I think your assessment of Orwell here, Alison, is very fair and even-handed,
and draws equal attention to his strengths as a writer and his particular blind
spots. On the other hand, I think it's in the Wodehouse essay, Orwell criticizes
the witch hunting at that time in England for "Quislings and traitors" and finding
Wodehouse somewhat unfairly seized upon, and it's a bit difficult for me to
square that with the equivalent of volunteering to deliver up names for the then
equivalent of un-American activities committee. Perhaps it just depends on
who's being hunted. And it may well be consistent of his views of traitors, for I
don't know all of Orwell's work that well, just some, but in the Wodehouse
essay, Orwell's argument seems to be larger, not just that Wodehouse wasn't a
traitor but sort of a naive dupe, but that scapegoating is a way of hiding various
other duplicities, etc. Well and perhaps I can't get past my sense of the present,
how easy and progressively easier, it would be to do this. I am curious how one
gets to this point of moral certainty that one would offer to turn over names to
the government and perhaps it's just that seems to me beyond the pale.
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:17:11 +1100
>From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: orwell
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>On 24/1/05 8:43 AM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> But Orwell is somewhat
>> troubling too, or at any rate has been to me since I read these particular
>> accounts, one from an old issue of the Guardian and another from European
>> Digest.
>
>I admire Orwell, mainly because I think he's a painfully honest and often
>extremely brave writer, always thoughtful and often prescient (he's very
>interesting to read right now). That doesn't mean that I don't read some of
>his essays with my eyebrows raised. He has a huge blind spot about gender,
>for example. His thoughts on patriotism, and his attempts to disentangle
>patriotism from nationalism (he claims they are different things) are also
>rather muddy; he never wholly escaped his English public school/civil
>service indoctrination, and sometimes the traditional British officer jumps
>into his thinking with startling clarity. He also hated English communists
>and thought their allegiance to Russia little short of treacherous. His
>offer to provide a blacklist is, I'm afraid, totally consistent with those
>thoughts in his essays, and so doesn't surprise me.
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
|