Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
___________________________________________________________________
Beyond
Calculation: Politics and Aesthetics in George Orwell
by
For the flyblown words that made me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit[i].
In
his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, Orwell makes a rueful confession about the
direction his career might have taken in an ideal world. “In a peaceful age I
might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained
almost unaware of my political loyalties”[ii].
Political allegiance is something he comes to almost by accident, the
remunerative side-line-turned virtuous necessity with which he must make a
compromise. “As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of
pamphleteer”[iii].
In these statements fictionally beautiful writing is opposed to the politically
responsible, but Orwell’s long-term ambition was to turn beauty into necessity
by amalgamating the two in a single virtuosity, “to make political writing
into an art”[iv].
That he was successful is evidenced by the later fictions, the strongest of his
oeuvre. Gordon Bowker notes that Animal Farm “is widely considered
Orwell’s finest achievement…Most reviewers greeted the book as a minor
masterpiece”[v]. Orwell says Animal Farm
“was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I
was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose”[vi].
Animal Farm in my opinion is indeed remarkable, both for the depth of its
appreciation of human motives, and for the simple acuity with which this
appreciation is expressed (“All animals are equal but some animals are more
equal than others”[vii].) However, Orwell’s
explanation of the compositional economy that enabled him eventually to write so
well is inconsistent or even contradictory. When his trajectory as a writer is
under consideration, this inconsistency is as significant as the stylistic
‘resolution’ of the artistic and the political at which Orwell aimed and at
which he eventually arrived. By way of introducing the inconsistency, we can
invert this ‘resolution’ account of Orwell’s progression as a writer,
which explains his career in terms of fusion of aesthetic and political
priorities. Instead we can ask
Why
do the ‘aesthetically inspired’ early novels, works which pre-date
Orwell’s political partisanship, apparently lack the purposefulness so
manifest in the political work?
What
are we to make of the later ‘pamphleteer’ work, the political journalism
and documentary writing that purports aesthetic ‘neutrality’, issuing
from the pen of an instinctively ‘ornate and descriptive’ writer?
In
the final paragraph of ‘Why I Write’, Orwell explains “One can write
nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.
Good prose is like a window pane”[viii].
Taken together these statements tread heavily upon one another. The window pane
through which a political writer is viewed must reveal writerly design, the
biases and personality of the writer. As it must, the effacement of a writer’s
personality cannot be maintained as a condition of good writing. Of course, with
the phrase ‘window pane’, Orwell wants merely to represent an aesthetic of
prose writing, a simple and pared-down-to-essentials style that suits its
subject and pleases its reader. However the relationship between style and
writerly intention is, to say the least, a complex one. Orwell treats this
subject with a simplicity which is misleading, and actually disguises his lack
of clarity when thinking about aesthetics and aesthetic motivation.
In
the same essay, Orwell attempts to define the four “great motives” for prose
writing. Along with “sheer egoism”, “historical impulse” and
“political purpose”, Orwell lists “aesthetic enthusiasm”. He defines the
aesthetic motive as
Perception
of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right
arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of
good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which
one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed[ix].
George
Woodcock, in The Crystal Spirit, points out that aesthetic theory was for
Orwell “one of those realms of thought in which he felt least happy”[x].
Regarding Orwell’s definition of the aesthetic motive, Woodcock argues that
“While the first two items in this list are valid enough, the third is not,
since all experiences are not aesthetic, and mere communication is not art”[xi].
The third item, in its implicit postulation of the social responsibility of the
individual, in fact is a proper foundation for a definition of political
purpose. If there is a component of experience which ‘ought not to be
missed’, the immediate question is, by whom should it not missed, and why? The
answer must be that other people should not miss the experience, because it has
a relevance to them that the writer is obliged to share. Feeling the success of
his writing hinges upon the value of the social experiences for which he is
responsible, the artist leaves the realm of pure aesthetics and becomes
political.
This
confusion of the aesthetic with the political is in evidence again when Orwell
expatiates upon his ambitions as a political writer. Of his compositional
preferences he claims “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a
long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience”[xii].
His explanation for this is “I am not able, and I do not want, completely to
abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood”[xiii].
There is an elision in evidence here. Orwell offers an argument from social
valuation (“the world view that I acquired”), essentially a political
explanation, to support a statement made about aesthetics. It is not possible
that Orwell does not understand the difference between the two terms. Rather,
there is a constitutive error – the political is inseparable from the
beautiful in his mind, or to put it another way, writing is beautiful in as much
as to some extent it has a social function.
A
reply to the first of the bullet-pointed questions above suggests itself.
Orwell’s early aesthetic ‘offenders’, particularly A Clergyman’s
Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying should be situated firmly
within his trajectory of political purposefulness. The explanation in ‘Why I
Write’ which Orwell provides of his aesthetic impulses, can be seen as a
failed attempt to put into words what was ‘really’ going on in these early
works. His later statement that these books “lacked political purpose”[xiv],
from this viewpoint, is a misunderstanding of his own aesthetic ideas and
practice. This is returned to immediately below.
Another
possibility, in response to the second bullet point, is that the later
‘decision for politics’ was in some sense also ‘a decision for
aesthetics’, a decision founded on Orwell’s intuition that at the bottom of
a writer’s motives “lies a mystery”[xv]. This idea will for most
of this paper justify close consideration of Orwell’s explicitly political
journalism and documentary work. Orwell’s conception of the writer’s mystery
as an effacement, an abyss or a void, will disclose itself in two alternate yet
connected conceptions. Their relationship is the cornerstone of this paper’s
view of authentic political decision, its sources and its conditions, its
potential and its effects, as experienced by Orwell.
Initially
my response to the first bullet-point needs clarification.
In ‘Why I Write’, Orwell says
When
I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a
work of art’. I write because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to
which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing[xvi].
As
was explained above, the later Orwell could feel quite confident in his power to
confer proper form on this important content, knowing that the political and the
aesthetic would successfully bed into the work together (though he was not able
clearly to comprehend this success theoretically). The difference between what
the later, politically engaged Orwell wanted to accomplish, in comparison with
his unsuccessful, artistically ambitious earlier self, is however quite apparent
in respect of his professed intentions for Keep the Aspidistra Flying and
A Clergyman’s Daughter. In a personal letter in 1935, Orwell remarked
of Keep the Aspidistra Flying not that it was intended to ‘get a
hearing’, but that “I want this one to be a work of art”[xvii].
