Our Orwell, Right or Left
Our Orwell, Right or Left:
The Continued Importance of One Writer
to the World of Western Politics
By
C. J. Fusco
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Our Orwell, Right or Left: The Continued Importance of One Writer to the World of Western Politics,
by C. J. Fusco
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by C. J. Fusco
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-602-5, ISBN (13): 9781847186027
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
He’s Created a Monster!
PART ONE – ORWELL AND THE LEFT
Chapter One............................................................................................... 10
The Left of the Left
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 14
The Call for Socialism
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 24
The Totalitarian Threat
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 30
Lines of Distinction
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 37
Studies in Dystopia
PART TWO – ORWELL AND THE RIGHT
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 48
Thought Control from Beyond the Grave
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 54
Posthumous Superimpositions
Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 59
He’s Making a List
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 63
The Neoconservative Agenda
PART THREE – ORWELL TODAY
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 74
Out of Retirement
Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 79
Big Brother is Watching
Chapter Twelve ......................................................................................... 87
Orwell in the Age of Spin
Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 100
Through the Fog (Conclusions)
APPENDICES
Works Cited............................................................................................. 103
Notes........................................................................................................ 108
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to extend his thanks to Thomas Pynchon, who
unintentionally and unknowingly planted the seed of the idea for this book
within the author’s mind; to Dr. David Rosen of Trinity College, without
whose help and advice this project would have never gotten off the
ground; to the author’s parents and brother for their love and support; to
the author’s network of friends for providing an occasional much-needed
distraction and escape; and, of course, to Eric Arthur Blair for dedicating
his life’s work to ensuring the continued preservation of physical and
intellectual freedom.
INTRODUCTION
HE’S CREATED A MONSTER!
If one follows the line of academic conversation amongst literary
critics on practically any significant piece of literature, one will invariably
find a reception history rife with disagreement and variable interpretation.
The confusing and often contradictory reception history of George
Orwell’s work, however, poses a problem which is significantly more
pressing and severe than academic squabbling over the semantics of a
single line of poetry by Pound or Eliot. Orwell’s writings and indeed
Orwell himself have been claimed as inspiration over the decades by
politically-leaning literary minds from both sides of the political spectrum.
As Norman Podhoretz wrote, “it is, after all, no small thing to have the
greatest political writer of the age on one’s side: it gives confidence,
authority and weight to one’s own political views.”1 If Podhoretz is
correct, and Orwell is worth claiming because having him on one’s side
gives weight to one’s argument, we, as political thinkers, are confronted
with a problem because those who attempt to claim Orwell as their patron
saint have done so largely for a selfish reason: in order to solidify their
own political argument. Whereas this situation does not seem terribly
troublesome on its own terms, what is truly problematic is that many
critics and politicians have occasionally evoked the man’s name and his
text inaccurately – or in a way that misrepresents what Orwell had written
– in an attempt to manipulate the thinking of their audience.
When both sides of a political debate claim the same man for disparate
reasons, of course, both sides cannot possibly be representing the writer
completely accurately. Viewed through the lens of his own reception
history, the real George Orwell has become obscured by a fog of shifting
images and intentional misrepresentations. That Orwell’s writing has been
and continues to be employed by political pundits and critics in order to
warn citizenry against situations that could potentially blossom into
“Orwellian” dystopia is a testament to the writer’s enduring importance
even approaching sixty years after his death; conversely, the fact that
Orwell’s writing has be misused by propagandists attempting political
2
Introduction
manipulation represents a situation that is, in a grand irony, frankly
Orwellian.
John Rodden’s book The Politics of Literary Reputation gives a full
overview of the literary and cultural reception of Orwell from the days of
his early literary career up until the 1990s. Rodden does an admirable job
of chronicling Orwell’s reception history on the Left, on the Right, and in
popular culture, but Rodden himself doesn’t overtly posit an opinion on
where Orwell’s politics actually lie – whether it is the critics on the Right
or the Left who have gotten it right. Rodden is not to be blamed for this, of
course – his book is more about the evolution (and manipulation) of
Orwell’s image throughout the years than it is about Orwell’s actual
politics. This study will deal with George Orwell’s reception as an
argument between the political Left and Right over who “owns” Orwell
and to which side Orwell actually belongs. Moving one step beyond John
Rodden’s book, this study will not only look at how Orwell has been
received by the Left and the Right, but will also cast a critical eye on the
critics themselves.
For the most part, one can follow the evolution of Orwell’s reception
history as a chronological process which has changed alongside the
world’s political situation. For example, during Orwell’s life and in the
decade directly following his death, Orwell was nearly universally
considered a man of the Left. There were many on the Left – Soviet
Communist sympathizers chief among them – who didn’t particularly like
Orwell’s politics and would have just as soon disowned him, but his
position on the Left was fairly secure. As the decades marched on,
however, changes in the world’s political climate led academics, critics,
and politicos to re-evaluate Orwell’s position, attempting to apply the
writer’s stance on various political situations that had occurred during his
life onto those that came to pass after his death, thereby superimposing the
perspective of a 1930s and ‘40s writer onto the events of the 1960s, ‘70s,
‘80s, ‘90s, and the current decade. For example, even though many had
argued that Orwell’s anti-Imperialist stance would have led him to oppose
America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict, others argued that
Orwell’s anti-Communist stance would have led him to support it.
In light of Orwell’s self-declared Leftist stance, an attempt by a Leftist
critic of Orwell’s era to claim him would represent something of a
redundancy. Therefore, attempts by Leftist critics to claim Orwell had
been less overt than those by critics on the Right – that is, until the present
decade, which, following an era of Neoconservative efforts to claim
Orwell for their own camp, has once again seen critics on the Left
invoking the writer’s name. Following the writer’s death, a major re-
Our Orwell, Right or Left
3
evaluation of what Orwell’s contempoarary political stance might be, had
he lived beyond 1950, occurred with the rise of Neoconservative thinking.
