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Industrialism and Hedonism in Orwell's Literary and Political Development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Gregory Claeys
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Extract

Since his death Orwell's reputation has derived largely from the anti-totalitarian emphasis in his later writings, even if it is now widely agreed that Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular does not represent any sudden shift towards pessimism in Orwell's thought. This article argues that Orwell's understanding and critique of twentieth century developments was much wider than many of his readers still presume. Instead of being read only as an anti-totalitarian theorist, Orwell must instead by seen as a critic of modernity, of modern industrial civilization (in both its capitalist and socialist forms) and its hedonistic culture. Orwell's critique of hedonism and conception of its relationship to industrialism is probably the single most important area of his thought not to have received adequate treatment by scholars and critics. To appreciate its significance is thus to establish him as a more sophisticated social and political thinker than he is usually assumed to have been, as well as to show that too narrow a political reading of his work obscures essential features in its development. Orwell does, of course, oppose political tyranny even in his early works, but he also identified the characteristics of what he regarded as a distinctively novel and modern form of civilization, which underlay and to some extent provided the cultural and psychological bases for the emergence of new, totalitarian forms of tyranny.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 1986 , pp. 219 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Orwell Archive, University College, London, for their assistance in the preparation of this article.

References

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20 Collected Essays, 1:381Google Scholar; Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 57Google ScholarPubMed. Socialist ideas are presented only in caricature in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (The Complete Novels of George Orwell, p. 632).

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26 Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in ibid., p. 586.

27 Coming Up for Air, in ibid., p. 519.

28 Ibid., p. 523.

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32 The Complete Novels of George Orwell, pp. 570, 505.

33 Ibid., p. 560. For recent criticism of the book see Van Dellen, Robert J., “George Orwell's Coming Up for Air: the Politics of Powerlessness,” Modern Fiction Studies 21 (1975): 57–68Google Scholar, and Jeffrey Meyers, “Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up for Air,” ibid., pp. 69-80.

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36 Homage to Catalonia, pp. 8-10, 29, 59-60. On this text see e.g., Edrich, Emanuel, “Naivité and Simplicity in Orwell's Writing: Homage to Catalonia,” University of Kansas Review 27 (1961): 289–97Google Scholar; Weintraub, Stanley, The Last Great Cause: Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1968), pp. 88–119Google Scholar, Lee, , Orwell's Fiction, p. 82Google Scholar, Carr, Raymond, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War,” in Gross, Miriam, ed., The World of George Orwell (London, 1971), pp. 63–73Google Scholar; Sperber, Murray, “Marx: G.O.'s Dog': A Study of Politics and Literature in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia,” Dalhousie Review 52 (1972): 226–36Google Scholar; and Jamal, Zahir, “Orwell in Spain,” Renaissance and Modern Sstudies 20 (1976): 54–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On The Lion and the Unicorn see Luthman, Stephan, “Orwell's Patriotism,” Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1967): 149–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Bernard Crick's introduction to the Penguin edition, and my “The Lion and the Unicorn, Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics,” Review of Politics 47 (1985): 186–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

37 See Homage to Catalonia, pp. 66-7, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 95, and “Fascism and Democracy,” Left News (February 1941): 1637–9Google ScholarPubMed. These arguments repeat long-standing republican prejudices against standing armies common to the republican tradition, which are also reflected in Orwell's strong interest in the Home Guard as a basis for socialist activities during the war. See, e.g., Collected Essays 2: 180–1Google Scholar, “The Home Guard,” Tribune (20 December 1940): 8–9Google ScholarPubMed, and “Three Years of Home Guard,” Observer (9 May 1943): 3Google ScholarPubMed. On republican opposition to standing armies see Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), pp. 401–22.Google Scholar

38 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 33-70.

39 Ibid., pp. 38-41, 44-5. See also Orwell's, “Culture and Democracy,” in Cole, G.D.H., ed., Victory or Vested Interest? (London, 1942), p. 77.Google Scholar

40 The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 45.

41 Ibid., pp. 48, 50, 69,-70; “Our Opportunity,” Left News (January 1941): 1608–9.Google Scholar

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43 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 63-4, 115-16. See also Orwell's comments on “The Freedom of the Press” (originally written as an introduction to Animal Farm, Times Literary Supplement 3680 [15 September 1972\: 1037–9)Google Scholar. The moral of this experience, Orwell stressed, was that “toughness is the price of survival,” which adequately summarizes a central element in the republican tradition. Bernard Crick is very useful on the meanings of the word “Nancy,” which Orwell often used abusively as a synonym for “soft” or “effeminate,” but which also had strong political connotations for him. See his edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 68.

44 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 40-1 (See Woodcock's, George comments in The Crystal Spirit, p. 217)Google Scholar; Manchester Evening News (9 December 1943): 2.Google Scholar

45 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 67-70.

46 “Will Freedom Die with Capitalism?” Left News, p. 1683.

