George Orwell’s message

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPkQ57cXrPA&t=3s

We have selected this article because Orwell has glimpsed where the materialistic dehumanization in which we are immersed is leading us

(El mundo del libro, El oficio de escribir, General) by Manu de Ordoñana, Ana Merino and Ane Mayoz, on 27-03-2023, Madrid

Modest, contradictory, intelligent and observant, he never bared his feelings except in poems or letters. That was George Orwell (1903-1950). Articles, essays, reviews… helped him to “live” from his writing, but the doubt of whether to continue writing because it did not “compensate” him either economically or in terms of reputation, pursued him unceasingly. This has been brought to our attention by Christopher Hitchens in Why Orwell Matters (2002) and Michael Shelden in Orwell, Authorized Biography (1993).

At school he had been led to believe that he was one of the weaklings and that whatever he did he would never be a winner. Part of him wanted to accept the idea that he was doomed to be an underachiever and that success was not worth it, but another part of him struggled to prove to the world that he could succeed. He always insisted that, if he found it, it would be success that would have to accept his terms and not the other way around. And so it was in the end.

At all costs, he wanted to live by his own rules, disdaining traditional ideas of comfort and progress; so he earned his living his own way. He taught himself and became a great humanist. He valued both freedom and equality, although he believed that they were not natural allies.

Never and always

He was a man whose passion, fidelity and generosity were matched only by his detachment and reserved character. In him, categorical adverbs-never, never, ever, always…-had a literal and true meaning.

He never had sufficient confidence in his ability. He never wanted people to think that he had diluted his opinions in the hope of being read. His life as a writer was a constant struggle for the principles he held and for the right to bear witness to them. He never failed to apologize for his shortcomings as a writer of fiction. He always refused to judge literature in political terms and his sense of irony never left him.

“Every book is a failure,” but as soon as he finished one failure, he was impatient to start the next; always dissatisfied, always doubting his ability, but always eager to do the job better and faster than the previous time.

He was always amazed at how easily reality could be manipulated; he concluded that both the press and the rulers did it and it was not the exclusive patrimony of fascist regimes. He talked a lot about lies and the use that power makes of them.

Spain

“Spain was the country that since my childhood I had longed to visit the most.” He wanted to go to Spain to witness the struggle and take part in it. Although he lacked neither courage nor conviction, he doubted whether he had the physical vigor or the skill to be a good soldier. Unforgettable to him was his first month at the front, where the great enemy was the “unspeakable cold”.

He felt that fascism meant war and that one had to join the battle with the greatest possible speed and determination. He was there to fight fascism and did so with courage, until a bullet hit him in the neck, a millimeter away from the carotid artery; an exceptional medical case: he even recovered his voice.

It was on the Spanish front that he became acquainted with communism. But it was in England, in 1938, where he wrote Homage to Catalonia (1952): an intensely personal book with which he denounced the political purges and the manipulation of information within the Republican side, as well as the deliberate lies that multiplied in the European press. The fascination of the story lies in its struggle to make sense of a senseless war.

In 1998, the city of Barcelona wanted to repay him for all he did for that community by naming a square after him. It is clear that, had he not fought in Spain, he would hardly have become the universal reference he is today and he might never have written his novel 1984.

Writings

His mother was the one who first noticed his ability for language and, being his right eye, did not hesitate to encourage him. In his essay, Why I Write (1946), he confesses that from an early age he knew he wanted to be a writer. “Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four I tried to give up the idea, but I did so with the awareness that I was violating my true nature and that sooner or later I would have to start writing books (…) My starting point is always a feeling of injustice. When I start writing a book, I don’t say to myself, I’m going to create a work of art. I write because there is some lie I want to denounce, some fact I want to draw attention to, and my initial concern is to be heard.”

“Almost everything I write I have to redo over and over again, I wish I was one of those who can sit down and write a novel in four days.” “Writing a book is a horrible thing, exhausting struggle, like a long fight against some painful disease. One would never get into such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one cannot resist or comprehend.” He described several of his works as “money-making nonsense”.

It was when he began to write that the boy christened Eric Blair began to use the pseudonym by which we all know him; he needed that parapet so as not to embarrass his family.

In 1927 he abandoned his position as an officer in the Imperial Indian Police for literature. His father had been one too, and only before he died did he see that he was recognized and changed his mind about his son’s career. His years in Burma led him to hate imperialism; he earned very well, but he could not stand it any longer: “Unfortunately I had not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human face.”

Having rejected “all forms of domination of man over man,” he wanted to experience life among the poor. His attempt to introduce himself among them disguised as a tramp worked to perfection and he was delighted to discover that he was treated no differently from others. Some of these experiences led to the pages of Sin blanca en París y en Londres (1933), his first publication; the version we have used belongs to Carlos Villar Flor’s edition and is entitled: Vagabond in Paris and London (2010).

His books shuffle social issues, but the focus of his attention during the first half of the thirties was literature, not politics, nor world events. However, he would not be who he is without his abundant work in print. While in his novels ideas appear condensed in the form of satire or allegory, in his journalistic work he shows a more explicit and complex development.

“Every line of every serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and in favor of democratic socialism.”

Two milestones

They are two of the most momentous books of all time:

Animal Farm (1946) was the first novel in which, fully aware of what he was doing, he attempted to merge political and literary purpose and with which he began to make money. The secret of the book’s lasting success lay in its simplicity, brevity and humor.

He never dreamed he would have such an impact and was not prepared for the sudden fame that fell upon him. All he had set out to do was to make a vigorous attack, in an imaginative style, on the myths on which Soviet communism rested. The enemy, rather than Stalin, was the power of myths to suppress rational thought and substitute high-flown slogans for dialogue.

