George Orwell

This one-semester module will offer students the opportunity for an extensive study of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

Part of the great power of Orwell’s writing comes from his background as a member of the English imperial establishment. He was an Old Etonian, and a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. This led to powerful contradictions within his own politics, contradictions which Orwell was never really able to resolve, and which make him such a fascinating writer, and one who is definitely not a straightforward ideologue or propagandist. His experience in Burma, as recounted in Burmese Days (1934), his first novel, gave him a lasting hatred of the British Empire (a hatred which had been in him since childhood – his essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is a vicious denunciation of the English private school system), an overwhelming appreciation for the abuse of power and a strong sense of sympathy with the victims of power, all of which is very apparent in 1984. His longer works of documentary non-fiction from the 1930s – Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938) – are all written from this position of fundamental sympathy with the victims of political and economic power – the disenfranchised, the underclass, the oppressed, the unemployed, the tyrannized. So, Orwell is a political writer – everybody knows this. In a late essay, ‘Why I Write’ (1946), he wrote: ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing on such subjects.’ But it is more complex than this. Orwell is a famously divided writer, and so it makes sense that he, of all writers, should have formulated the concept of doublethink: ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them’. Orwell is simultaneously enormously intellectually sympathetic towards the dispossessed while at the same time disgusted by them – disgusted, particularly, by their smell and dirt, but also by their ugliness and ignorance. 1984 is one of the great novels of physical disgust, acutely conscious of the body – its decay, its treacherousness, its appalling capacity for pain. One of the first things we discover about Winston Smith is that he has a varicose ulcer on his ankle, which troubles him throughout the novel. Early in the novel, he goes round to his neighbour Mrs. Parsons’s flat to help unblock her sink, which is clogged up with hair; her husband, Winston’s colleague, perpetually reeks of sweat. One of the things the novel records is the dissolution of Winston’s body, following perhaps months of torture. When Winston finally gets to see his emaciated body in the mirror – ‘A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing’ – he breaks down in tears. O’Brien the torturer pulls one of his teeth out with his fingers, and tells him: ‘You are rotting away. … You are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.’ Orwell had been writing like this – simultaneously full of pity and of disgust – about the tramps of London and the unemployed of Wigan in the 30s. In some quarters of the Left, Orwell was and remains a controversial figure. Homage to Catalonia records his going to fight in the Spanish Civil War with a division of the Trotskyist POUM, only to be more appalled and frightened by the actions of the Stalinist Communists, supposedly fighting on the same side, that the actual Fascists. This gave Orwell a deep distaste for Stalinism, as just another form of totalitarian power-worship, which informs 1984. The outbreak of the Second World War led Orwell into what was to be his settled political position of the 1940s, which one might want to call a kind of patriotic English radicalism. In 1941, in the midst of the Blitz, he wrote ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ – for me, the best thing he ever wrote, and one of the key texts for anybody who wants to understand the English, perhaps especially today:

‘When you come back to England from any foreign country, you immediately have the sensation of breathing a different air. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth, and their gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to and fro of lorries on the great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion though the mists of autumn mornings – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.’

The English, Orwell thought, were immune to Fascism, and all forms of totalitarianism, because they were immune to ideas: ‘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. 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”. … No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or “spontaneous” demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.’ Orwell thought the Nazi goose-step was ‘one of the most horrible sights in the world. … It is simply an affirmation of naked power; and contained in it quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.’ It is this experience which gives force to O’Brien’s most horrifying dystopian pronouncement to Winston: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ Orwell seems more relevant than ever in our contemporary world of fake news and alternative facts. He still has things to say to us. Many of us feel that democracy is under intolerable threat at the moment; that populist strongmen and Big Brothers are popping up all over the place, even in mature democracies. We need to find a way of resisting them, of recognizing their tactics, one of which is through the control and manipulation of language and consequently of reality - what today we would call gaslighting. As Orwell wrote, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ Novels like 1984 are still part of the resistance.

We will look at a representative sample of Orwell’s writing across a variety of forms and subjects, looking at Orwell as a novelist, a journalist, a memoirist, a social theorist, a political thinker and writer, and an essayist and cultural critic.

Week 1: Introduction Week 2: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) Week 3: Burmese Days (1934) Week 4: A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) Week 5: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) Week 6: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Week 7: Reading Week Week 8: Homage to Catalonia (1938) Week 9: Coming Up for Air (1939) Week 10: The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) and selected essays: ‘Good Bad Books’, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’. Week 11: Animal Farm (1945) Week 12: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Assessment: 5000-word essay.

In assessment, students of this module will need to demonstrate:

• familiarity with a range of Orwell’s writings across a variety of literary genres, and ability to apply close reading skills to individual texts • awareness of relevant cultural and/or social contexts, and a sense of what that awareness contributes to your understanding of the text(s) • the ability to argue coherently and independently and to adduce secondary materials appropriately and in a scholarly manner.

Learning Outcomes

• The student will be expected to gain detailed knowledge and understanding of the writing and career of George Orwell.

Students studying this module will develop:

• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts • an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts, genres, and critical approaches • an ability to discuss a range of texts in their intellectual, historical and critical contexts • an informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and an ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts • a sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language • an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature • an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to Orwell’s writings • an ability to demonstrate skills in critical reasoning, including the ability to assess other critical readings • skills of effective communication and argument

Selected further reading

Kristen Blemuel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intramodernism in Literary London (2004) John Brannigan, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000 (2003) Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006) Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (2013) Bernard R. Crick, George Orwell: A Life (1981) Roger Fowler, The Language of George Orwell (1995) J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Chronology (2000) ______, A George Orwell Companion (1982) Graham Holderness et al, eds, George Orwell, New Casebooks series (1998) David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-51 (2007) John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (1999) John Rodden, The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell (2012) Loraine Saunders, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2008) D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (2004) Raymond Williams, ed. George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays (1974) ______, Orwell (1971)

Darryl Jones