"Orwellian, dude!"

[jbor]

on 24/5/03 12:41 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> This next paragraph is one of contrast with, not
> one of context for the previous one..
> 
> The "Orwellian dude" paragraph is about the silly uses of the
> predictions or prophesies, which as P says are "worth a minute and a
> half of diversion."
> 
> The "well yes and no" paragraph is about the worthwhile uses of Orwell's
> book. Possibly the best paragraph is the essay. Not to say there are not
> others.

The paragraphs are paired, Pynchon's exemplification of how "prediction and
prophecy are not quite the same". In the first of the two paragraphs he is
actually noting down some of the things which Orwell "'got right'", as if
they were predictions, or were meant as predictions. When he says "[l]ooking
around us at the present moment" it's not just the USA he's referring to,
it's "us" again, everybody, as before in the "fascistic disposition"
paragraph. Certainly the things he lists apply to my experience here,
although the "news is whatever the government says it is" claim is a bit of
an exaggeration. People who misread the novel as just a set of predictions
("it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's
case") come to the same type of conclusion as "Bill and Ted" do in the
parodied conversation. Pynchon dismisses this approach as a "game which some
critics like to play".

In the second paragraph he hedges again: "yes and no". He allows that some
of the "details" from the novel have become familiar to us in latter times,
"circa 2003" etc., but then he goes on to talk about Orwell as a "working
prophet" looking into the "human soul", and diagnosing "the will to fascism"
which loiters there. I like the three rhetorical questions at the end of the
paragraph. Basically, the point Pynchon makes is that people are people
wherever, and that Orwell's essential theme and purpose in the novel was to
show that there is exactly the same potential for things to go in the same
way in "Britain and the United States" (NB that both countries get a
mention, not just the U.S.), as they did in Germany under Hitler or the USSR
under Stalin. 

It took me a while to work out what the difference between "prediction" and
"prophecy" actually was in his eyes, but I get it now, and I agree that it's
interesting. Those trying to turn the Foreword into an anti-Bush jeremiad do
it very little justice.

best