As the writing of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz gained popularity
amongst politically-minded readers in the west, some Neoconservatives
(Podhoretz chief among them) seized upon Orwell’s vehement antiCommunism (and a few other factors) as proof that he would have stood
side-by-side with the Neoconservatives as the Cold War began to heat up –
this despite Orwell’s repeated Leftist proclamations to the contrary. The
Neoconservative camp would prove to be the most prevalent group on the
Right to claim Orwell; even though Rodden doesn’t appear to declare his
support for one side over the other in the partisan debate over Orwell, it
will become clear throughout this examination that the Neoconservative
argument for Orwell doesn’t hold much water.
In order to illustrate how badly Orwell’s writing has been misread and
misused as propaganda, one has only to take a look back at the rhetoric of
political speakers and writers in the middle 1980s, the zenith of what one
might refer to as “Orwell Fever”. Thanks in large part to the success of
Nineteen Eighty-Four (and, to a lesser extent, Animal Farm), Orwell’s
name and image have, through the years, been bandied about in popular
culture and in politics as a propaganda weapon and as a prophetic warning.
In many cases, especially leading up to the historical year 1984 (and again,
we will see, in the early years of the twenty-first century), the writings of
Orwell and the term “Orwellian” were both used and horribly mis-used as
political propaganda. Since the early 1980s, the terms “Orwell” and
“Orwellian” seem to have become the contemporary equivalent of the
name “Frankenstein”:
[Orwell] has become the Dr. Frankenstein of the twentieth century. And as
has happened with the good doctor, one wonders if we will one day forget
the man George Orwell and associate his name exclusively with his
brilliant, horrible creation.2
In other words, just as people eventually began to refer to Frankenstein’s
monster simply as “Frankenstein,” the writer and his writings have
become so incredibly conflated that the meanings behind the writings
themselves have become distorted. For example, during the debate that
accompanied Ronald Reagan’s proposal of a “squeal rule,” which would
mandate that Planned Parenthood centers notify parents after giving
contraceptives to teenagers, both advocates of the rule (Republicans,
mostly) and those who opposed the rule (Democrats, mostly) nearly
simultaneously labeled the other party using identical Orwellian terms: a
Democratic congressman exclaimed “this is Big Brother getting into the
4
Introduction
bedrooms of the people,” and Richard Schweiker, Reagan’s Secretary of
Health and Human Services accused the Democrats of putting “Big
Brother government between the parent and the child.”3 Use of the term
“Big Brother” here refers to supposedly totalitarian tactics being
implemented by the opposing party. Of course, one has to question how
closely either of the two opposing politicians had read Nineteen EightyFour, for the “Big Brother” I remember calls to mind direct surveillance
and systematic oppression; invoking the images that accompany a term
such as “Big Brother” for something like the “squeal rule” seems
reactionary and, to under-state the case, overly dramatic. Indeed, the only
direct “squealing” that occurs within the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four are
the accusations of the Parsons’ children, whose eagerness to be a part of
The Party leads them to accuse the innocent – even their parents – without
completely comprehending the consequences of said “squealing”. Next to
these manipulations by the “Big Brother” of Orwell’s text, the claims of
Schweiker and the Democratic Congressman come off as weak (and
technically incorrect) manipulation. Moreover, the fact that both sides use
the same set of images for opposite purposes completely renders the
otherwise potent claim impotent; the opposing claims, issued practically
simultaneously, each, in effect, cancel out the other’s effectiveness.
Even more prevalent than the bandying-about of terms like “Big
Brother” as political propaganda in the 1980s were claims that the
practices of one’s political adversaries were “Orwellian.” These claims
represent, like “Frankenstein” and “Frankenstein’s Monster,” a conflation
between the man and his creation. Rodden’s book catalogs many of the
uses and incredible misuses of Orwell’s name and works throughout the
early- and mid- 1980s. A sampling:
“George Orwell would have been proud of our 1984-ish ways. I am
horrified.” From a 1982 column criticizing new state restrictions on
insanity plea.
“Orwell in the Classroom.” A 1982 letter warning against the perils of
mandatory school prayer.
“An antidote to Orwell.” A 1983 editorial from the chief of the New York
Tourist Bureau on tourism’s role in promoting international understanding.
“A world in which tourism thrives is not the world of 1984.”
“We might agree to let Reagan be Reagan, but it is frightening to think of
letting Reagan be Orwell.” From Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s speech to
the National Press Club in February 1983, in which Kennedy voiced
Our Orwell, Right or Left
5
disapproval of the Reagan Administration’s plans to affix dissenting labels
to three Canadian films critical of U.S. nuclear policy.4
“Cable TV an Orwellian plot.”
“Official Calls State Fire Code Imposition Orwellian.”
“Baby Jane Doe Case Called ‘Orwellian Tragedy’ in Court.”5
What is bewildering about some of these headlines and passages is how
illogical some of the applications of Orwell’s name have been; for
example, why in the world would Orwell “have been proud of our 1984ish ways”? Is this column implying that Orwell would have wanted a
world like the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four? If that were the case,
Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly be considered a “cautionary” novel –
which it most certainly is. Why would “letting Reagan be Orwell” be
frightening? Perhaps Senator Kennedy would have been closer to the mark
(although still inaccurate) if he claimed to be afraid of letting Reagan be
“Big Brother”. Claiming that Reagan is like Orwell, if one reminds oneself
of the difference between the writer and his creation, would mean that
Reagan would be the one warning about policies such as the affixing of
dissenting labels to films critical of U.S. policy. And how exactly is
tourism antithetical to “the world of 1984”? Although I imagine that there
would be a minimum of continent-hopping for the denizens of Oceania,
Eastasia, and Eurasia, there are no mentions of restriction on travel in
Orwell’s book. In any case, attempting to quell the citizens’ desire for
travel hardly seems the focus of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s despotic,
totalitarian regime.