Similarly, A Clergyman’s Daughter is unique amongst Orwell’s works
for its “absorption in the mechanics and craft of fiction”[xviii].
In particular, Clergyman’s reveals the influence that Joyce’s Ulysses
exerted upon Orwell’s technique at the time. According to Orwell’s
later, more mature reflection, such early artistic ambitions, whether innovative
or derivative, are seen in the light of mistakenness:
I
see that it is invariably where I lacked political purpose that I wrote
lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug generally[xix].
Keep
the
Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter are
unsuccessful, Orwell later realizes, because they are ‘only’ aesthetic
works, lacking the substance and focus of his committed later output.
However,
Orwell’s early work is not innocent of political purpose, despite his later
claim that his prime motives had been aesthetic. Several of
Orwell’s characteristic political themes emerge in A Clergyman’s Daughter,
which is concerned with vagrancy and poverty, with social inequality and the
vested interests that sustain it. Clergyman’s is also concerned with
society’s loss of spirituality and with mental dominance and submission,
themes that nourish his later ideas and writings upon totalitarianism. Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, commenting on the same destitute social landscape, is
also, according to Bowker, an obvious forbear of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This
novel, Bowker realises, “stands in a long continuity of thought”, for which
the characters, structure, themes, and “mental topography” of Aspidistra are
significant predecessors, “as if Orwell thought ‘I can tell this story
better second time around’”[xx].
Both
of these early works were however dismissed by Orwell in 1946, when he called
them “books I am ashamed of”. He confessed to George Woodcock that Clergyman’s
was
written
simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate
for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t
a book in me, but I was half starved[xxi].
Considering
the dire poverty that loomed over these works’ composition, it is all the more
surprising that Orwell does not trace his political purposefulness back to them.
Instead, Orwell ascribes his political awakening to epiphanic experiences he had
in Spain’s civil war, and to other events of 1936-7, including his trip to the
industrial towns of northern England, after which “I knew where I stood”[xxii].
After this period, the early novels appear to be merely aesthetic failures,
incomplete and inconsequential searches for form. But Orwell’s conception of
the aesthetic as opposed to the political is, I have argued, inherently
confused; he sees the early works as artistic failures, I think, actually
because it is their political aspect that is incoherent. In this light,
the claim that he was forced to become a pamphleteer washes slightly
differently: Orwell was always a kind of pamphleteer, as the wide-ranging,
inchoate commitments contained in the early novels make evident. His failure in
these works is to find the proper form for his political messages, not in the
absence of politics. The later Orwell credits his mature style with the
successful introduction of focused ‘content’ to appropriate form, but what
he misunderstands is that the ‘content’ actually has always been there –
all along his problem has been one of form, and this problem resolves itself
when Orwell becomes a ‘pamphleteer proper’, when writing the journalism and
documentary works.
Developing
the second bullet-pointed question above, Orwell’s confusion of aesthetic and
political purposes invites us to ask whether aesthetic motivation is to be found
in his ‘proper’ political work. The openings of his three book-length
documentary works, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and
Homage to Catalonia indicate that it can be found. These works follow the
same pattern, establishing a mise-en-scene in which ‘slice of life’ episodes
can occur which are typical of Orwell’s experiences. These episodes radiate
poetic license, and are not so much incidents recalled as emblematic friezes
that combine fact and fiction, reality and aesthetic. One of the most often
quoted from Homage to Catalonia is taken from Orwell’s arrival at the
Lenin Barracks, wherein he is struck by the face of an Italian militia man (who
also became the poetic inspiration for this paper’s heading epigraph). Orwell
explains
With
his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special
atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of
the war – the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers
creeping to the front, the grey war stricken towns further up the line…[xxiii]
No
doubt Orwell did see a face, or some faces that became furrowed with many lines
of memory and association. This particular militia man’s face is a device that
allows him to locate this feeling in one place, to frame it as the real
encounter of two people, and in so doing to make it simple, personal and
authentic.
All
his book-length documentary works make a great deal of the experiences of the
researcher himself in this way -- as acting in, as enacting what will
later be given discursive / philosophical treatment. I hesitate to say the researcher is Orwell, he is of course a
‘factionalised’ Orwell, or the character “Orwell” as Raymond Williams
memorably put it[xxiv].
Orwell the writer inserts details and incidents into Homage to Catalonia that
make Orwell the character seem real: There are the grubby details of living
conditions on the Aragonese front, including “that bright red sausage which
tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea”[xxv].
The documentarist also talks about the trials of disciplining teenage recruits,
which “almost turned my hair grey”[xxvi].
Perhaps most typically in Orwell, there is the apparent heroism verging on
negligence, in the midst of which bathetic, even comic anxieties arise. During a
courageous defensive action by the POUM militia, after storming a Fascist
trench, the narrator admits that he was “all the time encumbered with my
rifle, which I dared not put down for fear of losing it”[xxvii].
Orwell the character is made solidly human in this way. His experiences are
plausibly sensory and tactile, his actions entangled but intelligible, his
difficulties extraordinary but not unreal.
In
Homage to Catalonia the documentarist is permitted, again and again, to
anchor himself in the small business of reality, and in so doing to enact his
observational neutrality and sincerity. Orwell intertwines contrived and
embellished episodes, like his symbolic encounter with the militia man, with
this ‘realistic’ framing. These episodes are aesthetically charged yet
purport to continue the observational ‘sincerity’ and consistent objectivity
of the narrative. In another example, on the march with his militia column to
the Saragossa front, Orwell the character ‘incidentally’ notices a youth
from the cavalry “…who pranced to and fro, galloping up every piece of
rising ground and posing himself in picturesque attitudes at the summit”[xxviii].
It is possible that the cavalry youth continually preened in this way, but
unlikely, surely. It is more likely that the youth struck a pose once, and that
Orwell’s imagination took over from there. Even if things did happen in the
way Orwell tells it, their narration is incongruous with the style of rest of
the passage. This episode is sudden and visual, like movie stills inserted in a
passage of prose.
