On 26/1/05 4:36 AM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Quite aside from questions of economic justice, or the cruelty of
> poverty and the working conditions imposed on the poorest, this
> proposed elimination of the master-servant relationship was a question
> of emotional decency and hygiene. Orwell was wincingly aware of the
> attractions of sadism, of his own propensity for violent cruelty. The
> gloatingly intimate brutality of O'Brien is as much a projection of
> that inner propensity as it is a portrayal of the realities of
> totalitarian rule
I think this is perceptive, Dominic. The abject writer in Keep the
Aspidistra Flying, with his vengeful cruelties and rancorous envies towards
his girlfriend and his wealthy Marxist mate, is another of those cruel
portrayals; he's very clearly at least partly autobiographical, and is
sometimes as unbearably and impotently loathsome as the narrator in Notes
from Underground. You'd never wince if you didn't at the same time feel a
rather interesting empathy for this character. (Except that you begin to
wonder why nobody tells him to fuck off). His conversion at the end to
married middle class beatitude is rather unconvincing, and strangely without
irony; but it's an interesting foreshadow of Winston Smith's rather bleaker
happiness at the end of 1984.
Maybe this propensity for cold self observation, and how he used it to
incisive effect, is most clear in his essay on anti-Semitism in Britain,
which finishes rather brutally with a confession of his own anti-Semitism.
He says that if the phenomenon is to be understood and studied, it is no use
looking in all the usual overt places; one needs rather to examine one's own
distastes. This pitilessness permits him to write a damning and prescient
indictment of British hypocrisy towards Jews. Racism and sexism are often
just under the skin of his writing; in the best and most illuminating
instances, pulled out and examined. In others, just there.
Interesting that you mention decency, because his obsession with this
concept is one thing that's been preoccupying me as I read my way through
these essays. Surprisingly, he writes about decency quite well, even
convincingly; but like much else about Orwell, it's extremely difficult to
pull that idea out of the constellation of middle class colonialist English
attitudes that birthed it, and not have a whole lot of other messy matter
clinging to it.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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