Essayist George Orwell

By: Bernard Crick
Translated by: Granit Zela

American critic Irving Howe has called Orwell "the greatest English essayist since William Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr. Samuel Johnson. A preface therefore seemed necessary to this excellent selection of Orwell's most important essays, well chosen among many short ones, if only to show that they are not merely pleasant appendages to his original books, but they may well constitute the ultimate test of greatness as a writer. It is imperative that Orwell be read, at the very least, as an inherent personality of this once famous and particularly English writing tradition, even if behind all English writers lurks the contemplative yearning of the benevolent figure of the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne and its first major English translator, John Florio. Two books of his essays were also published during Orwell's lifetime, although it was easier to publish essays then than it is now. Arguing the greater importance of the essays may create a certain sense of guilt and confusion among many who believe that Orwell is a great personality, but cannot honestly say that any of the books live up to his fame.[1]

Kipling posed the question: "What is there to know about England that only England knows?" Lecturing to English teachers in Czechoslovakia and Poland shortly after the fall of Soviet power, I was prompted to ask, "What do they know about Orwell when they only know Animal farm and 1984?” These two books, satires of very different kinds, though completely consistent in meaning, were almost the only ones that gave Orwell international fame. Both were immediately translated into many languages, and illegal translations and copies circulated in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. Orwell even wrote a foreword to a Ukrainian translation of Animal farm in 1946 explaining the purpose of the work and who he was.

Moreover, thanks to the name as a model of simple English style, Animal farm it soon became the textbook set for the Cambridge Advanced Level English Language Proficiency exam and was openly used in foreign language schools in South American dictatorships and across Africa. The censors read the text as if the pigs represented Russian Communism and nothing else, but the students in Chile had no doubt that their own General Pinochet was a big pig, and quietly even in Paraguay there were grim similarities between "Napoleon" and the general Stroessner.

An Arab dissident in Zanzibar, jailed by President Julius Najrir in the 1960s, spent part of his time in prison translating animal farm, but when he was released he discovered that a translated version already existed on Najrir's order. Satire can mean different things to different people.

Even readers in Eastern Europe and Russia thought that the satires were simply aimed at communism. The books, without a doubt, aimed primarily at communism, but not only at communism; as with great satires, the targets were broader and multiple. Mind you, te 1984 Julia's work in the Ministry of Truth: she worked with a machine that created pornographic novels to vilify (corrupt) and humiliate the proletarians to whom the Party secretly gave, for the same grand purpose, alcohol, drugs, "films that get drunk with sex" and "useless newspapers that contain almost nothing but sports, crime and astrology". This was not the behavior of either Stalin's or Hider's parties: they propagated, recruited and mobilized the masses. The target of the flogging is surely closer to home: Julia's work is meant to be a savage Suiftian satire of the British press and its readers (even the most depraved of debauches). Orwell mocked the power-hungry wherever they were; The Communist Party was just the worst case. In any case, it is in the nature of fictional satire that the targets become broader over time, like loose clothing that can be adjusted as needed. Gulliver's Travels of Swift have transcended the politics of his age: we laugh at the little Lilliputian rulers who think they are great and mighty, and curse the clumsy giants of Brobdingnag who do not notice the little people they trample on.

If my friends in Eastern Europe had known Orwell as an essayist, they would have known a brooding, humorous, mockingly provocative man, and they would have read him 1984 less in the literal sense, and more as satire than prophecy, they would have seen it as part of what it is - (Brecht said it, or am I making it up? Orwell himself said it) "the laughter of to free men," a powerful weapon against tyranny and oppression, whether domestic or political. But to demote Orwell from the position of the prophet to that of the essayist, or perhaps to raise him from the position of the second-rate novelist to that of the great essayist, is to face some difficulties in reading essays in general and essays of his in particular. A price must be paid for Eric Blair's literary strategy to create (or perhaps, more accurately, to allow him to develop) George Orwell's appropriated character, the plain, open, honest man—a friend not of "the people." , certainly not of the "proletariat", but of the "ordinary man". Orwell's much-vaunted simple style has its dangers. One can tell lies or spin stories with monosyllabic words and simple sentences.

