eCUa ° n , that k is the an O"fascism of the

accused that is really on trial.

S— h 00 ' ° n trial here - If -'t were, I have little doubt as to
your verdict as responsible citizens would be. However if is

Politics ishow h f Rh0de K Wh ° ^ ° n triaI ’ and ^ ° nly ^ uestion of
regime of re T tea ^ ln S s lmbl bed from that great oriental

"lies it l,kT’ u nt ‘‘? hnSt m modern dress > die Soviet Union,

■ likely that James Bradlaugh Rhodes should have

208 Inside the Myth

committed this crime ... the Party to which he belongs, a party
which our perhaps too easy-going political system has so far
permitted a legal existence ... 45

The inconsistencies of the police evidence, the perjury of
some of the fascist witnesses, the judge’s misdirection of the
jury, the political allegiances of the Attorney General, amount
to an extraordinary indictment of the contemporary British
legal system, impossible to make if the novel had not been set
in the future.

A fifth reason why anti-fascist writers chose future and
fantastic locations for their novels is that these enabled them to
make a long-term analysis of fascism. By casting fascism in the
future, as a successful and permanent force of government ,
novelists were able to examine its political content and its
popular appeal.

A novel like Swastika Night (1937) by ‘Murray Constantine’
imagining Europe after seven hundred years of Nazi rule, was
able to offer a feminist critique of Nazism impossible in any
other fictional circumstances. The world of the novel is divided
between the Nazi and Japanese Empires, permanently warring
over their sources of labour and materials in the colonies.
Women are kept together in cages, their heads shaved, their
male children taken away at eighteen months; sexual contact
with men is only possible under the cover of darkness, and
permanent relationships not permitted; rape is not recognised
as a crime.

To love a woman, to the German mind, would be equal to loving
a worm . . . Women like these, hairless, with naked shaven scalps,
the wretched ill-balance of their feminine forms oudined by their
tight bifurcated clothes - that horrible meek bowed way they had
of walking and standing, head low, stomach out, buttocks bulging
behind - no grace, beauty, no uprightness, all these were male
qualities. If a woman dared to stand like a man she would be
beaten.

In the novel a young English ‘dissident’ is entrusted by one
of the Knights with the only existing copy of a ‘true’ history of
the world. Alfred learns from this that Hitler was not a God,

Anc/y Croft

th T ,v “ did n °' b,o ' , •

our Lord Hitler 720 mr. , y erman Em P lre In this year of

^ To 2’ ^ ^ ^

acute uneasinecc t course, but now it was causing

LlZZoT “ S,OP repr0dud "«

man who had no mother th, u u ’ h worsh ip of a

zx, e s ?z fr „ Klr ’ z ve f “ ^

™y fresh statist,^! paper ' hat

•hen .developing a "^T to "° P

7. Orwell and Anti-Fascism

^menffhar and „ Unique criticism of fascism, an

selfdestructive and diatTf l ™ ys °P nist and ultimately
hysteria. ^ - sexual

sophisticated and original of li r undoubtedly the most
Of the late 1930s an lM i S' T* 1 amW »« i « dystopias

forgotten today I„ a ^ h is

Photogranh thJie J . number of specific details - the

explains the true histmw Y ^ dlss ! dent ’ ; the party leader who
w hich proves aL cZI 311 ° f ' the Part y; the book

official rewriting of S histn OSS1 b e ’ and memor y inviolable;

I g f hlstor y; the permanent vilification of

2io Inside the Myth

the enemy ("the four arch-fiends Lenin, Stalin, Roehm and
Karl Barth); the abasement of sex and the outlawing of love;
the state of perpetual and unwinnable warfare ( we re dying,
both the huge Empires side by side, of our own strength’) -
Swastika Night clearly anticipates Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
by several years.

There is no evidence that Orwell ever read Swastika Night, or
indeed that he read any of the anti-fascist novels mentioned
above. Whether or not he was influenced, either in general or
specific ways by this body of writing is not important. What is
important is that, with the exception of Isherwood, Greene
and Day Lewis, these anti-fascist novelists have been
disregarded by literary history, and their novels are long out of
print. Anti-fascist fiction in this country was a much more
varied, original, widely-based and influential body of writing
than is generally allowed. Pessimistic in the short term,
committed to a victory over fascism in the long term,
addressed primarily as a warning, a call to vigilance, looking to
the future as a way to talk about the present, drawing upon all
sorts of styles and forms — there is just space for Nineteen
Eighty- Four on the end of this shelf- full of novels. But that
novel begins to look a lot less original, a lot less clear and
important a contribution to the dystopian tradition, to our
imaginative understanding of tyranny, when it is put alongside
all these other titles.

And it must be remembered of course that Orwell had no
access to any of this earlier dystopian writing, since it was the
product of a literary culture he rejected. This literary
phenomenon arose out of the arguments for a Popular Front
current in the late 1930s in parts of the Labour Party and in the
Communist Party, and influential far beyond them both. Not
all the writers discussed above were socialists, few belonged to
any political party, but all were participants in a remarkable
anti-fascist literary alliance that Orwell went to repeated

lengths to abuse. i

As late as July 1939 he was characterising the anti-fascist

movement as a

sort of monstrous harlequinade in which everyone is constantly

bounding across the stage in a false nose - Quakers shouting tor a

Andy Croft

211

poi e churchii1

tSfrZ'fi sreater ,nju! ; ,ce? - ““--Twoum

system to b ™« “O'™

way just as bad?" g blgger and in lts diffe ™t

British ,mperia,ism

home took priority over the^ea^of'fasdsm ' CapUallSm aI
A couple of years earlier he had argued

I do not see how one can oppose fascism except by working for the

overthrow of capitalism, starting of course T y T mgt ° rthe

T r _ i| < o* course, in one s own counh-v

If one collaborates wtth a capitalist-imperialist govemmem iTa

jomed, now

influence, increasingly hostile to what they saw as the

reformism’ of the Popular Front idea a t , the

Of war Orwell was

td “ S't — fr ° m r ' d “ Pi ” 1 - ' W ” ld

democracy- and ’Stop °!

blue-eyed boy ^ ^ "*r

S 1 KS? a ‘ ,rf "™ S ‘ h0Ugh,e “n.'moJed'

^ZZutT’I ‘ N , arrowed down’? This is a hard phrase
extraordinary "amt a deVelo P m ' nt ab| o » generate such an
B ut then fo^Orw ii ™ Iterary culture in so short a time.

w hole anti-fascist canon^ M ! mide J ke Whale m 1940 the
works of Auden w / i be reduced to the collected
Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Isherwood, in

212

inside trie Myin

particular to Auden’s poem Spain (and to two lines of that

\ TKomi 1

poem

ular to Auden s poem spam iana cl
.) Edward Thompson has argued that

in this essay, more than any other, the aspirations of a generation
were buried; not only was a political movement, which embodied
much that was honourable, buried, but so also was the notion of
disinterested dedication to a political cause. 50

can we conclude of

Orwell, he wrote, ‘falsifies the record.’

More than this, surely. What else can we conclude ot
someone who complained in 1944 that ‘English literature had
failed to contribute to ‘the special class of literature that has
arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of
fascism’ and that

England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call
concentration camp literature. The special world created by
secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up
trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved
of, but it has made very little emotional impact

— what else can we conclude but that — as so often — Orwell

didn’t know what he was talking about? 51

Our sense of the sheer size, liveliness and richness of British
anti-fascist literature has been denied us for over forty years,
largely because of the critical judgements of George Orwell.
There is some irony in the fact that the consequent gap in our
^ f fh,. tnurrps of tvrannv. of the wav in which

anti

There is some irony in the fact that the consequent gap in our
understanding of the sources of tyranny, of the way in which
the human imagination has responded to tyranny, has been
filled for so long by one novel only, and that this novel should
have been written by, of all people, George Orwell.

Notes

F. Warburg,

1

Publisher’s Report on

London,

Nineteen Eighty-Four, 13 December
ndon, 1973; D. Trilling, Nation, 25
rru- 11 1QAQ- FT Read. Wow

1948. See All Publishers are Equal , London, iy/3; u. 1 ruling, T.

June 1949; V. Wedgewood, Time and Tide , 11 June 1949; H. Rea .
Review, June 1950; P. Rahv, Partisan Review, July 1950; R A - Leif>
to Oceania, Ohio, 1969, p.26; A. Burgess, 1985, London, 1978, P «. '

f\r\ay cro/f

Crick Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, 1982 „ 570 - I

Animal Farm and Ninpfppn r » . _ * oz > L. Spencer,

Adult Education LT Tr™*' Leeds University

1981, p.81 ; WSteiS^J Occasional Papers No 3

1975, pp.216, 222. ’ °f Nineteen Ei &ty-Four, Ann Arbor,

2 S “S r eXamp,e J- Wa,sh ’ ^scist Quarterly, January , 956 . c sm „ n M

After the Thirties, London ^1956 TITfo L ° nd ° n ’ . 1955; Jack Lmdsa y.
responses to the n ehef uf ^ extens.ve survey of cnt.cal
Heritage, London, 1975 J ' (etU ’ Geor S e The Critical

3 pi34; * <*»*■«.

1984; P. Johnson, Spectator, 7 Janua c ct'Sf 28

18 December 1983, 25 March 198? I

Survive 1984?’ Encounter, June 1984. ’ ' VV|11 Ge °rge Orwell

4 See E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale* in f p / . *

Apathy, London, 1960. ’ E P * Thor npson (ed.), Out of

5 A. Burgess, op.cit., p.52.

6 issaTft ^ZZjfeltZ If °cZt: 0*!ll VoT: TheC / leCt t

1970, p.95, referred to hereafter as 'CEIL' * ’ Harmondswor *,

7 See LF. Clarke, Tale of the Future, London 1979- Th* p ct?

Lcmdon^ig^g.'p 6 ] 1 ^ 011 ^ a ^ (edsd ’ Culture and ^Z^inBritrinintiZrhirties,

9 For discussion of this wider hterary development see C Kl, <c • ,•
Ficdon m the 1930s; in [. Lucas (ed ) Tho tZ . C / ee L *?* K us Sociallst
Brighton, 1978 and Andv fWV *‘c • . lTties: A Challenge to Orthodoxy,

space the present essav x’ 2 '. Though for reasons of

in the 1930s, it should be recognised drat thiTfr' 0 " ° f , nOV f S P ublishe d
sustained throughout the 1 940s^ h terary develo pment was

■0 R. Todd, Preface to The Lost Traveller, New York 1 968
W OUOn m^ W ^ld I Never Made, London, 1967 p 83

' (i«" n E“» r rCd‘°,‘ h “ ” ere *7 w "“'' m »■«» a.

ml V (,9SS, “ d

not so much to attack cSSkT ■ 1 Each wa5 concerned, however,

each sought to Z t ^ “ T sustainin g ide °logy, and

gestation of both Upward’s and of idealism. The lengthy

Position of Hamilton’s within hk 1710 S novels ’ and r,lc exceptional
Partly explains the exceptional ° Wn f e * a £S erated ' natura l*st’ writing,
to the Border was published it °f these titles - B y the tim e Journey

)3 ^-fantasy novel P ’ “ dear that Upward thou &^ of it as an

" ms - pm

214 Inside the Myth

15 L. Mitchell, Gay Hunter , London, 1934, pp.47, 178. For a discussion of
the influence of Marxism and Diffusionism on Mitchell’s work see I.S.
Munro, Leslie Mitchell , London, 1966 and D.F. Young, Beyond the Sunset ,
Aberdeen, 1973.

16 See F. Brockway, Inside the Left , London, 1942.

17 F. Brockway, Purple Plague , London, 1935, p.263 (my italics).

18 See K. Radek, ‘World Literature’ in H.G. Scott (ed.), Problems of Soviet
Literature , London, 1935, p.108 (my italics); republished as Soviet Writers*
Congress , 1934 , London, 1977.

19 Left Review, October 1934.

20 Left Review , ‘Controversy’, March 1935 (my italics). See also New Writing ,
Spring 1936, where John Lehmann declared that it should be ‘first and
foremost interested in literature, and though it does not intend to open
its pages to writers of reactionary or fascist sendments, it is independent
of any political party’ - in other words it was to be simultaneously
non-polidcal, literary- based and anti-fascist.

21 Significandy, when in 1937 Philip Toynbee’s first novel The Savage Days
was published, describing a successful Communist led revoludon in this
country, the establishment of Soviets and the extermination of the
‘Whites’, it was severely cridcised in the Daily Worker. ‘Gabriel’ noted with
some impatience that the novel was written by ‘an Oxford undergraduate
who ... has not yet come of age’ and that while ‘this young man should
be encouraged to keep on writing’ he should ‘for a time at least, be
discouraged from writing.’ Daily Worker , 17 March 1937. Raymond
Williams recalls (in Politics and Letters , London, 1979) that he wrote such a
novel at the age of sixteen called ‘Mountain Sunset’, which was rejected
by Gollancz. The miner and novelist Harold Heslop also wrote such a
novel, ‘Red Earth’, about a successful British revolution set in 1941; he
could never get it published in this country.

22 Daily Worker , 11 April 1934.

23 See, for example. The Communist Party of Germany Lives and Fights ,
enthusiastically reviewed in the Daily Worker , 27 December 1933.

24 See A. Rattenbury, ‘Some Poems and a Play by Montagu Slater’ in J.
Lucas (ed.), op.cit.

25 N. Mitchison, We Have Been Warned , London, 1935, p.552.

26 Daily Worker , 8 May 1935.

27 C. Day Lewis, New Masses , 7 June 1938; John Lehmann made a similar
point the following year when he said that this sort of political fantasy
‘could only have been produced in a country which was at the same time
isolated from the “gradual ruin spreading like a stain” and deeply
involved in the long run in its consequences.’ New Writing in Europe ,
Harmondsworth, 1940, p. 61.

28 C. Isherwood, New Republic , 8 March 1939; see also J. Symons, The
Thirties , London, 1960, pp.16, 28; andj. Lindsay, op.cit., p.33.

29 M. Roberts, ‘The Tragic Way’, T.E. Hulme , London, 1938.

30 S. Hynes, The Auden Generation , London, 1976, p.3 15; J.A. Morris makes a
similar point when he argues that the effect of Kafka was to encourage the

‘examinationof therole(orplight)of theindividual, rather than the

Andy Croft

215

if

from work by Warner ^JnwarH T [™ C P ,eces ' including extracts
collection had n^SodS’ on. ^ “ d Herbm Hod ^ e ' The
Chalmers Mitchell on fasdsm a’s Y T 0 ™ from Sir P «er

Red, London. 1938 pathological condition’; In Letters of

Is L0n ‘ ,0n ’ ,m ■ H*™on*word,, ,9,4. pp

’’ 3 t poZTr Uf ‘

'Y 1 '* “

period adopted the thriller cenrT’for’ p f° [ aSC ' S ' novels o! this
Shadow MuuoUni London 1931 .j , ,? ', J 0 ''!' 1 ""' Wand, Th,

.contemporary discussion’offascistthrUlerssee’lf’Riatova^Fa Y

Reeert, English Literature', W No 6 XcJ Z," ““

depicting the 'coming be»«n Bri^a’d r® ’ ”” ° f “»*
t S,.r, ofth, Bit Of London 19,4 ^ '* PM ' “
occupation of Czechoslovakia. ’ ’ 35 ’ descnb,n g the German

40 r h^T’ Th l Con Mential Agent, Harmondsworth. 1982 p 10
40 B ■ Hamilton, Tutor’s Way , London. 1938. p.97 P

«c,io™l i^Tonrf £isfSee1 , h L ° nd PP 2 “' «»*«■

J do ”

43 R. Todd, Over the Mountain, London, 1939, p.63
M f‘ Jameson, In the Second Year London iqsfi _ ac. , ,

45 ^ deaIi ' ig ^"^

whose identity /have been Ce u S nah| WOmai l nOVel r St ’ P enTlission to reveal
detailed examination ofth b e “ obtain from her agents; for a
Nineteen Eighty-Four see D T beWeen Swastlka Night and

Gender and Power n/L’- 0rWel1 s Des P air > Burdekin’s Hope-
Power m Dystopta’ m Women’s Studies International Forum

216

Inside the Myth

Vol.7, no. 2, pp. 85-95. Frank Tilsley made the same connection between
patriarchy and fascism, domestic and European politics in Little Tin God ,
London, 1939.

47 G. Orwell, ‘Not Counting Niggers’, Adelphi , July 1939, CEJL , Vol.I,
p.434.

48 Letter to Geoffrey Gorer, ibid., p.318.

49 ‘Inside the Whale’, ibid., p.563. For an excellent discussion of Orwell as
an ultra-leftist and as a propagandist see C. Fleay and M. Sanders,
‘Becoming a Dragon: George Orwell and Propaganda’, Middlesex
Polytechnic History Journal , Vol.I No. 4, supplement spring 1984.

