Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Terrance]

> 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. 

Orwell disliked and distrusted capitalism and communism. I can't follow
your economic history. It sounds so off the wall I don't know where to
begin pointing out the absurdities. 


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'.