Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Terrance]

Prescient? I simply don't believe that anyone can see tomorrow or the
day after that. I guess one can read 1984 as a political condemnation
of  Bush/Blair policy or whatever, but it's kinda difficult when the
United States and England are not experiencing industrial depression,
rampant unemployment, miserable housing, health, nutrition ... while a
rigid and deeply entrenched class system hangs on with religious zeal
and conviction to its privileged position atop the world. There is no
new Soviet alternative or experiment being applauded by the Left. If
there is, where in Hell is it? Oh yeah, it went to Hell. Where is the
rise of Nazism & Fascism that will usher in World War? Oh come on now,
1984 is a wonderful book, but it is not a prophetic text, its author
could only see what was ahead and not too far into the future. 



Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> 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'.