50 E.P. Thompson, op.cit.

51 G. Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’, Focus , 2, 1946 {CEJL, Vol.3, pp.271-2).

Stuart Hall

Conjuring Leviathan: Orwell on the
State

Orwell was a representative, as well as a controversial, figure -
just as Nineteen Eighty-Four became a ‘representative’ as well as
a prophetic book Both came to ‘stand for’ something
significant in the political and intellectual life of the age tK
not surpnsmg. Though Orwell was only forty-six' Wien he
re he lived through tumultuous times, was personally
involved rn events which became turning poTms in
twentieth-century history, and engaged directly with themes
and qiiesttons which have dominated much of our political

Z th? ZL T T fi K St h < and ’ <tWiIi e ht of Empire’
Un the Burma police), the ‘Hungry Thirdes’ and the

arche3 n and e f WimeSSed ^ ° f ^ sdsm and made *e
archetypal anti-fascist response - he went to fight in S D ain He

hand _ grim impac. of sSX t he

haneH h rT ent a Eur0 P e ’ HiS P ° litical Outlook was deeply
In ad/ - hC SeC ?. nd World War > and then by the ‘Cold War’

events inT n i° there ’’ 0rwe11 also wote about these

tary’ style^whfch^h plain ‘ Spoken ’ self-expressing ‘documen-
pedod Th™ h , eCame Char acteristic of him and of his
r j hr ° Ugh thlS WItnessin g of events, he helped to define
St^ n n?L entS meant , 3S political experiences - giving efch
com^e hlS PCCUhar,y ‘ En S lish ’ P° int of view. In trying m

areobliged^recko^ 1 * Wh3t tW CVentS ‘ reaJly meant ’’ we

Why we keen a ^ Way or another, with Orwell. That is

since he waTso oS f °7 eI1 right? ’ A ho P e,e ss approach,
was so often right and wrong, sometimes in succession

217

218 Inside the Myth

more often in the same moment. Despite the claims on moral
clarity and political honesty which his style makes for him, his
political writing was shot through with ambiguities and, in the
final analysis, deeply contradictory. For example, the best case
of these ‘boiled rabbits of the left’ who are hesitant about
sinking their differences with the right simply because they are
both against fascism (and whom Orwell excoriates in that
inexcusably casual brutalist phrase, ‘My Country Right or
Left’) is, of course, none other than Orwell himself, writing in
exacdy that sceptical vein about the dangers of sinking
differences only a few months earlier in ‘Not Counting
Niggers’. He was almost always partial: but the parts he saw,
he saw into with an astonishing penetration. Even when wrong,
he makes us think again about our certainties. That is why
there are so many ‘Orwells’. There were so many to choose
from. In addition, there are those we have felt obliged to make
up for ourselves. It now seems wholly wrong to read Orwell for
his ‘correctness’. We read him for his contradictoriness, for his
vulnerability, his gift of exposure. Of the mountain of critical
observations, favourable and dismissive, which exists about
Orwell, the one observation which in my view comes closest to
the truth is that of Raymond Williams:

Instead of flattening out the contradictions by choosing this or
that tendency as the ‘real’ Orwell, or fragmenting them by
separating this or that period or this or that genre, we ought to say
that it is the paradoxes which are finally significant. 1

That, at any rate, is the approach adopted in this sketch of
the evolution of Orwell’s ideas about the state, which
eventually found such powerful expression in the nightmare
vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Despite his socialism, Orwell was instinctively an
individualist. He held independent, sometimes idiosyncratic
views; he was always ‘his own man’. George Woodcock, his
anarchist friend, called him ‘an iconoclast’. He fought with
others for causes he believed in - but always in his own way.
He hated to be told what to do, bossed around, regimented or
made to toe the party line. He belonged to the libertarian
socialist, rather than the collectivist socialist, tradition. This

Stuart Hall

219

had consequences for his instinctive attitudes toward,

s a ^ 0r wha?h iP h ne 7 d " and hence for his view of the

state What he hated about the fellow-travelling left-win?

mte ectuals was their willingness to subordinate themselves to

Sved^K me and . Co S ,ve U P thinking for themselves. What he
! d about Cat al°nia was the spirit of radical egalitarianism-

no°s™unW ’2n kS "f "u ^ ° r badges > no ^-clicking and
no saluting. - One of the greatest strengths of the English he

argued, was the weakness of its militarist tradition the

WlhariWm WaS 3 UmversaII y hated %tire. ‘Fascism’ and
totalitarianism came to signify t h e jackboot, the torture

chamber and the rubber truncheon: the iconographv of naked
violent unqualified state power, with the individual Tits
isposa the basic s tructure of imagery in Nineteen Eighty-Four
The proles are unable to become the basis of the opposition to
tyranny, and Winston and Julia go down alone, holding aloft
the flickering candle of individual liberty, private emotion and
personal dissent. Orwell’s individualism gave him a basic
orientation to politics which was fundamentally alien to the
statist notion of ‘bringing socialism to the masses’ through the
imposition of state dictatorship and, indeed, to the thole
tradition which identified socialism with collectivism and state
control. Nineteen Eighty -Four owed a great deal to Orwell’s
instinctive libertarianism.

, 0 ° / ^ ella ! S ° hada ver T independent political formation « a
social st, which distinguished him from the majority of
intellectuals who turned to the left in the 1930s. For whereas
p ^ i C under or bit of the Communist Party and the
thTlLP r ° nt ’ ,? nVe j S formation was mainly in the orbit of

statist of Party ° f Che Ieft ’ °PP° s ed to the
tatism of both the Labour Party and Stalinism: ‘the only

tish party which aims at anying I should regard as

Socialism ; which Crick describes as ‘left-wing, egalitfrian a

which is h™ h HlS rOUte t0 Spam Was via his ILP contacts -

batuhon C3me C ° J ° m P ° UM rather 3 Communist

betrayed thl T- “ aC ^ pt *** ILP line tha t Stalin had

social^ ^ rev °lution and was holding back the pace of the

bTflv in, T? “ Spain ’ When he returned from Spain, he
| J ne the ILP in 1938, though he was an inveterate

220

Inside the Myth

non-joiner. Though he admitted that, in England, there was
only one socialist party that ‘really mattered’ in a mass sense -
the Labour Party - he never wrote or spoke of it seriously as a
political vehicle which could bring about a fundamental shift
of power. 5 It was to the short-lived Commonwealth Party that
he looked for leadership of the popular movement he thought
was developing during the radicalizing years of the war.

On his return from Spain, the anarchists tried to recruit
him, but he never formally joined them. However,
undoubtedly, his experiences in Spain strengthened the natural
‘anarchism’ of his politics and this, too, carried with it
implications for his attitude towards the state. Catalonia
remained with him as a radical, egalitarian utopia. POUM’s
brand of oppositional communism and anarcho-syndicalism,
and the egalitarian working-class character which Barcelona
assumed under its inspiration, strongly appealed to him. It was
the destruction of POUM and the imprisonment of anarchists
and others, including many of his ILP friends, which
conclusively demonstrated to him the consequences of the
Stalinist betrayal of the revolution. These events deepened his
anti- Communism. But they also set in motion one of the most
powerful themes in Orwell’s thinking (and in Nineteen
Eighty-Four)\ the idea of the growing convergence between the
fascist and the Stalinist dictatorships, and of totalitarianism as
the basis for a new type of state formation.

When he tried to tell the truth about Spain as he saw it, once
he had returned to England, he encountered a wall of silence
and hosdlity: the left did not want to hear. It preferred to
believe what he saw as a falsification of history. This is why, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, the question of ideological control (the
control of thought and language), the erosion of historical
memory, the falsification of records and the re-writing of
history are so basic to his view of the essential mechanisms of
the totalitarian state. It is why Winston - when he drinks a toast
- puts ‘the past’ above all else. Subordination to the party
could make intelligent people accept ludicrous ideas. But
under ‘totalitarianism’ doublethink became a necessary way of
life: ‘2 + 2 = 5’.

Were Orwell’s views on the state ‘Trotskyist’ P The Spanish
communists and the Comintern labelled POUM ‘Trotskyist .

Stuart Hall

221

When T.S Eliot politely advised Fabers not to publish Animal

Fd b rm, A h f la u b , el ! ed 0rwe!1 ’ s view point ‘Trotskyite’. Warburg
who did Publish it, was incorrectly described as ‘the Trotskyite
publisher, Yet Orwell was never a member of the Trotskyite
movement had little connection with its sects and, though
impressed by some of Trotsky’s writings, expressed doubts as
to whether things would have been radically different had
Trotsky s opposition to Stalin succeeded. Goldstein’s ‘testa-
ment in Nineteen Eighty -Four is clearly modelled on Trotsky’s
writings, as indeed was its dialectical style of argument and the
desmpcon of Cold St ein himself - 'long, thin nose, near the
end ot which a pair of spectacles was perched’. But Goldstein
and his testament are composite creations, with elements of the

pnui!? 1 ? an , arch l St ? mma Goldman > and the testament of the
POUM leader Andres Nin, as well as Trotsky himself
Goldsteins position in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell’s
attitude to him remain ambiguous.

Though Orwell did not become a Trotskyist, he did take up
at different times, positions not dissimilar from some of those
held by Trotskyists. One example of this is his wavering
adherence to the thesis that the defeat of Franco and the
deepening of the revolutionary process in Spain had to go
hand m hand - a position which he later transposed into an
argument about the war against Hitler, and the development
of an English socialism. r

, ?w ell s th . eS u abOUt the growin g convergence between East
and West and the emergence of a new kind of state based on
the rule of a powerful elite and a collectivized group - what he

wii the f h St ° ,igar ^ CaI coll ^ism’ - has manyfimilaritS
T 'i c . h f dl 1 e ° neS of J bureaucratic collectivism’ which some
tskyists later used to explain what had happened in the

exarnnfp ni ° n Ae character oft he Soviet state. For

Xrm P m th ? I960s ’ a fading American ex-Trotskyist and

published *n S n° r and 1UeraiT executor ’ Max Schachtman,
analysed! Af Bureaucratlc r Revolution in which he tried to
analyse the deformation of the Stalinist state using the theory

for oZTT C ° h llecdvism ’ f E -n more directly influentid
ig^Tefl 1 ^ 6 V1C ^ S ° f , James B umham who, in the
The Mann 1 merican Trotsk yist movement and produced
Managerial Revolution, a book which depicted the drift

222

Inside the Myth

towards a system of managed collectivism which, he argued,
pointed up the growing similarities between Hitler’s Germany,
Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Much of this reflected the evolution of Trotsky’s thinking
about the character of the Soviet dictatorship. After his
exclusion from power, Trotsky had described the Soviet state
as ‘degenerated’ through the growth of a privileged
bureaucracy which found its political representative in Stalin.
Economic backwardness, shortages and the isolation of the
Russian revolution had produced, not a new type of capitalist
ruling class but a bureaucratic caste. The state was drawn by the
need to extract forced surpluses for modernization to exploit
and coerce its own class. But from 1939 onwards (Schachtman
gives as a critical reference Trotsky’s ‘The USSR in the War’,
published in the New International in November) Trotsky
advanced the proposition that the Stalinist dictatorship was
not, as he had supposed, a workers’ state which had suffered
temporary bureaucratic ‘degeneration’, but rather ‘the first
stage of a new exploiting society’ which, on the basis of the
nationalization of property, the party and state bureaucracy
had become a new exploiting and dictatorial ‘ruling class’.
Splits between the different .Trotskyist sects depended in part
on which of Trotsky’s theories were thought to be correct.

Orwell’s thinking did not follow the intricate twists of these
internal sectarian debates. But he began to envisage a ‘new type
of social system’, with its roots in, but by-passing, its
revolutionary and democratic origins, which would continue
to exploit the masses on the basis of collectivized property and
the oligarchical rule in a repressive state of a dictatorial elite.
The lineaments of this system we clearly discernible in his
description of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four

There is another way in which Orwell related to the question
of ‘Trotskyism’. In order to secure his rule, Stalin obliged the
left opposition groups to confess that they had acted in ways
which were ‘objectively’ inimical to the Soviet Union or were
actually agents of Western capitalism. In Stalinist language, the
term ‘Trotskyite’ became synonymous with ‘enemy of the
state’: and the assault against these enemies within was
exported into the Communist parties and movements
throughout Europe - including Spain where Orwell

Stuart Hall

223

records th^ Aik firSt . hand ' Professor Crick in his biography
records that Alba, a historian of Catalan Mancism reported

that three days before the POUM leader Andres’ Nin was

expelled from the Republican government (the beginning of

the drive against POUM), the Soviet newsnaoer pH

announced that, ‘In Catalonia the elimination of Trotskrites

l" d ^ narCho ' SyndlCahsts has be gun. It will be carried out with
same energy as it was carried out in the Soviet Union ’ 7
In a remarkable passage on the manipulation of political
anguage, which carries echoes down to our own day, Orwell
reflects on how this particular syllogism - Trotskyist -

IZ&TT* S ° C i liSt T trait ° r - has been ^worked by Ae left
by t ri^ht ^ Tr ° tSkyiSt ’ ^ t0 be merdless] y -rked over

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word - in Spam at this
moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there Lefirfitdy
without trial, on the mere rumour that you are Trotskyist - is only
eginnmg to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be
hearmg more of it later. The word ‘Trotskyist’ (or ‘Trotsky-fascist’)
ts general y used to mean a disguised fascist who poses
ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing forces. But it
derives its peculiar power from the fact that ft means three
separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for

Trot!™ 0 rTtT a member of the actua l organization of which
rotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word)- or the

j" SC1St u y T nd ° ned ' The three meanings can be
telescoped one into the other at will. Meaning No. 1 may or mav

not carry with it meaning No.2, and meaning No. 2 almosl

3 Tf k "“g No - 3- Thus ‘XY has been heard

p favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a

.^ngrind 6 ^ 15 ? faSdSt -’ In Spain ’ t0 S ° me extent even
nmf« S u u y ° ne P rofessm g revolutionary socialism (i e

MO) h ' ^'“ SS ,he Comnu, ” i!t Pan y professed u„dl a few

Franco^or Hite.f SUSP ' C '° h ° f b ' ing * *e P*y of

<^0™:Led°S‘ ‘ hat ‘ hC repression and the watr had
plan. The war nm r °“( nneS a ol eapicalism a,| rl the need to
he war not only made the case for planning: it had

224

Inside the Myth

advanced it practically. Many did see, in rationing and
production for the war effort, the emergence of a sort of ‘war
socialism’. Planning, however, was not a straightforward
question for Orwell, because of its overtones of regimentation
and state control.

This may explain why so many of the stark images of the
Oceania landscape in Nineteen Eighty-Four reflect, not some
grim Soviet future, but ‘the drabness and monotony of the
English industrial suburb, the “filthy and grimy and smelly”
ugliness ... the food rationing and the government controls
which he knew in war-dme Britain.’ 9 The picture of society
given in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julian Symons noted in his review
in the Times Literary Supplement ,

has an awful plausibility. In some ways life does not differ very
much from the life we live today. The pannikin of pinkish-gray
stew, the hunk of bread and cube of cheese, the mug of milkless
Victory coffee with its accompanying saccharine tablet - that is the
kind of meal we very much remember ... 10

This has the effect, as Symons noted, of involving us more
direcdy, since so much of it is only an extension of familiar
things: a ‘near future’.

But was it only the stylistic requirements of naturalism which
made Orwell express the totalitarian nightmare through the
imagery of Britain’s war-time rationing, planning and
controls ? It may not be far-fetched to see this in the context of
a deeper ambiguity in the novel - the position he ascribes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four to INGSOC, whose sacred principles are
‘Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past’: even
though INGSOC is clearly an acronym of 'English Socialism’ -
the term used very positively in 1940 for the kind of socialism
which Orwell himself evoked so positively in The Lion and the
Unicom.

There is also the question of how much Nineteen Eighty-Four
was a caricature of Soviet totalitarianism, and how far it is
pointed at totalitarian tendencies latent in all the superstates,
including Western capitalism. Orwell himself, in the statement
he dictated to Warburg to clarify his intentions about Nineteen
Eighty-Four , not only gives the latter reading his posidve

Stuart Hall

225

warrant but links it with the final elements in the chain of
ideas which went into the making of Nineteen Eighty-Four and
his last thoughts about the state. This final phase was
dominated by the descent into the Cold War, the division of
the world into the armed superstate blocs, each with their
spheres of influence, the state of ‘permanent war’ generated
between them as a requirement of their survival, the
dependence of each on the arms race, and the frozen postures
imposed by the advent of atomic weapons. Here Orwell is on
the edge of a theory of ‘exterminism’ - to use E.P. Thompson’s
phrase - where the military complex has acquired a sort of
autonomous, self-sustaining impetus of its own within the
superstates.

George Orwell assumes that if such societies as he describes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four come into being there will be several super

J h ' S ,S fuHy dCak With in 1116 relevant chapters of Nineteen
Eighty-Four. It is also discussed from a different angle by fames

Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. These super states will
naturally be in opposition to each other or (a novel point) will
pretend to be much more in opposition than in fact they are. Two
of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American
world and Eurasia. If these two great blocs line up as mortal
enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the
name of their opponents and will not dramatize themselves on the
scene of history as Communists. Thus they will have to find a new
name for themselves. The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is

r C r S n!* gS °u C ’ bu / in practice a wide ran s e of choices is open,
n the USA the phrase ‘Americanism’ or ‘hundred per cent

? r ' CaniSm Is SUItable and the qualifying adjective is as
totalitarian as anyone could wish. 11

Clarification of this kind was necessary because even
Warburg, when he first read the draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four -

Ms? CO 0rwdl -. had g-ned precisely the £ipression
wmch Orwell was so anxious to avoid:

SK**? T Cem " h ' Ch prevails iS IngSOC = En s lish Socialism,
social^ 6 3 ddlberate and sadistic attack on socialism and
alist parties generally. It seems to indicate a final breach

226

Inside the Myth

between Orwell and socialism, not the socialism of equality and
human brotherhood which clearly Orwell no longer expects from
socialist parties, but the socialism of Marxism and the managerial
revolution. Nineteen Eighty-Four is among other things an attack on
Burnham’s managerialism; and it is worth a cool million votes to
the Conservadve Party; it is imaginable that it might have a
preface by Winston Churchill after whom its hero is named.
Nineteen Eighty-Four should be published as soon as possible, in June
1949. >2

Warburg was by no means alone in interpreting Nineteen
Eighty-Four in this way. Sillen, in the American Communist
journal Masses and Mainstream, might have been expected to
gloss Nineteen Eighty-Four an ‘anti-socialist polemic’. But more
sympathetic critics, like Diana Trilling in The Nation, did see
Nineteen Eighty-Four as ‘an assimilation of the English Labour
government to Soviet communism’, documenting the thesis
that ‘by the fourth decade of the twenueth century all the main
currents of political thought were authoritarian. Every new
political theory ... led back to hierarchy and regimentation.’
Golo Mann, the German historian, tried to separate Orwell
from the charge of crude anti-communism — since Life, Reader’s
Digest and other American magazines had ‘pounced upon
Nineteen Eighty-Four and given the book the widest possible
publicity as an anti- Communist pamphlet.’ Shortly before his
death, Orwell was obliged to clarify his intentions again to the
United Automobile Workers, who wanted to recommend
Nineteen Eighty-Four to their members. In the press release
quoted above Orwell had emphasised that the book was a
warning rather than prophecy: ‘The moral is ... Don’t let it
happen'd 3

Orwell hated everything to do with fascism from the
beginning. Everything in his life to that date predisposed him
to do so. After the emergence of Stalinism in the Soviet Union,
the purges and the Moscow Trials, he came to hate everything
that Stalinism stood for, too. He became convinced that the
‘reign of terror, forcible suppression of political parties, a
stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass
imprisonment without trial’ which he had seen perpetrated by
both the fascists and by some Communists in Spain meant that,

227

Stuart Hall

paradoxically, Communism too had become ‘a counter-
revolutionaij force’." His concept of ‘totalitarianism’ was
born out of this equation: the growing similarities in the
tendencies and character of types of state which appear
superficially to belong to different species.