Orwell chose to write in a simple style because he felt it was the best way to reach the common reader and convey the truths. He saw the common reader as the idealized "common man" of Thomas Jefferson and Immanuel Kant (even with the determination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau): a creature of sound judgment and integrity who is not servile and needs no servants, is able to do most things with his own hands, and can easily acquire all kinds of formal learning. The common man was the best hope for civilization, not the proletarian man, the aristocracy or the elite of any kind. Orwell tried to follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens and HG Wells by writing, for both political and literary reasons, about those whose only university had a public library. His chosen audience was not the highly educated middle class or the intellectual strata, but the lower middle class that had only had a secondary education, along with the self-educated working class.

Although thoroughly familiar with modernist and even futuristic literature (as shown by his accurate interpretation of and sympathy for Joyce's Ulysses, Tropic of Capricorn of Henry Miller and Ne of Yevgeny Zamyatin, he deliberately avoided, in all but one of his pre-war novels, those tools of modernism which, according to his way of thinking, had begun to make the modern novel unspeakable to the common man - books of intellectuals for intellectuals, who could not be understood without a university degree in English Literature. The only exception was the early, unsatisfactory experiment, Clergyman's daughter, where a different style and point of view was intended in each chapter. Judging by the sales of the pre-war novels (never more than three or four thousand copies), Orwell did not reach the common man at all - without the fame and name they gave him Animal farm and 1984.

Critical thought in Britain is increasingly valuing Orwell as an essayist, if we use the term in a wider sense to include critical writing, long book reviews, newspaper articles, short polemics, traditional essays, and the various fragments, serious and comic in Road to Wigan Pier and The lion and the unicorn (which can be taken as an essay but also as a short controversial book or as a long pamphlet). Consider this famous excerpt from the essay Why do I write? (1946):

What I've wanted to do most over the past ten years has been to turn political writing into an art. The starting point for me is always a sense of loyalty, the sense that there is injustice. When I sit down to write a book I don't say to myself: "I will create a work of art". I write it because there are some frauds that I want to highlight, because I want to draw attention to some facts, and my initial concern is to be heard. I wouldn't be able to do the work of writing a book, even a long magazine article, if it wasn't also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to look at my work will notice that even when it is pure propaganda, it contains a lot of what a full-time politician would call irrelevant. I am not able and I do not want to completely abandon the world view that I created in childhood. As long as I am alive and well I shall continue to have a strong sense of prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in whole things and bits of unnecessary knowledge. It is not worth suppressing this side of yourself. My task is to find the commonality between my likes and dislikes rooted in the essentially public, non-individual actions that this age dictates to us all.[2]

The essay form suited Orwell well, which he slowly came to understand. But it can be confusing to decide Why do I write? out of temporal order (after four volumes of Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell of 1968) because at the time it was written, it was a mid-career afterthought, not a premeditated manifesto or solemn statement of purpose as a writer. Moreover, it arose simply in response to an invitation to participate in a symposium entitled Why do I write? in Gangrel, a short-lived magazine with a small circulation. The author was still searching for the path he should follow and had to take advantage of almost every opportunity to get published, some of which were fortunate, most of which were the exploitation of momentary interests. One should not exaggerate with interpretations of the chosen theme, nor in the parts left without being included.

Essay[3] it is a special, even very special form of writing. It can be moral, didactic and serious, even propagandistic up to a certain point; but it is not preachy, there is more conversational discourse and elasticity; first of all, it leaves the reader with some uncertainty about what will be said next, how the discussion argument will develop; and the argument is not conclusive or logically structured – an essay quite normally raises an issue to get the reader's attention, to ponder and speculate, but not to make a speech or to be dogmatic; first of all, it should appear personal and non-objective, create the feeling of listening to a varied conversation with a strange but interesting individual. The essay may refer to facts, evidence, and authorities, but only in passing; it is not like a legal defense, an argument ordered and presented logically, step by step. The essay speculates and researches as if the author is thinking out loud; it should not seem overly contrived, but rather a set of loose associations created by a sensitive and rich mind.