The
aesthetic way of seeing is here so knotted with its political subject, that the
writing in a sense effaces the act that composed it. The creative
‘contrivance’ which is the writing’s aesthetic purpose, is displaced onto
the political, ‘real’ world of the documentary itself. The world of the
documentary appears to rise up to meet ‘Orwell the character’’s eye, and
this documentarist-narrator sees it objectively and sincerely, ‘as it actually
is’. Precisely because the question of artistry is not posed to the narrator,
what might be called a political ontology is founded in the world of the
documentary. This world comprises, in essence, a centre of knowledge and the
things it knows about. It is an ontology similarly evoked by Lacan’s teaching
on the psychological isolate, which “is not separable from a cosmology,
it is, in the cosmos, the centre from which, according to the inflections, what
is contemplation or harmony takes place”[xxix].
The centre of knowledge, the ‘thing that thinks’, defines the cosmos, the
universe of ‘things that can be thought about’ by the very act of
contemplating them. The cosmos, the universe of thinkable things, harmoniously
acts as an external guarantee for that act of contemplation, and for the
thinking centre itself. Centre and cosmos define each other.
The
same is true of Orwell’s documentarist and the world he observes; the
consistency of cosmos and observing centre are conferred upon each by the other.
The world of reportable things simply shows itself to the observing centre, a
centre which, observing the world, is guaranteed as a centre of observation and
therefore of knowledge. There is an artifice at work that is unacknowledged, and
its origin is to be found in Orwell’s confused thinking about the political
and the aesthetic. Because the style of Catalonia purports to be
political-factual, and not aesthetic, the mutually reinforcing self-evidence of
observer and observed world is not in question.
This
stylistic ‘knotting’ of the political and the aesthetic, is the
compositional reflection of a deep-seated antinomy in Orwell’s thinking about
truth. The concept of truth is one Orwell was at great pains to defend, and he
did it with increasing subtlety but diminishing sureness as his career advanced.
By our contemporary standards, Orwell was not much in the habit of reflexive
critique. That is to say, he was critical, but did not reflect often, at least
in print, upon the conditions of validity on which a viewpoint can be based.
There is evidence of such reflection, however, in the essay ‘The Prevention of
Literature’ from 1946. In this essay Orwell argues that intellectual liberty
comprises
the
right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is
consistent with the ignorance, bias and self deception from which every observer
necessarily suffers[xxx].
The
implications of this line of thought are a commonplace for contemporary readers,
namely, truth is not objective, it is a constructed preference. In an article
from 1948, ‘Writers and Leviathan’, Orwell makes exactly this point about
standards in literary judgement:
I
often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is
fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever…every
literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an
instinctive preference[xxxi].
However
Orwell could not always prevent his own instinctive preferences from
overshadowing his grasp of truth. The critical reflection in evidence in ‘The
Prevention of Literature’ and ‘Writers and Leviathan’ extends only so far;
Orwell is only really concerned with ideologically motivated distortion of
judgements and preferences by post-war doctrinaires. These dishonesties are
denounced in order to preserve a higher entity, the ‘true nature’ of the
artist, who should remain uninvolved in politics. However Orwell has not fully
digested the implications of his thinking, and does not see the argument through
to its logical conclusion. The conclusion that he should come to, is that
‘true nature’ is also ‘only’ an instinctive preference, one he supports
in opposition to the twisted truths of the dominant orthodoxies. Orwell’s
contextualising and situating of his own viewpoint, as evidenced above in ‘The
Prevention of Literature’, remain for him incidental to the ‘truth’, which
he does not recognise as ‘only’ his own instinctive preference. He therefore
renounces at the last moment an apparently inescapable conclusion: That ‘the
viewpoint’, stands in a relation of productivity to ‘the truth’, and is
not simply a side-effect of the truth itself.
One
sees the necessity of Orwell’s standpoint when the atrocities inflicted on
truth during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War are taken into
account. Barbaric irrationalities strived for precedence: Show trials,
propaganda, smear and insinuation, falsehoods in the press, and so on. Orwell
feared the extinction of objective truth even as an idea, and defended it
stoutly. But in attempting to reconcile this moral obligation with the freedom
of artistic expression, time and time again he was drawn into spurious arguments
and self-contradiction.
In
a 1944 review entitled ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’
Orwell’s train of thought is strikingly tendentious. His abhorrence for his
subject emanates from every syllable; he can no more contain his disgust than he
can acknowledge Dali’s artistic merit, although he does concede at one point
that “Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts”[xxxii].
However, against his personal distaste for Dali’s work Orwell sets its right
to fulfil its own function, to exist uncensored, as art should. It is in trying
to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, personal feelings and artistic
principles, that the argument becomes incoherent. The solution, Orwell argues,
is
to
be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good
draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a
sense, affect the other.
But
a few lines further on, he says
In
the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good
picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman’. Unless one can say
that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that
an artist is also a citizen and a human being[xxxiii].
The
contradiction here is obvious. In the first extract, art and social value are
indifferent to one another, and in the second social value is the measure of
art. The first passage is strongly reminiscent of Nineteen-Eighty Four’s ideological
schizophrenia, doublethink. In that novel, sustaining two contradictory
thoughts at one time is presented as a kind of dehumanising madness, precisely
because there is no possibility in its totalitarian world of discerning which of
them is true. In ‘Benefit of Clergy…’, Orwell is unable to sustain two
co-existing but equally ‘true’ ideas, (or, two ideas existing equally beyond
the reach of truth), and therefore must validate the thoughts according to a
third criterion (“this is a good book or a good picture…”) and the doublethink
equilibrium departs.
Orwell
is unable to sustain the doublethink because he does not believe in it.
The doublethink antinomy poses an ‘abyss’ or groundlessness of
calculation which is inimical to his conviction that truth, moral obligation and
commitment exist within decidability. The ‘decision’ for or against Dali
must be made, and having arrived at the unsustainable limit of reason,
Orwell’s choice becomes instinctive. Orwell ‘irrationally’, instinctively,
prefers morality over art, as for him it is the ‘truth’ of the matter. It is
an instinctive preference that purports to be the rational conclusion of the
thinking process itself, though this process actually has been suspended by the
way Orwell conceives of humanity and of art, as existing in autonomous and
incommensurate spheres for rationality.
