Book Review: All Art is Propaganda
Oct. 5th, 2019 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerHaving finished - finally! - going through all my Ilf & Petrov quotes, I can now start unloading George Orwell quotes on you, from the essay collection All Art is Propaganda.
I should start by saying that the title of this book arises from the fact that Orwell repeats this phrase, or variations of it, in at least half the essays - which makes it sound like its going to be very samy, when in fact it isn’t at all, but there are some definite themes running through all the essays. Three of them really stuck out to me.
1. “All art is propaganda,” obviously. Orwell is not arguing that all art is literally propaganda in the sense that the government is paying for it, but in the sense that all art - consciously or unconsciously - advances a view of the world. There’s a particularly excellent chapter where he talks about the boys’ boarding school stories that ran in a popular magazines at the time, and notes that they all have a conservative bent, which arises simply from the fact that they’re set in and subtly glorify the British boarding school establishment.
It should be possible, he suggests, to swing the propaganda in children’s books in the other direction, although from the sound of it no one was doing it very effectively in Orwell’s time; I think there’s been some movement in that direction in more recent years, although I daresay if Orwell was alive he’d find something in it to be grumpy about.
2. From this categorical statement about art, there follows this musing about artists. “Insofar as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly.”
I suspect Orwell would widen this to include artists who work in other media - he’s got an entire essay about bawdy picture postcards, so clearly he casts wide nets - but for obvious reasons Orwell the writer is most concerned with the relationship between writers and politics. “It is merely that acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity,” he notes. And yet he also feels passionately that writers should have strong political convictions, that his own best work springs from his political convictions (although he blames this on the times rather than his temperament) - the problem is not politics themselves but the discipline, the knuckling under to the dictates of either a party or the popular opinion within a group. “A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread - not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group.”
Writers not only can but must have political convictions, but their first allegiance ought to be to the truth: that they genuinely believe what they are saying. “Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to mere wind.” And also: “..the controversy over freedom of speech and of the Press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.”
I think it’s Orwell’s rock-solid understanding of these facts which makes him so good at understanding and portraying totalitarian states. He may be right that the political language of all parties is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” but nowhere is this more true or more necessary than in a totalitarian state.
“The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” … “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”
The Soviet Union ended up proving his point for him long after he died: it took a draught of glasnost and perished.
Just in general, he understands the totalitarian mindset so well (and this quote is true of the authoritarian, too): “It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough.’”
3. “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself merely an index of majority opinion.” Orwell makes this comment in re: an anti-Shakespeare pamphlet that Tolstoy wrote, but it’s something that comes up a number of times in the book, particularly when he’s discussing poetry.
It ties in particularly with his definition of a good bad poem, or a good bad book, which is a phrase Orwell attributes to Chesterton: “the kind of book that has no serious literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious literary productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable ‘problem novels,’ ‘human documents,’ and ‘terrible indictments’ of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion.”
I found this interesting both for its own sake and also because it converges with C. S. Lewis’s theory in An Experiment in Criticism, which tickled me because in terms of explicit politics the two men are so very different that I would be surprised if they ever read each other’s work. Orwell is a contrarian socialist; Lewis is a Christian apologist with a conservative bent who rarely bothered to read the newspapers, which I suspect would have given Orwell fits despite the fact that he doesn’t think much of newspapers himself.
But they are similar in their clarity of thought and writing and a sort of generosity of temperament (this is more apparent in Lewis’s later work), and I think Lewis had some contrarian impulses himself. The criteria for what counts as literature in An Experiment in Criticism basically tossed the academic literary establishment at the time into the garbage can (although I think those criteria would sit comfortably in pop culture studies today), and Lewis doesn’t seem to be doing it out of malice but the sheer puckish joy of telling the truth and thereby spreading chaos.
I should start by saying that the title of this book arises from the fact that Orwell repeats this phrase, or variations of it, in at least half the essays - which makes it sound like its going to be very samy, when in fact it isn’t at all, but there are some definite themes running through all the essays. Three of them really stuck out to me.
1. “All art is propaganda,” obviously. Orwell is not arguing that all art is literally propaganda in the sense that the government is paying for it, but in the sense that all art - consciously or unconsciously - advances a view of the world. There’s a particularly excellent chapter where he talks about the boys’ boarding school stories that ran in a popular magazines at the time, and notes that they all have a conservative bent, which arises simply from the fact that they’re set in and subtly glorify the British boarding school establishment.
It should be possible, he suggests, to swing the propaganda in children’s books in the other direction, although from the sound of it no one was doing it very effectively in Orwell’s time; I think there’s been some movement in that direction in more recent years, although I daresay if Orwell was alive he’d find something in it to be grumpy about.
2. From this categorical statement about art, there follows this musing about artists. “Insofar as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly.”
I suspect Orwell would widen this to include artists who work in other media - he’s got an entire essay about bawdy picture postcards, so clearly he casts wide nets - but for obvious reasons Orwell the writer is most concerned with the relationship between writers and politics. “It is merely that acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity,” he notes. And yet he also feels passionately that writers should have strong political convictions, that his own best work springs from his political convictions (although he blames this on the times rather than his temperament) - the problem is not politics themselves but the discipline, the knuckling under to the dictates of either a party or the popular opinion within a group. “A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread - not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group.”
Writers not only can but must have political convictions, but their first allegiance ought to be to the truth: that they genuinely believe what they are saying. “Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to mere wind.” And also: “..the controversy over freedom of speech and of the Press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.”
I think it’s Orwell’s rock-solid understanding of these facts which makes him so good at understanding and portraying totalitarian states. He may be right that the political language of all parties is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” but nowhere is this more true or more necessary than in a totalitarian state.
“The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” … “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”
The Soviet Union ended up proving his point for him long after he died: it took a draught of glasnost and perished.
Just in general, he understands the totalitarian mindset so well (and this quote is true of the authoritarian, too): “It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough.’”
3. “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself merely an index of majority opinion.” Orwell makes this comment in re: an anti-Shakespeare pamphlet that Tolstoy wrote, but it’s something that comes up a number of times in the book, particularly when he’s discussing poetry.
It ties in particularly with his definition of a good bad poem, or a good bad book, which is a phrase Orwell attributes to Chesterton: “the kind of book that has no serious literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious literary productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable ‘problem novels,’ ‘human documents,’ and ‘terrible indictments’ of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion.”
I found this interesting both for its own sake and also because it converges with C. S. Lewis’s theory in An Experiment in Criticism, which tickled me because in terms of explicit politics the two men are so very different that I would be surprised if they ever read each other’s work. Orwell is a contrarian socialist; Lewis is a Christian apologist with a conservative bent who rarely bothered to read the newspapers, which I suspect would have given Orwell fits despite the fact that he doesn’t think much of newspapers himself.
But they are similar in their clarity of thought and writing and a sort of generosity of temperament (this is more apparent in Lewis’s later work), and I think Lewis had some contrarian impulses himself. The criteria for what counts as literature in An Experiment in Criticism basically tossed the academic literary establishment at the time into the garbage can (although I think those criteria would sit comfortably in pop culture studies today), and Lewis doesn’t seem to be doing it out of malice but the sheer puckish joy of telling the truth and thereby spreading chaos.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-05 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-05 06:42 pm (UTC)“It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough.’”
Talk about timeless relevance!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 02:33 am (UTC)