Orwell knew that fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia had
pifFerent economic, political and ideological systems and
subscribed to totally opposed political philosophies: the
record of anti-fascist struggle by Communists throughout
Europe m the 1930s was well documented. Orwell argued that
the two societies had begun to reveal striking similarities at the
level of their underlying tendencies. Later, he came to include
Western-style monopoly capitalism as belonging to the same
family of states, exhibiting the same underlying dynamic. It
therefore became possible to speak of ‘totalitarianism’ as a
general historical movement towards a distinctive new
terrifying type of state. ’ ’

For Orwell, ‘totalitarianism’ was a loose, general concept-
more a political image than an analytic construct. Yet it is
interesting that when he reviewed a book about the Soviet
Union called Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons (a United
States Agency correspondent), Orwell began with what he now
regarded as the difficult but key question: ‘Is it socialism or is
it a peculiarly vicious form of state capitalism? ... The system
ffiat Mr Lyons describes does not seem to be so very different
from fascism. 15 This statement, however, did not lead Orwell
on to an analysis of the similarities and differences in
economic, social and political structures between the three
qpes of state. The discussion pivots instead around a set of
images dominated by a single element: the repressive character
and the reign of terror on which totalitarian states are
founded. If you want a picture of the future of humanity
imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever ’

Another indication of the drift of his thinking is found in his
ev lews of the work of Franz Borkenau. In July 1937 he

ve^fw BO K k , en f U S jUStly fam ° US b ° ok ’ The S P a ™ h Cock P il >

Ca7rfn ! b y u beCaUSe U matched his own experiences in
dfstinl B a ^ at time r e thou e ht Bork enau was simply a
was ai?A Sh f d ° b * erver of the international scene. In fact he
Austrian Communist who had been a Comintern agent.

228

Inside the Myth

Borkenau’s history, The Communist International , which Orwell
reviewed in 1938, documents the impact and working out of
Comintern policy on other European parties, including the
Spanish. Orwell’s review of Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy
(1940) explored a new set of themes: the ‘striking resemblance
between the German and Russian regimes’, the friendships
between opposites ‘cemented in blood’ (the Hitler-Stalin pact),
and the fact that ‘The two regimes, having started from
opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system -
a form of oligarchical collectivism.’ 16 One of the main forces
driving these two regimes towards one another, he added, is
the ‘socialistic’ effect of preparing for war.

‘Oligarchical collectivism’ is a term which belongs to a
‘family’ of concepts which were used, especially in Marxist
debate, to define the character of the Soviet Union and,
sometimes, other types of social system. ‘Oligarchical’ refers to
the fact that power is held in and wielded by a small, compact
but powerful elite. ‘Collectivism’ signifies the ‘corporate’,
planned, centralized and integrated nature of the economy,
and the massive and direct involvement of the state in a much
expanded role in the economy and society. ‘Collectivism’ was,
historically, an ambiguous concept, linked with but by no
means identical to ‘socialism’. It was assumed that ‘socialist’
states would be planned, centralized and integrated, with
expanded state regulation, and therefore they would be
‘collectivist’ in character. But historical ‘collectivism’ had also
been at the turn of the century a programme for national
regeneration sponsored by the social-imperialist right as a way
of integrating the classes into an organic conception of the
nation, and as an alternative to both classical laissez-faire and
redistributive, egalitarian socialism.

At the turn of the century, imperialists and tariff-reformers,
as well as the Fabians, were collectivists without being
egalitarian or democratic. Many believed that the need to
make society more efficient, followed by the need to organize
for war and to achieve national mobilization, were the factors
which most powerfully shifted the old laissez-faire capitalism in
a ‘collectivist’ direction.

The term ‘oligarchical collectivism’ thus raises a number of
questions about Orwell’s ideas about the state at this time. For

Stuart Hall

229

in addition to characterizing the Soviet state, it refers to the
proposmon that ‘advanced’ or ‘monopoly’ capitaffim could

“SSsm and ‘ m .h£ ^ 0 ° of
socialism and yet preserve its most ‘capitalistic’ features e g

he exploitation of waged labour, and that so cdled

communist or ‘socialist’ societies could similarly become

state-collectives and planned in character without deliverffig

T S’ BBC' l eme / end ^ thC ex P ,oi ^ on of the mas^
In h,s BBC broadcast ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’

Orwell remarked that When one mentions totalitarianism one

thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one

mU M ", *V, 1Sk Aat ** Phenomenon 7 is going to be

Z‘mZr * ? f® SeCOnd P art of the ^quatfon on which
the totalitarianism thesis was based: the proposition that

fascism, Stalinism and capitalism in its monopoly phase all

belonged to a new and distinctive species of toulitLfan tate

One of the places where this line of argument is most fu Iv

developed is in Orwell’s essay on James Burnham’s The

Managerial Revolution, a book premissed precisely on such a

thesis. Orwell thought that Burnham had greatly exaggerated

some things but that, in his identification 5 bask trends arid

0™eH ,e diH aCrOSS f g '° be - Bumham was b ™<%

1 T P f COUrse ’ shar ' Burnham’s aLmac“e
attitude towards the growth of ‘managerialism’ ) Orwell

summarized Burnham’s thesis as follows:

Capitalism is disappearing, but socialism is not replacing it What
u now ansmg is a new kind of planned, centralized

Slotadc 5,f P T “ rr my accep “ d ° f ^

b^Bumh' teChn ' ClanS ’ bureaucrats a nd soldiers, lumped together

~ZTp aU P ° Wer eC ° n0miC privile S e remain in

comm hands^ Private property rights will be abolished but

sociefewfiTnot c P ^ “°J ** established ‘ Th ^ new ‘managmal’
states but of rrear ° f 3 patchwork of small, independent

centres u SUper - States round the main industrial

230 Inside the Myth

Burnham himself gave an account of the evolution of the
managerialism thesis in his Preface to The Managerial Revolution.
He had been a member of a Trotskyist organization in the
1930s - the ‘Fourth International’ - and originally subscribed
to the analysis of the character of the Soviet state which at that
time carried Trotsky’s imprimatur. This was that, though
Stalinism represented a bureaucratic dictatorship, the Soviet
Union was still a ‘degenerated workers’ state or proletarian
dictatorship, and therefore the Soviet regime still had to be
defended by those who wished to preserve the victories
achieved by the Bolshevik revolution. Burnham says that the
thesis began to disintegrate for him as soon as he attempted to
fit the formulas to reality. For the workers, as far as he could
see, were as far away from wielding power as they had been
under the Tsar, the country was ruled by a dictatorial party
apparatus backed by the police, and the country did not
appear to be moving in a socialist direction. How, then, were
Marxists to understand and analyse the nature of the Soviet
state ?

In classical Marxist terms, there could only be two possible
types of state in die modem industrialized world: a
capitalist/bourgeois state or socialist/workers’ state (leading
eventually to communism and the withering away of the state).
Burnham came to the conclusion that, since the Soviet Union
was neither of these, there must be in embryo a ‘new form of
society’, perhaps combining features of both but representing
a novel line of development. This he christened ‘mana-
gerialist’. Once established, there was no reason to restrict its
application to the Soviet Union. It became possible

to interpret long-term structural developments in other major
nations as moving, though by different paths, towards the same or
a similar form. The analogies were especially convincing in the
case of Nazi Germany and New Deal America. I thus arrived at a
general hypothesis that world society is in the midst of a major
social transformation that may be called the managerial
revolution ’. 19

The most novel aspect of this formulation is that Burnham
considered Roosevelt’s New Deal to be also a very primitive

Stuart Hall

231

movement in the ‘managerial’ direction. By the end ‘The

^ chapter was ca, ' ed) had
rk l * Burnham s preoccupations.

conn «ts the debate, and Orwell's thinking

not only w.th attempts to understand the evolution of "he

except, onal fascist and communis, states, bu, also wid! Ae

analysts of the developed capitalist industrial system Within

Manns, arete, . this debate began with Lenin's attempt in Us

. ,mperial f' S,a S' of capitalist development to
e ish Marxist terms for analysmg the post laissez-faire phase
of monopoly capitalism, drawing on such works as
Hilferdings studies of finance capital, Bukharin’s thesis
concerning the fusion of state and private cap, til and
Hobson s study of capitalism and the imperialist systeln

phrase state capitalism’ was not, of course, restricted to
this analysis of twentieth-century capitalism. Len n had
favourably characterized his New Economic Policy - a partial
retreat from ful collectivization in the Soviet Unim after 1921
- as state capitalist’, on the model of the German state’
superintendence of private capital in the interest oTthe nltion
dunng the First World War. But the Menshevik critics who

fLt ° f cap r ,is ' could

I n TT h SoViet Union used the term to describe
the Bolshevik ^system as such; and later TrotskyiS Tlso

appropHated ^ concept. (Tony Ciffs view that after 1928
capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union through the

mn 1 Tk “ fo , rCin f throu g h industrialization is one of the
most elaborated of these appropriations.) The concept

^Tk °!i e l pr0gr 1 ess,vely ac( * uired a critical edge P

TO SFS 1 T‘ - b L "

™7d“f° n and federal Ration of ™ ecXmy “»
amon/sr 'hn^™ economic crises, there also developed

zz mcrrir omists , and theorists a deba *

which f d< ; rn ca Pttahsm. The principal ways in

the ‘classk’ /? e C3 ? lta 1St economies were said to difFer from

intervTXn- ^ "T in a) the of stam

ention, b) the decreasing role of the private capitalist

232

Inside the Myth

entrepreneur and of the ‘private ownership’ of industrial
property; c) the growth of ‘corporate’ property, sometimes
including the state ownership of basic industries; and d) the
separation of ‘ownership’ from ‘control’. The effective control,
it was argued, now rested not with the capitalist class as such
but with the managers , who may or may not own large chunks
of corporate property, but who have a massive stake in the
long-term accumulation of capital, the strategic management
of corporate policies and enterprises, who derive immense
wealth, privilege and power from their control of the means of
production, and who share a ‘collectivist’ and ‘capitalist
planning’ ideology with their counterparts in the expanding
state bureaucracy with which they are increasingly connected.

In support of his rather speculative and ‘Machiavellian’
propositions. Burnham developed another important aspect to
his theory: namely, a critique of the classic argument that
ownership of capital and property - capitalist ‘property-rights’
- is the sufficient guarantee of a capitalist system; and that,
therefore, the abolition of those property rights is a sufficient
guarantee that the society is becoming socialist. Burnham
argues against this syllogism. It is possible, he says, for
property rights to be abolished - as they have been in the
Soviet Union and in those parts of capitalist economies with
large, nationalized or state- owned sectors - and yet for the
control over the means of production to continue to be
concentrated in the hands of a small elite, with no passage of
power to the working class.

Another intriguing aspect of Burnham’s case is how he deals
with the ‘New Deal’. For, though the New Deal did mark an
important transition point in the development of American
capitalism, it clearly differed radically from the line of
development of either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. He
recognized the New Deal as ‘the most primitive and least
organised’ of the managerialisms. But, he argued, there was a
historical bond, even if not a formal identity, between
Stalinism, fascism and ‘New Dealism’, in their common
movement away from competitive capitalism, their reliance on
planning and the state and their corporate, managerialist,
‘anti-capitalist’ ideologies. Above all, he argued, ‘the direction
is what is all-important; and New Dealism points in the same

Stuart Hall

233

^““ect m 0!hm T TW! , may seem fetched in

of 'mixed economies”

wL d ap’d h d" 1 ' h ° W radi “' 3 *e

political ideologies whTh cSSTLSS k £

real attempt to set Keynesian theories to work in a practical
way, in a large-scale advanced capitalist economy as a remedy

cod'^xivfsT^deolog^wa^^a^adical^mKKl'fi 5 ^) ann ' n ?
‘libera, -free-entetprlL' ideo^ththTa falw“s Vel t
strong in the US. It did appear to be a sort of halfwayhouse
between capitalism and socialism or, like KeynesiaS Sf
the reforms required by the system to prevem and forestli
more wide-ranging structural changes. The difference is that
whereas, according to the latter view, the New Deal was a
stone compromise between two fundamentally alternative
systems a compromise sealed by the evolutio/of the new
corporate capitalist forms - Burnham saw such a hybrid not as
reverong to one or other of the fundamental models but
stage. r 35 g ° mgf0TWaTds to the evolution of a new type, a new

When Orwell came back to Burnham, in 1947 (in a review nf
The the Worn), it was to note and rSTn a

S.. STr^°\ d, \' n T ageria ' i! '’ ° r ‘•°XSn-

theses about the f b °° k ’ Burnham projects his speculative
tfteses about the state on to the world stage. It concerns the

world of rival armed blocs, of East vs West h Tl w
above all the shadow of atomic weaponfand the ami raa
gam n parallels, to some extent, the direction of Orwell’s
own thmktng though he continued to have a ctuhe dlfollt
Buruh' '? wards the developments which Burnham described

XT*e XT 1 here - a fam,liar pS

was S on the wal ,o C w nV M T that WOrld C °™™nism

-^con^b^ssl— 1^^ =

opponents bv mJ b r e hmmates all real or imaginary

Hpunents by means of terrorism.’ 22 6 r

234

Inside the Myth

It does not take a moment to see that the managerial/
totalitarian society, which Burnham was predicting as the
future of all major societies, has now been conveniently
assigned to Communism alone ; and that, unpredictably,
Burnham has - as Orwell wryly noted - under the pressure of
the Cold War, reverted to the position of ‘champion of
old-style democracy’ which he believes has somehow survived
all the transitions he described and is still alive and well in the
United States. Indeed, ‘old-style democracy seems somewhat
optimistic a description, because Burnham, with his char-
acteristic intemperateness, now recommends that the only
option open to the US is to seize the initiative and establish
‘what amounts to a world empire now’; the first move of which
should be a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet
Union. It was a strange and unpredictable place for the theory
of ‘managerialism’ to end. It must be added that a number of
ex-Trotskyists, whose anti- Communism became their whole
political raison d'etre , coupled with their overwhelming
antipathy to and hatred of the Soviet Union, did, under the
multiple pressures of the Cold War, tread a very similar path,
and end up on the extreme right of the American political and
strategic-policy spectrum.

Orwell did not go in Burnham’s direction in this respect. He
reported that he had heard many conversations in Britain
about the division of the world between two camps dominated
by the USA and the USSR, which ended with the reluctant
admission, ‘Oh well, of course, if one had to choose, there’s no
question about it - America.’ He himself moved increasingly
into the position of feeling trapped between these alternating
and competing world systems, with much that he believed in
crushed out of existence by both. This is another way of saying
that Orwell remained more faithful to the pessimistic
conclusion that there might be very litde to choose between
‘Eurasia’ and ‘Oceania’. That is what ultimately defined the
structure of thought, the play of concepts and the deep
pessimism which underpinned Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel
was predicated on the stark proposition: ‘what if totalitarian-
ism is the future of all societies?’

The centre-piece of this conception of a general totalitarian
form of the modern state was the concept, not of class, but of

Stuart Hall

235

Orwell • terrn H ^ tW ° P rmci P al dimensions for
Orwell, terror and torture - the apparatus of organized

violence and thought control’ or what Orwell called 8 in his

review of Bertrand Russell’s Power, ‘the huge system of

organized lying upon which dictators depend’. 8 In another

review on Soviet government, Oiwell concluded a dismssTon

of aspects of Russian modernization and the standard ofllving

of the average Soviet citizen with a very strong emphasis on

^somethin 8 entirely unprecedented’ about modem dicutor

The radio, press-censorship, standardized educadon and the
secret police have altered everything. Mass suggestion is a science

will be -' t " enty ^ 3nd W d ° n0t yet know how successful it

The ideological dimension thus played an increasingly
important role m Orwell’s use of the totalitarian concept It
was also, subsequendy, elaborated in theoretical temfs by
o Aer wrrters of whom, at this stage, Orwell seems to have had
de or no knowledge. Theorists of the neo-Marxist ‘Frankfurt
School such as Herbert Marcuse or Theodor Adom^for
example who were expelled from Germany by the Nazis’ and
emigrated to the USA, argued later that the manipulation of
propaganda and the exploitation of the mass mentality by
powerful elites had been substantially enhanced by the^new

. ia ) °. f^nda and communication. The Nazis
particularly had brought the art of mass propaganda to a high

prelf , d fr a T ff eM « al£

p esent, if in a different form, in the mass culture of Western

pitahst societies like Britain and the USA. This argument also

'•''concentration of power in thfhands of a

tafni? linH b 7d ‘ ™ °r ° Wer ' s °cial systems

lew kinds of division between ‘elites’ and ‘masses’ the

thTuseofl Th m mani P u,a ^ n S mass consciousness through
‘B^g Broker’ ntanan Symb ° IS ' Ae Fuehrer ’ Stalin ’ °r

culmrT Bm wh 1 g K Cat dCal 7 3nd With insi g ht - at >out popular

°f ‘totalitarianism M? on the bought control aspect

msm he did so less in relation to ‘mass culture’

236

Inside the Myth

and more in terms of rather more traditional themes: the place
of the writer in a totalitarian world; the threats to the writer’s
individual voice; the corruption of political language; the
falsification of historical records, the obliteration of the
memory of the past and the ubiquitous presence of doublethink .
His essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’ (1942)
contained a lengthy reflection on the fact that ‘the very concept
of objective truth is fading out of the world’ and ‘the chances
are that those lies, or at any rate, similar lies will pass into
history’. 25 It toyed with speculation about a ‘nightmare world’
in which ‘the Leader or some ruling clique controls not only
the future but the past ,’ 26 By 1947, when Orwell’s plans for
Nineteen Eighty-Four were developing fast, the ‘organized lying’
is conceived as ‘something integral to totalitarianism’, which
demands the ‘continuous alteration of the past’, and a
‘schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of
common sense ... could be disregarded’ by some, and people
would see nothing wrong in ‘falsifying an historical fact.’ 27 The
idea of writing books by machinery which crops up again in
Nineteen Eighty-Four is already here - and on this occasion the
description of totalitarianism steps over very easily into a
caricature of contemporary culture in the West. 28 The
distinctions - fascism, Stalinism, capitalism - were beginning
to break down.

Interestingly, there was a passing encounter between Orwell
and someone who did espouse a view close to that, not from
the ex-Trotskyist right, but from a classic liberal position. The
theme comes through very powerfully in Orwell’s review of
Hayek’s Road to Serfdom , which appeared in 1944. This book,
by the distinguished European liberal philosopher, was a
vigorous denunciation of the drift into ‘despotism’ taking
place in all directions, and an eloquent restatement and
defence of laissez-faire capitalism and liberalism, which has
become a locus classicus of modem neo-liberalism. In the 1970s
and 1980s Hayek became one of the most powerful ideologues
of the ‘New Right’ and a philosophical precursor of
Thatcherism.