Thus
decision is unrelated to any rational definition of truth; it is instead the
result of an irrational attachment which overrides the logical train of
argumentation. Orwell harboured many such antinomian attachments, irrational
preferences that warped and refracted his logical clarity, of which his
attitudes to machine civilization and empire stand out as examples. He was more
self-conscious however, and painfully aware of his instinctive preferences, in
relation to social class. A meditation from The Road to Wigan Pier
reveals Orwell’s acute understanding of the intractable class problem:
To
get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private
snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to
alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable as
the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of
working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery,
but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life.
And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the extent to which I grasp
what is demanded of me[xxxiv].
It
is a passage of some restraint and humility in comparison with the bruising
style in the examples above. There is acknowledgement that the personality
‘Orwell’ is not the rational centre, or ego of the man; rather the man is
the enactment or embodiment of a prior social economy, an organisation or
structuration of selfhood that is hidden and barely knowable. There is a
quandary or impasse for this narrator, because he must exceed the domain of what
he knows, surpass what he is, to approach the solution; but he must do it
as he is, as this rational being attempting to gain purchase on his
irrational foundations. He faces the problem of altering the irrational through
rational means, but of course the ‘rational’ being is itself an
‘irrational’ preference, a delimitation and accumulation that presents
itself as selfhood.
This
instance is exceptional, rather than being typical of Orwell. Often he harboured
furious prejudices that at times led him to excesses of swingeing and ludicrous
rhetoric. His writings on pacifism are a good example. At various times he
accused its adherents of being power worshippers and “objectively pro-fascist”[xxxv]. In a letter to the Tribune
from December 1944, he comes close to, at least indirectly, recanting these
excesses, claiming “The important thing is to discover which individuals
are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this
more difficult”[xxxvi].
He admits of political opponents that “It is more immediately satisfying to
shout that he is a fool or scoundrel, or both, than to say what he is really
like”, adding in the most Wigan Pier- like note, that this is a
“habit of mind”[xxxvii].
Similar
examples, including Orwell’s blanket treatment of intellectuals, whom he
repeatedly slaughtered in print, and other subjects, could be here adduced. To
put the matter perhaps over simply, in his journalism Orwell attempts the
calculation, the rational, fair, objective analysis of his subjects; but this
attempt is founded upon irrational preferences, decisions for or against that
are outside or beyond rational calculation.
Lacanian
terminology conveniently explains the double-sided nature of Orwell’s
thinking. From a Lacanian perspective, the distinction is between the imaginary
and the point de caption. Rational arguments are the imaginary
elaboration of points of investment, which are the quilting points or “knots
of subjectivity”[xxxviii]. These knots are the
basis of imaginary ‘protection’ for the subject, they are the basis “to
which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity”[xxxix].
Orwell’s rational arguments are given consistency and unity by the irrational
attachments on which they stand. Without the rational ‘cloaking’ of
imagination, the points de caption are exposed for what they are,
arbitrary and irrational preferences. As their exposure threatens subjective
dissolution, these knotting points are veiled by the subject’s sense of
wholeness, selfhood and rationality: they are imbricated in the imaginary. Irrational
preference makes itself felt in Orwell as the nucleus of conviction that more or
less conscientiously and substantially corroborates the logical process. But
irrationality insinuates itself in that process also as pressures and anxieties.
The imaginary examines and confronts the limits of its own protective
reach; the subject demands of himself ‘what am I?’ ‘What is the
subject?’
Existential
anxiety runs in a continuous thread throughout Orwell’s oeuvre, though it
appears at different times in various guises. The self effacement that haunts
the author of 1946’s ‘Why I Write’ is prefigured in 1935’s Keep the
Aspidistra Flying as a sense of creative absence for its fabulist Gordon
Comstock; he withdraws from the world to “the abyss where poetry is written”[xl].
Similarly in A Clergyman’s Daughter, religious belief and
self-realization are for Dorothy Hare tied up with “a deadly emptiness that
she had discovered at the heart of things”[xli].
However, Orwell was most forcibly assailed by anxiety when he reflected that
something in human nature had nourished totalitarianism. In his review of Russia
under Soviet Rule from 1939, Orwell writes
…we
cannot be at all certain that ‘human nature’ is constant. It may be just as
possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a
breed of hornless cows [xlii].
This
passage contains in proposition what was to become a chilling conviction for
Orwell in later life: that human nature
is an abyss and mankind is not naturally good; that there are no guarantees for
decision, so what it is necessary to do may not be the right thing, and the
right thing to do may never be done. There are instances in which Orwell merely
sounds uncomfortable with this realization, and times when he is closer to
outright despair, as in an example taken from a 1946 letter to Tribune:
When
one considers how things have gone since 1930, or thereabouts, it is not easy to
believe in the survival of civilisation…exactly at the moment when there is,
or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have
to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one
another. Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that
no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be
impossible and half the world is run by secret police forces. Exactly at the
moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe
becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never
before. The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in
earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about[xliii].
It
is a hellish picture of what humanity is capable. Paranoid and rapacious power
devours the weak, irrational and reactionary decision- making subsumes human
action and motive. Human nature has been cast adrift, and supplanted by realpolitik
in its most brutal and unconcealed form. Orwell’s extreme pessimism is not
surprising when we consider the context. He was writing in the wake of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, in the shadow of European totalitarianism and its intercontinental
successor, the Cold War. He was also, as Bowker points out, experiencing bouts
of illness that must soon have made themselves felt as intimations of his own
death[xliv].
That Orwell was also labouring with Nineteen Eighty-Four at this time can
be seen from the outline of its themes in the Tribune letter. That novel
is acutely concerned with the undermining of human dignity and resilience, and
wonders how far our natures can be stretched before breaking. Whilst torturing
Winston Smith, Party member O’Brien tells him
You
are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged
by what we do and will turn against us…Men are infinitely malleable…They are
helpless, like the animals[xlv].
We
find in this scene the crystallization of Orwell’s pessimism, and an answer
for the question of subjectivity posed above (‘what is the subject?’).
According to this viewpoint, there is no subject; there are only
irrational attachments, the most powerful of which is the desire for power.
