Orwellians mix it up at Wellesley

[pynchonoid]

More grist for the Orwell mill.
Meanwhile, back at Pynchon's Foreword...


<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/131/focus/Curious_George+.shtml>

Curious George

Orwellians mix it up at Wellesley

By Matthew Price, 5/11/2003

WELLESLEY-George Orwell has been called many things:
the conscience of his generation, a prophet, a rebel.
But was he also a misunderstood Christian, an early
gay-rights activist, a latter-day Alexis de
Tocqueville, and quite possibly the first blogger?
These were but a few of the aspects of Orwell debated
last week during a Wellesley College conference
marking the centenary of his birth in 1903. 

Wellesley's serenely wooded campus hosted some of the
English language's most tart-tongued intellectuals,
among them the essayist Christopher Hitchens, the
sociologist and media critic Todd Gitlin, and the
journalist David Rieff. Over the course of three days,
they debated how we should remember this stubborn
English eccentric, whose ferocious independence has
made him one of the most appealing-and
appealed-to-icons of modern letters.

Celebrated (and often sanctified) for his
antitotalitarian novels ''Animal Farm'' and ''Nineteen
Eighty-Four,'' his reportage in ''Homage to
Catalonia'' and ''The Road to Wigan Pier,'' and for
scores of essays on everything from communism to
brewing a proper cup of tea, Orwell succeeded in his
stated ambition-''to make political writing into an
art.'' He was also a writer of dazzling range. As
Thomas Cushman, the Wellesley sociology professor who
organized the conference, put it, ''There was nothing
that he didn't turn his guns on.''

But at the conference, participants frequently turned
their guns on each other.Not surprisingly, the
military action in Iraq often shadowed the
discussions. At one heated moment, Christopher
Hitchens roundly accused the left of ''carrying water
for dictatorship ever since 1989.'' Gitlin shot back
that Hitchens sounded ''like a character in an Orwell
novel who paints the world in two tones.''

In 1983, the neoconservative writer Norman Podhoretz
famously argued that Orwell-who was an ardent
anticommunist and a committed socialist-would have
become a neoconservative had he not died of
tuberculosis in 1950. Today, the quest to fit
Orwell-''a writer well worth stealing,'' as he himself
said of Dickens-to our own specifications has taken
new turns. Though Hitchens urged conference attendees
to say good-bye to the idea of ''Orwell, our
contemporary,'' Orwell often came off as an impossibly
prescient, up-to-date fellow.

Perhaps the most startling example of this came on day
two, when Jonathan Rose, a professor of history at
Drew University, argued that ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''
was not only ''a kind of manifesto for gay
liberation'' (a surprising contention, given Orwell's
ill-tempered remarks about homosexuals in his
journalism) but a potent defense of erotic freedom in
all its varieties. ''Long before Foucault, and without
reading Wilhelm Reich, Orwell seems to have grasped
that sexual repression was the foundation-and not
merely a by-product of-totalitarianism,'' said Rose.

Rose warned that Orwell's fictional Big Brother would
endorse today's crusades against 

''sexcrime,'' and attacked Anita Hill for legitimizing
''the use of sex as a weapon of political
destruction''-a charge that provoked lively debate
among audience members.

Many panelists stressed that Orwell was a man of
paradoxes-he had a wicked sense of humor, yet was
rarely photographed smiling; he was a social democrat
who despised socialist doctrine; an Eton schoolboy who
went over to the working classes; an atheist who
hankered after Christian values; an advocate of
everyday decency yet caustically sarcastic at times.
''It's ironic people want to be like him, since he
didn't like himself much,'' quipped William Cain, a
professor of English at Wellesley.

At one of the more provocative sessions, Daphne Patai,
a professor in UMass-Amherst's department of Spanish
and Portuguese, and author of ''The Orwell Mystique,''
a feminist critique of the writer published in 1984,
discussed her nagging ambivalence about Orwell's
fraught psyche, particularly his obsession with
manliness and his displays of spite. Though she finds
herself more accepting today of Orwell's flaws, she
said it was pointless to ignore his ''obvious
misogyny'' and his tendency to snarl at his opponents.
''There is too much ad hominem nastiness which cannot
be dismissed simply as cranky mood,'' she said.

In a panel on Orwell's journalism, David Rieff echoed
Patai's charges, arguing that Orwell's affection for
the English countryside and its simple virtues was, at
heart, blinkered and crotchety, redolent of Evelyn
Waugh's nostalgic-and reactionary-vision of England in
''Brideshead Revisited.''

In his keynote address, Hitchens-whose 2002 book ''Why
Orwell Matters'' (Basic) lauds Orwell for
simultaneously opposing imperialism, fascism, and
Stalinism-stressed Orwell's ongoing struggle to
overcome the prejudices of a middle-class son of a
British imperial official. And Michael Shelden, one of
Orwell's many biographers, asked us not to forget the
suffering and strain he endured finishing ''Nineteen
Eighty-Four'' before his death at the age of 46. As
for Orwell's sacrifices finishing his last book,
Shelden movingly concluded, ''He made them for us.''

The literary critic Morris Dickstein cautioned against
an undue emphasis on the man himself, when it's the
work that most matters in the end. Not surprisingly,
''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' which has sold many millions
of copies, was a constant point of reference at the
Wellesley event. Vladimir Shlapentokh, a sociology
professor at Michigan State, spoke with great passion
about his discovery of the novel during the 1960s in
Russia, a place Orwell never visited. For Shlapentokh,
''Nineteen-Eighty Four'' is not a dystopian projection
of the future or a treatise about power and sexual
repression, but a profoundly realistic treatment of
life under a totalitarian system. Orwell, claimed
Shlapentokh, was nothing less than ''Russia's
Tocqueville.''

Granted Orwell's skills as a political writer, was he
also a political thinker of any note? The social
critic Jim Sleeper suggested that Orwell came close to
echoing Tocqueville's serious concerns about the
tyranny of the majority. But the Orwell biographer
Peter Stansky emphasized his amateurish, unsystematic
approach to political questions. ''Thank God, Orwell
was not a policy wonk. He was an artist,'' Stansky
exclaimed during one exchange. As for Orwell's
posthumous adoption by thinkers on the right, Stansky
opined that ''the wonderful thing about Orwell was
that he was an intense anticommunist without being a
neoconservative.''

Though largely a celebration of the man, the
conference did touch on one quality Orwell's admirers
are sometimes reluctant to admit: Their man could be a
bit of a hack. Eric Weinberger, a critic who teaches
writing at Harvard, argued that Orwell's famous ''As I
Please'' essays, written during World War II for the
Tribune, a socialist weekly, could be tedious and
self-indulgent, whatever their charms. But, adding his
own novel gloss, Weinberger noted that the essays
remind him of that ever-growing journalistic
phenomenon, the weblog. Looked at this way, it seems
we may never be able to bid farewell to the idea of
Orwell, our contemporary.

Matthew Price, a freelance writer based in Brooklyn,
New York, is a regular contributor to the Globe.

For comments and suggestions, email ideas at globe.com

This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on
5/11/2003.



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com