Orwell summarized his argument thus:

By bringing the whole of life under the control of the state,

Stuart Hall

237

socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats
who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own
sake and will suck at nothing in order to retain it. Britain he savs
is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wine
intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The
only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free
competiuon, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security. 29

Underlying Hayek s argument is the premise that the
freedoms of the individual (liberty) and free market
competitive capitalism (the market) are identical, mutually
interdependent and indivisible. Any movement away from
them is a small step on the primrose path to totalitarianism
Hayek accepts the Orwell/Burnham thesis that fascism and
communism have come to resemble one another more and
more. But Orwell thought that it was Hayek’s aim to show that
the post-war attempt to introduce the welfare state and
centralized planning into a liberal -democratic type of system
also opens the floodgates to a totalitarian futur?

Hayek argues that in order to ensure the wide consensus
necessary for planning, the state will need to use the means of
education and information to create a unity of purpose. As it
replaces the hidden hand of the market - the ideal way of
reconciling competing interest for Hayek - processes of
planning will progressively spill over, from the strictly
economic, into all other aspects of society. Planning must, for

£™ nS ’ become /° taI ’ - ^d, pivoting, so to speak, on
th^ double meaning of the word, Hayek says that democratic

the lnfr g r 111115 bec< ? me mcreasmgly totalitarian. So, from
hav * 1frjve 0f ^ motives the attempt to supercede the market will

wfl> d US > S ?^ y down the same P a A as the other
totahtanamsms : The road to serfdom’. The similarities

between this argument and Mrs Thatcher’s charge of ‘creeping
state socialism’ are obvious. S creeping

^oZt:r P °r is t ° argue that there is httle evidence of
since fre nr,T even if ' *at were what we wanted,

towards f K 0mmant trend m capitalist economies was not

concentrarioif and mon^T Ch0i “ b “‘ “ Wards

Considered in the way outlined here, we can see that

238

Stuart Hall

Inside the Myth

Orwell’s ideas about the state evolved against a rich theoretical
and political background, and engaged questions and issues
which, more than ever, lie at the centre of contemporary
preoccupations. This sketch of the evolution of his ideas
should also help us to approach Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Orwell’s controversial position in the closing years of his life in
a way significandy different from that which has become
convendonal wisdom on the left. Nineteen Eighty-Four was, of
course, a work of imaginative fiction, a ‘book of anticipations’,
not a text in political theory; and Orwell’s characteristic mode
was deeply antipathetic to anything overtly abstract, analydc or
intellectual. (His overt and-intellectualism is one of his most
consistent, and least attractive qualities.) One cannot therefore
expect to disinter fully- formed explanatory theories from
Orwell’s fictional and journalistic writing. On the other hand,
Orwell was a deeply political animal and Nineteen Eighty-Four,
right or wrong, was no mere exercise in literary utopianism.
He was always thinking about the big, troubling questions of
his time, trying to record and explain the contradictory
pressures of being alive as a certain kind of socialist at one of
the cross-roads of history. His work, therefore, gives evidence
not of theory but of thinking.

It is clear, for example, that although Nineteen Eighty-Four
had deep roots in Orwell’s anti-Communism, his experience of
Stalinism and his conviction of the revolution betrayed, its
central impetus is not exclusively an attack on Soviet
Communism, or even the failure of the promise of socialism,
but something else: a general historical tendency in modern
states - the collectivizing impetus and its fateful consequences -
which he regarded as well-advanced in Communist and
post-liberal capitalist societies alike. This led him to depict, not
a country or even a continent, but a whole world system in the
inexorable grasp of a new type of authoritarian system. Also, if
it is true, on die one hand, that Orwell was driven by his
experiences to the very edge (and some would argue over the
edge) of ‘cold warriorism’ as the world sharply polarized in the
great freeze of the 1 940s, he was also one of the first people to
stare the grim realities of the modem arms race in the face, and
one of the first to see how the Cold War would strengthen and
underpin the authoritarian tendencies in both major camps as

an inevitable consequence of that mutual interdependence in
the great dance of the dead we call deterrence.

[ , . V ( hat> then > °f the general accuracy and cogency of his

d linking on the question of the state? On a whole host of
• P om ts OnveU’s thinking can be shown to be interesting
insightful, even original, in some ways prophetic - but deeply
flawed, one-sided, or just plain wrong. For example,
convergence theory had its hey-day but quickly lost its
explanatory power. Overemphasizing the common features
arising from the process of technologically-advanced industrial
development, it flattened out all pertinent the historical
differences which are required to explain the linked but quite
distinctive historical evolutions within the capitalist and
communist ‘families’ of state.

Even more flawed was Orwell’s isolation of the power
principle from the whole complex of social relations which
^make up an actual, working social formation. Social relations
have a reduced, abstracted, disembodied character in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. The system works by the exercise of power and
violence alone, as ends in themselves. This is a useful
imaginative licence or exaggeration to make a polemical point,
but of course it is not an adequate account of any society or
state. Even the most totalitarian state we know is rooted in a
complex of class and other social relations and cannot be
adequately explained as a system of power alone. There is
something, after all, to Isaac Deutscher’s complaint of a lack of
f analytic or explanatory complexity in Orwell’s thinking, in
spite of the ‘testament’ - of a totalitarianism abstracted out of
its embedding within a set of social relations or a well defined
economic or class system. A criticism which led Deutscher
unfairly, to say that Onvell tells us ‘how’ totalitarianism works
but not why - an absence which leads, Deutscher argued, to a
disembodied sadism’. This is something more than the usual
accurate complaint that, though Orwell used some of the
language and concepts of Marxism, his analysis of the state was
not deeply informed by it. The criticism of ‘disembodied

ism points to another, related, weakness: the concentration
as principle modality of the totalitarian state,

Sh.l Sence ? f , the e< * ua!1 y P uzzlin g and in some ways more
•ethal question of the consent of the masses to power under the

240

Inside the Myth

‘normal 5 regime of the liberal democratic capitalist state.

All that and more having been conceded, one is also obliged
- taking his thinking about the state in its wider context - to
acknowledge how piercingly Orwell penetrates to the heart of
some of the key questions for the left, not just in his time but in
ours. The problem of the state and the linked questions of the
disciplinary power of the state apparatuses and the
bureaucracy is the great unsolved question both of
actual-existing socialism and of democratic socialism itself. The
great paradox remains: it is only through the intervention of
the state that the great processes of capitalist accumulation and
the market can be modified or transformed; but then the state
itself becomes a weight of authority and power resting on the
backs of the people, an instrument of their disciplining and
exploitation, with a life of its own. The failure of the Soviet
model, the disintegration of the reformist tradition and the
monopolistic, corporatist and authoritarian tendencies within
modern capitalism all, from their different and opposed points
in the political spectrum, come back to rest on the unresolved
enigma of the state.

Orwell may not have been correct to follow the line of
thought which traced all these divergent paths to the same,
mono-causal point of origin - totalitarianism; but at a less
literal level he was not wrong in what he glimpsed of certain
historical tendencies in the advanced societies of the world,
and of the fatal incipient trend toward authoritarianism built
deep into the very competitive process itself in post-liberal
capitalist societies, which has become more, not less, apparent
as the century advances. The statist character of socialism, in
any of its actual -existing varieties - East and West - remains
one of the greatest unsolved problems for the left, one of the
greatest inhibitions to the renewal of socialism in our time -
and the right’s greatest, most persuasive weapon.

Orwell did not ‘solve’ the problem, either; but he pointed
straight at it and hence enables us to learn from him - even, as
Brecht put it, from his ‘bad side’.

Stuart Hall
Notes

241

1 Raymond Williams, Orwell , London, 1971, p. 87.

2 Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life , Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 322,
referred to hereafter as ‘A Life . Homage to Catalonia , Harmondsworth
1970, p. 29.

3 S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell , Vol. 1, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 374, referred to hereafter
as 'CEJL'.

4 A Life , pp. 252-3.

5 CEJL , Vol. 2, p. 113.

6 A Life , p. 339.

7 Quoted in ibid., p. 329.

8 ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’ in CEJL , Vol. 1, pp. 306-7.

9 Isaac Deutscher, Heretics and Renegades , London, 1955, p. 43.

10 In J. Meyers (ed.), George Orwell: The Critical Heritage , London, 1975,
p. 252.

1 1 Part of the text of a clarificatory press release based on notes prepared by
Orwell and issued by Seeker & Warburg, quoted in A Life , p. 566.

12 Frederic Warburg in J. Meyers (ed.), op.cit., p. 248.

13 A Life , p. 566

14 CEJL , Vol. 1, p. 302.

15 CEJL , Vol. 1, pp. 369-70.

16 CEJL, Vol. 2, pp. 40-1.

17 CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 162.

18 CEJL , Vol. 4, p. 192.

19 James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution , London, 1960, p. vi.

20 Ibid., p. 197.

21 CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 360.

22 Ibid., p. 361.

23 CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 414.

24 CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 419.

25 CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 295.

26 Ibid., p. 297.

27 CEJL , Vol. 4, pp. 85-6.

28 Ibid., pp. 92-3.

29 CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 143.

Christopher Norris

Language, Truth and Ideology: Orwell
and the Post-War Left

‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’ wrote
Wittgenstein, drawing the conclusion that we had best not talk
about matters too deep for our language properly to
comprehend. George Orwell’s thinking about language and
politics might well provoke a similar reflection. The limits of
that thinking are plain enough in the puzzles, perplexities and
downright confusions which critics have often pointed out.
More specifically, Orwell’s homespun empiricist oudook - his
assumption that the truth was just there to be told in a
straightforward, common-sense way - now seems not merely
naive but culpably self- deluding. Raymond Williams sums up
this line of attack when he writes of Orwell’s ‘successful
impersonation of the plain man who bumps into experience in
an unmediated way and is simply telling the truth about it ’. 1

Williams’s point is that this plain-man role was closely
bound up with Orwell’s failure of political and moral nerve.
Claiming as he did to demystify politics, to speak up for the
average ‘decent’ character against all those typecast leftist
intellectuals, Orwell was unable to see beyond the blinkered
common-sense ideology which shaped both his politics and his
language. This role started out as a handy polemical device for
debunking what he saw as the chronic bad faith of party-line
Communists and self-styled ‘left’ intellectuals. It ended up as
second nature, not only for Orwell but for a whole generation
of collusive Cold-War ideologues, anxious to disguise their
breakdown of political nerve by retreating into postures of

242

Christopher Norris 243

cynical indifference. All this in the name of a painfully honest
endeavour to simply speak the truth as perceived by a mind
disabused of all fashionable creeds and ideologies.

Such, in rough outline, is the case against Orwell mounted
by Williams and others who have sought to explain the Orwell
phenomenon. It is an argument complicated by all manner of
sharp ideological tensions and disagreements. Orwell cannot
easily be lumped together with the run of socialist defectors,
those (like many of the group around Auden) who simply
switched sides like a new suit of clothes. He remained, if
confusedly, a spokesman of the left, and one who could
moreover look back and declare that every word he had ever
written had been in the cause of ‘democratic socialism’. This is
what makes him such a difficult figure to come to terms with
for anyone writing, like Williams, out of that same socialist
tradition. It is not just the fact that Orwell was kidnapped by
the forces of reaction, his style taken over as the basic currency
of what E.P. Thompson has aptly called ‘Natopolitan’
doublethink. Neither is it simply that the ‘good’ bits of his
writing - the occasional sharp-eyed socialist perceptions -
need to be winnowed from the great mass of obscurantist
rhetoric and prejudice. More urgent is the fact that Orwell
arrived where he did by clinging to an attitude - call it the
‘common- sense’ outlook - which few British socialists are
willing to break with, revise and refine it as they may. This
tension remains deeply inscribed within the discourse of those
who have attempted - like Williams and Thompson - to think
their way beyond it.

Put simply, it is the issue between ‘British’ and ‘Continental’
styles of Marxist debate. On the one side stands the empiricist
conviction that reality exists independently of the mind which
perceives or interprets it. The unmediated facts of real-life
experience are appealed to as a bedrock guarantee that we can,
after all, tell the truth of that experience by sticking to
straightforward accurate description and not letting words or
ideologies get in the way. It is an argument familiar enough in
the history of British commonsense responses to rationalism,
scepticism and other such threats to decency and truth. With
Orwell it takes a particularly bluff and dogmatic form. If you
eny his position - so the rhetoric implies — then you line up

244 Inside the Myth

effectively with those, like the craven state functionaries in
Nineteen Eighty -Four, who treat the factual record of history as a
mere 'text’ to be erased and re-written at whatever latest whim
of political command. Hanging on to past truths provides the
one small hope that commonsense and decency may prevail
over the powers of totalitarian mystification. Letting go of
those truths is the mark of an intellectual treason linked to a
last-ditch phase of political decline. It is a knock-down
argument against those who would object that truth is not such
a simple matter, or that Orwell’s plain-dealing common-sense
line produced a potent mythology all the more mischievous for
its widespread appeal. Only a fool or a villain (or maybe a
‘clever’ left intellectual) would cling to some sophisticated
theory of truth in the face of Orwell’s arguments.

So much for the empiricist politics of language bound up,
with Orwell’s characteristic style. It is a position - as his critics
ruefully admit - which evokes certain powerful ready-made
sympathies among readers brought up on the ‘British
ideology’ of native common-sense empiricism. As the left has
come to question that rooted tradition, so it has moved toward
a more articulate critique of the ideas and assumptions that
sustain it. Such is the strain of ‘Continental’ Marxist theory
which Williams and others of a broadly New Left persuasion
have increasingly taken into account. 2 To summarise its main
lines of argument - as I shall over the next few paragraphs - is
to show how they comprise, in effect, a very pointed critique of
Orwellian thinking about language, politics and ideology. The
desire to get a critical, diagnostic view of the culture which had
thrown up such an ambiguous ‘radical’ spokesman was no
doubt a part of William’s motivation in turning to these new
theoretical sources. But there remain certain unresolved
problems and tensions. More specifically, there is a residual
pull toward the native, ‘commonsense’ tradition which leaves
Williams himself ambiguously placed with regard to that
complex of ideological motives which he terms ‘the Orwell
character’. Williams cannot entirely divest his writing of the
homespun individualist-empirical style which animates
Orwell’s prose. He can certainly acknowledge the weight of
implied ideology which goes along with the resistance to
theory in its cruder, neo- Orwellian forms. But the same

Christopher Norris 245

resistance is at work in his own way of treating theoretical
issues as part of an evolving social experience , a combination of
documentary record and personal work-in-progress. And it is
this deep ambivalence that gives such a sharply paradoxical
edge to his dealings with Orwell over the past two decades.

The Orwellian malaise can be understood straightforwardly
from the standpoint of an Althusserian Marxism secure in its
own theoretical rigour. Orwell represents the confused and
self-destructive motives of a liberal humanism finally run
aground on its own bankrupt ideology. That the individual
subject is a fiction sustained by that ideology, held in place by a
process of imperative socialization, is a message not to be
found in Orwell’s writing. Or rather, it is there to be found
easily enough, but in the guise of a warning against what could
happen if ‘democracy’ gave way to the forces of totalitarian
social control. Orwell, one could say, perceives the mechanism
at work but projects it onto an alien and feared political
‘system’ by way of preserving his own deluded belief in the
sufficiency of human (individual) dignity and truth. What
Nineteen Eighty-Four thus documents - reading symp-
tomatically, or ‘against the grain’ - is the nihilistic horror
unleashed upon itself by an ideology wedded to the values of
liberal humanism but forced to acknowledge their precisely
ideological character. Winston Smith’s revolt, like those of a
long line of Orwell heroes, from Flory in Burmese Days to
Bowling in Coming Up For Air , becomes a kind of grim
working-out of the paradoxes attendant on humanist belief. It
begins with a gesture of faith (however muted) in the
autonomous individual as preserver of truth against the forces
of political repression. It ends with the wholesale destruction
of these hopes, with Winston’s resistances broken down and his
individual’ voice wholly reinscribed within the slogans of a
sovereign doublethink.

Althusserian Marxism holds that this is the enabling
condition of all ideology. 3 The autonomous, self-acting
subject of humanist discourse is in fact a mere figment of the
mystified political unconscious, a symbolic realm where
relations of power are both inscribed and effectively disguised.

h e illusion of autonomy - of independent selfhood - is
precisely what ideology requires if subjects are to keep their

246 Inside the Myth

place without recognising what holds them there. Ideology is
that which ‘interpellates’ the subject, inserts him or her into a
dominant order of social relations. This order is ceaselessly
produced and confirmed by the various agencies of power
which define all available subject-positions. Thus language
operates as the first and most basic socializing structure,
consigning the ‘individual’ to a certain clearly- marked role
within the discourse of family and institutional life. As the
child learns its place vis-a-vis the authority of parental
language, so the subject gains access to a larger realm of
symbolic interaction and mediated social relations. The power
thus acquired - the possession of language and, along with it,
social identity - also entails an unconscious adaptation to the
role laid down by that pervasive ideology. This ambiguous
sense is inscribed within the very word ‘subject’: on the one
hand the locus of (imaginary) selfhood and freedom, on the
other the seat of all subjection as imposed by whatever
socio-political constraints.

Such, in rough outline, is the core of Althusser’s theoretical
programme. He declares a total break with those varieties of
‘humanist’ thinking which assume that men and women create
their own history by coming to understand the forces at work
in that same complex but intelligible process. Such thinking,
even when found in the early texts of Marx, betrays (according
to Althusser) a strain of pre-critical ideology which it is the task
of Marxist ‘science’ to expose and criticise. Only thus can
theory lay claim to a wholly demystified (or ‘scientific’)
knowledge whose concepts are sufficiently rigorous to validate
its own production. Otherwise thought remains trapped within
a purely imaginary order of discourse where subjects fail to
recognise the ideological character of their own (spontaneous
or common-sense) modes of understanding. This strain of
‘theoretical anti-humanism’ is the aspect of Althusser’s
philosophy which sets it most firmly apart from the
mainstream of Western Marxist tradition. It entails what many
would regard as a thoroughly disabling break with the ideal of
potential human self-knowledge and fulfilment held out by the
‘early’ Marx. It denies that human agents have the power to
comprehend their own present role in the ‘overdetermined’
structures of historical cause and effect. Again, it is the

Christopher Norris 247

inveterate delusion of humanist ideology which places ‘man’,
the self-conscious willing individual, at the centre of his or her
own political destiny. Rather we must recognise, says
Althusser, that ‘man’ is the product of a certain (mainly
nineteenth-century) ideology, a figure whose imaginary
essence is wholly bound up with that superannuated discourse.

Marx remained captive to that same delusion so long as he
subscribed to a generalized notion of human fulfilment as the
end-point and redemptive upshot of historical change. Then
occurred what Althusser terms the ‘epistemological break’ in
Marx’s thinking, the decisive shift of analytical terrain which
signalled the emergence of a genuine ‘scientific’ Marxism.
Subjectivity must henceforth be conceived as an effect of certain
partial and distorting ideologies, rather than a cause or
self-sufficient ground of historical self-knowledge. To think
otherwise is to collude with ideology by supposing that there
might exist zones of private (or relatively private) experience
untouched by the structures of political power. It is precisely in
such activities - family, schooling, religion, etc. - that
Althusser locates the more subtly coercive effects of social
conditioning. These are the ‘ideological state apparatuses’
which keep subjectivity in place by holding out an illusory
promise of autonomous self-fulfilment.