47 Orwell's conception of some of the political effects of hedonism is also evident in his essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale.” Miller, whom Philip Rieff is precisely right to term “the real Mr. Warburton,” or epitome of the irresponsibility of hedonism for Orwell (“George Orwell and the Liberal Imagination,” Kenyan Review 16 [1954\: 65Google Scholar) takes the full force of Orwell's contempt at a time when taking sides politically seemed mandatory. See the Collected Essays, 1: 546–8Google Scholar. Robert Lee has seen a continuation of this characterization in the description of Benjamin's attitudes in Animal Farm (Orwell's Fiction, p. 124). On the development of the republican tradition generally in Britain see Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 462–552Google Scholar, and idem, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1917), pp. 80-103.

48 “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in Collected Essays, 3: 255, 257Google Scholar. Orwell continued this form of cultural analysis in the “Decline of the English Murder,” Collected Essays, 4: 124–8Google Scholar. Earlier essays of this type include “The Art of Donald McGill,” ibid., 2: 183-95, and “Boy's Weeklies,” ibid., 1: 505-40. In the first and last of these incipient Americanization is a central theme. On these essays see Coleman, John, “The Critic of Popular Culture,” in Gross, , The World of George Orwell, pp. 101–10Google Scholar, also Byrne, , “George Orwell and the American Character,” pp. 135–7Google Scholar, and Voorhees, , The Paradox of George Orwell, pp. 63–70Google Scholar. It goes without saying that Orwell also failed completely to account for the fact that such forms of culture had not led to far greater weakness in America itself.

49 Collected Essays, 4:48, 3:144, 126–7Google ScholarPubMed, and “The Christian Reformers,” Manchester Evening News (7 February 1946): 2Google Scholar. On Orwell and religion see Sandison, The Last Man in Europe, but also Beadle, Gordon, “George Orwell and the Death of God,” Colorado Quarterly 23 (1974): 51–63.Google Scholar

50 “Why Machiavellis of Today Fall Down,” Manchester Evening News (20 January 1944): 2Google Scholar; “How Can Civilization be Saved?” ibid. (19 October 1944): 2; “Conquer Nature or Care for it,” ibid. (25 January 1945): 2; Neil Wood cites J.B.S. Haldane as already in 1932 refusing to believe in either the Soviet or American ideals, claiming both would produce “the mechanization of life and the standardization of man” (The Inequality of Man, [London, 1932\, p. 227Google Scholar, quoted in Communism and the British Intellectuals [New York, 1959\, p. 105Google Scholar).

51 Collected Essays, 4: 102–6Google Scholar. See also the comments in ibid., 3: 61, on the “drug-like” qualities of the cinema and radio.

52 For this interpretation of Animal Farm see Voorhees, Richard, “George Orwell: Rebellion and Responsibility,” South Atlantic Quarterly 53 (1954): 558Google Scholar. This is distinct from the view that Nineteen Eighty-Four is, as George Woodcock put it, “first of all a satire on 1948” (The Crystal Spirit, pp. 172-3).

53 Rees, Richard, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London, 1961), pp. 87–8Google Scholar. The “huge bureaucratic machines” of “the modern state” refer in this sense to all states, not only to Stalinism. See Orwell's, comments in “Poetry and the Microphone,” Collected Essays, 2: 381.Google Scholar

54 Review of Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, 21 March 1940Google Scholar, Collected Essays, 2:29Google Scholar; Crick, , George Orwell, p. 468Google Scholar. On a visit to Germany in 1945 Orwell evidently took great pains to try to establish what life under National Socialism had been like for the average individual.

55 On this reading of Orwell see Rossi, John, “America's View of George Orwell,” Review of Politics 43 (1981): 572–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a modern example of it see Podhoretz, Norman, “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” Harper's (January 1983): 36Google Scholar. For commentary see Lange, Bernd-Peter, George Orwell: 1984 (Munich, 1982), pp. 7–26.Google Scholar

56 Orwell's, comments are in Collected Essays, 4: 564Google Scholar. Even fairly recently, however, it has been argued that Orwell was never a “socialist,” whatever he chose to call himself. For this view see Ingle, , “The Politics of George Orwell: A Reappraisal,” p. 31.Google Scholar

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60 Isaac Deutscher, “‘1984’—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” in idem, ed., Russia in Transition (New York, 1957), p. 238. See also Ashe, Geoffrey, “Second Thoughts on 1984,” The Month (November 1950): 289–90Google Scholar. The best response to Deutscher is still probably George Kateb's “The Road to 1984.”

61 See Woodcock, , The Crystal Spirit, pp. 60–1Google Scholar, Rieff, , “George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination,” p. 67Google Scholar, Hopkinson, Tom, George Orwell (London, 1953), p. 16Google Scholar, Lief, Ruth Ann, Homage to Oceania: The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell (Athens, Ohio, 1969), pp. 39–49Google Scholar, Maddison, Michael, “1984: A Burnhamite Fantasy?” Political Quarterly 32 (1961): 71–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brander, Laurence, George Orwell (London, 1954), pp. 191–3.Google Scholar

62 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 20, 60-1, 72, 122.Google ScholarPubMed

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64 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 62, 69-79.

