Orwell & Nineteen Eighty-Four

[jbor]

on 7/5/03 2:43 AM, Otto wrote:

> This seems to be a contradiction to what you have said about Orwell
> imagining in "1984" Britain having undergone some kind of revolution.
> Following this quote Ozeania would be the product of a *betrayed revolution*
> like the Soviet Union.

No, no contradiction. Unlike post-war Britain, Orwell's depiction of Oceania
in _1984_ is of a post-Revolutionary society. Certainly the Revolution has
been betrayed, specifically by Big Brother/Stalin, but it is by no stretch
of the imagination a democracy.

Our disagreement seems to be about whether modern Western democracies are
mainly similar to Oceania, and to the totalitarian regimes on which it is
modelled, or whether they are mainly different. We're not going to convince
one another, and Pynchon doesn't  buy into that debate anyway. Even when he
suggests that "one could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet had
behaved no differently than a fascist regime" he backs away from any real
comparison between liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes. In the very
next paragraph he discusses more specifically "Orwell's critique of
England's official Left" and how the society depicted in the novel is a
hypothetical scenario which has been projected "four decades into the
future" (x). 

Having now read the Foreword in full (thanks E.) I find it unlikely that the
mentions of "homeland" and "altering the landscape" (ix-x) refer to 9/11 or
Bush at all. Pynchon is explicit when later he does discuss "the Department
of Defense", "Department of Justice" and the FBI (xiii), so why would he
switch into cryptic mode in a passage which is significantly less damning
than the later one? The paragraphs before and after (ix-xi) focus
specifically on Orwell's relationship with and criticisms of British
governments and politicans of the time, and I think that while "enemy bombs"
and "air raid" sirens do describe the Blitz they don't relate at all to
hijacked passenger planes flying without warning into public buildings. If
he was talking about 9/11 and the Patriot Act I imagine he would've made it
clear, just as he makes the later reference to the "present-day United
States" clear (xii-xiii).

As a complete and sequential text it reads OK. I agree that Orwell wrote
_1984_ to serve as a warning about what "could" happen in the West, and
Pynchon notes again that the technological means for totalitarian control
which the novel foreshadows are readily available today. Thankfully he never
claims that B.B. has happened, or that it will happen, in the U.S., or that
Bush is a Nazi. It's a reasonably well-written introduction, though there
are a number of historical and interpretative assertions which are arguable
at best, a misuse of the terms "fascist" and "dissident" (i.e. "a person
disagreeing, or disagreement, esp. with established government" - Concise
Oxford), an evasion of the fact that the regime presented in _1984_ is
post-Revolutionary, and a strange attempt to conscript Orwell as an
anti-government or anti-Western ideologue, which he most certainly wasn't.

As history - even as literary biography - Simon Schama's 'The Two Winstons'
from the _History of Britain_ series compares favourably, even if Pynchon
does pan it as a "dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour's
entertainment" (xxi). This put-down seems a bit contradictory or even
hypocritical, coming as it does right after he celebrates Orwell's (or, more
properly, his own) "pop culture" (xix) sensibilities and empathy a couple of
pages beforehand.

best (sorry if this becomes a double-up post)