It is not hard to imagine how Orwell might have reacted,
had he lived to witness this phenomenon of a Marxism which
repudiates every last vestige of ‘humanist’ sentiment. And
indeed, in E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Poverty Of Theory’, we have (
what often reads like a latter-day Orwellian riposte, albeit on a
level of argument more intricate and sustained than anything
in Orwell . 4 My point is that Thompson takes over something of i W;
the plain-speaking, common-sense, empirical ‘line’, even while
deploring what it led to in Orwell’s case. His attack on
Althusser is conducted in the name of a socialism which
properly refuses to write off its own past history as so many
episodes of ‘ideological’ misrecognition. For Thompson, the
whole creaking edifice of Althusserian theory is nothing but a
species of abstract mystification, a means of keeping real
history and politics safely at bay. Worst of all, in Thompson’s
y iew, is the arrogant intellectualism that reserves ‘scientific’
knowledge to a tiny minority while consigning the great mass

248 Inside the Myth

of socialist efforts and activities to the region of mere ‘lived’
ideology.

Thompson writes, of course, as a chronicler of working-class
movements and events whose own best efforts have gone into
reconstructing that acdve pre-history. He likewise argues
against Althusser that individuals can achieve a consciousness
of their historical situation, such that they can act collectively
to change the institutions that shape it. To treat those
institutions - whether schools, churches or labour movements
- as mere emanations of a monolithic state ideology, is to
throw away the entire history of working-class experience in a
gesture of sovereign ‘scientific’ contempt. What is more, that
‘science’ - as Thompson most tellingly argues - amounts to
little more than a congeries of empty abstractions resembling
the worst excesses of scholastic philosophy. All in all - and in
default of any convincing responses from the Althusserian
camp - it may be said that Thompson’s robust empiricism
carries the day.

The Orwell comparison seems apt in two main respects.

, There is the air of a knock-down common-sense argument, an
1 exasperated appeal to what anyone must recognise unless they
are in the grip of some half-baked ‘theory’ or other. It is the
tone of some of Orwell’s best journalism, and also some of his
worst - most prejudiced and obfuscating - tracts for the times.
In Thompson, to be fair, the style is more tightly disciplined
and never blurs an argument by taking a line of plain-man
‘honest’ bluster. What Thompson does is to turn against
Orwell the same kind of powerful tu quoque argument that
Orwell employed against his own targets. The following
passage (from Thompson’s essay ‘Outside the Whale’) shows
the similarity clearly enough:

Somewhere around 1948 the real whale of Natopolis swam along
this way through the seas of the Cold War. After watching the
splashing about of the disenchanted, with mean speculation in its
small eyes, it opened its jaws and gulped - not, indeed, so that the
intellectuals could sit in a dignified posture in its belly, but in
order to add nourishment to its digestive system ... The
Natopolitan intellectual was disabled by self- distrust no less than
the Stalinist intellectual was disabled by fear of reverting to

Christopher Norris 249

bourgeois modes of thought ... The Western disenchanted
delivered themselves over, by their own hand and in confessional
mood, to McCarthyism, just as an earlier generation of
communist intellectuals had, by their capitulation before the
‘infallible’ party, delivered themselves over to Stalin and to Beria. 5

This argument is Orwellian not only in symmetrically reversing
Orwell’s charges, but also in the way it appeals to
straightforward honest self-evaluation as the means of seeing
through political fraud and doublethink. The politics and the
rhetoric are inseparable here. The force of Thompson’s riposte
comes from his agreeing with Orwell to this extent at least; that
‘intellectuals’ (whether Stalinist or ‘Natopolitan’) are in no
good position to act wisely or learn from experience.

What Thompson chiefly objects to in Althusser’s thinking is
the pitiless divorce between theory and experience, the latter
reduced to a mere reflex of prevailing ideology. The result of
such high-handed intellectualism is to sidetrack ‘theory’ into a
dead-end of arid dialectics, and at the same time to evoke
sinister echoes of a Stalinist dogmatism on matters of method
and principle. These charges, explicit in the essay on Althusser,
are also present more ambiguously in Thompson’s writing
about Orwell. There, it is the Stalinist ‘intellectuals’ who are
seen as ideological dupes, victims of a passive conformist
mentality which precisely mirrors Orwell’s brand of confused
reactionary sentiment. This amounts to a partial endorsement
of Orwell’s anti-intellectualism. It is qualified, of course, by
Thompson’s insistence that Orwell got everything upside down
when he came to draw the lessons of his own political
experience. What Thompson cannot do, on the other hand, is
take the line so readily available to Marxists of an Althusserian
persuasion: that is, the argument that Orwell’s blinkered
ideology - his commonsense empiricist stance - was precisely
what led to his chronic political confusions.

Hence the nagging problem that Orwell presents to thinkers
working in the broad tradition of British socialist politics. He
turned against that tradition while persistently claiming to
speak for it; took over its most rooted assumptions in the
service of antagonistic aims; and produced, in short, a

250 Inside the Myth

point-for-point travesty of socialist argument. This confusion
is worse confounded by the marked convergence between
Orwell’s cridque of totalitarian thinking and the case which
Thompson and others bring against Marxist intellectuals like
Althusser. The appendix on Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four is
precisely an account of how language ‘interpellates’ the subject
by dictating his or her role within a clearly- marked order of
juridical limits to the power of independent thought. The
destrucuon of freedom begins and ends - as Orwell repeatedly
insists - in the more or less systemadc corrupdon of language.
Winston Smith’s short-lived revolt is finally snuffed out when
he comes to accept the mind-bending paradoxes of Newspeak.
That the individual can resist such pressures - hold out for
decency and truth - is a hope which the novel in the end shows
up as sadly deluded. Thompson might take it as a warning
example of what intellect may get up to when divorced from
the empirical checks and remembrances of communal history.
Certainly this is where Orwell places the one tiny hope of sanity
redeemed. Hence Winston’s efforts to recover the past through
scraps of evidence and folk-memory as yet undestroyed by the
wholesale re-writing of official history. But this revolt in the
name of empiricist wisdom ends up in abject failure as the
forces of ideological coercion reassert their hold. Truth-to-
experience can muster small resistance against a state
‘apparatus’ that controls the very terms by which to make sense
of ‘experience’ and ‘truth’. There is no line of exit from
Nineteen Eighty-Four that doesn’t lead back to a message of
out-and-out cynicism and despair. This thoroughly undercuts
any remaining belief in the strengths and virtues of a
‘common-sense’ opposed to the abstract machinations of
political theory.

Perry Anderson has offered a persuasive account of how this
impasse developed within the broad tradition of Western
Marxism. It began, he argues, with the chronic divorce
between theory and practical politics imposed by the
beleaguered situation of left-wing intellectuals in a deeply
entrenched liberal-bourgeois culture. This led to an increasing
concentration on issues of method and principle, as opposed
to the kind of strategic activist thinking which might have
issued in a genuine revolutionary politics. ‘Where Marx had

Christopher Norris 251

successively moved from philosophy to economics to politics
in his own studies, Western Marxism inverted his route.’ 6
Theoretical questions - notably those of epistemology and
aesthetics - came to monopolize the high ground of Western
Marxist debate. In Anderson’s words:

Major economic analyses of capitalism, within a Marxist
framework, largely petered out after the Great Depression;
political scanning of the bourgeois state dwindled away after the
silencing of Gramsci; strategic discussion of the roads to a
realizable socialism disappeared almost entirely. What increas-
ingly took their place was a revival of philosophical discourse
proper, itself centred on questions of method — that is, more
epistemological than substantive in character. 7

And the upshot of this development, Anderson argues, was a
state of theoretical deadlock within the discourse of Western
Marxist reason. This had to do with the rival claims of subject
and structure, or - more generally - ‘humanist’ and ‘scientific’
modes of explanation. The conflict was signalled in Marx’s
own writings as a matter of shifting emphases. On the one
hand texts like the Communist Manifesto laid stress on the ways in
which human agents could engage collectively in the
class-struggle and thus influence the historical course of events.
On the other, such writings as A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy insisted that priority be given to causal
explanations in the structural mode, chief among them the
conflict between ‘forces of production’ and ‘relations of
production . The one line of thought leads directly to a
humanist Marxism founded on the notion of man as the
more-or-less conscious or willing agent of his own historical
destiny. The other renounces such residual elements of
‘bourgeois’ individualism in the name of a scientific theory
opposed to all humanist (‘ideological’) motives. It is this latter
tendency which receives its most extreme formulation in
Althusser’s structuralist reading of Marx.

Anderson finds this problem epitomised in the finally
abortive project of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. In his
pre atory essay ( Search For A Method’) Sartre focuses on the
question: what kinds of knowledge can we bring to bear

252 Inside the Myt/i

nowadays on the task of reconstructing an individual
life-history? His proposal involves a complex assemblage of
ideas from Marxism, psychoanalysis and a refined, socialized
form of existentialist philosophy. This amounts to an assertion
that classical Marxism is inadequate, as it stands, to
comprehend a life in all the vivid contingencies of actual,
historical experience. As Sartre famously put it, Paul Valery
may have been a petty- bourgeois French intellectual, but not
every petty-bourgeois French intellectual was Paul Valery.
Socio-economic modes of explanation had a real but limited
efficacy. They were concerned with large-scale structural
determinants which had little bearing on the lived project
which made up an individual ‘case’. Such theories required the
supplementary evidence of a knowledge more finely attuned to
existentialist psychology. Only thus could Marxism avoid the
charge of abusing its explanatory powers in pursuit of a
crudely reductive determinist creed.

Such was the argument of Sartre’s polemical preface. But the
major part of the Critique is devoted to its other, more
‘structuralist’ project: to describing, that is, the complex
ensembles of socio-economic relauonship which make up the
objective conditions of human existence. The ‘Search for a
Method’ had pointed toward biography - albeit a new and
sophisticated form of biography - as the touchstone of
historical understanding. In the Critique proper, as Anderson
describes it, Sartre aimed to provide ‘a philosophical account
of the “elementary formal structures” of any possible history,
or a theory of the general mechanisms of the construcdon and
subversion of social groups.’ 8 The two projects were intended
to generate a unified totalizing method, a synthesis of Marxist
explanatory science and existentialist biography. In the event
this ambition failed to materialize and Sartre never produced
the promised second volume of the Critique. What followed was
the fashionable swing toward structuralism, a theory which -
in Anderson’s view - abandoned any genuine attempt to arrive
at a workable mediation between subject and structure,
experience and knowledge. ‘The unresolved difficulties and
deadlocks within Marxist theory, which structuralism
promised to transcend, were never negotiated in detail within
this rival space.’ 9 The result was another, more extreme

Christopher Norris 253

disjunction between reified ‘structures’ on the one hand, and
anarchic subjectivity on the other.

Anderson s diagnosis is open to quesdon in its reading of
the current post-structuralist predicament. Nevertheless it
offers a useful hold for understanding what exacdy it is, in
Orwell’s thinking about language and politics, that continues
to vex his socialist commentators. The painful antinomy of
‘subject’ and ‘structure’ is present with a vengeance in Orwell’s
wridng, not least in the confused philosophy of language that
runs through his fiction and journalistic essays alike. Anderson
undoubtedly puts a finger on this same problem when he
argues against the structuralist habit of adopting the
Saussurian language-paradigm by way of explaining all
manner of cultural phenomena. 10 The relation between langue
and parole is, he writes, ‘a peculiarly aberrant compass for
piotdng the diverse positions of structure and subject in the
world outside language’. 11 This because the terms of Saussure’s
disdncdon create a polarized contrast between the long-term
stability of language-as-system ( langue ) and the short-term,
voladle character of speech (parole). Neither provides a very apt
analogy for the complex, many-levelled interplay of time-
scales which operates elsewhere in human society. Linguistic
structures, Anderson points out, ‘have an exceptionally low
coefficient of mobility’ compared with other social institutions.
And this structural immobility of language has its obverse in
the sheer inventiveness of speech, the freedom of the subject to
improvise at will within the broadest constraints of meaning
and context. Yet this very freedom, as Anderson sees it, is
curiously inconsequential : that is, its effects on the structure in
return are virtually nil’. 12 In short, the nemesis of structuralist
thinking is a constant vacillation between unworkable extremes
of determinist rigour and subjectivist illusion.

Of course I am not claiming Orwell as some kind of
homespun proto-structuralist stumbling toward the light. His
bluff empirical stance was all too proof against anything
resembling a worked-out theoretical ‘position’. Yet that very
desire to stick with the facts of commonsense experience
betrayed Orwell into a version of the same double-bind that
Anderson so shrewdly diagnoses. Its effects are most evident in
his various pronouncements on the relation between language,

254 Inside the Myth

politics and ideology. Basically Orwell subscribes to the
straightforward empiricist view that language in a normal,
healthy condition simply hands over the raw stuff of
experience. Abstractions are bad (like cliches and ‘dead’
metaphors) if they get in the way of this primary purpose.
‘What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the
word, and not the other way around.’ 13 Or again: ‘probably it
is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s
meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.’ 14
It is an attitude familiar enough from the long tradition of
(v-C. Iu> ? British common-sense philosophy. (No ideas but in things, or
in words that retain as much as possible of the lively
impressions which summon them to mind. Hitting off the
right form of words is simply a matter of hunting around until
the language fits whatever you want to describe.

As Orwell sees it, the main threat to this healthy state of
language is the habit of letting words choose meanings, or relaxing
the vigilant referential grip which prevents language from
conjuring up phantom realities. Such is the fundamental ethics
of style which Orwell expounds in ‘Politics and the English
Language’. The writer’s plain duty is to think without words as far
as possible, and then to make sure that they do an adequate
job by simply handing over die sense of what he thinks.
Abstraction is a sure sign that language is getting in the way. As
Orwell puts it:

When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to
use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort
to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the
job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your
meaning . 15

That is, the writer sets out with a clear enough sense of what he
or she means to say, and then works hard to prevent language
from distorting what those thoughts turn out to mean. The
problems with this are more than just a matter of local
ambiguity (‘meaning’ = either ‘sense’ or ‘intention’). What
exactly can Orwell have in mind when he conjures up a
pre-linguistic stratum of innocent, original thought as yet
untouched by the malign influence of words? How can the

Christopher Norris 255

writer s meaning begin to take shape before thought becomes
intelligible to itself in the process of achieving adequate
expression? These are crude formulations, but nowhere near
as crude - or hopelessly confused - as Orwell’s way of stating
the case.

What creates this confusion is the same sharp dichotomy
between langue and parole that Anderson detects in the
structuralist paradigm. On the one hand language is a set-up
of prevailing significations which threaten to invade and
disfigure whatever one wants to say. ‘The existing dialect’, as
Orwell puts it, will come rushing in and do the job for you.’
On the other, mere honesty requires that the writer ‘make a
conscious effort to prevent it’, opposing his or her vigilantly
truthful parole to the langue of ideological mystification. To this
way of thinking there is no middle-ground between language
as an alien structure of ready-made, mindless cliches and
language as a purely voluntarist expression of the individual
will-to-resist. And the upshot of this drastic dualism, as
Anderson argues, is a failure to conceive how language could
possibly withstand the drift toward systematic reification. For
there is no real effect of parole upon langue, such that the
writer s individual efforts might exercise some long-term
influence for the good. The ‘structural immobility’ of language
at large is indifferent to the great multiplicity of speech-acts
whose conditions it determines, in an abstract way, without
their being able to reciprocally act back upon it. As Anderson
so rightly observes, Even the greatest writers, whose genius has
influenced whole cultures, have typically altered the language
relatively little.’ 16 What structuralism fails to reckon with is this
basic asymmetry in the relation between langue and parole. To
extrapolate directly from language to politics is to end up with
a stark confrontation of determinist and voluntarist creeds.

Orwejl’s thinking about language is closely bound up with
his reading of political history. ‘Prose literature as we know it’,
he writes, ‘is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant
centuries, of the autonomous individual.’ 17 There is a morality
o style, Orwell insists, and its truth-telling virtues have their
own very specific historical sources and conditions. The
autonomous individual is the last fragile hope that language
can be rescued from the traps and snares of collective ideology.

257

256 Inside the Myth

(One recalls, in this connection, that ‘The Last Man In Europe’
was Orwell’s first working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four.) The
empiricist matching-up of words and experience requires a
well-nigh heroic effort of individual will if the untruths of
language are not to insinuate their hold. ‘Unless spontaneity
enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible,
and language itself becomes ossified. 18 Spontaneity (or
sincerity) is the precondition for cutting through the swathes of
conventional verbiage and simply telling things as they are.
This has been the attitude of a long line of literary critics, from
Dr Johnson to F.R. Leavis. Catherine Belsey sums it up as the
doctrine of ‘expressive realism’, and describes it as follows:

This is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as
it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it
in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as
true. 19

Orwell’s morality of style conforms closely enough to this
general description. What sets it apart from the mainstream of
liberal-humanist ideology is Orwell’s attempt to think out the
consequences in political terms. This attempt may have ended
in a state of deadlocked despair, but its lessons are pointedly
relevant still.

Orwell never faced up to the deep contradictions in his
thinking about language and politics. The Orwellian persona
was a means of holding them at bay, warding off doubts and
perplexities by an appeal to straightforward common-sense
knowledge. A bluff disregard of theoretical problems has
always been the hallmark of that ‘English’ ideology which
thinkers from the ‘other’, Continental tradition have treated
with alternating wonder and despair. Unconsciousness, as Basil
de Selincourt remarked, is the great virtue of the English,
though also - he might have added - the source of much
ideological mystification. In Orwell unconsciousness is raised
as a guard against the kind of critical self-knowledge that
might create problems for his homespun empiricist outlook.
Yet the symptoms of that repression are there to be read in the
twists and complications of Orwell’s writing, fiction an

Christopher Norris

journalism alike. I have suggested how they bear on a
diagnostic reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four and his essays on
language and politics. It remains to analyse more specifically
the relation between Orwell’s political ideas and the
blind-spots of mystified ideology to which they give rise in his
texts.

A good case in point is ‘Politics Vs Literature’, an essay on
Swift which Orwell published in 1946. It is a remarkable piece
in several ways, not least for its apparently unconscious
bearing on Orwell’s own predicament as author and
ideologue. Politically, says Orwell, ‘Swift was one of those
people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the
follies of the progressive party of the moment.’ 20 If Swift can
hardly be labelled ‘left’, still he is a kind of Tory anarchist,
‘despising authority while disbelieving in liberty’. The
generalized misanthropy of Gulliver’s Travels is strangely allied
to a passionate defence of individual rights against the
manifold abuses of state power. It makes sense to think of Swift
as rebel and iconoclast , though only if we recognise the
perverse element of right-wing ‘totalitarian’ thinking which
went along with his confused populist sympathies.

