Leviatha ...the other two extremes here BIG POLITICS & little literature

[Terrance]

James Joyce, in the person of Stephen Daedalus, made a now famous
distinction between static and kinetic art. Great art is static in its
effects: it
exists in itself, it demands nothing beyond itself. Kinetic art exists
in order to demand: not self-contained, it requires either loathing or
desire to achieve its function...George Orwell's new novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, is a great work of kinetic art. This may mean that its
greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone,
now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be
the pawn of
time. Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this generation
has
made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such
fulness. 

In the excesses of satire one may take a certain comfort. They provide a
distance from the human condition as we meet it in our daily life
that preserves our habitual refuge in sloth or blindness or
self-righteousness. Mr.
Orwell's earlier book, Animal Farm, is such a work. Its characters are
animals,
and its content is therefore fabulous, and its horror, shading into
comedy,
remains in the generalized realm of intellect, from which our feelings
need fear no
onslaught. But Nineteen Eighty- Four is a work of pure horror, and its
horror is
crushingly immediate. 

The motives that seem to have caused the difference
between these two novels provide an instructive lesson in the operations
of the
literary imagination. Animal Farm was, for all its ingenuity, a rather
mechanical
allegory; it was an expression of Mr. Orwell's moral and intellectual
indignation before
the concept of totalitarianism as localized in Russia. It was also bare
and somewhat cold and, without being really very funny, undid its
potential
gravity and the very gravity of its subject, through its comic devices.
Nineteen
Eighty-Four is likewise an expression of Mr. Orwell's moral and
intellectual
indignation before the concept of totalitarianism, but it is not only
that. 

It is also--and this is no doubt the hurdle over which
many loyal liberals will stumble--it is also an expression of Mr.
Orwell's
irritation at many facets of British socialism, and most particularly,
trivial as this may seeem, at the drab gray pall that life in Britain
today has drawn across the civilized amenities of life before the war. 

Mark Schorer, "An Indignant and Prophetic Novel," in The New
York Times Book Review, June 12, 1949, pp. 1, 16. 

Terrance wrote:
> 
> WRITERS AND LEVIATHAN (1948)
> 
> http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79e/part50.html
> 
> Blair says,
> 
> "Of course, the invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen.
> It must have happened, even if the special problem of totalitarianism had never
> arisen, because we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not
> have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a
> guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a
> purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible. No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James."