As George Packer, the editor of two excellent editions of Orwell’s essays once put it: “In his best work, Orwell’s arguments are mostly with himself.”
Those readers who pick up his fiction seeking to navigate today’s fraudulent, profoundly cynical rhetoric could well miss out on the best, most concise, most penetrating writings of a man whose constant intent was to interrogate his own beliefs, while holding those in power accountable for theirs. Regardless of how prescient Orwell’s novels might seem, his powerful, tightly argued essays remain far more relevant in our current batshit cuckoo political climate. (Recent events suggest a tasseled loafer stamping on a human face forever might be a more likely scenario.) If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. The fact that Orwell was clear-eyed enough, meanwhile, to perceive the brute peril manifest in both Stalinism and in the fascism of a Mussolini or a Hitler provides commentators across the political divide with handy phrases to wield against their ideological foes:Īll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. It is a chronicle of a crushing, obliterating defeat.) (He also envisioned what a mass-media-fueled totalitarian victory might look like - a critical aspect of the book’s plot that many people who haven’t read 1984 since high school have probably forgotten. Orwell, the pen name of the Indian-born Eric Arthur Blair, speaks to us in this moment not only because he understood that words have the power both to shackle and to liberate, but also because 1984 inscribed on the literary imagination a vision of what a mass-media-fueled totalitarianism might look like. That both novels are suddenly on the radar of people who probably haven’t given Orwell a second thought in years is hardly surprising at a time when war refugees are painted as national security threats, white nationalists hold positions of power in the White House and an American president is openly involved in an abusive relationship with the English language. Orwell’s earlier (and arguably greater) allegory, Animal Farm, is also getting its due. His seven-decade-old dystopian classic, 1984, recently made waves by topping a bunch of bestseller lists.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, George Orwell is everywhere these days. Forget ‘1984’ - Today, Orwell’s Essays Matter More You’ll get more from “Why I Write” than from ‘Animal Farm.’ Image: Luca Cerabona
0 kommentar(er)