Up to this point Orwell’s version is pretty much in line with
standard critical thinking on the matter of Swift’s ambivalent
politics. There are two things, however, which work to
complicate Orwell’s reading. First is the fact that he tends to
equate Swift with Gulliver, assuming (for instance) that the
latter s admiration for the cold, calculating Houyhnhnms may
safely be imputed to Swift himself and called upon as evidence
of his political views. Second — and connected with this — is
Orwell’s doubtless unconscious investment in a version of the
same contradictory ideology that he discovers in Swift. With
Orwell likewise, there is a strain of ‘perverse Toryism’
produced - as he wants us to believe - by honest
lsenchantment with ‘the follies of the progressive party of the
moment . Orwell sees Swift as a problematic case, a writer
orce into tragic isolation by his keen understanding of the
tollies and corruptions of his day. What he fails to grasp is the
extent to which his own reading both mirrors and intensifies
me latent contradictions in Swift.

Thus Orwell can write, as if stating the obvious, of ‘the

258

Inside the Myth

“Reason” which he [Swift as well as Gulliver] so admires in the
Houyhnhnms. , There is no allowance here for the way in
which Swift - like all inventive satirists - manipulates his
fictional narrators so as to keep a firm distance between their
views and his. By collapsing that distance Orwell is giving voice
to the same ideology of ‘expressive realism’ that determines the
logic of all his thinking on language and politics. He is more
clear-sighted at the outset of his essay, where the point is made
that Gulliver is a far from unitary ‘character’, his viewpoint
shifting drastically in the course of the narrative from
down-to-earth, homely practicality to a well-nigh imbecile
misanthropic hatred. ‘These inconsistencies’, Orwell remarks,
‘are forced upon Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly
to provide a contrast .’ 21 Quite simply, it is necessary - in the
light of Swift’s satiric design - that Gulliver should appear
sensible in Part I and increasingly erratic or unbalanced
thereafter. But this formalist attitude in Orwell turns out to
have sharp limits. ‘Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge
there is a sort of continuity in his character, which comes out
especially in his resourcefulness and his observation of physical
detail .’ 22 This supposed continuity, or ‘depth’ of character, is
the source of Orwell’s implicit belief that Gulliver speaks for
Swift in admiring the Houyhnhnms and their inhuman
socio-political arrangements. And what precisely is the
‘Reason’ that Swift so admires? Orwell defines it as consisting
for the most part in ‘either common sense - i.e. acceptance of
the obvious and contempt for quibbles and abstractions - or
absence of passion and superstition .’ 23 Swift assumes in short
that ‘we know all that we need to know already, and merely use
our knowledge incorrecdy.’

The trouble with this, as Orwell goes on to argue, is that it
leaves no room for rational disagreement, since the truth is
always self-evident to those with sense enough to see it. The
Houyhnhnms have reached ‘the highest stage of totalitarian
organization’, the stage where dissent is simply unthinkable
and reason coincides perfecdy with public opinion. Swift,
according to Orwell, approves of this kind of thing ‘because
among his many gifts neither curiosity nor good nature was
included’. But this is to ignore what most readers perceive
readily enough: that Gulliver’s attitude in Book IV is by no

Christopher Norris 259

means endorsed by Swift, but represents a crazy extreme of
cynical paranoia. Orwell concedes that ‘Gulliver’s horror of
the Yahoos, together with his recognition that they are the
same kind of creature as himself, contains a logical
absurdity .’ 24 What he won’t acknowledge is that Swift may be
manipulating Gulliver s (and the reader’s) responses with a
view to undermining precisely that absurd misanthropic
over-reaction. And it is here, one suspects, that Orwell’s
reading becomes skewed by his own disenchantment and
general dim view of the hopes for political progress. The
despairing message has to come from Swift’s real-life
experience, rather than from Gulliver’s merely fictional
awareness.

This essay drives home the same grim conclusion, the same
paralysis of intellect and will, as afflicts Winston Smith and the
other protagonists of Orwell’s novels. Swift becomes a
spokesman for the rock-bottom cynical commonsense which
cleaves to the ‘facts’ of unmediated experience and admits of
nothing beyond them except the contortions of ‘totalitarian’
intellect. Most readers will see that Book IV of Gulliver's Travels
is a species of elaborate narrative frame-up which exposes the
absurdity of Gulliver’s choice between ‘Houyhnhnm’ reason
on the one hand and Yahoo’ common humanity on the other.
Orwell is intermittently aware that the case has been framed in
a highly prejudicial manner.

In comparison with what are die Yahoos disgusting? Not with the
Houyhnhnms, because at this time Gulliver has not seen a
Houyhnhnm. It can only be in comparison with himself, i.e. with
a human being . 25

There may be something odd, this concedes, in taking so lofty
a view of human values and reason as to exclude all humanity
k P roperl y claimin g to possess them. Yet this is the logical
absurdity that Orwell wants to attribute to Swift, rather than
seeing Book IV of the Travels as a brilliant device for exposing
such drastic and fallacious choices of attitude. In the end
Urwell is unable to conceive of any path between brutish
popu ar instinct and the dictates of pure ‘totalitarian’ reason.

1S the same stark dichotomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four that

260 Inside the Myth

separates the mindless existence of the proles from the cynical
acquiescence of Party ‘intellectuals’ like O’Brien.

What this finally comes down to is Orwell’s deep-grained
empiricist conviction: that intellect can only corrupt and
distort the certitudes of common-sense knowledge. Yet
common sense itself proves incapable of rising above the
errors and delusions of unreflective experience. Houyhnhnm
society has reached that stage, as Orwell describes it, where
‘conformity has become so general that there is no need for a
police force’. The habits of unreflective thought have been so
bedded down into common-sense lore that the Houyhnhnm
language has no word signifying ‘opinion’. Within such a total
ideology there is simply no room for dissenting views. The
Houyhnhnms represent all that is rational and virtuous, while
the Yahoos serve as convenient foils by embodying the lowest,
i.e. the ‘human’, aspects of animal nature. Orwell was to make
his own use of this topsy-turvy logic in Animal Farm, published
just a few months after the essay on Swift. He was evidendy
drawn by its capacity to turn the moral tables on anyone
claiming superior insight on behalf of whatever ideological
creed. But along with the manipulative skill of Orwell’s sadre
there emerges a perverse and self-defeating logic born of
political despair. Thus he remarks of Gulliver,

One feels that all these adventures, and all these changes of mood,
could have happened to the same person, and the inter-connexion
between Swift’s polidcal loyalties and his ultimate despair is one of
the most interesting features of the book. 26

This constant equating of Gulliver and Swift - thus muffling
some of Swift’s most effective satirical points - is symptomatic
of Orwell’s confusedly personal reading. The essay is a curious
mixture of blindness and insight, most revealing as regards
Orwell’s motives in writing it where it seems most perversely
off the point about Swift.

I have argued a connection between Orwell’s politics, his
ideas about language and the narrative forms in which those
two strands of thought were closely intertwined. I have also
suggested that Orwell’s predicament is that of a peculiarly
‘English’ ideology forced up against its limits by a last-ditch

Christopher Norris 261

adherence to empiricist habits of mind. This is why he remains
very much on the agenda for Marxist critical debate. What
Orwell represents - albeit in a distorted perspective - is that
clash between ‘common sense’ and ‘theory’ which thinkers like
Raymond Williams have striven to surmount, or at least to
articulate more clearly. With Orwell it takes the form of a
desperate allegiance to factual self-evidence, along with the
grim recognition that facts’ can be manipulated out of
existence by those with the power to impose their own versions
of truth. From the standpoint of ‘Continental’ Marxism his
case can be diagnosed as displaying all the blindspots and
irrational regressions of empiricist ideology. Williams registers
the force of this argument when he writes of Orwell’s
plain-man, common-sense style: his air of perpetually
‘bumping up’ against the straightforward facts of experience.
Yet the commitment to empiricism - as a mode of historical
experience, if not as a full-blown ideology — continues to
exercise a rival claim in Williams’s dealings with Continental
Marxism. For him, as for Thompson, it acts as a constant
qualifying check on the powers of theoretical abstraction.

It is this, perhaps, as much as his renegade politics, that
constitutes the standing provocation of Orwell’s ‘case’ in the
context of present socialist debate. In Politics And Letters
Williams says that he now finds Orwell just about unreadable,
his writing - as well as his politics - so repugnant as almost to
resist further comment . 27 The causes of that reaction, in one of
Orwell s most acute commentators, make up a whole complex
chapter m the history of post-war British socialism.

Notes

1 Raymond Williams, Politics And Letters, London, 1979, p.385.

ee (or instance Raymond Williams, Politics And Literature, Oxford 1977
i ffp Tc' 5 AJthusser - F <>r Marx, (tr. Ben Brewster), London, 1969.

S pp ^° m P son ' J he F° veTt y of Theory and Other Essays, London, 1978.

• Thompson, Outside The Whale’, in ibid., pp. 1-33, p. 19.

^ erry Anderson, In The Tracks of Historical Materialism , London, 1983, p.

7 Ibid., 16.

I Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith),

262

Inside the Myth

London, 1976, p. 36.

9 Anderson, op.cit., p. 55.

10 Ibid., pp. 32-55.

11 Ibid., p. 44.

12 Ibid., p. 44.

13 ‘Politics And The English Language’, in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The
Collected Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , Vol. 3, Harmondsworth,
1970, pp. 156-70, p. 168. Referred to hereafter as 'CEJL 1 .

14 Ibid., p. 169.

15 Ibid., p. 168-9.

16 Anderson, op.cit., p. 44.

17 ‘The Prevention of Literature’, in CEJL , Vol. 4, pp, 81-95, p. 92.

18 Ibid., p. 95.

19 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice , London, 1980, p. 7.

20 ‘Politics vs Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels 1 , in CEJL , Vol.
4, pp. 241-61, p. 243.

21 Ibid., p. 242.

22 Ibid., p. 242.

23 Ibid., p. 247.

24 Ibid., p. 254.

25 Ibid., pp. 254-5.

26 Ibid., p. 243.

27 Williams, Politics And Letters , op.cit., p. 392.

Antony Easthope

Fact and Fantasy in ‘Nineteen Eighty-
Four’

Nineteen Eighty-Four , after two decades in which it was read with the
utmost seriousness as a political prophecy, is now taking its place
... as a science-fiction story.

Patrick Parrinder 1

When Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted, the
BBC showed footage shot through the front window of a car as
it ranged at night through the backstreets of Bradford,
Barnsley and Leeds. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston
Smith sees a similar townscape:

Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth -century
houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows
patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron,
their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions ? And the bombed
sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb
scra ggled over heaps of rubble ... 2

— • nui uy wai out oy live years

o I hatcherite recession and deindustrialisation. These are the
an scapes not so much of Dorking and Basingstoke but of
Bolton, Manchester and Rochdale.

Fact and Truth in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Kmeteen Eighty-Four has sold over eleven million copies round
world. Published by Seeker and Warburg in 1949, it has

263

264

Inside the Myth

Antony Easthope

265

gone through forty-one impressions since appearing as a
Penguin in 1954. More than any other novel this century -
certainly more than any English novel — this book has come to
pervade general consciousness. ‘1984’, ‘doublethink’, ‘Big
Brother is watching you’ have become shorthand figures,
collective images for the fear of bureaucratic, state-controlled
totalitarianism.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is very widely known and almost
everyone seems to think they know what it is and what it says.
One way to begin to unpack the text is to discriminate between
fact and fantasy, to move forward from reading the text as a
discourse of knowledge to reading it as fantasy in a certain
fictional mode (novelistic realism), as literary discourse for
which truth or falsity is no longer the most applicable
criterion.

Considered as a prediction of the actual political situation in
1984 AD the book has sometimes, but not always, prophesied
correctly. Right that the world would be divided into three
blocks (Soviet, Chinese, North-Atlantic), each living under
continuous threat of war; right also that the purpose of the
Cold War is not really a matter of classic nineteenth-century
competition for markets, but not quite right to regard war as
mainly a means to eat up the surplus of consumer goods
(rather than as politically motivated in the military- industrial
complexes, East and West). Right that the Cold War functions
ideologically for the international benefit of the super- states
‘to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical
society needs’ (p. 161). Dead wrong that the ruling groups used
atomic weapons for a while after 1945 but stopped when they
saw that such use ‘would mean the end of organized society,
and hence of their own power’ (p. 158).

Of course Britain in 1984 is not a totalitarian dictatorship.
But in the past five years it has moved closer towards that
formation and away from democracy. By letting unemploy-
ment rise from around one to four and a half million (the real
figure), Thatcher’s government has strengthened the hierarchic
and undemocratic power of capital (both state and private). In
the past five years the army and police have been powerfully
reinforced and now sometimes act in coalition: on 30 October
1983, in an unprecedented step, some women at Greenham

Common were arrested by soldiers. 3 Special riot police in shinv
new visors now enforce shiny new laws against trade union
activity. Central government has effectively taken over the
powers of the regionally elected local authorities and is now
moving to abolish the county authorities. Poverty has
increased While in 1979 1 1.5 million people were living below

^ o ,°rr r a J pOVe !^ ty lme the fi S ure had risen to 15 million by
1981. Under Thatcherism Britain in 1984 is getting more

seedy, more run-down, more unhappy, a zone symbolised by
silent people waiting in lengthening queues for the bus, the
post office, the hospital, the dole. Five years have witnessed the
explicable death of social -democratic England. 5

As Orwell foresaw, secrecy and surveillance have increased.
In Britain freedom of information is restricted by the use of D
Notices, the Official Secrets Act, laws regarding libel and sub
judice. Although the television screen does not spy on us
Orwell was right to anticipate the central importance of
television in manipulating public opinion. A secret committee
of the BBC, the Director News and Current Affairs Committee
meets every Tuesday morning in Room 70.82 at Lime Grove to
fix the political lme to be followed in news broadcasts. 6 During
the past few years the state has greatly extended its capacity to
monitor individual behaviour electronically, for example bv
listening to transadandc phone calls. And yes, we do now

generally use a biro, ‘an ink-pencil’ (p. 9) rather than a pen
with a nib. K

Totalitarianism

To rt^d Nineteen Eighty-Four for its accuracy and inaccuracy as a
political prediction - look here on this picture (Orwell’s
account) and on this (the world in 1984) - is to read the text
re erentially, as a matter of facts proved true and false. But
traditionally there is another, more general level at which a
text may be read as truth. For Aristode the historian differs

‘JT u l° Ct m 11131 the historian tells us about facts and
what has happened’ while the poet tells us ‘the kinds of things

affW 1 ^ happen at a level of typicality. 7 Read as a text
mirn ing some general truth about reality, Nineteen Eighty-Four

devpL C SCen antlcl P aUn g and in some way leading to the
development during and after the 1950s of a particular area in

266 Inside the Myth

political theory (I would reserve the term political science), one
which identifies both communism and fascism as totalitarian. In
1965, in a chapter called ‘The General Characteristics of
Totalitarian Dictatorship’ C.J. Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski list
six features of this form of society: ‘an ideology, a single party
typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communi-
cations monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally
directed economy.’ 8 S.E. Finer later defines ‘the totalitarian
type’ of state according to two features: ‘that the entire society
is politicised’ and that ‘the viewpoints which so politicise it are
reduced to one alone, from which no dissidence is tolerated.’ 9
On this basis the Soviet system under Stalin during the 1930s
and Hitler’s Nazi Germany can be equated.

Nineteen Eighty-Four aligns itself with this conception,
explicidy so in the section which contains Emmanuel
Goldstein’s ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism’ (pp. 151-174). Noting that the conditions of life
in the three super-states of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are
very much the same, Goldstein affirms that ‘Everywhere there
is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a
semi- divine leader, the same economy existing by and for
continuous warfare’ (p. 160). The rest of the novel seeks to
illustrate this view in detail, for instance by making Goldstein
himself a composite scapegoat, both the Stalinist’s Trotsky and
the Nazi’s jew.

As a concept ‘totalitarianism’ depends more upon ideology
than upon science. As Leonard Shapiro says, ‘Perhaps as a
concept totalitarianism is elusive, hard to define, liable to
abuse by the demagogue, and, if wrongly used, a source of
confusion when we are trying to find our way through the maze
of the many forms which a polity can assume.’ 10 His qualifying
‘perhaps’ is over-cautious. Firsdy, because any definition of
totalitarianism must efface major social differences between
specific examples, even when they may seem as close as
National Socialism in Germany and Soviet Communism
during the 1930s (for example, while capital was state-owned
in the USSR it remained largely privately-owned in Germany).
Secondly, because by abstracting and universalising a political
system the concept of totalitarianism makes it impossible to
understand political effects in terms of specific historical

Antony Easthope ^

causes causes as diverse as the development of Stalinist Russia
out of Tsarist absolutism and of Nazi Germany from the liberal
democracy of the Weimar Repuh^. Accordingly, Goldstein’s
Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism’, despite its satirical force
is pretty short on explanations. It is left for O’Brien to say that
it all comes about because ‘The Party seeks power entirely for
its own sake ... The object of power is power’ (pp. 211 212)
And he is not so much anticipating Foucault as reviving
Hobbes: the general inclination of mankind is a ‘resdesse
desire of Power after power.’ 11

Liberalism

The political theory of totalitarianism is deeply penetrated by
an ideological commitment to liberal-humanism, as evidenced

}!? , , way u works to hypostasise and privilege the

liberal-democratic system as summum bonum and ideal type of
government. Liberal democracy is complicit with the
totalitarianism it would condemn in that it supports the
undemocratic structures of corporate capitalism and state
paternalism. As usual, freedom for the individual really means
freedom from social control for the private corporation
Perhaps an extreme instance this, yet no discourse can wholly
escape ideology. 7

A number of somewhat unrelated areas of recent theoretical
work, including the Anglo-American philosophic critique of
empiricism, the philosophy of science since Kuhn, contrib-
utions by Althusser in historical materialism and, within a
contrasted problematic, by Derrida, can be summarised,
however drastically, m a smgle statement: since the distinction
between science and ‘ideology’ is not absolute but relative,
t ere can be no corresponding, pure distinction between the
cognitive and affective effects of a text, between the text as fact
and the text as fantasy. While this may work to the
isadvantage of political theory (disablingly so, I would have

to d m 1116 die , theor y totalitarianism), it works

r e a Vant ^8 e °f Orwell s novel. It can and has been read in

DarnnhL 3 d ! SCOUrse of knowledge, as a political tract or
fs hard f aiming to give access to a reality beyond itself. But it

evidenrp° n ° W Tr ^ 006 * S ^ oin & ln trying to refute or bring
evidence against Nineteen Eighty-Four. And if it were compelled

268 Inside the Myth

to survive as a text only within the discourse of polidcal theory it
wouldn’t last very long.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is subtided ‘A Novel’. Among other
things this means that whatever is read as the text’s asserdons at
the level of knowledge (and no text can wholly escape these even
if it is only the assertion that Sophia is the capital of Bulgaria),
they will be ‘enacted’ or ‘dramatised’ or ‘realised’ or ‘supple-
mented’ by a fictional narration such that these asserdons
become re-installed within the category of ideology rather than
science. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the novel’s abstractable and
discursive ‘statement’ about totalitarianism becomes insepar-
able from the pseudo-biography of Winston Smith, his love
affair with Julia, his betrayal by O’Brien. Inevitably this fictional
narrative becomes dream- like, a vehicle for fantasy.

