Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance:
> 
> OK, call the culturally  learned thingy a "narrative" . So, this is
what
> the reader contributes--his learned culturally consumed "narrative"--
to
> the activity.  But reading is not an activity without a text. And a
> text, like _1984_ has an author. And the author makes choices. He
> decides that he will make his narrator a boy. A girl. An insane man.
> What is the tale told by the boy, the girl, the insane man, the idiot
> ...  of the text to be called if not a narrative?
> 
> Can't we come up with some other term for what you are now calling a
> narrative? I mean, it's kind of confusing to call the culturally
> consumed "narrative" a narrative when we are talking about novels.
Isn't
> it? Or is that the point?

The nominal author might make choices but, insofar as he (I assume
Orwell here) intends this or that, he is still only a reader of the text
he is himself producing. There is then the issue of unintentional stuff
(which P gets into in the SL Intro, of course). The author of the text
is not just Blair/Orwell but the society he lives in which writes, as it
were, through him. Any text is a social construct. And it is
reconstructed by its readers. You yourself referred to the contemporary
response to Orwell the penitent leftist. 

Another term for narrative? You have to be joking - why complicate
matters? Orwell's narrative includes a conventional heterosexual couple.
Is this really a choice on his part? Or do we want another word for
'choice' here? The only point I'm making is that any text has a
narrative that can be read by the learned reader - that my definition of
the 'learned reader' is at odds with what Leavis or Orwell would have
understood by the phrase is, of course, the point.