_1984_ & Genre?

[Terrance]

It's kinda old hat to talk about genre, but it's useful to me and it
might be to you too. 


On my copy of _1984_ the publishers have printed, "A Novel" 

 But _1984_ is not really a novel, but what Northrop Frye calls
Menippean Satire, a kind of fiction that 

"...deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes...The
Menippian satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle
abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its
characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and
presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.... At its
most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the
world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."


And less we have any doubt that the Prophetic & Prescient reading of the
"novel" dismantles the satirical structure, we can read Orwell's
comments: 


Orwell described _1984_  as "a satire" in a letter he sent to an
American trade union official in order to counter a view of the book
that had greatly distressed him, that it was "an attack on Socialism or
on the British Labor Party." MOre than once Orwell insisted that the
book was did not prophesy that "the kind of society I describe
necessarily will arrive," but warned that "something resembling it could
arrive," even in Britain, "if not fought against."