Foreword "Is Something Else Going On?"

[Dave Monroe]

   "Besides the uexpected presence of racial tolerance
in Oceania, the class structure is also a bit odd.  It
should be a classless society, but it isn't.  It is
didvided into Inner Party, Outer Party,a nd the
Proles.  But as the story is being told from the point
of view of inston Smith, who belongs to the Outer
Party, the Proles are largely ignored, much as they
are by the regime itself.  Despite his admiration for
them as a force for salvation, and his faith intheir
eventual triumph, Wisnton Smith doesn't seem to know
any proles himself--his only personal contact, and
that indirect, is with teh lady singing outside the
room in the back of the antique shop where he and
Julia have found tehir lovers' refuge.[...]  By
Winston's Iner Party poetic standards, the tune is
'driveling,' 'dreadful rubbish.'  But Orwell quotes it
three times, almost word for word.  Is something else
going on?  One cannot be sure [...].  His own artistic
judgments were not those of Winston Smith, a bourgeois
of the late '40s projected into the future.  Orwell
enjoyed what we now call pop culture--his allegiance,
in music as in politics, being to the people.
   "Orwell was amused at those of his colleagues on
the Left who lived in terror of being termed
bourgeois.  But somewhere among his own terrors may
have lurked the possibility that like Galsworthy he
might one day lose his political anger, and end up as
one more apologist for Things As They Are.  His anger,
let us go so far as to say, was precious to him.  He
had lived his way into it [...] he had invested blood,
pain and hard labor to earn his anger [...].  It may
be an affliction peculiar to writers more than others,
this fear of getting too comfortable, of being bought
off.  When one writes for a living, it is certainly
one of the risks, though not one every writer objects
to.  The ability of the ruling element to co-opt
dissent was ever present as a danger--actually, not
unlike the process by which the Party in 1984 is able
to renew itself from below." ("Foreword," pp.
xviii-xix)

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>  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.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com