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George Orwell and Raymond Williams ' "... George Orwell and Raymond Williams. : A Comparison of their Thoughts on Politics, Letters and Language. D. W. Johnson. Thesis Submitted Universityfor the Degree of Master of Cape of Arts in TownEnglish at the University of Cape Town in December 1988. The University of Cape Town h~s been given the ririht to reprr.duce t\!is thesis in whole '.!i' or in pad. Cr.;iyright is held by the author. -i:·' :r The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town -----··--------------------------- Abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the ·exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their ·political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of ·experience ; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of ·literature· ; they both explore the relation between ·politics· and 'letters·; and they both seek to use 'letters· in the service of (socialist) ·politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a ·unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning ; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they j represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care. Acknowledgements: I would like to record here my thanks to a number of people and institutions: to Eve Bertelsen and john Higgins of the English Department at the University of Cape Town, who supervised the writing of this thesis, and provided unstinting encouragement and intellectual guidance; to Nie Visser, for generous help and advice in presenting the final product; to my neighbours and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Western Cape, David Bunn and Jane Taylor, whose advice (academic and otherwise) and enthusiasm was a constant source of strength; to Bill Nasson of the Economic History Department at U.C.T ., who assisted me greatly in my attempts to understand twentieth century British history; to Kelwyn Sole of the English Department at U.C.T., who discussed with me, and helped to clarify, certain areas of cultural politics ; and to Rochelle Kapp, fellow-student and one-time colleague at Khanya College, who facilitated the conclusion of the thesis in many ways. They are, of course, in no way responsible for the flaws in the thesis. I was also helped by sitting in on seminars in the following courses: the M.A. in literary studies at U.C.T.; the honours course in British labour history in the U.C.T. History Department; and the honours course in Marxist literary theory in the U.W.C. English Department. I would like to thank the Human Sciences Research Council for generous funding received in 1986 ; and also the F.G. Cannock - and U.C.T. Council Bursary Funds for financial assistance in 1987. I would like to thank my mother, Valerie Johnson, for typing numerous earlier drafts of the thesis and for help with proof-reading; and Mrs Pearl Fourie, for typing the final draft under some pressure. I would like to thank my family for their love and support over many years of studying, and finally, express my deep gratitude to CeHa, whose love and companionship, more than anything else, has sustained me during the last three years. Contents: Page No. Introduction. 1 Chapter One : Politics . 19 1.1 'The Lion and the Unicorn' . 21 1.2 'Britain in the 1960s' in The Long Revolution ..... 47 1.3 Towards 2000 . ·. ..... 70 Chapter Two : Letters . · . 92 2.1 'Charles Dickens' . 94 2.2 Chapter 1 of The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence . 114 2.3 'The Reader in Hard Times' in Writing in Society . 139 Chapter Three: Language .............. 163 3.1 'Politics and the English Language' 164 3.2 The Chapter 'Language' in Marxism and Literature. 181 Conclusion 198 Notes. ................... 202 Bibliography . ... 221 Introciucuon In recent years, several scholars have suggested that there are significant similarities between the jdeas of George Orwell and those of Raymond Williams. The most extended study on the subject is that of Paul Thomas. In his essay 'Mixed Feelings: Raymond Williams and George Orwell', he argues that although the comparisons should not be pushed too far, Orwell and Williams do have a great deal in common. For Thomas, 'the points of similarity and areas of overlap ... are largely political' (p. 424) : both Orwell and Wi11iams reject the vulgar-Marxist contention that (economic) base determines (political and cultural) superstructure; both are concerned centrally with removing class barriers to equality; and both are indifferent to the mechanics of parliamentary politics, public ad ministration and trade union structures, focusing instead on the cultural dimension of the struggle for socialism. A second similarity Thomas identifies is their shared concern with 'lived experience': Orwell and Williams frequently refer or appeal to their own experiences, perceptions, and recollections and inscribe these within accounts of social, cultural, or political events and processes that are much more general. (p. 425) According to Thomas, this desire to relate personal experience to the society as a whole leads to another area of overlap, their exploration of popular culture. He quotes with approval George Woodcock's argument ( p. 251) that Orwell's essays on boys' weeklies, Donald McGill and detective fiction 2 have formed the foundation for the cultural criticism developed by Williams and Richard Hoggart. The final area of common interest Thomas discusses is that of language. He argues: Orwell and Williams share a direct and politically-charged preoccupation with the use and meaning of words, a preoccupation that links Williams's book Keywords with Orwell's essays on language, particularly 'Politics and the English Language' and 'Why I Write'. (p. 426) Furthermore, in their respective understandings of language both Orwell and Williams are in different ways vulnerable to the Althusserian argument that 'dominant ideologies habitually exploit "imaginary" devices [ including language] in various ways in order to bolster up the construct of a relatively "fixed" identity' (p. 427). Like Thomas, Christopher Norris, in his essay 'Language, Truth and Ideology: Orwell and the Post-War Left·, sees Orwell and Williams sharing a similar reliance on 'experience' , and a related resistance to 'theory·: Williams cannot entirely divest his writing of the homespun individualist-empirical style which animates Orwell's prose. He can certainly acknowledge the weight of implied ideology which goes along with the resistance to theory in its cruder, neo-Orwellian forms. But the same resistance is at work in his own way of treating theoretical issues as part of an evolving social experience , 3 a combination of documentary record and personal work-in-progress. (pp. 244-5) Norris employs the perspective of Althusserian ('Continental') Marxism in order to contextualise the 'common sense' empiricism he sees in both Orwell and Williams's work: From the standpoint of 'Continental' Marxism [Orwell's] case can be diagnosed as displaying all the blindspots and irrational regressions of empiricist ideology. Williams registers the force of this argument when he writes of Orwell's plain-man, common-sense style: his air of perpetually 'bumping up' against the straightforward facts of experience. Yet the commitment to empiricism - as a mode of historical experience, if not as a full-blown ideology - continues to eiercise a rival claim in Williams's dealings with Continental Marxism. For him, as for [E. P. 1Thompson, it acts as a constant qualifying check on the powers of theoretical abstraction. (p. 261) In his discussion with john Lukacs and Gerald Graff entitled 'The Legacy of Orwell' , Edward Said suggests yet another basis for comparing Orwell and Williams: I'd like to think of Orwell as simply one actor in a very complicated drama which is continuing to unfold. The drama has to do with problems of superstructure and base. Are the political and economic circumstances more determining 'than the ideological and cultural? What is the relationship between them? A person who 4 comes after Orwell - Raymond Williams, for example - can be much more interesting on this sort of thing. Williams of course depends a great deal on Orwell, and has an Orwellian sensibility, but he takes in a lot more than Orwell ever took the time to do, trying precisely to gauge the inflection in the relationship between culture and social polity.
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