Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> One of the problems I have is dealing with the arbitrary distinction
> between fiction and non-fiction, between the novel and politics. 

 If we dismiss the distinction between fiction and non-fiction (i.e., 
Gravity's Rainbow equals a  biology text) what the author and the text
tell us is subordinated to what the reader says they do. GR is a work of
biology?  On come now, it's not. Is it an obituary? A list of
ingredients? 



Not that the distinction lies entirely in the text--the context, the
sentence structure, the syntax, the presence or absence of metaphor,
character, setting, plot ... etc. ... or classification ... the cover,
where the book is filed, shelved, how categorized... tragedy, comedy,
blah blah...poem, prose fiction...novel...; or in the author's choosing:
to call his writings a fiction, a novel, a poem; his creating a
fictional world, his fictional characters ... his use of or deliberate
subversion of "traditional" elements of fiction or a particular genre &
ect. & Co. ..... but I must insist that a text is a necessary condition
for any act of reading and that an author of said text, while he/she may
be called Homer or Nobody or God, deserves to be acknowledged  for
his/her creation and the choices he/she has made. 


It may be quite an arbitrary distinction to you, but _1984_,  is clearly
not the same thing as a list of ingredients on the back of a meal
replacement Power Bar. 

>Writing is writing. 

NO. And reading is not reading. One simply does not read a novel like GR
in the same way that one reads the ingredients listed on the back of a
Power Bar meal replacement package. 



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). 

One can avoid these priorities altogether, I guess. But why? 
If Guliver's Travels is a brilliant political satire and GR is a
brilliant political satire we can compare them as such. If _1984_ is a
political satire too, we can compare it with these others. If _1984_ is
so weak when we set it next to GT and GR we might say that it is a
lesser political satire or we might even say it is not a brilliant
political
satire but only a crude propaganda. 



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. 

Suppose I only want  to know if the Yankees won yesterday. I can read
that "narrative" in about 3 seconds. Is this a very short story?  Not
that
I want to compare it with Heart Of Darkness or The Dead, but where is
the narrative?  


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'.

You needn't avoid asking these questions just because you are reading a
novel. I guess what you are suggesting is that we read two books at one
time--a
novel & something else. Not a bad approach to any subject. 

> 
> 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.

OK, sounds cool. 

 Being an American, Pynchon seems  typical in that he is a bit naive
about social class. In the SL Intro. he seems to admit that he had
attributed too much to race and
not enough to class.