Therefore the decision to be a rebel, which is made by Winston Smith, or to be a
writer or to be a religious believer for that matter, is a decision ‘from
nowhere’, from the seat of attachment on an underlying emptiness. Such
decisions cannot look for an external guarantee, such as might be represented by
‘truth’, or ‘art’, or ‘God’. They must take their chances,
‘bumping up against reality’ as Orwell himself might put it.
This
view of the human condition rubs against the grain of Orwell’s middle-period
writing, in which he was at great pains to set human existence on solid
ontological foundations. For example in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941)
Englishness, or less frequently Britishness, is conceived as a communion of
spirit, something vital and eternal which ties the nation together. Whilst the
thrust of the piece is towards social revolution, Orwell employs English
vitalism to urge and exhort patriotism in the face of the European threat:
“…it is your civilization, it is you”[xlvi].
Other works from that period make a similar case for continuity and community.
In ‘Inside the Whale’, for example, he talks about the “human heritage”[xlvii].
This, he contends, is what writers run the risk of abandoning if their writing
becomes politically motivated, responsible, as opposed to subjectively
free.
In
‘Inside the Whale’ the relationship of literature with objective truth is
subsumed by the importance of a writer’s individual integrity, “…being
able to care, of really believing in your beliefs, whether they
are true or false”[xlviii].
Raymond Williams notes of ‘Inside the Whale’ that “This is his
prescription for a writer, under the dangers of his time, but in a more general
way it marks his real discouragement”. Orwell was, Williams argues, so
“disillusioned…he had to make what settlements he could find”
[xlix].
I think Williams has half of it here. At the onset of war it surely was
Orwell’s feeling that writing must be kept subjectively free at the
cost of political quietism. But Orwell did not apply to life in general what he
reserved for literature, arguing that political passivity in 1940 is “the
final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility”[l].
Political battles must be fought, but there is no place for writing in them, nor
the subjective truths and emotional sincerities writing contains. The world of
public and political events, the looming tumults of the “world process”[li],
are indifferent to this human heritage. To preserve its inheritance therefore,
humanity must remain aloof from the process, ‘irresponsibly’ refusing to
make itself ‘objectively’ worthy.
Subjective
freedom is given a specific inflection in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. A
native trait that Orwell makes much of is
the
privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower lovers, but also a
nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers,
darts players, crossword-puzzle fans[lii].
English
privateness is significant, because it is typical of an indigenous communality.
It is therefore inimical to ‘official’ prescriptions for native English
culture:
All
the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when they
are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden,
the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’[liii].
In
this work Orwell roots a popular and representative patriotism in ordinary
English life as opposed to nation-state politics. The same motive is apparent in
his treatment of state administration, against which he detects a popular
reaction in favour of individual liberty:
Like
all other modern peoples, the English are in the process of being numbered,
labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in
the other direction[liv].
If
‘Inside the Whale’ opposes a ‘private’ subjectivity to a ‘public’
one, here the same subjectivities are at stake in an extended form. ‘The Lion
and the Unicorn’ opposes the ‘private and unofficially public’, to the
‘officially public’ or ‘political’. These two versions of subjectivity
are inimical because of the threat posed by the political sphere to the private
domain. The latter can exist only when not known by the former, by being
unintelligible to it, being of a different kind. If it is invisible to
administration, private life can remain as it is. However, officialdom threatens
to administer the private and unofficial and thereby to change it, by making it
a public object (“numbered, labelled, conscripted, co-ordinated”). In ‘The
Lion and the Unicorn’, therefore, Orwell redeems subjectivity by
driving it underground. Sincere, authentic humanity must stay beyond the reach
of the co-optive knowledges with which nation states administer and define
themselves.
This
paper has argued that Orwell’s ‘decision for politics’ was also a decision
for aesthetics. Developing this claim, the paper has argued that Orwell’s
political work purports objectivity, but actually is shaped by his aesthetic and
instinctive preferences. One of Orwell’s critical political goals, the defense
of truth, brought him premonitions of a void or abyss in rationality, which
asserted itself in Orwell’s irrational attachments and his anxiety about human
nature. Orwell’s premonitions can now be reformulated in a positive and in a
negative light, each suggesting a different conception of ‘void’, and a
differently inflected understanding of irrationality.
The
first version finds its expression in the discussion above, broadly
speaking, from ‘The Prevention of Literature’, to Nineteen
Eighty-Four. In this negative instance, political subjectivity is
identical with subjectivity per se, which is made up of irrational
preferences. ‘Irrational’ here refers to a preference that it is
impossible to understand; in psychoanalysis it might be explained in terms
of libidinal investment, which is made subjective at its quilting or fixing
point. Exposure of this
irrational foundation threatens to unravel the fabric by which the subject
is given consistency, and therefore to dissolve the subject entirely,
leaving him confronted at the ‘abyss’ of selfhood by the realization
that selfhood is nothing. The subject has no choice but to maintain his
subjectivity by whatever means are available to him, even if, like Orwell,
they entrench him in an “attitude to life” from which he wants to be
freed.
Political
subjectivity can also be viewed in a second, more positive way. Because
political preference is no more than irrational attachment, it does not have
any rational or ideological claim upon truth. Therefore, ‘outside’ or
‘beyond’ rationality, the subject can make another kind of political
intervention which aims at truth which is non-rational. In this instance
irrationality is defined not as a subjective defence against nothingness,
but in the sense of privacy and unofficialness, which are not placed in the
order of official knowledge. In this case there is not an ontological
absence or abyss, as in the negative example above; there is only a void in
calculation and decision – an unknowability. Despite seeming politically
quiescent therefore, the stances upon subjectivity taken in ‘The Lion and
the Unicorn’ and ‘Inside the Whale’ point towards politics. The
political subject imitates the ‘private’ subject because he remains
impervious, inscrutable to the knowledges and calculations that are
symptomatic of ‘official’ life.
Orwell
made two grand-scale renunciations of ‘official’ life. The first of these
was when he revolted against his background and upbringing, beginning with his
resignation from the Burman Imperial police. He made his decision to resign
after much soul searching and furtive, seditious discussion with like-minded
Imperial functionaries. In one famous passage he talks about spending a night on
a Burmese train with an English serviceman. After cagily sussing each others’
orthodoxy they went on to damn the British Empire, “from the inside,
intelligently and intimately”[lv].