These lists, compiled by Rodden in an attempt to illustrate how many
different perceptions of “Orwell” and “Orwellian” exist in Western
Culture, also illustrate – considering how Orwell’s images have been
disseminated and manipulated by critics and politicians – how difficult it
has become to affix a title to Orwell himself, or to easily define the scope
of Orwell’s writing. Examples of these various Orwell “images” include
the analyzing of Orwell as a prophet warning of totalitarianism, a
conflation of the writer and his literary creation (a process by which
Orwell himself becomes, to the apparently confused critic, “Big Brother”),
and a simple application of the term “Orwellian” to any situation which
seems to the critic to be ominous or foreboding. This isn’t to say that these
misuses didn’t go unchecked even at the time, however: an editorial letter
in a January 1983 edition of The Boston Globe criticized the rhetoric of a
previous letter’s claim that a hard-to-understand section of a Massachusetts
6
Introduction
death penalty bill was “Orwellian in timbre.”6 The letter, headlined “If It’s
Orwellian, It’s Not Obfuscatory,” correctly points out that whereas
Nineteen Eighty-Four was very concerned with the breakdown of
language, describing an obfuscatory passage as “Orwellian” represented a
“great disservice to the legacy of George Orwell” (and yet another
“Frankenstein”-like conflation), for “the outstanding characteristic of
Orwell’s writing was the clarity with which he expressed his thought.”
Rodden is correct when he hits upon a kind of ultimate irony in discussing
the above example – even though Orwell’s writing itself was anything but
obfuscatory, the variety of uses of his name has made it difficult to attach
meaning to it:
[I]n fact, “Orwellian” has in some cases come to mean precisely
“obfuscatory language” – and has become an example of obfuscatory
language in its own right. Much of obfuscation arises from the fact that,
like “1984,” “Big Brother,” and “doublethink,” “Orwellian” has become a
useful word for tarring political opponents. So much so that in 1984
observers were arguing over who had the proper claim not just to Orwell
but to these words – quite apart from their reference to the man or the
7
works.
Despite Orwell’s clarity of writing, the use of terms like “Orwellian” in
situations that are not only various but often contradictory have shaped
and transformed the meanings of such terms as “Orwellian” into illdefined, ambiguous jargon and have thereby “served to obfuscate Orwell’s
reputation.”8 It is clear that a conflation, in the minds of many, of the
writer and his works is a partial cause for this confusion – for what other
explanation could one conjure for bewildering assertions such as “George
Orwell would have been proud of our 1984-ish ways”?
In the above passage, however, Rodden only scratches the surface of
what I believe to be the more pressing political debate about Orwell.
Whereas the argument between the Left and Right over the use of terms
such as “Big Brother” and “Orwellian” to describe their opponents is
certainly troubling, there is a more severe, systematic cause to the
obfuscation of Orwell’s political identity: that of the reception history by
serious critics and essayists from both sides of the political spectrum.
Part One of this study will examine Orwell’s position on the Left,
taking a chronological look at his own writing as well as the critical
reception of his writing by critics on the Left. Beginning with The Road to
Wigan Pier, Part One will trace the origins of Orwell’s allegiance to the
Socialist ideal – an allegiance that will prove to be the foundation of his
Leftist position – and will follow the development of the politics inherent
Our Orwell, Right or Left
7
in Orwell’s writing as his major cause proved itself to be antitotalitarianism. Not everyone on the Left always agreed with Orwell’s
positions, however, as will become increasingly clear as I go on to
examine Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four –
for Orwell’s disillusionment with Soviet Communism did not sit well with
many on the Left who were unable to separate the Socialist ideal from the
ugly truth of Soviet Communism. Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union
claimed to be driven by an adherence to Socialist politics; in reality,
however, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime that was, in many
ways, just as brutal as Germany under Hitler. Even as this reality was
evident to those as clear-sighted as Orwell, there were still many on the
Left who failed to recognize this reality and chose to declare support for
the Communist Soviet Union. This situation, along with other various
details, helped earn Orwell his share of enemies on the Left.
Part Two of this study will examine the arguments posited by critics on
both the Left and the Right that Orwell’s current position, had he lived into
the late twentieth century, would be among those on the Right. The
Vietnam conflict in particular had sparked a series of reflections on where
Orwell would stand if he were still alive. In many of these arguments, the
writer-in-question would seize upon one detail or another (while often
simultaneously ignoring some larger, contradictory evidence) as proof that
Orwell would have held a particular stance on a historical issue had he
lived longer than he did.
Part Two also take a look at one of the most bizarre and misinterpreted
chapters in Orwell’s reception history – the notorious “list” in which
Orwell had supposedly “snitched” to the British government the identities
of various possible Communist sympathizers. After refuting many of the
common interpretations of this episode, Part Two will go on to discredit
the Neoconservative attempts to claim Orwell for their own camp. I will
not only highlight the flaws in the Neoconservative interpretation of
Orwell’s writing, but will also analyze the Neoconservative stance itself in
order to prove that it is very unlikely Orwell would have been in support
of their agenda.
