Tea at Trianon: On George Orwell

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

On George Orwell

From Nicholas Reid at Reid's Reader:

All of Orwell’s novels are in some ways polemical (and his non-fiction is certainly polemical.). Burmese Days condemns colonialism. A Clergyman’s Daughter has a go at many things - a fading Anglican church, the nastiness of cheap private schools, exploitation of workers in the hop fields and poverty in London. Keep the Aspidistra Flying targets both pretentious literary people and the advertising industry. Coming Up For Air laments both the decay of English countryside and the growing militarism that is preceding a coming war. And of course you already know how polemic Animal Farm and 1984 are. Orwell always has a “message” clearly spelt out. I also find it interesting that every one of his novels ends with defeat for the main character. John Florey commits suicide in Burmese Days. Dorothy Hare, after all her wild journeys, goes back to doing good works in her father’s parish in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Gordon Comstock gives up the arty-literary life he took to, and returns to the advertising agency he had escaped in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. George Bowling is completely disillusioned by his journey to his childhood town and returns to his nagging wife in Coming Up For Air. And you all know that the animals in Animal Farm are stuck with their horrible regime, while at the end of 1984, Winston Smith truly loves Big Brother.

I am bemused by the way Orwell leaves his protagonists in defeat. Does this mean that he was basically a pessimist? Or was he simply always facing the reality that most people have to get on with their lives, happy endings are rare, and there is not one great revolution coming along fix things? I have noticed that, while Hollywood cranks out happy endings in frivolous movies, it is especially in totalitarian countries that earnest films have happy endings, usually concluding with the state and its ideology neatly fixing things. (Over the years, I have been able to see some Stalinist Russian films that were made to this formula.) While Orwell wanted to improve the world, he was not a Utopian and was fully aware that making things better was going to be a long, hard struggl

A difficulty in all Orwell’s novels is that, from Burmese Days to 1984, his narrative always hinges on just one main person. His novels are never told in the first-person but they might as well be. In this respect, Orwell’s novels are very like most of the novels of H. G. Wells [look him up in the index at right ]. It is well-known that Orwell liked books written in the Edwardian era (it is an Edwardian society George Bowling is futilely seeking in Coming Up For Air ) and he admired much of Wells’ earlier work. What it means, though, is we are getting one [usually male] character’s perspective. There is a real single-mindedness in Orwell’s work with an inability to step inside the minds of characters other than the protagonist. Hence a degree of flatness.

It is easier to categorise Orwell’s non-fiction. In descriptions of places and people he is often a master, but two of his non-fictions are very poorly organised. Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are both made of two incompatible halves. Down and Out in Paris and London appears to have been patched together to pad out a book that was regarded by his publisher as too short. The Road to Wigan Pier yields some of the best reportage Orwell ever wrote, but the second half is a rambling, often vague essay about socialism and types of people. It’s a mess and his publisher hated it. Only Homage to Catalonia stands up well as a unified and perfectly purposeful narrative. I regret that Orwell did not have the opportunity to write more in the same vein.

How do I sum up Orwell? He is certainly very readable, but his work does not amount to a great classic. It is very, very interesting to read about the times and places he depicts. He enlightens us on the era in which he lived. I do not believe he was a prophet as some of his most fervent admirers suggest; but he was absolutely right to call out a totalitarian idea which gullible people in the democracies had embraced. In the end, his work is most interesting not as literature but as history. Which, for all his flat characters, means he is still important. (Read more.)