On 25/1/05 5:23 AM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yes, I think the criticism of the work should originate in response to the
> work,
> but I wasn't arguing for a rereading of Orwell's work or that his works be
> judged in the shadow of this action of his delivering a list of names to the
> government. All of my preoccupation was with that action.
> I see this though as human a trait or frailty as
> the frailty that a writer may fall prey to, and would guess part of the
> interest is
> just that, the "human interest" angle, seeing what others do. And so while I'd
> argue for reading the work, and not by the dim light of the personality, I
> don't
> expect it's an argument that will be successful, since in my view, people
> write
> and publish and read shock biographies from certain innate human
> predilections and interests.
"Human interest" is another journalistic term; it is used to mean the
stories about firemen rescuing kittens used as column fillers or at the end
of news broadcasts. It may be popular, even irresistible, but it's not a
value. It's in the same world as "infotainment" and the cult of celebrity.
I've read a very few illuminating and tactful biographies, but on the whole
I instinctively dislike this whole business of prying into a writer's life:
it's fraught with problems and is most usually misleading rather than
otherwise. Even more so when it happens in the mass media.
The problem is that this kind of revelation is very often (I would say in
Orwell's case, certainly) used to discredit a person's work. Earlier, you
said that it _did_ reflect on the work, since he was arguing for justice and
yet behaving unjustly ("To give a list of names as traitors "fellow
travellers" to the government seems to be that sort of extralegal process,
ratting others out, making accusations in private, depriving those accused
of defense or reply or public enquiry that at least has the possibility of
other evidence being introduced, that is a totalitarian process, even when
it serves a 'democratic government,' i.e., it's not so far from what's going
on in Guantanamo now. So it seems that Orwell in his hatred of totalitarian
governments, particularly in the list naming, of communist government was
able to condone totalitarian process and practice in himself and in fighting
that particular fight.") Ie, here's this great arguer against
totalitarianism acting in a totalitarian way, so how can we trust what he
says? Well, it may be a dubious action, but it's certainly not Guantanamo.
Who, I wonder, seeded this story in the first place, and for what reasons?
If the focus is on "human interest" rather than on what someone has actually
written, it becomes very easy to smear a whole body of work. And, as they
say, mud sticks.
I thought Timothy Garton-Ash's article interesting for how it contextualised
this action, which has clearly caused much fuss of the shock horror variety.
First, because as TGA said, Orwell sent no one to a gulag (which was your
immediate thought) and no one was arrested by secret police - it's hard to
see how anyone materially suffered by his action. It seems he had a list
written in his diary of people he thought were "crypto communists" or
"fellow travellers". At the beginning of the Cold War, when he was dying of
TB, he gave some names on this list to a friend, who worked in an anti
communist propaganda unit. Orwell recommended that these people, being
communists, should not be employed in such a unit. It seems to have been
used for that purpose, if it was used at all. It wasn't given to some
shadowy secret agent, but to someone he thought of as a "dear friend", and
it was by no means written in certainty, but in doubt and anguish. He
clearly knew it was going to the government, and what it would be used for:
but beyond that, it's hard to judge his culpabilities, or his thoughts.
The other point TGA makes is that if Orwell had made a similar list of
people whom he thought were fascists, it's doubtful there would have been
such a fuss. The gulags and forced famines of Stalin still don't occupy the
same kind of imaginative place as the Nazi concentration camps, although in
many ways they were just as horrific, and killed more people. Why doesn't
the name Kolyma cause the same shudders as Auschwitz?
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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