George Orwell (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

225 Pages·2007·1.86 MB·English

Bloom's Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
GEORGE ORWELL
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: George Orwell—Updated Edition
Copyright © 2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For more information contact:
Chelsea House
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ISBN-10: 0-7910-9428-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9248-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
George Orwell / Harold Bloom, editor. -- Updated ed.
p. cm. -- (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9428-6 (hardcover)
1. Orwell, George, 1903-1950--Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title.
II. Series.
PR6029.R8Z638 2007
828’.91209--dc22 2006031145
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Autobiography:
An Analysis of ‘Shooting an Elephant’ 9
Adriaan M. de Lange
Versions of Realism 23
Roger Fowler
The Underground Man as Big Brother:
Dostoevsky’s and Orwell’s Anti-Utopia 49
Adrian Wanner
Orwell’s Heart of Darkness:
The Road to Wigan Pier as Modernist Anthropology 63
Patricia Rae
The Real George Orwell:
Dis-simulation in
Homage to Catalonia and Coming Up for Air 97
Antony Shuttleworth
Orwell’s Perversity:
An Approach to the Collected Essays 115
William E. Cain
vi Contents
George Orwell’s 1984 and Political Ideology 133
James M. Decker
The Dual Purpose of Animal Farm 145
Paul Kirschner
Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air 181
Annette Federico
Chronology 197
Contributors 199
Bibliography 201
Acknowledgments 204
Index 206
Editor’s Note
My Introduction, written in 1986, seems to me altogether accurate twenty
years later. Orwell was more a fabulist than a writer of novels, and essentially
always was a pamphleteer, who aspired to join an English tradition that
includes Defoe, Swift, Edmund Burke, Carlyle and Ruskin, among many
others.
As a prophet, Orwell achieved his apotheosis in 2004, when the United
States endorsed Karl Rove’s version of 1984: Dubya as Big Brother, War as
Peace, and mountains of Doublethink and Doublespeak in our Empire of
Oceania. I write in 2006, when our current fusion of plutocracy and theocracy
intensifies weekly.
Unfortunately, Orwell wrote Period Pieces, whose shelf life
momentarily may be prolonged, but doubtless will rub down and away as
the Age of Karl Rove wanes. In praise of Orwell, he was at heart a Catalan
Anarchist, personally heroic, and a moral essayist of authentic honesty and
integrity.
The actual essays in this volume present something close to Orwell’s full
range. Though there are useful critiques of 1984 and of Animal Farm here,
the reader is advised to seek out the Chelsea House volumes that concentrate
upon each of those political fables.
Adriaan M. de Lange analyzes the essay of “Shooting an Elephant,”
and finds in it Orwell’s characteristic rejection of imperialism, while Roger
Fowler surveys three versions of Orwellian “realism”: descriptive, naturalistic,
surrealistic.
vii
viii Editor’s Note
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is seen as the ancestor of Orwell’s Big
Brother by Adrian Wanner, after which Patricia Rae explores Orwell’s The
Road to Wigan Pier as a kind of progressive anthropology.
Antony Shuttleworth, questing for the “real” Orwell in Homage to
Catalonia and the novel Coming Up for Air, finds unintended limitations in
the writer’s truth-telling.
In an overview of the Collected Essays, William E. Cain makes the
surprising observation that Orwell’s freshness results from his stylistic
“perversity,” or writing against his own grain (as it were).
1984 is seen by James M. Decker as purely a warning and not an
ideological statement, while Paul Kirschner judges Animal Farm to be both a
literary parody and a social admonition.
In this volume’s final essay, Annette Federico praises the novel Coming
Up for Air as a vision of cheerful, ordinary human decency.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
There is an equivocal irony to reading, and writing about, George Orwell
in 1986. I have just reread 1984, Animal Farm, and many of the essays for
the first time in some years, and I find myself lost in an interplay of many
contending reactions, moral and aesthetic. Orwell, aesthetically considered,
is a far better essayist than a novelist. Lionel Trilling, reviewing 1984 in 1949,
praised the book, with a singular moral authority:
The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has
been directed toward teaching us to understand the economic
motive as the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in
the rational and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he
asks us to consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the
mind, in their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of
things far worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first
to raise the question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal
or radical grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for
a just society, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion.
This priority makes his book a momentous one.
The book remains momentous; perhaps it always will be so. But there
is nothing intrinsic to the book that will determine its future importance.
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