Part Three of this study will represent a coda to this work that analyzes
Orwell’s place in the contemporary arena of political discourse. Even
though the Cold War has long ended, Orwell’s name continues to be
evoked by political and cultural critics, often as a warning about trends in
our own Western society. Topics such as the use of manipulative and
deceptive propaganda (referred to in recent years with the innocuoussounding term “spin”), government and corporate surveillance, and actual
real-world uses, by our own political leaders, of what the Orwell reader
8
Introduction
might recognize as “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, seem to set off alarms
amongst critics who keep the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four close to
their hearts. These examples will serve to reiterate Lionel Trilling’s
assertion that George Orwell was, in fact, a major literary figure, for there
may be no greater mark of being a figure than a relevancy which endures
even as the world itself undergoes drastic change.
PART ONE
ORWELL AND THE LEFT
Although many reviewers read into Mr. Orwell’s
novel a wholesale condemnation of left wing
politics, he considered himself a Marxist and a
member of the non-Communist wing of the British
Labor Party.
– Ian Williams1
CHAPTER ONE
THE LEFT OF THE LEFT
Within the essay that introduces the 2003 edition of Nineteen EightyFour – published to celebrate the centenary of Orwell’s birth – Thomas
Pynchon makes the intriguing claim that George Orwell’s politics “were
not only of the Left, but to the left of Left… Orwell thought of himself as
a member of the ‘dissident Left,’ as distinguished from the ‘official Left.”1
This claim, made by a reclusive postmodern novelist, marks yet another
chapter in a reception history that has seen representatives from all over
the political spectrum to attempt to claim George Orwell. Being a writer
whose work (seemingly encyclopedic novels such as V., Gravity’s
Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and the recent Against the Day) is so
universally praised and admired, the MacArthur Fellow and former
Pulitzer nominee Pynchon writes with an apparent position of authority
that very few in the literary world enjoy (though Orwell would almost
certainly be counted among them).
This act of claiming by Pynchon – whose own personal politics, read
through his complex and often labyrinthine novels and essays, are also
difficult to force into any conventional orthodoxies or “-isms” – represents
not only his own attempt to place Orwell somewhere within the political
spectrum, but also, presumably, his response to the various partisan critics
that comprise Orwell’s long and various reception history. This
interpretation of Pynchon’s essay remains purely speculative, however, for
within the text of the introduction itself Pynchon does not directly engage
any of the various critics that comprise Orwell’s reception history.
Anybody that has read Pynchon’s mammoth and imposing Gravity’s
Rainbow – nearly universally considered the novelist’s masterpiece – can
attest that one of the writer’s most frequently-occurring literary tactics
involves the implication a circumstance but then leaving interpretation
almost completely up to the reader. Did it really happen within the frame
of the book’s story? Was it imagined by a character? Was it a dream
sequence? Was the intended meaning only symbolic? These questions
frequently occur to the reader of Pynchon, but the answers are rarely
provided by the text. It can be said with some degree of certainty that
Our Orwell, Right or Left
11
Gravity’s Rainbow – widely considered not only Pynchon’s best and most
difficult book but also one of the toughest reads in American literary
history – is set in the European theater of World War II and concerns the
search for a prototype V-2 rocket, but much of the rest of the book is so
open to interpretation that there are as many distinct and drastically
different readings of the novel as there are critics willing to attempt a
reading. To provide an example from personal experience, in a 2005
Trinity College graduate course on Gravity’s Rainbow, the final paper
assignment was to create a cohesive symbolic reading of the text, to
provide a key that would unlock the secrets of the novel. The assignment
was, in large part, a lesson in humility. From each student in the class
resulted a strikingly unique reading of the novel varying from an attempt
to prove that the book’s structure represented the variables in the
mathematical equation of a parabola (the “gravity’s rainbow” of the
missile arc that begins and ends the novel) to an analysis of how the use of
colors in the book are related to theories of entropy in physics. My own
final paper discussed how the chess symbols employed in Gravity’s
Rainbow were meant to represent the changing state of warfare during
World War II. None of these symbolic readings are explicit within the
novel itself, of course; the dense book’s obscurity is what allows each
individual person to have their own individual reading, as unique as a
snowflake or a fingerprint. In a way, this is very possibly the point of
Pynchon’s postmodern literary approach, and, indeed, one can make a
very convincing argument that Gravity’s Rainbow is about the human need
to seek systems of organization and order where there may be none2; in the
words of critic Leo Bersani, “No matter how much work we do on
Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that
it resists analysis – that is, being broken down into distinct units of
meaning… Singularity [in Gravity’s Rainbow] is inconceivable.”3
Orwell’s best-known work (and, some would say, his masterwork)
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow share many
common themes and motifs – including the evolution of political power,
protagonists whose lives are ruled by paranoia, and the dissolution of
personal identity – but it is perhaps the intentional obscurity of Pynchon’s
writing that makes him the most suitable contemporary writer to contribute
an introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell is a writer whose work,
clear and straightforward as it may be, has been received so variously
throughout the decades that the possibility of critics reaching any sort of
consensus on his politics appears to be just as unlikely as the possibility of
critics reaching a consensus on an organizing symbolic system in
Gravity’s Rainbow. Of course, considering the position of authority that
12
Chapter One
Pynchon allows himself, it can be convincingly argued that the “heir
apparent” status one might attribute to Pynchon after reading his
introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four might be yet another case of the
Orwell reader projecting himself onto his reading of Orwell. As John
Rodden writes, in his examination of Neoconservative Norman
Podhoretz’s attempts to claim Orwell, “we construct the Orwells we
need.”4 Here, Rodden is referring to the veritable epidemic of notable
writers and critics who have found in Orwell similar political stances or
details in character that match their own – and have simultaneously
ignored those that don’t. George Woodcock once stated that Orwell’s fans
comprised “the most heterogeneous following a writer can ever have
accumulated,”5 a claim that does not seem unreasonable when one
considers the number of Socialists, Reaganite Republicans, New York
Liberals, and Neoconservatives that have cited Orwell as an inspiration
throughout the years.