Orwell's desire "to turn political writing into art" led to a bold but carefully worded citation for the 1946 publication of his critical essays (which must have been approved by Orwell, always suspicious of publishers for presenting misleading): In these essays, Orwell applies a new method of critical analysis to writers as diverse as Dickens, Kipling, Frank Richards and PG Udëhaus. The essays are not political tracts, the main emphasis is literary, but they begin with the assumption that every writer is in some sense a propagandist, and that subject matter, imagery, and even stylistic tricks are ultimately driven by the "message" the writer is trying to convey. forwarded. This is the method that Orwell applies in essays on Dickens, Welles, Kipling, James, Dahl and Koestler. But of special interest are the parts dealing with school stories in "Gem" and "Magnet", with comic postcards by the sea, with parodies and comedies by PG Udehaus and gangster stories by James Hadley Chase. In each of these Orwell shows that what appears to be entertainment has a definable worldview and even a conscious purpose, and that a book that has no literary value can have the greatest meaningful significance as a narrative. These essays are among the few attempts that have been made in England to seriously study mass art.

The real polemicist or propagandist knows exactly what he wants to say, but a born essayist like Orwell, even when he writes a polemic, he says, as he himself pointed out, about many secondary things. He stops to explore side issues, indulges in the play of imagination and the act of writing to be either a credible polemicist or a completely objective sociologist.

Perhaps, writing and thinking in a more independent and fun way than paid or commissioned writers, the real essayist or writer may in some cases be a more effective polemicist, but he cannot be reliable. Orwell said that: "a writer cannot be a member FAITHFUL of a political party". I have italicized loyal because at the time he wrote it he was a member of a political party, albeit a fairly small one – the Independent Labor Party (PPP).[4] Indeed, he became the 'conscience of the left', someone who enjoyed rubbing the cat's fur back - much like football fans say to their side: 'What's the point of this game. Totally useless!" For example, when he wrote during the war a column in Opinion (a leftist, more or less pro-Labour magazine), he presented his readers with a cunningly set trap. One week he devoted almost the entire column to the question of what was the best price for a rose that cost sixpence in the shops. Letters from angry readers flooded the paper with the usual threats to cancel the paper's non-existent reconciliations: "While our glorious Russian allies fight to the death in Stalingrad, how dare you..."; "We can't wait to read these"; "Trivial things"; "It is not serious". Orwell replied that his idea of ​​a just, egalitarian, classless society was not one in which only big issues were discussed, but one which had time to sit back and reflect, to enjoy nature and free time; such ideals should not be forgotten, especially in times of mortal crisis: they were part of his idea of ​​a classless society. And he kept returning to his subject, annoying or teasing the reader: "I'd better not go on too much with this subject, because the last time I mentioned flowers in this column, an indignant lady wrote to me to say that flowers they are bourgeois". "Some Thoughts on Common Toads" elaborates this serious subject more fully, in a simple style and comic tone.

How many times have I stood watching toads mating, or two rabbits boxing in a field of wet corn, and it made me think of all the important people who would rob me of the pleasure of enjoying these sights if they would they could do it. But, luckily, they can't. As long as you're not sick, hungry, scared, or depressed in a prison or a rest camp, spring is still spring...the earth still revolves around the sun, and neither dictators nor bureaucrats, even though they support these phenomena, they are unable to prevent them.

Here Orwell plays a great old Central European cultural role, the "wise lolon," or if not always that, at least the Chaplin-like little fellow who turns the pomposity of statesmen and intellectuals upside down. And he implies, at a deeper level, that human life must strike a balance between material progress (which he values ​​as the basis of all hope for the poor and dispossessed) and the preservation of nature. Today we would see a little more green in his red.