65 Ibid., pp. 214, 155, 164.

66 Corrigan, Philip, “Hard Machines, Soft Messages,” in Chilton, Paul and Audrey, Crispin, eds., Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (London, 1983), p. 101Google Scholar. See also Simms, Valerie, “A Reconsideration of Orwell's 1984: The Moral Implications of Despair,” Ethics 84 (1973–1974): 300–1.Google Scholar

67 Collected Essays, 4: 106.Google ScholarPubMed

68 The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 90-1. The state, of course, produces pornography for the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four; but their pursuit of pleasure is also in part precisely what prevents them from becoming totalitarian as well.

69 Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 164. Orwell portrayed the potential political effects of a much higher level of consumption by writing that “In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away” (ibid., p. 154). For similar reasons as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, hedonism plays no major role in Animal Farm either: rations are too low for the animals to consume beyond their bare necessities. In the Collected Essays (2: 299), Orwell implies that the inter-war working classes would have been more fascist if they had had a greater variety of consumer goods available to them, which is in keeping with his general theory of the effects of consumerism.

70 Amongst Orwell's critics, David Kubal has characterized Julia as a “mindless sensualist” (Outside the Whale, p. 100), though without drawing out the implications this has for her role in the book. See also Rees, , George Orwell, p. 110.Google Scholar

71 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 108, 124-8. There is obviously some parallel here, too, with the character of Mollie in Animal Farm, who symbolizes the White Russians and despite the revolution remains addicted to sugar lumps and colored ribbons, eventually defecting back to the humans for this reason. See Animal Farm (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 17, 20, 41–2Google Scholar. Richard Rees has also interpreted Winston's breakdown under torture and his insistence that his persecutors “do it to Julia” as Orwell's belief that we must be ready for self-sacrifice, not egoism and hedonism if we are to maintain our self-respect (George Orwell, p. 110).

72 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 64, 170. 125-6, 75-8, 80, 144. Much the same role for memory is outlined in Animal Farm, p. 76.

73 See Woodcock, TheCrystal Spirit pp. 54–8.Google Scholar

74 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 38, 106.

75 Collected Essays, 4: 92–3.Google ScholarPubMed

76 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 96-104, especially 101-2.

77 Sandison, , The Last Man in Europe, pp. 9–11Google Scholar. See also Smyer, Richard, “1984: The Search for the Golden Country,” Arizona Quarterly 27 (1971): 46–7Google Scholar, as well as Orwell's praise for Shakespeare (against Tolstoy) for the humanistic fact that “he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life—which, it should be repeated, is not the same thing as wanting to have a good time and stay alive as long as possible” (Collected Essays, 4:345Google ScholarPubMed).

78 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 164-5.

79 The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 68-9. On Orwell and Burnham see Maddison, , “1984: A Burnhamite Fantasy?,” pp. 711–9Google Scholar, and Steinhoff, , The Road to 1984, pp. 43–54Google Scholar. It can be argued that the class of pigs generally in Animal Farm (aside from the leaders) are analogous to the managerial elite. See especially p. 110, where the pigs are described as expending “enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called ‘files,’ ‘reports,’ ‘minutes,’ and ‘memoranda.’”

80 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 17, 144, 167. See also Orwell's comments that “As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is the prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved. On the other hand, when men stop worshipping god they promptly start worshipping Man, with disastrous results. The humanist has to decide whether what is needed is re-education and a ‘change of heart,’ or whether the indispensable first step is the abolition of poverty” (The Observer, 22 July 1945, quoted in Atkins, John, George Orwell [London, 1971\, p. 27).Google Scholar

81 Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 155-60: “‘World Affairs,’ 1945,” Junior 1 (1945): 79–88.Google Scholar

82 Hence the dangers of merely calling “conservative” such values as Orwell's “love of nature,” as Crick has done (George Orwell, p. 19). On the coincidence of Orwell's interests and environmentalist concerns see in particular Strasser, Johanno, “1984: Decade of the Experts?” in Howe, , 1984 Revisited, pp. 149–65Google Scholar. Orwell's wartime comments on forms of nature appreciation are interesting in this regard: “There is no question that a love of what is loosely called ‘nature’—a kingfisher flashing down a stream, a bullfinch's mossy nest, the caddisflies in the ditch—is very widespread in England, cutting across age-groups and even class distinctions, and attaining in some people an almost mystical intensity. Whether it is a healthy symptom is another matter. It arises partly from the small size, equable climate, and varied scenery of England, but it is also probably bound up with the decay of English agriculture. Real rustics are not conscious of being picturesque, they do not construct bird sanctuaries, they are uninterested in any plant or animal that does not affect them directly. In many languages all the smaller birds are called the same name. Even in England a genuine farm labourer usually thinks that a frog and a toad are the same thing, and nearly always believes that all snakes are poisonous and that they sting with their tongues. The fact is that those who really have to deal with nature have no cause to be in love with it. On the East Anglian coast the older cottages for the fisherman are built with their backs to the sea. The sea is simply an enemy from the fisherman's point of view” (“Countryman's World,” Manchester Evening News [20 March 1944\: 2Google Scholar). Once again Orwell's views defy easy classification, though they certainly help us to see that at least here his own idea of nature was not an overly romanticized one.