What Pynchon wrote?

[Paul Nightingale]

Meanwhile, at the risk of inspiring raucous laughter ... I've wasted
some time today (you were all having such fun) thinking about how the
Foreword hangs together as a piece. In my view (no apology for being
predictable) it functions as a Pynchon-text always does function, by
asking us how we know what we think we know, by interrogating the way in
which writing tells us, or would like to tell us, what there is to know
(about). What follows is necessarily sketchy, and I'm not holding my
breath.

Phase 1 (vii-ix) introduces Orwell and the novel itself. P raises the
question of identity through constructing a series of oppositions. Blair
becomes Orwell as he moves away from his comfortable family/social
background, a journey completed on the final page. Neither is the novel
quite what it seems ("a sort of anti-communist tract"): BB and Goldstein
"do not line quite line up with their models" etc.

Phase 2 (ix-xv) describes "Orwell's intention" in writing the novel as a
response to current events, hence the relationship between text and
context. P again sets up oppositions: real/phony antifascism,
dissident/Official Left, a "critique" of what passed for socialism under
the post-45 Labour Govt (opposed to an earlier "honourable struggle").

The fascistic disposition passage is the first to function in the
present, the here-&-now. P has gone from reconstructing O's mind-set to
asking the reader to consider their own responses to a given situation.
And then doublethink: O's source in the left's schizophrenic attitude to
Stalinism. But doublethink is just O's take on a common phenomenon: P
cites social psych as well as other writers. The juxtaposition of
Oceania's MoP/MoT/MoL to the DoD/DoJ again pulls the reader back to "the
present-day US". O's thinking post-war and the juxtaposition of
real-world and imaginary politics (or the dividing-up of real and
imagined worlds).

Hence, I would wish to argue that text/context includes the
reader/reading of P's Foreword, given the two passages that address the
reader directly (by which I mean they refer to 'now' and ask the
'now'-reader to call upon their own experiences/knowledge/feelings).

Phase 3 (xv-xvii) deals with the accuracy of the novel's
prophesy/prediction, which means the reader is now being asked to judge
the text (novel) against the world they (the reader) live in. By this
stage, then, the reader (of P's Foreword, it doesn't matter if they
haven't read 1984 ... which is quite reasonable, really) has become more
and more important. I would also suggest that, more and more, P himself
as author is more important.

Phase 4 (xvii-xxiii) deals with the novel as a vehicle for O's own
attitudes/feelings (as opposed to his critical stance vis-à-vis official
socialism in phase 2). The traces that remain of O's (alleged)
anti-Semitism. Popular culture: the song. O's anger ... his identity as
a writer. Popular culture/detective novels as a source, which echoes
(for this reader) P's use of Baedeker: the usage is different, of course
(O not being 'ignorant' as the young P was) but it does emphasise a
characteristic of P's own writing, that we only know the world through
writing. Then the "familiar formula" of boy/girl vs "there's no happy
ending" ... "as dark an ending as can be imagined".

The section as a whole is much more about imagination, perhaps
developing the distinction P made earlier between 'mere' "details" and
the "working prophet [who can] see deeper than most of us into the human
soul". Perhaps also it develops the relationship with the reader. Again
a passage ("commonplace circa 2003") that addresses the reader directly.
The control of history (including memory, experience, the 'I') is
juxtaposed to the control of desire.

Phase 5 (xxiii-xxvi) is about endings. The discussion of Newspeak
challenges the status/identity of the text preceding it by throwing it
into the past. The dark ending is no ending after all. The photograph
returns O to the family from which he departed at the outset.

OK - time for the insults to start flying again.