Orwell, Mark 2
Oct. 11th, 2019 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI didn’t manage to get through all my Orwell quotes in one post, so here’s a second one. (Ilf and Petrov have set a bad precedent.) The first post focused on Orwell’s general themes in All Art is Propaganda; this second one collects his comments about a few works in particular.
1. Here’s his description of Henry Miller’s early novels, Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring: “The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion.”
Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and read them both? I have to remind myself that I loathed The Crucible, and it seems unlikely that Henry Miller actually wrote women any better in the 1930s.
(ETA:skygiants has pointed out that Henry Miller and Arthur Miller were in fact two different people. TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS NAME MILLER HOW VERY DARE. This is like the time I got Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver confused.)
But nonetheless, it was Orwell’s description of Miller’s work that really solidified for me one of the reasons why Orwell seems so applicable today. “At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing helplessness of all decent people. It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non-cooperative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel.”
I feel like this perfectly encapsulates the way a lot of people feel about climate change, and it’s cheering in a deeply grim way to realize that the Allies managed to defeat the Nazis despite going into the war already completely fucking exhausted.
2. “If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.” Orwell kicks off a review of a production of The Tempest with this comment, and then continues with the exasperated comment that “Ariel, although for some reason he was painted bright blue, was horribly whimsical and indulged in exaggeratedly homosexual mannerisms, a sort of Peter Pansy.”
This highlights both Orwell’s verbal ingenuity and one of his less attractive traits: his homophobia. This is another place where it’s instructive to compare Orwell to C. S. Lewis. Lewis technically disapproves of homosexuality, because a writer of Christian apologetics in the mid-twentieth century could not have gotten away with any other opinion, but he only discusses it when he’s forced to and you always feel that he’s tapping his foot, wanting to get back to something he feels God actually disapproves of, like thinking that you’re morally superior to other people when maybe you don’t understand their spiritual challenges - please envision a pointed stare here.
(Lewis’s childhood friend Arthur Greaves was gay, which I think influenced his thinking on the subject.)
In contrast, Orwell often pops to homosexuality when he needs a metaphor for something distasteful. I suppose we all have feet of clay.
3. One of the longest and most interesting essays in this book is Orwell’s essay about Kipling. Orwell comments that Kipling “identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?,” whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.”
This comment particularly reflects Orwell’s frustration with the pacifists at the time, who opposed war with Germany without offering any sensible alternative. It’s all very well to be a pacifist in the sense of not wanting to go out a-conquering, but if someone else brings war to your doorstep, you have to do something; it’s wishful thinking to believe that pacifism must prevail simply because it’s right.
Or, as Orwell grouses, “The left… inherited from Liberalism certain distinctly questionable beliefs, such as the belief that truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself,” and certain pacifists seemed to think that sitting back and waiting for persecution to defeat itself was the right way to go. The problem is that persecution defeats itself only in the sense that it sometimes makes it easier for outsiders to knock it down by making foolish decisions as a result of its prejudices: it may set up the dominoes that will lead to its defeat, as when Hitler opened a two-front war, but someone has to be there to bloody well knock those dominoes down.
And here, a quote that I wanted to share just on general principles.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
1. Here’s his description of Henry Miller’s early novels, Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring: “The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion.”
Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and read them both? I have to remind myself that I loathed The Crucible, and it seems unlikely that Henry Miller actually wrote women any better in the 1930s.
(ETA:
skygiants has pointed out that Henry Miller and Arthur Miller were in fact two different people. TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS NAME MILLER HOW VERY DARE. This is like the time I got Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver confused.) But nonetheless, it was Orwell’s description of Miller’s work that really solidified for me one of the reasons why Orwell seems so applicable today. “At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing helplessness of all decent people. It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non-cooperative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel.”
I feel like this perfectly encapsulates the way a lot of people feel about climate change, and it’s cheering in a deeply grim way to realize that the Allies managed to defeat the Nazis despite going into the war already completely fucking exhausted.
2. “If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.” Orwell kicks off a review of a production of The Tempest with this comment, and then continues with the exasperated comment that “Ariel, although for some reason he was painted bright blue, was horribly whimsical and indulged in exaggeratedly homosexual mannerisms, a sort of Peter Pansy.”
This highlights both Orwell’s verbal ingenuity and one of his less attractive traits: his homophobia. This is another place where it’s instructive to compare Orwell to C. S. Lewis. Lewis technically disapproves of homosexuality, because a writer of Christian apologetics in the mid-twentieth century could not have gotten away with any other opinion, but he only discusses it when he’s forced to and you always feel that he’s tapping his foot, wanting to get back to something he feels God actually disapproves of, like thinking that you’re morally superior to other people when maybe you don’t understand their spiritual challenges - please envision a pointed stare here.
(Lewis’s childhood friend Arthur Greaves was gay, which I think influenced his thinking on the subject.)
In contrast, Orwell often pops to homosexuality when he needs a metaphor for something distasteful. I suppose we all have feet of clay.
3. One of the longest and most interesting essays in this book is Orwell’s essay about Kipling. Orwell comments that Kipling “identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?,” whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.”
This comment particularly reflects Orwell’s frustration with the pacifists at the time, who opposed war with Germany without offering any sensible alternative. It’s all very well to be a pacifist in the sense of not wanting to go out a-conquering, but if someone else brings war to your doorstep, you have to do something; it’s wishful thinking to believe that pacifism must prevail simply because it’s right.
Or, as Orwell grouses, “The left… inherited from Liberalism certain distinctly questionable beliefs, such as the belief that truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself,” and certain pacifists seemed to think that sitting back and waiting for persecution to defeat itself was the right way to go. The problem is that persecution defeats itself only in the sense that it sometimes makes it easier for outsiders to knock it down by making foolish decisions as a result of its prejudices: it may set up the dominoes that will lead to its defeat, as when Hitler opened a two-front war, but someone has to be there to bloody well knock those dominoes down.
And here, a quote that I wanted to share just on general principles.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 01:53 am (UTC)