Experience, Interpretation, and the Performance of Authorship
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
EXPERIENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF AUTHORSHIP: A STUDY OF MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVE IN THE WORK OF GEORGE ORWELL by Robert Rose Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia December 2013 © Copyright by Robert Rose, 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………...........................................1 CHAPTER 2: CHALLENGING ETHNOGRAPHIC AUTHORITY IN “A HANGING,” “SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT,” AND BURMESE DAYS.......................................................................................19 CHAPTER 3: PERFORMANCE, TRANSFORMATION, AND THE FIGURE OF THE MASK IN DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON AND THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER.........................................................66 CHAPTER 4: HOMO SERIOSUS, HOMO RHETORICUS, AND THE DIALECTIC OF EXPERIENCE AND INTERPRETATION IN HOMAGE TO CATALONIA....................................................................111 CHAPTER 5: SELF-PORTRAITURE, “IMPLIED PERSONALITY,” AND THE REBEL WRITER IN “THE PREVENTION OF LITERATURE,” “WHY I WRITE,” AND “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”..........................................................................................145 CHAPTER 6: TOTALITARIAN THEORY AND MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVE IN NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR..............................................................187 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………............231 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................241 ii ABSTRACT This thesis examines stylistic technique and narrative strategy in a range of George Orwell’s fictional and non-fictional texts to demonstrate how personal experience and detached interpretation interact dialectically in his work to create layers of narrative complexity. Moving from Raymond Williams’ observation that the figure of “Orwell” is the writer’s “most successful” creation, this study asserts a vital correlation between form and content in Orwell’s work, specifically in the central position that perspective occupies in his political outlook. The multiple perspectives that surface in Orwell’s texts – the reluctant Imperial policeman, the tramp in disguise, the advocate of the working poor, the rebellious and satirically-inclined anti-totalitarian writer – correspond with the author’s life experiences, and yet are revealed as rhetorically constructed positions that are adopted strategically to generate nuanced, and at times contradictory, impressions of a wide range of subject matter. Chapter 1 treats Orwell’s Burmese writings as ethnographically-inflected texts; Chapter 2 examines the figure of the mask in Down and Out in Paris and London and in The Road to Wigan Pier; Chapter 3 analyses a dialectic of experience and interpretation at play in Homage to Catalonia; Chapter 4 scrutinizes the mobilization of the rebel writer figure in a selection of Orwell’s mature essays; and Chapter 5 examines the strategic deployment of competing perspectives in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s anatomy of the totalitarian state. This array of analytical approaches serves the dual function of highlighting the versatility and sophistication of narrative strategy across a range of individual texts in Orwell’s oeuvre, and of demonstrating a trajectory in his work that adheres simultaneously to both formal and political considerations. Orwell’s highly prolific two-decade-long writing career, I argue, can be productively understood as an ongoing experiment with narrative strategy, and this experiment exerts at each stage a direct influence on his evolving political aesthetic. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the guidance and support of my thesis committee. Foremost, my supervisor Dr. Anthony Stewart has been a great help throughout the process, as both a scholar of George Orwell and as a voice of calm. I thank him for his ongoing encouragement of my work. I am also grateful to Dr. Len Diepeveen and Dr. Russell Perkin, both of whom generously agreed to take on more involved roles in the project in its final stages. In addition to providing instructive commentary on my work, Dr. Diepeveen graciously accepted the role of co-supervisor that was thrust upon him and handled its onerous tasks uncomplainingly. Dr. Perkin, meanwhile, offered a thorough and intellectually generous reading of a late draft of my dissertation that was pivotal in helping me to clarify my argument. I thank both these men for their important contributions in helping to bring the project to completion. Finally, I dedicate this work to my family. My partner Heather is especially deserving of my gratitude. Her support throughout this sometimes difficult process has been unwavering, and she has time and again checked my doubt and frustration with words of encouragement. I would also like to thank my children, Esther and Vera, both of whom were born during the writing of this thesis. Their presence has consistently helped to remind me that this work is, after all, not so very important. iv 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: In George Orwell: The Search for a Voice, Lynette Hunter argues that Orwell “has been consistently underestimated in terms of his awareness of the complexity of literary and linguistic strategy”: From the beginning [Hunter writes] he recognizes that the distinctions between form and content, subject and object, fiction and documentary, are all versions of the fundamental separation between fact and value that has dominated rationalist humanism since the seventeenth century. And for Orwell, the final question is indeed one of value and morality: his writing career is concerned with a search for a valid voice with which to persuade others and express opinion. (1) Hunter’s observations, made in the now-distant Orwell year of 1984, remain relevant to the extent that, as Nils Clausson points out, Orwell’s literary and linguistic strategies continue to be glossed as a mastery of the plain style, one of the effects of which is to relegate his work to introductory composition classes rather than literature classes – that is, as something to be imitated rather than studied.1 The obvious exception is Nineteen Eighty-Four, which continues to be read and studied in any number of contexts and from a range of scholarly perspectives; but in an important sense the very durability of this late text perpetuates the critical underestimation to which Hunter alludes. As Lorraine Saunders observes, “Orwell is as popular as ever, but this is due to the continued obsession with Nineteen Eighty-Four” (3) – an obsession, she thinks, that unwittingly 1 Clausson refers here to Orwell’s essays in general and specifically to the ways that “Shooting an Elephant” is used as a model for good writing in introductory-level English classes. 2 contributes to “an imbalance in Orwell studies” (1). For Saunders, this has resulted in an under-appreciation of Orwell’s 1930s novels, and her 2008 book, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell, sets out to refute the widespread impression that “Orwell’s reputation as a first-rate novelist must rely solely upon the continued appreciation of his last two works” (1). Like Hunter before her, Saunders’ strategy is to subject these books to “detailed textual analysis” and, in so doing, to demonstrate a hitherto unrecognized degree of sophistication in Orwell’s “imaginative and artistic powers” (1). To the extent that reading Orwell closely is thought to be an undervalued exercise, both these scholars set their text-focussed readings of Orwell work against the grain of typical Orwell scholarship. As Saunders puts it, her aim in The Unsung Artistry is “to be a part of the growing sea-change in Orwell criticism that is at last recognizing the totality of Orwell’s contribution to twentieth-century literature” (3). 2 Following Hunter and Saunders, this thesis moves from the premise that Orwell’s stylistic technique should be taken seriously and that doing so reveals dimensions of his work that have been overlooked. On two key points, however, it departs from their claims. First, while Hunter’s focus on the rhetorical complexities of Orwell’s writing serves in some respects as a blueprint for the sort of work this thesis tries to do, her suggestion that Orwell’s writing career can be framed as an ongoing search for a single 2 “In doing this,” she continues, “I am building on the achievements of critics such as Peter Davison, Roger Fowler, Håkan Ringbom, and Lynette Hunter, who, by taking Orwell’s stylistic technique seriously, have made invaluable inroads into aiding our understanding of his artistic consequence” (3). One might expect that the proliferation of Orwell scholarship in 1984, followed by a second wave of interest in 2003 to coincide with the centenary of Orwell’s birth, would make any such claim for the critical underestimation of the author appear as exaggeration. However, to the extent that scholarly attention to Orwell persists in emphasizing the man (or, more precisely the figure of “Orwell”) as much as the work, the impression remains that the literary and rhetorical dimensions of his writing have not been fully appreciated. Reviewing Peter Marks’ 2011 book George Orwell the Essayist, Stan Smith refers to Orwell as an “under- rated writer”;