An argument that opens up at this point is whether the device
and artifice of the literary text defamiliarises ideology or natur-
alises it. While Althusser claims that such ardfice enables us to
‘perceive’ ideology, Macherey tends to argue that it naturalises
and neutralises ideological contradictions. I suspect that the
literary text does both at once, according to its own specific
economy, in a simultaneous movement that is ultimately self-
cancelling; I am sure that it is up to a progressive reading to
make visible the foundations on which the ideological asserdons
of a text depend.

Certainly the explicit tendency of Nineteen Eighty-Four is to
affirm a liberal nodon of the freedom of the individual against
all totalitarianism. It aims to do so both themadcally, in discuss-
ion of the nature of reality, subjectivity, and language, and
formally, by offering itself to be read as a realist text. And yet
(one reason why it is such a good novel?) this liberalism is
worked through so thoroughly in the novelisdc forms of dia-
logue, narrative and the dramadsadon of character, and brings
into play such a range of heterogeneous discourses that the
effect of the text - at least in this present reading - is to
undermine precisely the liberal assertion it proposes for itself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is committed to advocadng and defining,
sometimes even hysterically, a view of human nature. Or rather
one view of human nature against another. Against O’Brien s
Hobbesian apology for tyranny the book passionately and
explicitly proclaims a notion of self-conscious individuality as

Antony Easthope 259

definition of man and source of all value. Through the
rendering of Winston Smith and his fictional world this liber-
alism is explored and extended in relation to epistemological,
ethical and ontological discourses. Like a good Cartesian (or
more surprising! 7, like a Beckett hero) the first thing Winston
Smith becomes certain of is his own inner speech, ‘the inter -
minable restless monologue that had been running inside his
head, literally for years’ (p. 10). Rather than attributing this to
the internalisation of various outward discourses, the novel
(with Smith) claims it as the private property of the individual -
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside
your skull (p. 25). Individual self-consciousness is validated by
contrast when the word ‘unconscious’ is applied to the body and
the social. ‘Orthodoxy’, says Syme, Smith’s colleague ‘is
unconsciousness’ (p. 46, but see also the use of the word on
pp. 32, 33, 35, 46, 55). Throughout the novel the individual is
accorded value as transcendental subject of knowledge. Winston
Smith feels vindicated when he discovers by accident a fact
‘concrete evidence’ that the Party has lied (p. 66). He returns
obsessively to an empiricist conception of truth as pregiven once
and for all in the real such that the individual may be present to
himself as bearer of that truth. This underlies Smith’s horror of
what the Party does, and it is constandy reaffirmed by the text’s
references to doublethink and Newspeak: ‘The empiricist
method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of
the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental
principles of Ingsoc’ (p. 157). Significantly (it is an issue to which
we shall return), Smith cannot interest Julia in becoming a
transcendental subject for knowledge as ‘She did not feel the
abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming
truth (p. 17). He does. s

Corresponding to this imputed priority of individual con-
sciousness are the moral values Smith describes as ‘privacy, love,
and friendship’, a sense of personal loyalty located in the family
tp- 28) values which are those traditionally subscribed to by the
English gentry (and quite admirable they are as far as they go)
but which Smith later discovers among the proles:

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not
question. What mattered were individual relationships ... They

270 Inside the Myth

were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to

one another, (p. 135)

This is no mere passing phase in Smith’s developing
experience. Right at the end, after he has tried to refute
O’Brien’s view that ‘Nothing exists except through human
consciousness’ by pointing to the pregiven truths of geology
(‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals
p. 213), Smith’s liberalism is forced to admit its claim to
metaphysical guarantees. O’Brien rightly diagnoses that Smith
imagines ‘there is something called human nature which will
be outraged by what we do and will turn against us’; and he
speaks Smith’s epitaph: ‘You are the last man ... You are the
guardian of the human spirit’ (pp. 216-217). ‘Man’, for
Winston Smith and Orwell’s text, is an abstract essence
‘inherent in each single individual’ rather than a heterogenous
being constituted in ‘the ensemble of social relations .’ 12 It’s fair
to add that O’Brien’s Hobbesian anthropology (‘The object of
power is power’) is no less humanist than Smith’s liberalism in
resting on a view of man as an abstract essence.

This informing liberalism can be easily recognised as
holding up one side in a series of well-known ideological
contradictions, each handing on a supposedly absolute
opposition : subject/object, mind/body, individual/ social.
Once the text has set up a prior conception of the individual as
self- constituted (outside history, language, the psychoanalytic
process) it follows inevitably that anything which threatens to
limit this will appear as unfreedom, all ‘Orthodoxy’ will be
‘unconscious’. Posed as abstracts, the couple freedom/totali-
tarianism generate and confirm each other, and in this respect
the novel only presents an extreme version of the social as itself
oppressive, a notion found everywhere from Jane Austen to
D.H. Lawrence. And what is thematically asserted in the
narrative of Nineteen Eighty-Four is also worked through in the
novel’s narrative form as a realist text.

A Science-Fiction Story

As Patrick Parrinder well argues, Nineteen Eighty-Four must now
take its place in the genre of science-fiction, ‘not because of the
future setting but because of the “estranged” and yet cognitive

Antony Easthope

271

status of the Thought Police, the two-way telescreen
Newspeak, and Oligarchical Collectivism .’ 13 These distorted
transpositions from our own world become recognisable
cognitively but also provide the pleasures of metamomhosis
play and wit. One minor example occurs when Winsto/smith
expects wine to taste of blackberry jam and have an immediate
intoxicating effect' (p. HO), and/his palate eroded b™ of
v ictory Cm, is disappointed. Classic science fiction, however
presupposes the realist mode even if in some ways iti pumoS'
like that of coherent meaning in the tendentious P ioke as
analysed by Freud, is to defer and disguise the point o as to
make it more suddenly effective. F as to

But Nineteen Eighty-Four is not classic science fiction
Relanvely low on fantasy situations and high on psychological
complexity, „ ls much closer to the traditional realism of die
nineteenth-century novel. On the basis of a rendering of
individuals situated in an internally consistent world of
everyday reality a nan-auve is sustained according to the

‘ "£ sb ? wh,ch cause aid effect are assumed to
together. This is Barthes’s proairetic code, for which an
example might be the way the arrest of Smith and lulia at the
end of Part Two ,s followed by his interrogation in Par “hree
And the narrative also operates consistendy through the
hermeneutic code according to which, for examph- ie
seemingly unmotivated appearance of a rat in the loven'
hideaway to be greeted by Winston Smith’s words ’of Til
horrors ,n the world - a rat’ (p. 1 , 9 ) is explained when ’the

ra ° s rS (p 228) m The W ° rId ' m RO °T 101 tUniS ° Ut IO be a ca S e of
rhe n, 2 ? 8 ' Th c 1 onsistent application of these codes within

presentation' Til" ** P^ 0 ' 0 *^ 1 coherence of the
presentation of character, tends to efTace the means of

presentation m the novel in favour of the represented to

offer die narrated as an object not constructed by P « t“g and

^aceS™ ) “T* 1 ' “ 5ub i«'’ made® ff us

by the generally ann^ n,aS ‘" T ' ^ P os,tion is confirmed
the texf fe whh "r° US lnd ‘"“larked novelisdc style of

thp fl Y Wltbin the wat er of its would-be stvleless stvle
mm r° u™ 0 “ her dislinct kinds of wiling, the long atraal

Pies of Newspeak (pp. 241-252), as well as various

27 2 Inside the Myth

slogans (on p. 86, for example), the voice of the singing prole
(pp. 133, 175), slabs of newspeak from Smith’s office (p. 34),
and a series of extracts (some unpunctuated and all in lower
case, as on p. 19) from Smith’s diary. In order to substantiate
itself as a unity aiming to secure a unitary and transcendent
position for the reader, the text establishes these different
kinds of discourse and modes of writing within itself only
because it is confident it can bind them together into a
seamless whole.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' as Writing

In this the text’s project necessarily fails. There are various
places where it begins to unravel but possibly two are the most
manifest. One is the respect in which Nineteen Eighty -Four by
directing its attention so forcibly at the topic of writing, comes
in conequence to place in the foreground and make a problem
of its own discursive origin. Another occurs in the
development and dramatisation of Winston Smith’s character.
Invited, or rather compelled, by the realist narrative to take
Smith as the main point of identification, readers find
themselves entangled and led elsewhere by a body of fantasy
far exceeding the function the text means to assign to it.

A feeling of falling into a Derridean abime afflicts Winston
Smith whenever he thinks of ‘lies becoming truth’ (p. 127). An
occupational hazard for him in his work on Newspeak at the
Ministry of Truth, it becomes a main constituent in his
neurotic obsession with the real:

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in
any particular number of The Times had been assembled and
collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy
destroyed, and the corrupted copy placed on the files in its stead.
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to
newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind
of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any
political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute
by minute the past was brought up to date . . . All history was a
palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exacdy as often as
necessary ... (pp. 35-36)

Antony Easthope

v • 273

For Winston Smith and for the novel that endorses him rhi,

t t o°?984 m Th h e , ofh WhlCh S ° C W ° rSe Britain in the Y^rs up
to 984 The other is the impossibility - in every sense - nf l

rea ity which stands (to adapt some phrases fromDerrida)

sir - '■ “ &

external buT'exio? °’ Brien !ays th “ 'reality « no.

In 9 nn) o a ,sts , m the human mind, and nowhere else’
(p. 200), and again, that nothing exists u u

consciousness’ (n 913 ^ rvt> ■ > • i . through human

consciousness (p. 213). O Bnen’s idealism (truth exists onlv in

discursive construction) shares the same absolutistTroblemLk
as Smith s positivist empiricism (truth exists independent of
discursive construction). Winston Smith’s mind - his be W -

ateaTn^sta JhTa eaning ° f histor >' “ ^bjecVto'conSom

E” ( ' h °“g. h * ™ a U id ng nTSow "sTTS

linguistic components are re-written if fnr* ^ i

"d atZ

Sausaum cads 'the social fact ’ ^

iiSSSSsSaSSr?

favour of what is ren ° Verl °° Jc the means of representation in

something weightiest and w>h C ° aCCCC ^ e to t h e P rose style as
g igntless and without origin ? And what happens ?

274 Inside the Myth

Continuous insistence on writing pushes into the foreground
the text’s own discourse, making us ask what it is and where it
comes from. If it originates in the present, how can it have
access to this narrative from 1984? And if it derives from 1984,
how come it is not written in Newspeak, and what would it be
like if it were? Worse follows. For Winston Smith’s obsession
with finding a truth immune to discursive construction cannot
but call attention to the fictionality of this text we are in the
process of reading. Nineteen Eighty-Four , as a novel, consists of
meanings which do not refer to reality; as such, it can’t be
distinguished from the material in the Ministry of Plenty which
‘had no connexion with anything in the real world’ (p. 36). The
life, love and subsequent suffering of Winston Smith are
themselves nothing but a set of ‘lies becoming truths’.

Julia is less susceptible to the horror induced in Smith by the
way writing makes truth and lies ultimately though not
immediately indistinguishable. As far as he and the novel’s
avowed purpose are concerned, this counts against her. As
main representative of woman in the text Julia is essentialised.
She belongs to nature rather than culture (Smith finds her
breasts to be ‘ripe yet firm’, p. 112). She is imagined as all
woman, her ‘short hair and boyish overalls’ only making her
‘far more feminine’ (p. 117). She is seen as exclusively
heterosexual, exclaiming at one point ‘How I hate women!’
(p. 107), a feature strengthened in Winston Smith’s eyes by the
number of men she has made love with:

His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had

been hundreds - thousands, (p. 103)

Julia, then, is a figure of masculine fantasy, not unlike
Honeychile in Fleming’s Dr No, the tomboy stereotype of
woman, less rational, less conscientious, less aware, less
committed to culture, less concerned with absolute truth.
‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards’ is Smith’s
enthusiastic assessment (p. 128).

Part Two follows the course of their love affair, Chapter 2
concluding with their escape from London and the Anti-Sex
League into a clearing in the Berkshire woods. Smith reflects
that ‘simple undifferentiated desire . . . was the force that would

Antony Easthope

275

Sflov^Ae^ec'Sn ends ‘It “ ra , tified when ’ aftcr th <7

they may beTe^e w ?ti Zu P° teiC f , a “' <P- 104). So

conclusion in The History of Sexuality diat the NlesirTidlkvof 1 ^
makes us think we are affirming it desirability of sex

are f r ned ,o ***■«

opposition

between poBtalSl^ - «■»
Fantasy

**£ t't

Smith* constkutes TpZrfdZZc ^ P T "■

knowledge p„vZZdh' r Zf77 of the subject of

(tenre He is ahn rtS o fi : uon ' “e the detective in that

be the hero of my own life or a 1 h rn ° ut to

by anyone else, dtese paws mt^show 1 ? Tk™" be Wd
version of the existentialist hero sina orthod"'" 3
unconsciousness, individuated «.|f orthodoxy is

acion: ^

KTeTel “fX f ' h“ IO "! “ ‘

sympathetically Smith’* A > Xt ^ C rea< ^ er * s invited to follow
sense of selfhood develo P in & experience, his burgeoning
attempt ^2^ h !?. loVe f ° r ■ ^ **

fi’orLTo™; 5K2SS

* nove, Lo a

276

Inside the Myth

ineluctably unsticks the text’s avowed unity and its aim to make
readers as present to themselves in the face of the text as
Winston wants to be within it. Nineteen Eighty-Four does this the
more radically because it seeks to disavow so curtly the
dynamic of the unconscious by ascribing it to a social other
(orthodoxy is unconsciousness) or a bodily otherness.

One way to envisage what can figure in the place of an object
of desire for Winston Smith is to consider how often and how
intensely he recurs to the fantasy of killing a woman - ‘He
would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon’ (p. 16, but
examples also on pp. 84, 92, 99, 111, etc.). From this main
trajectory his love for Julia brings only a temporary inflection.
Traversing the ‘official’ narrative of the text, running through
and across its preferred concatenation of events, there is
another narrative. What counts in this other theatre is less the
narrative order of events than the order of their narration for
Winston Smith. Though a practice of reading will exceed any
programmatic analysis, attention can be drawn to some of the
more cathected moments of the text.

‘The question, as always in classical realism, is one of
identity.’ 17 Nineteen Eighty -Four opens with Winston Smith
watched by the castrating gaze of Big Brother and moved by
O’Brien’s ‘curiously disarming’ trick of ‘resettling his
spectacles on his nose’ (p. 12). Admitted thus into conscious
self-identity and starting a diary, Smith would negotiate the
castration complex by locating its site as the maternal body. He
hates women, wishes to kill them, dreams that his mother and
sister sacrificed their lives for him (p. 27). In the passage from
polymorphous perversity to distinct heterosexual preference
for a mature object the human subject never loses its bisexual
potential. For men the Oedipus complex is both positive
(identification with the Father leading to heterosexual
object- choice) and negative, a form in which a boy ‘displays an
affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a correspond-
ing jealousy and hostility to his mother.’ 18 Insofar as he is
placed in the feminine position towards the Father, Smith feels
an ambivalent love towards O’Brien, one on which the text
constantly (and otherwise inexplicably) insists. O’Brien knows
his thoughts (p. 17), O’Brien promises to meet him ‘in the
place where there is no darkness’ (p. 24), O’Brien has a

Antony Easthope

277

SpertacGT C W h r (P- US). To the end Smith

experiences a peculiar reverence for O’Brien’ Paranoia

D 7“ 7“?' ng > ,ou and voice enveloping you’

homosexuah^ UCed by S ™' h ' s ““*■ »

Against this negative form at a deeper lewd

Kadtennete^Ltot^'TS Zf h “ Wif '’

(pp 54 - 5 Q) l | . n a iema le prole prostitute

her mouth £«? " b ° nIyjUSt ~ overcoming his horror of
her mouth (nothing except a cavernous blackness’)- writes that

if tfaieTand’ * ( P’ 59) " ‘-nderstandmg of to

^deterred, and visits an antique shop owned by Mr
Chamngmn. perhaps sixty ^ a P benCT '^

(p. 79), from whom he acquires the phallus
It is symbolised fedshistically:

It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other
making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness as of
rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass At the
heart of it, magnified by the cuiwed surface, there was a strand
pmk, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.’

sftesas taszs m po ^nA M f r u r iy ;

against his thigh a, every £. 84) gh “ ba " ged

Armed with the phallus (whereas O’Brien’s erace is

(P sTsmi h 3 P ^ hCr t0 him > love you’

They ke a room 11 rl int ° his lov e-affair with Julia,
the paperweight Cham "S ton s sh °p, where Smith keeps
half-darkness’ g (p m) " ‘rf h gleamin S ‘softly in the
interesting in thetext’s oJ? a ™*} austlh > y in t ere st in g’ (more
into itself the tradhionT eS “™ tlon t^n Julia), it gathers

the crystal’ (pp. 12, ,V K>, Tsafnr'S ,” %

278

Inside the Myth

represented fetishistically not only by the paperweight but also,
now, by the figure of the singing prole, the phallic mother. As
‘solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms’, she had a
mouth ‘corked with clothes pegs’. Her love-song echoes
through Part Two, and at one point she is watched by both
Smith and Julia (pp. 175-176). Having found this hope in the
proles, Smith is now able to recall his own mother, imaged not
as death but in terms of a similar phallicism. Working over his
earlier dream he sees in his mother a protective ‘gesture of the
arm’ (p. 131) and admits to Julia, ‘until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother’ (p. 132). In identification (albeit
uneasy) with Goldstein and with the (deceptive) appearance of
O’Brien as member of the Brotherhood, Winston Smith starts
to take political action against an unjust society. But at the end
of Part Two Charrington turns out to be a member of the
Thought Police, Smith and Julia are arrested, the glass
paperweight is ‘smashed to pieces’ (p. 179).

