Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

One of the problems I have is dealing with the arbitrary distinction
between fiction and non-fiction, between the novel and politics. Writing
is writing. If one accepts that all writing is ordered discursively,
then one can make connections. One can also avoid prioritising one
category over another (eg "crude propaganda" over "fiction" or
vice-versa). Admittedly, one responds differently as a reader to, eg, GR
and a newspaper report of yesterday's game. But if one accepts that each
is a narrative, with telling a story its aim, then a different series of
questions are raised. I don't approach 1984 as a novel if that means I
avoid asking it the questions I would ask of, eg, Leavis' Mass
Civilisation and Minority Culture, one of the references for mass
culture aforementioned. Each deals with the way in which technological
developments in the mid-C20th have contributed to the restructuring of
'the populace' - Leavis' mass civilisation, Orwell's proles. Each of the
groups in question is manipulated - by advertising and propaganda
respectively. Each manipulation requires that markers of social
differentiation (along the lines of social class, sex, ethnicity/race)
be glossed over/ignored - since Orwell is making it up in a way that
Leavis isn't, he can quite literally suggest that everyone 'is the
same'.

It isn't a question of picking the reference (Leavis) at random and
applying it to Orwell's text. Leavis' writing is part of a tradition of
writing about mass culture/society that covers the political spectrum:
from the Frankfurt School on the left to someone like Eliot on the
right. It then seems reasonable to ask if there are connections with the
modernisation/convergence writings of the 1950s and 1960s. Again, to
speak of technology is to insist that social divisions (here framed in
terms of capitalist and communist societies - Bell speaks of the end of
ideology) are disappearing. To the best of my knowledge this writing is
principally American; this is also, then the context for the early
Pynchon, whose stories feature marginalised social groups but don't have
a lot to say about social class.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Terrance [mailto:lycidas2 at earthlink.net]
> Sent: 28 April 2003 14:51
> To: Paul Nightingale
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Foreword,Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that
> 
> 1984 is not a crude propaganda novel. Animal Farm is not a crude
> propaganda novel. Both are fictions. If we don't deal with them as
> fictions first (acknowledging all along that Orwell claimed that his
aim
> was "to make political writing into art"), if they only serve our
> political purposes, if we read them as the  prophecy of a penitent
> Leftist (the common reading in the USA after publication), if Ingsoc
> equals the British Labor Party, if ... or it ... Capitalism
(Technopoly,
> Postman's term) is the target, in short, if we put politics in front
and
> then aim at a political/econmoic bull's eye  we risk missing  the
target
> altogether. The target, it seems to me, is a totalitarianism that cuts
> across all ideologies, a general indictment of all those forces in
> society that make for dehumanization. His warning (not his prophecy)
is
> that humanity itself will be annihilated if any System, any
government,
> of whatever political persuasion, assumes absolute power and control.
> And Orwell  identified his audiance--the British people. He warned
them
> that evil empires and axes of evil may emerge in the East and in the
> West.