Five years before his death in 1950, he was, in the words of one of his biographers, D.J. Taylor, “still a faintly marginal figure”. He had published seven books, four of them novels, none of which put him in the front rank of novelists, two of which he had refused to have reprinted. He was acknowledged as a superb political essayist and bold literary critic, but his contemporary and friend Malcolm Muggeridge, first choice as his biographer, frankly considered him “no good as a novelist”. It was only with his last two books, “Animal Farm” and “1984” (published in 1945 and 1949), that Orwell transformed his reputation as a writer. These two books would change the way we think about our lives. he had categorically stated that everything he had written since his return from the Spanish civil war had democratic socialism at its very heart. It was possible to spot Orwellian scenarios on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Academy-award-winning film “The Lives of Others”—set in 1984—depicts the nightmare apparatus of the secret police in East Germany. (When its star, the late Ulrich Mühe, was asked how he researched the role, he replied: “I remembered.”) But the toxic fear of McCarthyism that runs through a film like George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” is every bit as Orwellian. The vision of the future Aldous Huxley had conjured up in “Brave New World”, of a society rendered passive by a surplus of comforts and distraction, seemed more prescient. In 1985, the cultural critic Neil Postman argued in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us while Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us. In 2002 J.G. Ballard, reviewing a biography of Huxley, said that “Brave New World” was “a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror…‘1984’ has never really arrived, but ‘Brave New World’ is around us everywhere.” He had gone to Spain to fight fascism, but had returned with a hatred of communism. The group he joined, the POUM, were separate from the pro-Soviet communists, and in the factional fighting that broke out in May 1937 the POUM were denounced and their members either went into hiding or were murdered. Orwell and his wife escaped back to England, but he was charged in his absence as a fascist. He saw his trial in Valencia as a by-product of the show trials taking place in Moscow.moreintelligentlife/content/features/robert-butler/orwells-world?page=full#_ Maggie WhiteheadRamnath Subbaraman
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 01:44:56 +0000
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