1984: history, politics

[jbor]

Perceptive review, thanks for putting it up. The central conceit of Orwell's
satiric fantasy in _1984_ is the joyless plight of a petit bourgeois
Englishman living in a surrealistic projection of Stalin's Russia,
transplanted into the future and onto British soil. ( ... Is the wider
contention of the '"homeland" = 9/11 such that Bush is Big Brother' crew
that Pynchon sez or believes that Winston's experience in the society
depicted in the novel in any way resembles life in the USA in 2003? Or that
it does? Mm.)

Sex in _1984_ is something Pynchon picks up on in the Foreword in what seems
like a critically-fashionable way. The paragraphs about sexual desire and
Julia might be worth a closer look.

best


on 18/5/03 5:37 AM, Terrance wrote:

> 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.