In an image underlining the dangerous pleasure of their forbidden discussion,
Orwell memorably describes them parting in the morning, “…as guilty as any
adulterous couple”[lvi].
Orwell’s
time in Burma had a profound effect on him. It made him re-think absolutely his
attitude to Empire and to authority in general:
I
felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of
man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among
the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants[lvii].
This
repudiation of what he had been, culminated in the tramping exploits that are
recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell was compelled by a
new but as yet unclear feeling that the oppressed lay much closer to home than
Burma:
I
knew nothing of working class conditions…Therefore my mind turned immediately
towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals,
prostitutes…What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of
getting out of the respectable altogether…I should have touched bottom, and
– this is what I felt: I was aware then that it was irrational – part of my
guilt would drop from me[lviii].
Orwell’s
choice of words (“getting out”, “touch bottom”) suggests he wanted to
abjure his ‘respectable’ subjectivity, as it stood, altogether, attempting
instead to explore some ‘ground zero’, some absolute nowhere of
subjectivity, in a radical gesture of renunciation. With Derrida, we might say
Orwell made an ethical decision, (‘decision’ being that which cannot be
known,) because it was made outside of the subjective knowledge that Orwell’s
background had given him. (Derrida’s ethical decision, like Orwell’s, has an
“irreducibly ‘tragic’ and ‘guilty’” quality, existing as it does,
“in the face of impossibly overwhelming obligations”[lix]). Because Orwell’s
decision did not proceed from the known, it cannot be absorbed by
socio-political knowledge. It is what can be called an irrational intervention,
a genuine political act. An act, in fact, of pure will.
Orwell
ultimately came to see this early period as a failure. As was explained above,
he saw in himself deep-rooted attachments to bourgeois habits, arguing that
revolutionary sentiment in the bourgeois “draws part of its strength from a
secret conviction that nothing can be changed”[lx].
In The Road to Wigan Pier he claims that movement towards socialism, to
which Orwell was becoming strongly inclined, is obstructed by the same
prejudices on the proletarian side as on the bourgeois, resulting in working
class people wanting to climb the social ladder rather than dismantle it.
Amongst other obstacles to the establishment of socialism in England, he blames
the stupidity of its ideologues, and the bleakness of the mechanized future they
prophesy. Putting it perhaps too simply, despite what was being said about the
abolition of class distinction in 1936, the state-of-affairs in which the
abolitionist feeling existed, effectively opposed the blossoming of the feeling
into successful action.
Orwell
refined and clarified his own stance on socialism after another great
renunciation in early 1937. He travelled to Spain in December 1936 with the
intention of covering the Civil War for the British press; upon arrival,
however, he was struck by the social revolution underway in Barcelona, the
absence of privilege, the social equality, the idealism. Orwell decided
immediately to sign up with the workers’ militia, “because in that time and
in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”[lxi].
Why was it the only conceivable thing to do? Disillusioned by the insincerity
and ineffectiveness of English radicalism, Orwell found powerful intent in
revolutionary Spain. It was a society, at least at that early stage, attempting
genuinely to make itself classless; when Orwell arrived it seemed, in contrast
with England, to be outstripping its own state-of-affairs, to be re-founding
itself in different conditions with new principles. Of course, it did not last,
as the Soviet-sponsored communists systematically discredited and then outlawed
the radical workers as the war progressed. But there is no doubt that the early
months had a profound effect on Orwell that bordered on the mystical:
one
realised that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One
had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy and
cynicism…One had breathed the air of equality[lxii].
We
have a different angle on the ethical decision here (a choice that is ethical
because it cannot emerge from within knowledge or calculation). Orwell decided
to defend a social state-of-affairs that was beyond knowledge, which could not
be arrived at through ‘logical’ extrapolation of current egalitarian ideas.
Instead it was “strange and valuable contact”, it was “breathed” in with
the air. As Orwell explains in Wigan Pier, social fairness is undermined
by irrational reactions against it, made even by those who think they are
defending it, on both the bourgeois and proletarian sides. Irrational attachment
is therefore not an accident of ‘social unfairness’, but is a condition of
social unfairness, because this attachment maintains the structure of privileges
as it is. However the Spanish Revolution was an irrational event declaring
itself both outside of questions of ‘fairness’ and reactions to them. Its
purpose was to emerge from outside these questions in order (to paraphrase Alain
Badiou) to bespeak another, genuinely universal fairness. The Spanish Revolution
superseded the structure of social knowledges and irrational preferences which,
even under the guise of radicalism, maintain the status quo. The Revolution’s
provenance was therefore genuinely political.
The
Spanish Revolution is also an example of what Badiou has made systematic in the
theory of the event, which will need a little contextualisation. The
theory of the event exists in a
trajectory of writing that as yet is not complete. The principal issues were set
out first in Badiou’s 1988 book, Being and Event. They have been
refined through the intervening years and we await their definitive re-statement
in the forthcoming Logics of Worlds.
Badiou’s
work is in part a reaction to what is contemporarily called the atomization of
the social fabric, with its concomitant scepticism and relativization of values,
our fixation on language as the ‘real’ location of political struggle, and
our acceptance of difference and infinite alterity as ends-in-themselves. For
Badiou, our realization that things are by their very nature different, is a
trifling achievement. Infinite alterity is “quite simply what there is”[lxiii].
It is not uncommon, at present, to find that insisting upon labyrinthine
differentiations between things passes for an ethical stance, often accompanied
by the admonition to ‘respect differences’. Such a stance, for Badiou, is
only descriptive, having done no more than distinguish the nature of the social
milieu in which our ethical actions must make themselves accountable.
As
a result of our obsession with differences, the “axiom of our contemporary
conviction”[lxiv], is that there are only
bodies and languages. In the ethical space of infinite differences nothing can
be known, because there is no translation; no language is up to the job of
describing reality, which is always different from meaning and from itself.
Therefore communication becomes an end in itself and our sole accomplishment,
while ethics withdraws into the material certainties of the body. Badiou opposes
to this ethics of differences, a logic of truths. Truths
‘come to be’ in particular situations, and are “indifferent to
differences”[lxv].
Truths address everyone in their
situation as they are “the same for all”[lxvi].
