Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance is right to say that Orwell was writing about "his own
immediate milieu" - his concern was with the way capitalist society was
developing. He subscribed, as I pointed out previously, to the view that
massification was taking place and class differences were being (or
would subsequently be) masked (not eradicated) by patterns of
consumption. This, in the 1930s and 1940s, was an early version of the
modernisation and related theories that became attractive in capitalist
democracies (like the US and the UK) in the 1950s and 1960s. Daniel
Bell's version of "the end of history", for example, predates Fukayama's
rather more feeble effort by some 30 years. Bell could write; Fukayama
can't, but managed to get away with recycling old ideas as new. The land
of opportunistic over-production, indeed! The young Pynchon was writing,
in the 1950s, at a time when convergence theory (technology would make
all societies 'the same' eventually) was a persuasive counterweight to
cold war fears. This is (part of) the context for 1984 and certainly one
might accept that Orwell's writing in the mid-1940s was prescient
(whatever one thinks of him as a novelist).

However, as regards Pynchon's own views as author of the foreword, is it
"old hat"? Social class doesn't feature much in the SL stories ("Under
The Rose" is significantly different). Pynchon admits to being
embarrassed by the sexism and racism that crops up here and there;
perhaps he has, over the years, come to reconsider his writing of class.
Less important in the 1950s; much more so by the time he wrote/published
M&D forty years on. Perhaps the foreword to 1984 is as much about
Pynchon's own infancy as a writer as it is about Orwell's 'masterpiece'.