This process of a reader projecting himself onto the work of a
particular writer, as Rodden points out, is a problem which Orwell had
both discussed and seems to be guilty of himself. In his “Inside the
Whale,” Orwell describes a passage of Henry Miller’s writing as being
“one of those revealing passages in which a writer tells you a great deal
about himself while talking about somebody else.”6 The irony about this
claim, Rodden argues, is that, through Orwell’s biographical examinations
of Miller, Dickens, Swift, Kipling, and Tolstoy, we learn more about
Orwell’s own beliefs, politics, and prejudices than we do about his
subjects’. To this Rodden adds yet another layer of irony, proceeding to
argue that many of the critics and essayists that have attempted to claim
Orwell for their own cause – many of whom have pointed out that
Orwell’s biographical essays had revealed far more about Orwell himself
than the subjects of his writing – are doing the very same thing. “For when
many observers tell us, however knowingly or unawares, as much about
themselves as about their ostensible subject,” Rodden writes, “it suggests a
great deal about how readers identify with authors as intellectual models
and rivals.”7
I believe it is safe to assume that Thomas Pynchon – a man who seems
to, if the scope of his writing is any indication, enjoy a nearly
encyclopedic knowledge of the world to begin with – is very familiar with
Orwell’s writing, for within the aforementioned introduction alone he
analyzes the effect that Animal Farm’s reception has had on the reception
of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he examines the concept of doublethink (and
muses on its similarity to the Bush administration’s tactics of propaganda),
Our Orwell, Right or Left
13
and he points out the evidence, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of Orwell’s own
fondness for the geopolitical writings of Halford Mackinder. Following
this assumption that Pynchon is at least moderately acclimated to Orwell’s
writing, it is also probably safe to assume that Pynchon was well aware of
the claims on Orwell by critics of the Left – such as Lionel Trilling – as
well as his claiming by critics of the Right – such as Norman Podhoretz.
An aspect of Orwell’s writing that made him attractive to the
Neoconservative set was the ongoing feud he had waged against the
Leftist intelligentsia that had continued to support Stalin’s Soviet Union
even years into the Cold War. This animosity toward the “mainstream”
Left of Orwell’s era, as well as Orwell’s disdain for Stalinism, was the
starting point for the Neoconservative argument that Orwell should be
counted as one of their own. What Pynchon seems to be implying,
however, by referring to Orwell as a member of the “dissident” Left, is
that a critique of those on the Left does not necessarily make one a
proponent of the Right.
Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing concept behind this seemingly
innocuous line from Pynchon’s introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four is
that Orwell’s admirers are still driven to claim him for one side or the
other, even long after the dust of the Cold War has settled. This, despite
Orwell’s assertion, in 1946’s “Why I Write” that “every line of serious
work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly,
against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it”8 –
which sounds very much to me like an overtly Leftist manifesto. To
Pynchon, as to many before him, George Orwell was very much a man of
the Left – so far Left, Pynchon might argue, that he became an enemy to
those on the “official Left,” the Leftist intelligentsia and the card-carrying
Communists who would have represented, in the eyes of many, the Leftist
establishment. Within Part One, I will, through an analysis of Socialist and
Communist concepts in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to
Catalonia, examine Orwell’s relationship with Socialist ideals, from the
belief that Socialism must be the only antidote for the maladies of
Capitalism and Fascism, to his eventual disillusionment with “official”
Communism and the beginnings of his writerly attacks on Stalinist Russia.
The details of Orwell’s own writings will serve as a foreground to the
critical reception received from Orwell’s contemporaneous critics on the
Left, including those who disapproved of his anti-Soviet stance was well
as those who held it in high favor.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CALL FOR SOCIALISM
While investigating the conditions of the working classes in England
for a work of journalism that would eventually evolve into his book The
Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell made his opinion abundantly clear that the
only possible way to relieve the plight of the poverty-stricken Northern
England miners and their ilk would be if England were to experience a
drastic shift from Capitalism to a Socialist economy. The first half of the
book is a chronicle of Orwell’s travels in the industrial north of England,
investigating both the unemployed as well as the employed workers who
had no choice but to brave the dangerous coal mines in order to make a
(barely) living wage. In the second half of the book, however, Orwell
offers an alternative option to poverty and plight described within The
Road to Wigan Pier’s first hundred-some-odd pages. Here, Orwell argues
that only in a Socialist society would the conditions exist in which the
poor and working classes might be able to improve their bleak existence:
[A]ll the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a
world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least
ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else…
the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his
fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so
blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to
accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present
system. 1
In this passage, Orwell argues that he sees no reason why there should be
poor and unemployed working-class people in northern England if there
were plenty of wealth and plenty of food for everyone in England to live
comfortably if it were evenly distributed – unless, of course, there had
been some kind of selfish and “corrupt” motives standing in the way of
this possibility. This passage, aided by the hindsight afforded by the
passing of over a half century, makes Orwell out to be a bit of the naïve
idealist to the contemporary reader; it should be noted that later in the
same book Orwell also names Socialism as the only alternative to an
Our Orwell, Right or Left
15
eventual lapse into Fascism. Although this argument appears to be far
more pragmatic and less idealistic, it too, as we will see, proves to be a
naïve one. No matter: the point is that Orwell had established early in his
literary career a strong advocacy for the basic concepts of Socialism, a
system which he apparently believed to be the antidote for much of what
he sees going wrong in the Europe of the 1930s. It is very clear in Orwell’s
early writing, then – considering that he was strong advocate of Socialism,
and was therefore strong advocate of economic equality (with a degree of
animosity toward the bourgeoisie) – that he was, at least at this point in his
life, inarguably a man of the Left.