Using this logic Badiou is attempting to orchestrate a seismic movement in
ethics, away from unprofitable assertion of our infinite differences, and
towards acceptance of our sameness.
Truths
are for Badiou the result of events.
An event is “in a situation but not of it”[lxvii],
it brings to pass “something other” [lxviii]
than the situation. A situation is a state-of-affairs that is socially
structured by the dominance of some individuals by others, although this
dominance usually appears to be merely the ‘objective’, ‘natural’
existence of the state-of- affairs itself. When an event
occurs, it is unpredictably, originating outside the structuration that makes
the situation ‘objective’. The event
occurs at society’s blind spot, in the void left behind by its
‘structure-in-dominance’. The event
exposes the fault-lines of the structure itself, the bias and privilege sewn up
in it, and addresses all the situation’s subjects in the same way.
Probably
the most contentious aspect of the theory is the ambivalent relation of the
individual to the event. The
individual is both the ‘carrier’ of the event
and is carried by it. Whilst being a condition of an event’s occurrence, the individual has no hold on it in subjective
terms. Its ‘happening’ cannot be proved, only “affirmed and proclaimed”[lxix].
We are again within the arc of Orwell’s experiences in Spain here, the logic
of the event coinciding with that of the workers’ rebellion. The
Rebellion manifested the social blind spot that in proclaiming itself subverted
the ‘normal’ functioning of workers in the social structure as a whole. For
Orwell this event represented what is incalculable in subjectivity, that
which cannot be explained, but must be proclaimed:
This
period…is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of
my life that already it has taken on the magic quality which, as a rule, belongs
only to memories that are years old. It was beastly while it was happening, but
it is a good patch for my mind to browse upon. I wish I could convey to you the
atmosphere of that time[lxx].
The
rebellion is like “magic”, originating outside or beyond the rationality of
the subject. It is an event, a truly political action.
Orwell’s
experience further reflects Badiou’s evental logic in that the event
is followed up with fidelity. For Badiou, fidelity is “a
sustained investigation of the truth process, under the imperative of the event
itself”[lxxi].
In the passage just above we see exactly that, an irresistible attraction having
matured into sustained commitment. The Spanish Civil War was the turning
point for Orwell; in its wake came a period of much more astute and mature
political thinking, which made Orwell align himself irrevocably with the cause
of socialism.
In
Badiou’s terms, Orwell’s ‘public’ fidelity is to political
subjectivity. Viewed from the opposite direction, he is given consistency, given
body, induced by being faithful to Spain, by remaining true to it. Continuing
with the terms employed thus far, together fidelity and inducement reveal
an authentic form of political action, which pledges faithfulness to an
irrational, unknowable intervention. Orwell’s fidelity to the Spanish event
makes him politically authentic, because that event made a
revolutionary intervention in Spanish politics which is beyond
calculation. The event also induces his faith, giving Orwell subjective
substance which demands neither rationality, nor its supporting structure of
irrational preferences or point of consistency, points de caption. These
points of rigid insistence are actually obstacles to political change, as Orwell
found with the Wigan Pier prejudices. By premising subjectivity upon
the void, as opposed to against the void, the subject can be understood in terms
of fidelity to something real that exceeds the known -- as emergence. In
other words, the political subject is not to be located here, now, as this or
that; these preferences are irrational and personal, they stultify and calcify
the social whole. Instead, in a faithful relation with something that irrupts in
reality, addressing us all from a situation exposing the structures that have
denied it, he or she is sustained, maintained over time by remaining true.
The
problem of faithfulness suffuses Orwell’s work, indirectly or directly. It
assails all his protagonists as inner crises of various kinds, as artistic
anxiety, as religious scepticism, as nostalgic quietism. Faithfulness is at the
heart of his political wrangles, his ethical declarations, his artistic
judgments. Some of his worst post ‘36 excesses should perhaps be viewed,
generously, as subjective attempts to hold true to revolutionary Spain;
conversely, some of Orwell’s best analysis of social conditions during the
Second World War, draw openly and deftly on his Civil War experiences and their
intellectual aftermath. In ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, which was
published at the tail-end of 1942, Orwell returns to the inexpressibly enigmatic
and valuable nature of the “emotionally widening experience”[lxxii]
he underwent in Spain, of which he says “I ask you to believe that it is
moving to me”[lxxiii].
Once again the fusion of aesthetic and political is evident in the poem Orwell
appended to the essay, of which two verses provide this paper’s heading
epigraph. Politically, the poem appreciates the dignity of humanity’s desire
for emancipation (“the thing I saw in your face”), having witnessed the
distortion propaganda (“flyblown words”) can inflict upon this desire. As an
artistic work, the poem is as if an act of homage to a spiritual experience
(“in his ears were holy”), sounding the depths of Orwell’s commitment in a
way which only poetry makes possible.
Orwell
uses ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’ to underline the strategic
significance of Spain for the Fascist advance on Europe, and to attack France
and Britain for effectively sanctioning the defeat of the Republic through
non-intervention. Again he situates truly political subjectivity outside of the
knowable. The working classes, he argues, remain the best long-term hope for
Fascism’s defeat because, unlike the fundamentally reactionary and bourgeois
democratic hierarchies in France and Britain, their motivation is incalculable,
unofficial:
sooner
or later they must take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their
own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled
[lxxiv].
This
conceit is used by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four and elsewhere.
Totalitarian power ultimately is inscribed materially, upon the body. The body
figures therefore as a place of political dominion but also as a well-spring of
political resistance and courage. The idea is developed in typical Orwellian
terms as a bodily fundamentalism, a source and vitality that exceeds knowledge
and galvanizes real political decision:
The
common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco
was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were
fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them[lxxv].
Once
again Orwell writes with impassioned allegiance to his cause, insisting that
power and purpose were given to those who like him remained faithful. The
working class in Spain stayed true because of their evental sense that
something was coming. In ‘Looking Back...’ Orwell critically contrasts the
Spanish working class’ steadfastness with the “emotional superstructures”[lxxvi]
that warped journalistic coverage of Spain and are distorting the response of
the intelligentsia to the European war. Emotions are now being “turned on and
off like a tap”, he argues; it is a consequence of “newspaper and radio
hypnosis”[lxxvii].
