‘Thwarted by the general drift of society’: celebrating George Orwell

Yesterday afternoon, Gideon Haigh and Alan Attwood got together with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow to discuss the life and work of George Orwell, 60 years after his passing. Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favourite novels, but I am not so familiar with Orwell’s nonfiction – but I tell you what, Haigh and Attwood’s discussion, and the segments they read, made me want to get to know Orwell intimately. They mentioned such things as the simple and almost timeless language; Attwood mentioned Orwell’s ‘extraordinary grasp of detail’ but also his ‘powerful sense of humanity’; and Haigh noted Orwell’s sincerity and intellectual honesty – as opposed to a lot of today’s ‘phoniness’ and opinion for the sake of having an opinion. Orwell, even in his personal nonfiction, remains disembodied and humble. His consistent enemy was ‘orthodoxy’ and he was aware of contradictions, as in the class systems, but as a writer, ‘Orwell never shouts’, the speakers agreed.

I’ll share with you this section that Haigh read from an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (and I highly encourage you to read it in full) which demonstates the enduring relevance of Orwell’s prose and themes:

‘In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic–political, moral, religious, or aesthetic–was one who refused to outrage his own conscience.’

Attwood mentioned that today, Orwell might in fact be a blogger. What do you think?

You can find more of Orwell’s works collected online, here.

Orwell That Ends Well

The crowd behind me was getting angrier by the moment. I turned around to behold a sea of silver haired women, all jostling for Jolley. Their equally grey husbands had already reverted to the vacant stares of a lifetime of being dragged along to quick shoe shopping sprees. The red beret was refusing to let me in without a ticket. I told her I didn’t need one, because I had a lanyard that should allow me entrance into any event. She explained that I wasn’t wearing a lanyard and had in fact written my name on a beer coaster and tied it around my neck with string. She had a point. I wanted to explain that I had lost my pass after a rather long incident between a train door and myself. I decided not too. Especially after the Connex guard called me a tit when cutting me free.

I took a different tact and told the volunteer that I was a festival blogger and I was required to be at as many of the discussions as possible. She asked me to show her the blog as proof. I did some quick thinking, turned away from her, and fumbled in my bag. I then produced a napkin with the word blog on it and waved it under her face. Her expression was midway between angry and bored. The heaving crowd of older women behind me also looked quite angrored.

So I found myself sitting in on a discussion titled Visions of the City. This was chaired by three people who looked very much like they had written books. My guess was correct, they had. The Deputy Lord Mayor of Melbourne had also been invited to read a small introduction to set the tone for the discussion. If that tone was confusion, she succeeded admirably. I too enjoyed reading A Brave New World, except I had no idea it was written by Albus Hudgley. Nor was I familiar with Joel Orzell’s book 19-um-4.

Still, when she finished her piece, the person that clapped seemed very earnest.