But from whence did Orwell’s fondness Socialism come? Simply
stated, Socialism is an overarching term for a set of socio-economic ideals
in which the means of production are controlled not by individuals but by
society as a whole. This basic concept was formalized and structured into
a political doctrine through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, who argued that their version of Socialism was a solution to the
class strruggles between the “borgeoisie” (wealthy) and the “proletariat”
(worker). Numerous distinct ideologies have developed from these
writings, including Communism and Democratic Socialism, and the
power-hungry have often mis-used and misrepresented the concepts in
order to manipulate their citizenry and further their own agendas. In any
case, throughout the early twentieth century, Socialism was considered by
many on the Left to be a viable (and preferrable) socio-economic option to
the Capitalist state and its divisions of economic and social strata. To
illustrate George Orwell’s socialist ideal, scholar (and Soviet emigrant)
Anna Vaninskaya, in a discussion of utopias and dystopias in the works of
Orwell and William Morris, describes the concept as “moral outrage at
capitalist exploitation and economic equality, which is to be alleviated, in
the author’s belief, by the abolition of the private ownership of the means
of production, and replaced by some sort of nationalization (whether by
the people directly or by the government in their name).”2 Of course, a
distinction must be drawn here between Socialism as an ideology and what
has passed for state socialism in its official forms in the twentieth century
– Russian Communism, German National Socialism (i.e. “Nazism”), etc.
If one does not realize this distinction, one runs the risk of gross
misinterpretation and misrepresentation of many details in Orwell’s
writing.
For Orwell himself, the need for a realized Socalism meant more than
the abstract ideals of the Leftist intelligentsia; to Orwell, Socialism was a
matter of simple common sense – the kind of thing that “everyone who
uses his brain knows”. In an example of what Christopher Hitchens terms
16
Chapter Two
Orwell’s “power of facing”3 – which is Hitchens’s own re-evaluation of
what Lionel Trilling admiringly referred to as Orwell’s “virtue” – Orwell
was capable of envisioning the arguments against Socialism that
functioned as roadblocks limiting the socio-economic system’s widespread
appeal even as he had been openly advocating Socialism itself. While
Orwell saw and understood the need for Socialism, he was also pessimistic
about the system ever coming to fruition in England:
What I am concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground
exactly where it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour – for
every empty belly is an argument for Socialism – the idea of Socialism is
less widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking
person nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to
4
Socialism.
In concept, then, the idea of Socialism should be attractive to all – for a
system that promotes equality and a widespread sharing of goods would
find its greatest argument in the existence of people who are starving while
there are others who have an abundance of food. Yet, as Orwell claims,
somehow the concept is actually losing ground in England. He continues:
This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda. This means
that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented to us, has about it
something inherently distasteful – something that drives away the very
5
people who ought to be flocking to its support.
So, if one is to read the decreasing popularity of Socialism as an effect of
“mistaken methods of propaganda” – namely, how Socialism is presented
by its adherents and how it is thereby interpreted by the masses – one must
conclude that Socialism had been suffering from an image problem in the
England of the 1930s. This was certainly Orwell’s belief, for he goes on to
make the bold statement that “as with the Christian religion, the worst
advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”6 In a memorable tirade,
Orwell claims that it is the people who are drawn to Marxist concepts who
give Socialism a bad name:
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and
“Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice
drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack,
7
pacifist and feminist in England.
Later, at the end of the same chapter, Orwell continues to speak of
individual Socialists as “vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik
commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals,
Our Orwell, Right or Left
17
shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birthcontrol fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers.”8 Whereas many of
the vivid images of Socialists that Orwell paints might not make much
sense to the contemporary reader, the accusation itself comes through loud
and clear: it is the Socialists themselves who give Socialism a bad name,
their quirks and character traits apparently being unattractive to the
average Englishman. Certainly, modern partisans can relate – take, for
example, how many contemporary liberals might cringe at the over-the-top
antics of the otherwise well-meaning Michael Moore.
Of course, Orwell goes on to argue, it is the poor and the working
classes who would, in theory, have had the most to gain from a transition
from Capitalism toward Socialism:
To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in a pub on a
Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and
shorter hours and nobody bossing you about… often, in my opinion, he is
a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember,
what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common
9
decency.
It seems to me here that Orwell is projecting his own moral system on the
concepts of Socialism. What Socialism “means” is an abolition of the class
system, an even distribution of goods, and the workers controlling the
means of production. In this passage, however, Orwell equates the term
“Socialism” with “justice” and “common decency,” an idiomatic and
emotionally-charged interpretation of Socialism as a concept, and an
interpretation that is seemingly at odds with his descriptions of the
Socialists themselves. Orwell disdainfully describes Socialists as either
“orthodox Marxists” (which implies being driven by ideas rather by
emotions ) or through pejorative terms (“fruit-juice drinkers,” “nudists,”
“sandal-wearers,” “Nature Cure quacks,” “pacifists,” “vegetarians with
wilting beards”) with which the contemporary reader might apply the term
“hippies.”10 What Orwell seems to be attempting here is a reconciliation of
his attraction to Leftist politics with his middle-class English sensibilities
and prejudices – the kind of sensibilities which also led him to write
disparagingly about “gaspipe chairs” and “central heating.” Seeming to
prefer the old-fashioned, tried-and-tested ways of living, Orwell’s oldfashioned sensibilities call to mind several different images; the
politically-minded reader might not be able to suppress thinking of the
term “Old Tory,” despite knowledge of Orwell’s Leftist political leanings.