Clearly
Nineteen Eighty-Four represents an imaginative extrapolation of
Orwell’s thought and feeling in 1942. Winston Smith is faithful to the
departed ‘event’ of pre-war democracy, fidelity which emboldens him to
resist the Party’s blend of emotional hypnosis and terror. Remaining faithful
to Spain, the stance Orwell would be able to take against the European war was
made clear to him. The Second World War, he wrote in 1942, repeated and
magnified the worst aspects of the Spanish conflict, of which one was loss of
“the idea that history could be truthfully written”[lxxviii].
Totalitarianism banishes objective truths, “There is, for instance, no such
thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science, ‘Jewish science’,
etc.”[lxxix].
The Nazi regime presents its anti-Semitism as simply a ‘truth’ about the
destinies of races. This truth is sutured into a state-of-affairs with other
Nazi ‘truths’, replacing reality with ‘the reality of the state’. In the
world of Nineteen Eighty-Four this totalitarian fantasy becomes almost
unassailable, as Orwell had feared it would become in Spain. Yet in the novel,
totalitarianism provokes the same reaction in Winston as revolutionary Spain had
done in his author, by making him faithful to an event.
[i]
Orwell, George, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) Essays,
Journalism and Letters 1940-43 (Nonpareil, Canada, 2000) p.266-7
[ii]
Orwell, George, ‘Why I Write’ (1946) Essays, Journalism and
Letters 1920-40 (Nonpareil, Canada, 2000) p.4
[iii]
ibid.p.4
[iv]
ibid.p.6
[v]
Bowker,Gordon, George
Orwell (Timewarner, London, 2003) p.334
[vi]
ibid.p.7
[vii]
Quoted in Bowker, 2003, p.334
[viii]
Orwell, 2000 (1946), p.7
[ix]
Orwell, 2000 (1946),p.3-4
[x]
Woodcock, George, The
Crystal Spirit (Cape, London, 1967) p.230
[xi]
ibid. p.230
[xii]
Orwell, 2000 (1946), p.6
[xiii]
ibid. p.6
[xiv]
ibid. p.7
[xv]
ibid.
p.7
[xvi]
ibid. p.6
[xvii]
Orwell, 1968 (1920-40), p.148
[xviii]
Crick, Bernard, George Orwell A Life (Secker and Warburg,
London, 1980) p.152
[xix]
ibid. p.7
[xx]
Bowker, 2003, p.338
[xxi]
Orwell, George, Essays,
Journalism and Letters 1945-50 (Nonpareil, Canada, 2000) p.205
[xxii]
Orwell,
2000 (1946) p.5
[xxiii]
Orwell, George, Homage to
Catalonia (1938) (Penguin, England, 1989) p.2
[xxiv]
Williams, Raymond, Orwell (Fontana,
Glasgow, 1971)
[xxv]
Orwell, 1989 (1938), p.13
[xxvi]
ibid. p.27
[xxvii]
ibid. p.73
[xxviii]
ibid. p.17
[xxix]
Lacan, Jaques, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Karnac, Great Britain, 1973)
p.142
[xxx]
Orwell, George, ‘The
Prevention of Literature’ (1946) in Orwell, 2000 (1945-50), p.61
[xxxi]
Orwell, George, ‘Writers and
Leviathan’ (1948) in Orwell, 2000 (1945-50), p.408
[xxxii]
Orwell, George, ‘Benefit of
Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’ (1944) in Orwell, Essays,
Journalism and Letters 1943-45 (Nonpareil, Canada, 2000) p.159
[xxxiii]
ibid. p.161
[xxxiv]
Orwell, George, The Road to
Wigan Pier (1937) (Penguin, England, 1989) p.150
[xxxv]
Orwell, 2000 (1940-43), p.180
[xxxvi]
Orwell, 2000 (1943-45), p.289
[xxxvii]
ibid. p.289
[xxxviii]
Zizek, Slavoj, The Sublime
Object of Ideology (Verso, England, 1989) p.95
[xxxix]
ibid. p.95-6
[xl]
Orwell, George, Keep the
Aspidistra Flying (1936) (Penguin, England, 1989) p.34
[xli]
Orwell, George, A
Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) (Penguin, England, 1989) p.292
[xlii]
Orwell, 2000 (1920-40), p.380
[xliii]
Orwell, 2000 (1945-50), p.249
[xliv]
Bowker, 2003, p.380
[xlv]
Orwell, George, Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) (Penguin, London, 1989) p.282
[xlvi]
Orwell, George, ‘The Lion
and the Unicorn’ (1941) in Orwell, 2000, (1940-43) p.57
[xlvii]
Orwell, George, ‘Inside the
Whale’ (1940) in Orwell, 2000, (1920-40) p.525
[xlviii]
ibid. p.523
[xlix]
Williams, 1971, p.65
[l]
Orwell, 2000 (1920-40), p.521
[li]
ibid. p.526
[lii]
Orwell, 2000 (1940-43), p.59
[liii]
ibid. p.59
[liv]
ibid. p.59
[lv]
Orwell, 1989 (1937), p.135
[lvi]
ibid. p.135
[lvii]
ibid. p.138
[lviii]
ibid. p.139-40
[lix]
Quoted in Badiou, Alain, Ethics
(1993) (Verso, London, 2001) Introduction, p.xxv, xxvi
[lx]
Orwell, 1989 (1937), p.146
[lxi]
Orwell, 1989 (1938), p.2
[lxii]
ibid.
p.83
[lxiii]
Badiou, 2001, p.25
[lxiv]
Badiou, Alain, ‘Democratic
materialism and the materialist dialectic’ in Radical Philosophy
issue 130, p.20
[lxv]
Badiou, 2001, p.27
[lxvi]
ibid. p.27
[lxvii]
ibid. introduction,
p.x
[lxviii]
ibid. p.67
[lxix]
ibid. introduction
p.xi
[lxx]
Orwell, 1989 (1938), p.84
[lxxi]
Badiou, 2001, p.67
[lxxii]
Orwell, 2000 (1940-43), p.256
[lxxiii]
ibid. p.256
[lxxiv]
ibid. p.261
[lxxv]
ibid. p.261
[lxxvi]
ibid. p.257
[lxxvii]
ibid. p.251
[lxxviii]
ibid.
p.258
[lxxix]
ibid. p.258-9