Delusional jealousy in men is regarded by psychoanalysis as
a defence against homosexuality, a projection that can be
described in the formula: 7 do not love him, she loves him’. 19
In the more extreme form of persecutory paranoia ‘it is
precisely the most loved person of his own sex that becomes his
persecutor’, 20 and the corresponding paradigm is: ‘I do not
love him - I hate him, because HE PERSECUTES ME’. 21 In
Nineteen Eighty-Four O’Brien is the focus for Smith’s paranoiac
sense that everyone is watching him and threatening him. At
points in the text Smith’s homosexual love for O’Brien and his
heterosexual love for Julia coalesce in a compromise
formation, for example when he fantasises that he might use
the paperweight to ‘smash her skull in’ (p. 84), or again when
he tells her, ‘The more men you’ve had, the more I love you’
(p. 103). But for Smith the negative Oedipal trajectory wins out
in the end.

O’Brien in his role as member of the Brotherhood contacts
Smith in the same place and by the same means of a written
note as Julia first did (pp. 129-130). In Part Three with the
arrest, interrogation, torture and confession Smith finally
arrives at his long-promised rendezvous with O’Brien in ‘the
place where there is no darkness’ (p. 196), the constant electric
light of the prison-cell. ‘I do not love him, he hates me’:

Antony Easthope

279

S: B »mS r torhe wa s h ^‘ St,U ^ '“T Wm - says that 'He was

H Smfth ' OVed h f m “ dee P l y°'s a^thfs momen?'p 202)'

Ease',*’ WOmon Smith is ^me^ce7wfth PU wte^ ““s^ co ^
the idea took the form r.f Ratman > an obsessional neurotic,

cS coZoW ar r T bCT r ‘ -

spectacularly on 5th October 1930 "Faced'SthZ'e' 11 ”
thing in the world (‘they attack the eyes first’)^mitf ! "T
repudiates his heterosexuality (‘Do it to lulia.’) Aft ^
drunk in the cafe he ‘ft,-, • . . ° J u ia ‘ '■ Afterwards,

heterosexual intercourse (d 234) ^ 0rr ° r ’ at the bought of
With full relapse Tntothef. “ paranoia has d »solved
Brother- (p 24W. fem,n,ne pos,d °" : ‘He '°ved Big

Dystopia and Paranoia

WetTthe piZoufac( .?* ““ Mnetot

significance, fhisZX unZT 4°““ “ pand ia
fantasy in literature is alw^ ^ °i° ■ m ^ WOres P eas; because
formation- because it k T nca ^ an ideological
tepresentanveTather tCn* ,di"« flT ^ “ b '

-r4°^„t directions ^

■«h r o”g g 1% *aZ»T'Z ^ t Four but about

modern vision of river ’ • f C J ameson argues that the

immense and decentralized 3 aIle £ orical, y from ‘that

ana decentralised power network which marks the

280

Inside the Myth

present multinational stage of monpoly capitalism.’ 25 While
older expressions in the utopian/dystopian mode gave a
personalised account of power as originating, for good or ill,
with individuals, this contemporary film renders a sense,
‘rarely accessible in figurable terms’, of power as hostile,
systematic, and marked rather by the absence of personal
agency than its presence; a sense

inscribed in the spatial trajectory of the film itself as it moves from
the ghettoised squalor of the bank interior to that eerie and
impersonal science fiction landscape of the airport finale: a
corporate space without inhabitants, utterly technologised and
funcdonal, a place beyond city and country alike - collective, yet
without people, automated and computerised, yet without any of
that older utopian or dystopian clamour ... 26

Whether or not we go along with Jameson’s willingness to tie
back dystopia onto an economic cause, monopoly capitalism,
we may still accept that the modern dystopian mode
reproduces an ideological formation around anonymous
social repression rather than individual agency.

But the account of literature as ideology does not exhaust its
effect as fantasy, and for this we must turn to psychoanalysis.
Briefly: everyone has fantasies in the form of day-dreams,
invariably of an undisguised and narcissistic nature that is
boring for others; the aesthetic text, because it provides
‘forepleasure’ in the ‘purely formal’ 27 (that is, the work/play of
the signifier), presents fantasies in such a way that makes it
‘possible for other people once more to derive consolation and
alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their
unconscious which have become inaccessible to them.’ 28 While
the fantasy in actuality tends towards the merely personal and
subjective, the aesthetic fantasy moves onto the terrain of the
transindividual and intersubjective. And so the fact that
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been widely read for nearly two
generations is itself evidence that the text can perform as a
symptomatic literary fantasy for Europe and North America in
the twentieth century.

Nineteen Eighty -Four makes available the fantasy of
persecutory paranoia (and it would be a misrecognition to say

Antony Easthope

j!‘ Wimt ° n f Smith ‘ reall y’ is b «ng persecuted by Ingsoc). In

™ He’teT ° fa If Uing tHat <n ° meanin S given to histo^, based
egehano -Marxist premises’ is capable of accounting for
fascism, for the drama of Na^sm’, Lacan has suggested^
paranoia should be referred to the operation of the dea*

the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something

Tbierr If f" “ sacrifice “g^es that, in the

object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of

the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God™

Again the issue of historical explanation - monopoly

SSlS be ,efl in brin ^

psychoanalytic lining, the unconscious subtext, for dystopia
As such it constantly recurs through images and narrative? of

ndtnrf mP S SOnm ! nt , and Rogation, not only in popular

mode s televi * lon > but aIso in high cultural literary
modes. »n Kafka (there is a small, curiously beetle-like man’ in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 52); in Pound’s Pisan Cantos in
Solzhenitsyn s First Circle, and in Pynchon’s V (espec ally
Mondaugen s story’) Linked to a state of global warfare the

f u ntaSy a PP ears in Catch 22 and Gravity’s
* ' nk ! t0 ' he h ° s P ital or Psychiatric ward in Clockwork

tZTL a™ 1? eT the Cuck00 ’ s Nest ’ Woman at Me Edge of

for one of IhfhfT BiySOn ’ S descri P tlon , it forms the basis
tor one of the best-known paintings of this century:

eveT h’ 3 SPedfi u reaCti ° n t0 2 Single (if em blemat.c) polidcal
event, by raising the spectre of slaughter from the air, becomes a
generalised nightmare. 30

Icoid 1 C ° Uld be eXtended ' Des P ite the specific forms taken by

institution JTT® “ ° f ^ difrerent texts ~ state
psvcKiV hn Tf ^ Pn , SOn C3mp ’ GuIag ’ tnihtary base,
can bp hospital, secret police (whether KGB or CIA) - all

n be read for the fantasy of living in what Pynchon names

282 Inside the Myth

‘The Zone’, subject to institutionalised surveillance and
persecution by a wholly malign other.

Applying this view to Nineteen Eighty-Four , my argument
would be that the text makes the dystopian/paranoiac fantasy
more effectively available in Part One of the novel than later,
when, via Winston Smith’s affair with Julia and relationship
with O’Brien, the text becomes increasingly psychologised and
denunciatory in the rhetoric of what Jameson speaks of as
‘dystopian clamour’. Continuous international warfare (real or
invented), the Thought Police, Newspeak, ‘the eyes watching
you’, the seedy townscapes of London under Ingsoc, these state
institutional, cultural, linguistic and subjective apparatuses
present in figurable terms what is arguably the most typical
contemporary fantasy.

The Novel as Paperweight

There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent
as air ... as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the
sky, enclosing a tiny world ... He had the feeling that he could get
inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany
bed and the gateleg table, and ... the paperweight itself. The
paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life
and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal,
(p. 121)

Since persecutory paranoia is a defence against homosexuality,
Nineteen Eighty-Four may also achieve typicality in its sexual
politics. The homosexuality of Winston Smith’s negative
Oedipus complex leads to reinforcement of the disavowal of
castration in the positive form, his love for Julia. Within his
fetishistic imaginary Julia figures as the phallus of his fully
present heterosexuality. Unable to live with his own divided
sexuality, Smith must fix Julia’s femininity in place once and
for all according to the traditional phallocentric scenario of
Romantic love. Her own sexuality is to be denied so that she
can become coral in his paperweight, natural rather than
human, mineral rather than organic, like the metallic woman
that is Pynchon’s V or the Venus Anadyomene in ‘Medallion’,
the last poem in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley :

Antony Easthope ^33

Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber

Hence the names: Winston Smith, stand-in for the
cigar-smokmg warlord, Julia his jewel.

Juha in the paperweight, Julia as the paperweight, is meant
to be a mirror in whose reflection Winston Smith may appear
y present to himself in the form he wishes to see himself, a
transcendent ego. The paperweight represents ‘a sort of

Temnn^ 1 at which being is ^finitely present outside

S B it a ? renCe l aS SpadaI difFerenc e. a completed
f B S °’ m Ch ' S vanegated symbolism, because it is
most as transparent as air’, this crystal would provide
unmediated access to knowledge, with no means of
representation acting to bring subject into relation with object
Winston Smith sees himself inside the paperweight ‘along with
the mahogany bed’ and, in total seff-reference, g ‘the
paperweight itself.

If sexual difFerence is taken up analogously with linguistic
difference, Winston Smith’s foreclosure of sexual difference (he
is to be all man Julia all woman) corresponds to his denial that
meaning is produced in the process of the signifier. Absolutely
opposed to Newspeak, the paperweight for him is ‘a little
chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter’ (p. 120), one of
a few solid objects with no words attached to them’ (p. 127).

strmrcrl 3 ^ * S br °k en > Smith during his interrogation
gg!es like a tragic hero to retain his conception of himself
as a man and a sovereign consciousness able to grasp truth
outside words. In the name of the Father, O’Brien ifroL 101
reinstates for Smith the persistence of human consciousness
“ W ^ ds > text > wm *ng. And the novel intends a reader to
C S ? lth S E- re r Um t0 the feminine Position only as tragic

J™:: n ^ h r° ur tries to "wi*®** i ts p^Ced

Th I h ^ guarantee of a metatext, the ‘Appendix’
makCsrC P h rmaple ° fNews P eak is defi ned as the intention ‘to
neC (n P 94C) *1 aS P ossible independent of conscious-

POssiSlS nf C ng t0 C ,° unter P° se itself wholly against the
possibility of Newspeak, to present to the reader a

consciousness as nearly as possible independent of writing, the

novel mobilises the realist mode as a would-be transparent

284 Inside the Myth

means of access to the truth it would represent. In trying to
refound the significance of the text not so much as a picture of
reality, to be judged true or false, nor as a general truth about
totalitarianism, but rather as a typical form of modem fantasy,
this analysis has suggested how the text as writing provokes
readings beyond its overt intention. However hard it tries - the
more it tries - to tell the truth, Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot
cover clearly and hold in place the process of the text on which
it depends. Literally, a paperweight is something used to hold
down pieces of writing. Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be such an
object. Nor, for that matter, can this present analysis.

Notes

1 Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction, Its Criticism and Teaching , London, 1980,
p. 75.

2 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four , Harmondsworth, 1983, p. 7. All
page references are to this edition.

3 Guardian , 31 October 1983.

4 Guardian , 1 November 1983, report of Family Expenditure Survey,
published by the Department of Health and Social Security, 1983.

5 For an explanation, see Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, in
Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds.), The Politics of Thatcherism, London,
1983; for an alternative, see Geoff Hodgson, The Democratic Economy,
Harmondsworth, 1984.

6 ‘Screening the News’, The Leveller, No. 1 1 (January 1978), pp. 14-17.

7 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’ in Classical Literary Criticism, (tr. T.S.
Dorsch), Harmondsworth, 1965, p. 43.

8 C.J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and
Autocracy , Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965, p. 21.

9 S.E. Finer, Comparative Government , London, 1970, p. 75.

10 Leonard Shapiro, Totalitarianism, London, 1972, p. 124.

1 1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, 1957, p. 49.

12 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in C.J. Arthur (ed.). The German
Ideology, London, 1974, p. 122.

13 Parrinder, op. cit.

14 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference , (tr. Alan Bass), London, 1978,
pp. 278-293.

15 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, (tr. Wade Baskin),
New York, 1959, p. 113.

16 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, (tr.
Robert Hurley), Harmondsworth, 1981, p. 157.

Antony Easthope 235

17 SS v^7 e> M The s °7 4 and Film: Prind P les of Realism and Pleasure’,
Screen , Vol. 17, No. 3 (Autumn 1976), p. 18.

18 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition, (ed. J. Strachey)

London 1953-1974, Vol. 19, p. 33. J c,tratnc y''

19 Sigmund Freud, Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality, m Standard Edition, Vol 18 d 225

20 Ibid., p. 226. P ‘

21 Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case
of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoises), in Standard Edition, Vol. 12, p. 63

Sigmund Freud Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, in Standard
Edition, Vol. 10, p. 166.

23 Ibid., p. 167.

24 L he "r ber 7 ree 7 as r been COnfirmed from many sides as a symbol of

C r emtah ’ Tke InteT P Tetatlon of Dreams, in Standard Edition, Vol 5

Ll f r° r I" f e , mpt 7 establish ‘ in zero number the suturing
d-in for the lack and the number series itself as ‘metonomy of the

zero , see Jacques-Alam Miller, ‘Suture (elements of the logic of the
ignifier) , Screen, Vol 18 No. 4 (Winter 1977/78), pp. 24-34, and cf. the

rwrl// nd , COn 7 ntS i no Ml . ke Wesdake ’ s novel, One Zero and the Night
Controller London, 1980; A quite recent symbol of the male organ in

T\ D ° n: the airshi P’ {The Interpretation of Dreams, in
Standard Edition, Vol. 5, p. 356), for the disaster which overcame the

Mwt '7 airship ’ the R 101 * at Beauvais in France, see Norris
Mcwhirter, Guinness Book of Records, Enfield, 1979, p. 149.

25 ^7 eS ° n ’ Class a " d ABegory in Contemporary Mass Culture:

S *, PO “ Cal Film '’ No. so (Spring

26 Ibid.

27 Vo?^ F I53 d ’ Wnten md Da >- Dreamm g’ in Standard Edition,

28 ^T d Introductor y lectures on Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition,

vol. lo, p. 376.

29 ch C<1 T (7^ ThS F ° m Fundarnental incepts of Psycho-Analysis, (tr. Alan

Sheridan) London, 1977, p. 275. 7 ’

30 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting, London, 1983, p. 154.

Notes on Contributors

Bill Alexander was one of the Commanders of the British
Battalion of the International Brigades; he is the author of the
history of the British who fought for the Spanish Republic,
British Volunteers for Liberty: Spain 1936-1939 , which was
published in 1982.

Deirdre Beddoe is Principal Lecturer in History and Art
History at the Polytechnic of Wales at Pontypridd. She is
author of Welsh Convict Woman : A Study of Women Transported
From Wales to Australia , 1787-1852 (1979) and Discovering
Women's History , A Practical Manual (1984).

Alan Brown has done research on Shelley; his interest in
Orwell and the school curriculum stems from his work as a
teacher preparing students for O and A Level exams.

Beatrix Campbell works as a journalist for City Limits ; she is the
author (with Anna Coote) of SzOeet Freedom (1982) and of Wigan
Pier Revisited (1984), as well as a contributor to a large number
of publications, including Marxism Today and New Statesman.

Andy Croft teaches at the University of Leeds in the Adult and
Continuing Education Department; he has contributed to a
range of journals including New Socialist and London Magazine ,
and has also written introductions to a number of reprints of
socialist novels, May Day and Last Cage Down amongst them.

Antony Easthope teaches English and Cultural studies at
Manchester Polytechnic. His book, Poetry as Discourse , was
published in 1983 and he has also written for journals which
include New Left Review , Critical Quarterly , New Literary History
and Radical Philosophy.

286

Notes on Contributors

287

Malcolm Evans is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Lan guage and Literature at the Polytechnic of North London;
he is author of Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in
Shakespeare s Text (forthcoming) and has contributed articles to
Shakespeare Quarterly, Glyph and Shakespeare Jahrbuch.

Stuart Hall is Professor of Sociology at the Open University.
Co-author of Resistance Through Rituals (1976) and Policing the
Crisis (1978), he is also co-editor of The Politics of Thatcherism
(1983) and a regular contributor to a wide range of
publications, including Marxism Today and New Socialist.

Lynette Hunter has published G.K. Chesterton: Explorations in
Allegory (1979), Rhetorical Stance in Modem Literature (1984) and
George Orwell, The Search for A Voice (1984); she teaches at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh
University.

Alaric Jacob worked as a foreign correspondent for thirteen
years, and was a war correspondent on every major front
during the Second World War; later he joined the external
news services of the BBC. His books reflect this life-long
involvement in foreign affairs and include A Traveller’s War, A
Window in Moscow and Scenes From A Bourgeois Life.

Christopher Norris lectures at the University of Wales Institute
of Science and Technology at Cardiff. He is author of William
Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (1978), Deconstruc-
tion: Theory and Practice (1982) and The Deconstructive Turn (1983),
and editor of Shostakovich: The Man and his Music (1982).

Stephen Sedley is a QC specialising in civil rights cases; his
publications include an anthology of British folksongs and a
volume of Spanish prison poetry in translation.

Robert Stradling is Senior Lecturer in History at University
College, Cardiff He is author of Europe and the Decline of Spain
(1981) and has published articles in the scholarly journals of
England, Spain and the Netherlands.

INSIDE THE MYTH
Oiwell: views from the left
CHRISTOPHER NORRIS (Editor)

Has too much homage and too little critical
attention been paid to George Oiwell? This
collection of essays on Oiwell's life and writing
provides a compelling critique of the Orwell
myth and argues for a more sceptical - if
heretical - approach to the man and his work. A
critical spotlight falls on his attitude to women
in both fiction and documentary writing, his
view of the state and his involvement in the
Spanish Civil War. Orwell's sacred place in the
school curriculum and media reaction in 1 984
are also dissected. The literary antecedents to
Nineteen Eighty-Four are examined and his
ambiguous place within British socialism
assessed. A psychoanalytic examination of
Orwell's writing and a lively, personalised look
at his traumatised school-days round off a book
which will not leave the Orwell industry
undisturbed.

Cover design by Frances Battey, drawing by John Bendall

Contributors;

Bill Alexander
Deirdre Beddoe
Alan Brown
Beatrix Campbell
Andy Croft
Antony Easthope
Malcolm Evans
Stuart Hall
Lynette Hunter
Alaric Jacob
Christopher Norris
Stephen Sedley
Robert Stradling

r

i

Lawrence & Wishart

39 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LQ

ISBN 85315 600 X