Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

I'm prepared to accept I might have expressed myself a tad more clearly.
I said Orwell's writing might be considered prescient. I meant that his
concerns with, the way he constructed, the role (to be) played by
technology in a capitalist society foreshadowed (in what I at least
consider interesting ways) the modernisation/convergence theories of the
1950s and 1960s. At no point did I write, or I hope imply, that 1984 was
a prediction concerning current world leaders and their unsavoury
habits. It isn't a question of anyone seeing tomorrow or the day after
that.

As regards my off-the-wall economic history, all I can say is that it
wasn't intended as economic history. Having reread what I wrote, it
still fails miserably to come across as economic history. What I
intended was the briefest of references to a range of writing(s) that
construct social change in a particular way. Orwell's work links him to
Adorno in the 1930s and Williams in the 1960s, on the left, and Bell, as
well as Rostow and Kerr, in the 1950s and 1960s, on the right - in their
different ways, all these writers deal (at times, they write about other
topics as well) with consumption in a capitalist society. I believe
Rostow is usually considered an economic historian (even if what he
wrote is, arguably, bad fiction). I don't know about Bell or Kerr, but
certainly Adorno and Williams cannot be so described.

One of the impressions I get from Pynchon's foreword is that he's trying
to deconstruct conventional notions of left and right (as produced in
and by the cold-war rhetoric that has accompanied 1984 down the years)
as a means to reconsider, constructively, what Orwell actually wrote.
Discursively, Orwell's writing is of its time - hardly a contentious
statement, I believe.