As a witty satire of Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it struck a chord in the popular imagination. The central idea had occurred to him on his return from Spain, when the admiration he had felt for the first moments of the Workers’ Revolution in Barcelona held back his rage against Stalin. He used to say that the Spanish war should always be kept in mind as an objective lesson on the folly and senselessness of the politics of power.

He began to wonder how it was possible that a genuinely revolutionary movement like the one in Spain could have fallen under the control of a dictator living thousands of miles away. The fact that Stalin could supply arms to the Republic was important, but the influence went beyond that. Stalin was regarded as a divinity. And Orwell understood that this powerful image had seduced not only Spanish revolutionaries, but also well-meaning socialists around the world.

So Orwell produced a brilliant satire of how communism would end up denying itself, and also anticipated its final moment as a capitalist state controlled by a mafia. La conspiración de la Logia P2 en Italia

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) -or 1984, the numerical title has been adopted frequently, more in Spanish than in English, perhaps because it is more striking- was his literary testament; because it was published just before his death and also because it was like a final summary of his conception of the psychological and propagandistic mechanisms of totalitarianism.

He wrote it after becoming, unexpectedly, widower of his first wife, Eileen (with whom he had adopted, because he was sterile, a child). In this state of sadness and loneliness, he chose to isolate himself even more and moved to Jura, an island far removed from the kind of world described in the book. He created a novel unlike any that had gone before; dystopian science fiction; a deeply personal confession: he turned his eyes to the past, to his own past, to find a model of a remote world of the future.

There seems little doubt that Orwell drew on his experiences at the BBC when he wrote it. He always believed that it was possible for socialists to be advocates of freedom, even though socialism had essentially bureaucratic and managerial tendencies. The Daily News reported that this novel was an attack on the British Labour government and Orwell stated: “My recent novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or the British Labour Party, of which I am a supporter, but is intended to show the perversions of which a centralized economy is capable, some of which have already been realized under communism and fascism. The action of the book is set in Britain with the aim of emphasizing that the English-speaking races are not innately better than any other race and that totalitarianism, if not fought, could triumph anywhere.”

Set in a future society, he describes a perfect dictatorship composed of the main features of truth manipulation and political control that he had already identified in the dictatorships and democracies of his time. Contrary to what many people believe, Orwell did not intend his novel to be prophetic, but to start from several premises drawn from reality, to reflect on them and take them to their ultimate consequences.

His concern that an entity like Big Brother could take over power in Europe was quite real. And in Stalinist Russia there were examples of what such a powerful figure could do. The crushing of the individual by the state is the main issue; the human being is no longer human, but a cog in the machine, a mere insect. He made it clear that it is a warning against totalitarian methods in general of any birth and time. Perhaps for this reason what he narrates can happen between a state and its citizens, between a company and its workers, between one race and another, even within a couple.

This book speaks of its time, of our time, and of all times, precisely because its author did not invent an explanation of repression. He expressed, in the form of fiction, what he had seen, lived and analyzed with suspicion. Regardless of ideologies or situations, wherever the strong crush the weak, and even if all the rest of the planet were free, his sentences would come true.

It is his most irresistible work; its immense success, over the years, is well deserved. The title was an arbitrary choice; he only set out to represent a general date in the future, and he did so by flipping the last two digits of the year in which the book ended. The American publisher used the opening title, “The Last Man in Europe.”

Illness and death

He always knew his lungs were weak; in 1947 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. But nothing could persuade him to take better care of himself; he was not afraid of death, though he was afraid of it happening in a hospital bed: “It is a great thing to die in one’s bed, though it is better still to die with one’s boots on. However great the kindness and efficiency in a hospital, death will be a cruel and sad detail, a circumstance too small to be counted but which fails to bring back terribly painful memories brought on by haste, refinement and impersonality.”

Unfortunately he did not see his wish fulfilled; he died alone, in a London hospital room. No one doubts, except him, Orwell’s power as a fiction writer. Perhaps it lies in his astonishing facility for distilling political and philosophical concepts which, expressed in unassuming sentences or metaphors of almost schoolboy simplicity, become axioms that anyone can immediately understand.

His status as a figure in history and literature is due to the relevance of the subjects he dealt with and to which he remained attached. Not for nothing is the term “Orwellian” often used both to describe the existence of a crushing tyranny, of fear and conformity, and to describe a literary work where human resistance to these terrors is irrepressible.

He endures as a historical example because of the way he conducted himself as a writer, through his commitment to language as a companion to truth. He showed us that “opinions” don’t really count, that what matters is not what you think, but how you think, that politics has a relative transcendence, while principles manage to endure as do a few irreducible individuals who remain faithful to them.

So strong was the autobiographical impulse in him that there are reflections on his character in almost everything he wrote. Although he has often been portrayed as a Don Quixote, a crackpot idealist willing to sacrifice everything (health, safety, career, happiness, life) for his dreams, he also identified with Sancho. He despised the government, distrusted intellectuals and academics and had faith in popular wisdom; he was deeply disappointed with politics, the press and the intelligentsia.

He worked like a titan and with that strength his ideas remain today: “Against this changing and phantasmagoric world, a world in which black can be white tomorrow, in which yesterday’s weather conditions can be changed by decree, there are only two guarantees. One is that, however much we deny the truth, the truth still exists, so to speak, without our consent, and consequently we cannot twist it in a way that injures military effectiveness. The other is that as long as there remains a part of the earth unconquered, the liberal tradition will live on.”