Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2003 1:03 AM
Subject: Re: Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that


>
> >> 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.
>
> on 27/4/03 4:29 AM, Otto wrote:
>
> > This is true about GR too. Both novels are warnings against
technologically
> > advanced totalitarism.
>
> There is, however, a basic and important difference in that Orwell's text
> projects into a fictitious future, at what could happen, while _GR_ looks
> back on the historical past, at what did happen, though I agree that both
> texts can be described as "warnings". I think that, at the time of writing
> for Orwell, the type of technologically-advanced totalitarian society he
> depicts in the novel was certainly a real danger which he could foresee.
Of
> course, the Third Reich and Stalinism provided both a recent and a current
> example of technologically-advanced totalitarianism. But the danger which
> Orwell warns against is of a world-wide, or globalised form of this
> phenomenon, which is as much coded into Nazi-style plans for world
> domination as it is into the credo of "universal" socialism which might or
> might not have eventually have been a component of one of Stalin's "five
> year plans", but which was certainly an aspect or political philosophy
> within Marxism/communism. I think the interesting thing which Pynchon
seems
> to be addressing in the Foreword is the way that Orwell also foresaw the
> danger of technologically-advanced totalitarianism on this type of global
> scale as being a part of a "New World Order" orchestrated by the "good
> guys", i.e. the Allies of WW II, the "democratic" states of the "free"
> world, as well. Which seems to be where he picks up the ball in his own
> fiction.
>
> And I think it's in this latter sense that _1984_ is most relevant in
2003.
>
> best
>

I see the difference between the novels regarding the temporal direction.
"1984" is clearly dystopian SF while "GR" tries to show the "roots" of the
post-WWII world order under the nuclear threat. In both novels there's no
political "good side" -- which is interesting because I bet that the
(Western) Allies of WW II saw themselves as the "good guys" (and of course I
tend to do that too) and not just as the other side of the same coin.

I too believe that "1984" is very relevant today, especially because of
contemporary technical possibilities which make Orwell's ficticious future
more likely than ever before. Maybe Pynchon wrote the new foreword to
"1984" because he wanted to emphasize this relevance for the digital era.

"The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably,
escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that
lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were
imagining then--a question we are still asking. (...) what is left of us
that is not in some way tainted, coopted and colonized, by the forces of
Control, usually digital in nature."
(TRP, foreword to Jim Dodge's "Stone Junction," 1997, p. xii)

This he says about the year 1989, "toward the end of an era still innocent,
in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon
it." (ibid)

Otto