Reading and writing

[Paul Nightingale]

All writing is indeed representation, which means all writing is
fictional, ie a construct. It also means all writing revisits that which
is absent, the real world, and as representation seeks to stand in for
the absent world. On p. xx of the Foreword P writes of the difficulty of
writing knowing that the end result will, somehow, fall short of what
you aimed for.

This passage belongs in what I called phase 4, dealing with the novel as
a vehicle for O's own attitudes/feelings (as opposed to his critical
stance vis-à-vis official socialism in phase 2). I then went on to say
that the reference to detective novels as a source echoed (for this
reader) P's own use of Baedeker: the usage is different, of course (O
not being 'ignorant' as the young P was) but it does emphasise a
characteristic of P's own writing, that we only know the world through
writing.

P writes that "O had his moments of contempt for graphic scenes of
violence in fiction, particularly the American hard-boiled crime fiction
available in pulp magazines". This seems, to me, a direct reference to
O's ambivalent feelings about popular culture, in terms of writing, low
as opposed to high culture. This passage, therefore, is a counterweight
to the earlier reference to the song as an example of O's interest in
popular culture (pp. xviii-xix). The "hard-boiled crime fiction" would,
to O, be an example of mass culture (and I mentioned way back when his
antipathy to that). The song functions as 'folk art', the woman is
singing rather than reading/consuming what Adorno and others dismissed
as mass-produced, assembly-line rubbish.

But then: "What was 'disgusting rubbish' back in a more insulated time
had become by the postwar era, part of the vernacular of political
education, and by 1984 in Oceania it will be institutionalised." Hence,
the way we judge writing changes. To describe something as "disgusting
rubbish" is indeed a value-judgement, one informed by moral revulsion;
the phrase doesn't smack of a reasoned response.

P continues: "Yet O cannot, like the average pulp writer, enjoy the
luxury of unreflectively insulting the flesh and spirit of any
character. The writing is at places difficult to stay with, as if O
himself is feeling every moment of Winston's ordeal."

Given the events ("What had happened? Spain and the Second World War, it
would seem.") that separate the two moments P discusses, the casual way
in which the representation of violence might function in fiction has
been transformed. On the one hand, the violent image has become more
common as a function of political discourse, the ongoing
judgement/condemnation of Nazi crimes. On the other hand, its impact
changes as people recognise its use outside the bounds of the kind of
fiction (because it wasn't, quite, respectable) whose readership was
clearly defined (the 'mass market' for 'manufactured' fiction). The
violent image is no longer confined to genre fiction designed, so the
argument goes, to appeal emotionally to those readers who don't aspire
to literary fiction. Such images have been brought into the mainstream.
It has been argued that TV coverage of the Vietnam war forced Hollywood
to make films that were 'more' violent, precisely because the news
coverage of the war had set a new standard for the 'realistic'
representation of violence. That period (the late-60s on) was part of
P's education as a writer, of course, the years of the writing of GR.
Perhaps here he is talking about O's experiences of the same process,
trying to write when the world around you is changing so (obviously)
rapidly (or more accurately, the way the world-as-represented is
changing).

As a writer, one is no more than a reader of one's own work. One might
set out with what one thinks are clear intentions, but the way those
intentions are translated into writing is dependent on one's material
circumstances. O wished to record the brutality of political oppression;
he could only do so by borrowing what he felt was an alien language
(alien in terms of the writing style, perhaps, also in terms of the way
such writing constructed its audience). To put it another way, O might
have wished to construct a POV that condemned the brutal act
unreservedly; he knew he ran the risk of writing in such a way that he
(as he had always thought) no more than titillated the audience (not a
fact, of course, but a judgement dependent on his own prejudices against
popular writing).