As strange as Orwell’s marriage of “Old Tory” sensibilities with
Leftist politics might seem to a contemporary reader, it would be naïve of
18
Chapter Two
us to think of Orwell’s prejudices as unique. In an October 12, 2006
Tonight Show interview, Michael Caine told Jay Leno about an encounter
he had with Socialism as a young man.11 A young woman whom Caine
had been dating wanted to bring Caine to a Socialist meeting. Caine, very
much wanting to sleep with the young woman, duly went along. Upon
arriving, Caine discovered that the man speaking at the head of the
meeting was saying things that made a whole lot of sense to Caine, but
there was a problem that was keeping Caine from taking seriously what
the man had been saying: when he was a child, Caine’s father had advised
him to never trust a man who wears sandals, and to never trust a man with
a beard. The man leading the Socialist meeting, naturally, possessed both
qualities.
Michael Caine was born in 1933, the son of a fish-market porter.
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, would have been from
vaguely the same generation as Caine’s working-class father. As
idiosyncratic as Orwell’s prejudices about bearded, fruit-juice drinking
Socialists might seem today, the Tonight Show interview with Caine
suggests that these might simply be part of a set of values that were
common amongst the British working class during the century’s middle
decades. That Caine found himself attracted to the bearded man’s Socialist
rhetoric further suggests that Orwell was not alone in being attracted to
Leftist ideology despite his socially conservative, working-class
prejudices.
Orwell, however, reconciled his revulsion toward Socialists themselves
and his attraction toward the principles of Socialism by claiming that the
tenets of Socialism were synonymous with the “common decency” that he,
with his “Old Tory” temperament, attributed to the “ordinary working
man”. Since the “ordinary working man” would have the most to gain
from a Socialist system of government, he would undoubtedly be an easy
sell, despite having to share room with every “fruit-juice drinker, nudist,
sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and
feminist in England.” Unless they could be mobilized for revolution
(which many Marxist adherents claimed to be a necessary evil in order to
implement their version of a Socialist system), the “ordinary working
man” is not the kind of person that has the power or influence in order to
begin the kind of social change that would be necessary for a shift from
Capitalism to Socialism. Those who do have the power and influence,
Orwell argues, would be the ones least likely to be in favor of the change;
besides the problem of the Socialist image itself, there is the
aforementioned problem of motive. As Orwell points out, even people not
belonging to society’s upper classes did have their motives – corrupt or not
Our Orwell, Right or Left
19
– for not rushing to leave behind their Capitalism in favor of Socialism,
namely “the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically
pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments
of social prestige.”12 In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell paints the wouldbe middle-class Socialist as “a prim little man” who holds “a social
position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”13 In other words, it
would be easier to sell to the poor theories of equality and sharing of
provisions than it would be to the rich; the inherent problem with this
scenario is, of course, that it is the rich, not the poor, who hold all the
power.
The problem of convincing the wealthy to forfeit their social position
is far from the largest roadblock Orwell observes Socialism encountering
in the England of the 1930s. Orwell believes that England’s working- and
middle-classes would be much more open to the idea of Socialism if it
weren’t for the negative stigmas that the term calls to mind – negative
stigmas that existed long before the Cold War made Socialism a four-letter
word, and Communism a specter to be abhorred by any good American or
Englishman. As we have seen from Orwell’s rants against Socialists
themselves, the problem one might encounter attempting to get the English
working- and middle-classes to accept Socialism as a viable political
system, in Orwell’s estimation, is one of perception. Besides the
aforementioned fruit juice-drinking, sandal-wearing pacifist image, there
is also the problem of how the middle class actually perceives the working
class who would benefit the most from instituting Socialism:
[A] European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a
Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his
equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are
chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my
childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. That was what we
were taught – the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an
impassable barrier.14
What Orwell is saying here is not that the lower classes smell (although he
has been incorrectly accused of saying this by his enemies on both sides of
the partisan debate), but rather that there are built-in prejudices existing
between the bourgeoisie and the working class, prejudices that would keep
middle- or upper-class Europeans from thinking of the working class as
their equals. The implication, of course, is that actual equality could never
exist if one social class looks down with disgust upon another. In addition
to a lack of equality, Orwell believes that most intellectual Socialists call
themselves Socialists because it apparently makes them look better in the
20
Chapter Two
eyes of others, not because of any actual desire for social change: “We rail
against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish
them… every [intellectual] revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength
from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.”15 Why an
intellectual revolutionary would claim a desire to abolish class distinction
despite drawing strength from knowing that nothing can be changed is a
mystery that a psychologist or a sociologist would be better equipped to
solve. Perhaps the contradiction derives from a desire to assuage what is
known in modern parlance as “liberal guilt”; perhaps the declaring of
oneself as a Socialist was simply a “safe” position taken by “intellectual
revolutionaries” in order present themselves as caring or socially-minded
while still ensuring that their social and economic status remain
untouched. Whatever the reason, even to the contemporary reader
Orwell’s accusation rings true.
