| OCR Text |
Show . 2E 1 he Salt Lake Tribune , t. Sunday January " 4.) f 1, 1981 Orwell's only orthodoxy was belief in decency By Mark Feeney Boston Globe Writer It was a bright cold day in April, and the docks were striking thirteen " That sentence, with its intimations of a world at once alarmingly familiar and grotesquely alien, Nineteen begins George Orwells Eighty-Four.- " The novel's plot is boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. What makes "Nineteen so remarkable has Eighty-Four- " nothing to do with plot, of course, and everything to do with setting After all, the reason boy loses girl has nothing to do with jealousy or fickleness its because of intervention by "Thought Police. In "Nineteen Eighty-Fouthree time-teste- d r, control the planet: Oceania (consisting of the Americas and the British Commonwealth), Eurasia (the Soviet Union and all of continental Europe) and Eastasia (China, Japan, and adjacent states). They are permanently at war. And while the fighting is constant, the belligerents are not: One minute Oceania is at war with Eurasia, the next with Eastasia. Yesterdays enemy is today's ally. No one notices any difference. It's simply accepted, like changes in the weather. Four Ministries London, the novels setting, is the capital of Oceania. Four ministries comprise the government: The Ministry of Peace oversees war, the Ministry of Truth lies, the Ministry of Plenty shortages, and the Ministry of Love tortures. The names exemplify the principle of doublethink what we would call "reality con- trol the basic operating princiNineteen ple of the world of The government is, of Eighty-Foucourse, an absolute dictatorship. Society resembles a pyramid. The proles, who form the pyramid's base, make up 85 percent of the population. Above them are members of the Inner Party and Outer Party; Outer members outnumber Inner six to one. Big Brother the father figure reis at the apex. His vered by all image, plastered on every wall and constantly appearing on telescreens, is inescapable. Telescreens, two-wa- y televisions, are the chief tool of the Thought Police (the secret police). Found every- super-state- s ' r. all-wi- where, the devices ceaselessly spout propaganda and spy on the citizenry. All Party members are under constant surveillance; the proles, considered dumb masses, are largely left alone. Party Vernacular Newspeak is the party vernacular. Working via compression and simplification, it aims to reduce English to a point where the language can no longer express any politically unorthodox view. Some examples, besides doublethink or Newspeak itself, are thoughtcrime, Ingsoc (English socialism) and Eighty-Fou- the r, coal- mine owners in The Road to Wigan Pier, British imperialism in Burmese Days and the porcine in Animal Farm. As Winston Smith had rats for his private terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four,Orwell had his own special fear: "The thing that frightens me 1 . . . is (the intelligentsias) inability to see that human society must be based on common decency, whatev- er the political and economic forms may be. What He Wasnt Orwells was not the intellectual Socialism of Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the Fabians; not the technocratic Socialism of HG Wells; not the anachronistic, aesthetic Socialism of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement either. He did feel a certain affinity for the other major influence on English Socialism, the trade unions (in The Road to Wigan Pier" he expresses a kind of awe at the inner strength and decency of the miners and workers lie met while working on the book). Yet as someone born into what you might describe as the class, Orwell never really overcame an inbred reserve toward the working-class- . (Does guilt over these feelings help account for the simplistically heroic role he assigned to the proles in Nineteen goodthink (orthodoxy). It is a society where the prevailing mental condition must be con- trolled insanity, a society where insanity is the highest form of . goodthink The man who came up with the idea of goodthink was himself at the furthest remove from goodthinking. To write in plain, vigorous language, George Orwell asserted in 1940, one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Politically orthodox he was not; indeed, unorthodoxy animated everything he did and is inseparable from his greatness as a writer and man. As for the rest, anyone who has ever read Orwell knows the admirable plainness and vigor of his prose. And anyone who has ever encountered the name "Orwell especially over the past year, as that name has dominated the media with, for example, Time, Harpers, the Village Voice and New Republic all devoting covers to either Orwell or the imminence of the year he made famous, 1984 associates him with fearlessness of thought. Deep Roots That fearlessness of thought had deep roots. Orwell belongs to a peculiarly English tradition that his biographer, the political scientist Bernard Crick, calls, Gods great awkward squad of unorthodox, dissident Englishmen the tradition of Swift, Johnson, Cobbett. Indeed, motivated by my natural hatred of authority, Orwell was simultaneously conservative and radical. As he pointed out in his essay on Most revolutionaries are Dickens, potential Tories. . . Orwell never allowed the claim of ideology, re-- "Nineteen in Eighty-Four?- Associated Press I oserphoto George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-four- . gardless of how pressing, to prevail over what he saw as the claim of simple human decency. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia, he stated in Homage to Catalonia, which recounts his service in the Spanish Civil War, I should have answered: To fight against Fascism, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: Common decency. If one had to assign a political ideology to Orwell, those two words, "common decency, would suffice. Nothing grander can describe Orwell and still hope to encompass his many contradictions. It is the violation of common decency on the part of each that makes coherent Orwells detestation of such wildly dif- ferent items as the Ingsoc oligarchy ) at the heart of Orwells Socialism was an elemental feeling that finds expression in the following statement from 1942: The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-clas- s Socialist for his materialism! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesnt leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done . . .(Privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real (i.e., spiritual) problems of humanity can be tackled. Again, we see the way in which Orwell reduces everything to What lay Books in brief the political common denominator of decency. Quaint Idea? This idea of common decency ?s a motivating force in political belief might be considered quaint And, indeed, Orwell cheerfully owned up to Outside my being work, he once wrote, "the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening. I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candle light and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and modern furniture. Besides gardening, he loved to fish and was an amateur naturalist. He also found time to write about A Nice Cup of Tea, the specifications for his ideal pub and Some Thoughts on the Common Toad." Simply stated, George Orwell was a man who happened to be born in 1903. To be sure, the 20th century dictated superficial changes in his outlook, (most important, fer the muscular brand of Christianity that Charles Kingsley had popularized in Victorian England he substituted an equally muscular brand of Socialism). But he remained a Little Englander all his life, for example, as opposed to imperialism as he was committed to English nationalism. (Could anyone other than the most enthusiastic English patriot have written something called In Defense of English Cooking and actually meant it?) As he said in a letter to Henry Miller in 1936, I h have a sort of attitude and always feel uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard etc. The 20th century was not designed for such a man. Crucial Point This point about Orwell is crucial. Only a man so attached to the past could have envisioned a future as and made it as persuahorrifying as that found in Nineteen sive To realize this, it Eighty-Fouhelps to remember that throughout the 1940s Orwell wrote a series of. London Letters to Partisan Review, letters full of political predictions that invariably proved wrong. Political specifics events, politended to defeat cies, programs his analytic powers; for all that Orwell prided himself on being he remained unfailingly idealistic. Yet on the larger trends of politics and society, the trends we see enlarged upon and rendered so memorably in Animal Farm" and he exerNineteen Eighty-Foucised an uncanny insight. . 19th-centu- belly-to-eart- r. tough-minde- Patterns of the Cosmos; American humor r, Los Angeles Times Service Timescale: An Atlas of the Fourth Dimension, by Nigel Calder (Viking: $19.95) seeks out the rhythms of the cosmos, revealing the context within which we have evolved to life and thought. It reveals many patterns of being, some too broad to be easily distinguished on the human scale, but in which we are nonetheless firmly embedded. Mapping the history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the Space Shuttle, Calder obviously has to adopt a scale. He begins by examining 'patterns of events that take shape over billions of years. Moving toward the present, he examines successively smaller time spans: The infall of primordial matter into wider-than-hum- j - galaxies gives way to the life cycles of stars, the birth of the solar system, the first stirrings of life, the evolution of humanity, and, finally, the course of recorded human history. Jim White. Understa'ement, overstatement, imagery and fanciful all the tools of the trade analogies of the humorist are handsomely displayed in The Best of Modern Humor, edited by Mordecai Richler (Knopf: $17.95). Fans of Benchley, Perelman, Thurber and Roth may quarrel with the editors inclusions and omissions, but theres plenty for all: stories, letters, excerpts from novels and every other form of fun with words. The author of'The Ap prenticeship of Buddy Kravitz,-Richle- has credentials as a judge of the artfully turned bon mot. Don G. Campbell. Leonardo, by Ralph Steadman (Summit: $25), the popular Rolling Stone cartoonist, is a fictionalized autobiography of Leonardo da Vinci. The amusing text recounts some of the major events in Leonardos life, but fails to capture his brooding, misanthropic personality. The witty drawings are filled with visual quotations from paintings. Through this historic setting walks Steadmans caricature of Leonardo: he looks Gawky and shaggy-hairemore like a rock musician, than a Florentine dandy. The drawings re , 15th-Centu- d, flect an angrier mood than Steadmans recent book on Freud, but less harsh than his famous illustrations for Hunter Thompson's books. Charles Solomon. Keepers of the Sea, by Fred J. Maroon and Edward L. Beach (Naval Institute: $45; deluxe edition: $75) provides captivating photography and compelling narrative combined in an outstanding account of the air, sea and land capabilities of our modern navy. The text offers an interesting historical perspective along with information on new technology; taut captions support 218 magnificent, photos. A beautiful, C. Bertsch. exciting publication. It reveals a great deal when Orwell has Goldstein, the enemy cf the state in "Nineteen Eighty-Fouwrite, "The world of today (i e , 1984) is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared to the world that existed before 1914 . . . The world prior to 1914 is Orwell's yardsick. Certainly one did not need to be spiritually of the 19th century to feel revulsion over the Nazi death camps or the Moscow Trials of the 30s; and Orwell was not alone in doing so. But while r. any objective person might grasp the horror in totalitarianism, it could still appear to be part of a logical progression its very senselessness did after all make a kind of sense, if only as a set of chronological facts. It took a person like Orwell to see totalitarianism as something exotic. Orwell took the recent past at its ugliest and extrapolati d from it to arrive at a conceivable but not inevitable future. He did not predict; he merely drew out implications. If you want a picture of the future, says O'Brien, the Inner Party member in Nineteen Eighty-Fouimagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." In picturing an evil so extreme, Orwell hoped to choke off its possibility. Elusive Legacy A man as idiosyncratic as Orwell can't have a political legacy in any standard sense of the term. His continuing contribution to us is, at best, elusive. What he bestows is in no way doctrinal or programmatic, but rather cautionary or exemplary. The cautionary aspect isnt hard to find; its there any time someone reads Nineteen Eighty-Fou- r or "Animal Farm or simply uses Newwords like doublethink, speak, or "Big Brother and pauses to consider their meaning Orwell's ultimate value, though, has less to do with his service as some kind of system for Western civilization than it does with the personal example he set: his unintended, yet irrefutable, demonstration of the possibility of individual integrity. The critic Lionel Trilling put it best when he said of Orwell, "What matters most of all is our sense of the man who tells the truth." The worth of the particular truths he told will no doubt fluctuate as they seem more or less relevant with the passage of time; perhaps one day, as 1984 recedes into history, our need for the message of Nineteen Eighty-Fouas well as of his other books, will go with it. Orwells act of telling those truths, however, is something whose worth is, and will always remain, incalculable r, early-warnin- g r, Best Sellers New York Times Service d The listing below are based on t every 2,000 bookstores from sales figures region United States Fiction of the well-writte- n, full-col- or Open Monday 11 AM-- 6 PM |
