Fact and friction

[jbor]

>> There's a sting in that final sentence as s~Z has pointed out, one which
>> resonates with some of the ambiguities relating to our current global
>> situation addressed at several points earlier in the essay. Pynchon can
>> envisage himself, and his reader, like Orwell's Winston, and like Orwell
>> himself, perhaps, "for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be
> done
>> to keep" our children's world, a world of "human decency", from being
>> "betrayed". By the Stalins and Saddams, and their proteges, he would seem
> to
>> be implying, much more so than the Churchills or Bushes.

on 2/6/03 12:17 AM, Otto wrote:
> 
> Where do you get that impression - expressed in your last sentence - from?

"It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in _1984_, was imagining a future
for his son's generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as
warning against." (xxv)

As amply explained throughout the Foreword, it's the projection of what the
British Labour government, in its unquestioning allegiance to Stalin, might
become, which Orwell was warning against.

best