Due to Orwell’s attacks on Socialists and intellectuals in The Road to
Wigan Pier, the book had stirred some controversy within Leftist circles
upon publication. The book, whose initial circulation was small, was
picked as a monthly choice for the Left Book Club. Victor Gollancz, one
of the Club’s founders, realized that many members of the Left Book Club
might take issue with many of Orwell’s arguments, and decided to write a
foreword to the book as a kind of disclaimer:
Why did we think that a Foreword was desirable? Because we find that
many members – a surprisingly large number – have the idea that in some
sort of way a Left Book Club Choice, first, represents the views of the
three selectors, and, secondly, incorporates the Left Book Club “policy.” A
moment’s thought should show that the first suggestion could be true only
in the worst kind of Fascist State, and the second is a contradiction in
terms.16
In other words, Gollancz was presenting the equivalent of the common
contemporary television and radio disclaimer “the following program does
not reflect the views of the station, its owners, or its sponsors.” His reason
for doing so, obviously, was that for many of the Left Book Club’s
readers, Orwell’s tirades might very well have hit a little too close to
home. Many of the Socialists and intellectuals of the Left Book Club
might have been personally offended by Orwell’s depictions of people like
them in The Road to Wigan Pier, and some would inevitably interpret
those interpretations as an indictment of Socialism itself – despite Orwell’s
clearly-stated intentions to the contrary. Moreover, Gollancz certainly did
not want the Left Book Club reader assuming that Orwell had been writing
on behalf of Gollancz or the Left Book Club in general. Gollancz attempts
Our Orwell, Right or Left
21
to defend Orwell, arguing that Orwell is simply playing “devil’s advocate
for the case against Socialism,” claiming that the writer “looks at
Socialists as a whole and finds them (with a few exceptions) a stupid,
offensive and insincere lot. For my own part I find no similarity
whatsoever between the picture as Mr. Orwell paints it and the picture as I
see it.”17 Even though Gollancz attempts to defend Orwell early on in his
forward, he eventually resorts to apologizing to Socialists and vegetarians
for how they are treated by Orwell in the book, and even calls Orwell a
snob while simultaneously being “a genuine hater of every form of
snobbery.”18 Although Gollancz seems to admire the purpose of The Road
to Wigan Pier – indeed, if he didn’t admire it, he likely wouldn’t have
chosen the book for the Left Book Club – it is clear that he is in direct
disagreement with the driving force of many of Orwell’s arguments, and is
unafraid to point out the apparent contradictions in Orwell’s writing (e.g.
being an intellectual and hating intellectualism, being a snob and hating
snobbery).
In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell also discusses the problem of the
imagery that is related, in the minds of many, not only to Socialists, but
also to the concept “Socialism” itself. The word, Orwell argues, conjures
up images that are antithetical to the ideals of the average Englishman:
Because of that nexus of thought, ‘Socialism-progress-machinery-Russiatractors-hygiene-machinery-progress,’ that exists in almost everyone’s
mind, it is usually the same person who is hostile to Socialism. The kind of
person who hates central heating and gaspipe chairs is also the kind of
person who, when you mention Socialism, murmurs something about
“beehive state” and moves away with a pained expression.19
In examining this “nexus of thought,” Orwell argues that the concept of
Socialism is inescapably tied with the images of machine production and
industrialization, because a socialist state would demand “constant
intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of the earth”
and “some degree of centralized control,”20 in order to make a worker’s
paradise a reality across a large expanse of land. “The Socialist world is
always pictured as a completely mechanized, immensely organized world,
depending on the machine as the civilizations of antiquity depended on the
slave.”21 In other words, the Socialist state, to many, is considered a
“beehive state,” a system in which the worker loses his individuality and
becomes, in essence, a drone. In this scenario, the individual would forfeit
his autonomy and become just another cog in the system. Considering that
Orwell’s somewhat naïve perception of Socialism hinges on the idea that
the “essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty,”22 becoming a
22
Chapter Two
drone in a beehive state would certainly represent a legitimate anxiety –
“liberty” and loss of autonomy are certainly not congruent concepts.
What would almost any right-minded person consider a more desirable
locale, the smoggy depths of a factory-clogged industrial city, or the green
grass and babbling brooks of the English countryside? Whereas a
mechanized, industrial world is in conflict with modern ideas of natural
beauty, the association of Socialism with machine-worship presents
another problem: the images of mechanical progress which, Orwell argues,
accompany the term “Socialism” in the minds of many, are presented “not
merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind
of religion.”23 Orwell uses propaganda about the rapid technological
advances of the U.S.S.R. as an example. The problem with this “ordered”
and “efficient” world, as he sees it, is that it is from this “vision of the
future as a sort of glittering Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil.”24
Orwell argues that the “sensitive” person is naturally suspicious of
machines and industry, and more attracted to ideas of simple, natural life.25
This avenue of thought is also reflected in the immensely popular works of
another British novelist, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings trilogy. In those books – published at roughly the same time as the
last of Orwell’s writing26 – the simple, pastoral lives of the nature-loving
Hobbits and their kingdom, the Shire, are juxtaposed with the ugly,
mechanized, and industrial existence of the evil Sauron’s Orcs and their
land of Mordor.
If the average Englishman of Orwell’s and Tolkien’s era is to hate the
concept of industrialization and is to be wary of the machine, it only
follows that the imagery attached to those concepts might adversely affect
that person’s perception of Socialism itself:
The unfortunate thing is that at present the word “progress” and the word
Socialism are linked inseparably in almost everyone’s mind. The kind of
person who hates machinery also takes it for granted to hate Socialism; the
Socialist is always in favour of mechanization, rationalization,
modernization – or at least thinks he ought to be in favour of them.27
Orwell draws an important line here, a line between what a Socialist is and
what a Socialist thinks he should be. The implication here is that there’s a
danger in handing oneself over completely to a dogmatic belief-system
and allowing oneself to be completely assimilated to the guidelines of that
particular “ism.” After World War II many ardent Communists and some
Socialists declared a love for Stalin and the U.S.S.R. simply because of its
supposedly Marxist intentions, ignoring completely the totalitarian aspect