Orwell's two most famous books, although different in structure, are written in a simple style, sometimes almost monotonous narrative, in simple words. But this does not prevent the fundamentally different readings that can be made of them. Is it Animal farm a lament for the Revolution that failed, for the betrayal that pigs did to other animals, or a sad parable that all revolutions will fail because there is too much of the pig inside us all? There is no doubt about the author's intention, but reasonable people have also read it in the second sense. Fellow British Socialist Democrats (Orwell always capitalized these two terms next to each other) would like to label such a reading as "American Cold War warriors," which is more than true. , but this bleak interpretation must have seemed the only one possible to readers under communist oppression in Eastern Europe and Russia.

1984 there is, too, only apparent simplicity: the text has been read in a surprising number of different ways. Some, for example, read it as Orwell's prophecy of what he thought was likely to happen in the Western world, but others saw it as a satire pointing out the pitfalls, even the impossibility, of any kind of total power. Just consider the famous passage at the end:

He stared at the huge face. It took him forty years to understand what kind of smile was hidden behind the black moustache. Oh, unnecessary cruel misunderstanding! Oh, headless, stubborn ear, away from the beloved bosom! Two gin-flavored tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was okay, everything was okay, the battle was over. He was upset about himself. He loved Big Brother.

Many serious critics have read this passage as a terrible black pessimism: Everyone is defeated by the totalitarian state, without even being killed by it, but being brainwashed to love it. Orwell becomes an English Kafka or a sane Nietzsche. But I see more the magnified provocation of the writer Enthëni Bërgësi, who called it "a comic novel".[5] We often overlook the fact that darkness contains much of what the Germans call from long experience "Galgenhumor," "gallows humor," or what we now call a whole literary method, "black humor." 1984 there are parts with the bitter, mocking tone of some of Orwell's major essays—such as the one on pornography and violence, Benefiting the Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali.

Consider the language of this "last" passage more closely. It is either excessively grotesquely written or written without any writing skills, or it remains all-out satire. Why was it necessary to use the sudden transition in the parody of popular and romantic novels: "Oh cruel... O desolate head?" Why "gin-flavored tears" do not flow on the dignified face, but on the comical "nose", moreover on its "side"? "Self-impression" has no totalitarian resonance, but was a common phrase of British tribunes, street evangelists and anti-liquor reformers (a point unfortunately difficult for most translators to grasp): it was that kind of "war ”, not Kampfi class or race. I read the part where it says that the Party can break Winston Smith, but it cannot remake him in any heroic image, but only as a miserable, beaten, frightened drunk, it can neither make him a committed proletarian nor pure Aryan. And note that it is not "the last fragment", as is often said in a somber tone. After "END" comes "Appendix". I suspect that the capitalized "END" is another part of "Galgenhumor" because it does not appear in any other book by the same publisher in this period, but usually appears only in popular novels and at the end of Hollywood films - apparently in case the reader or viewer mistakenly confuses them with each other. The appendix, "Principles of Relanguage," is the real conclusion, and says that because it is "slow and difficult work," the final translation into Relanguage of "Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and a few others" ( Orwell's favourites) had to be postponed until "as late as 2050". This year, next year, sometime, never.

If we read the book as dark pessimism (notably evident in the torture scenes and the image of the future as "a boot on a man's face - forever"), then this Appendix will have to be ignored or become an afterthought. incapable of the nature of the language, which the author somehow could not process in the text properly. But if we see the book as satire, specifically as Suifian satire, then the "Appendix" becomes part of the text and shows us that the author believes that language cannot be controlled by the state or the academy (it was of popular or colloquial discourse and not of the school structuralist linguistics, whether he knew it or not). This is consistent with Orwell's views on language and literature expressed in several essays, Propaganda and popular speech (1944) and more fully in the excellent essay Politics and the English language (1946), although the picture is admittedly murkier in the essay The obstruction of literature (1946), where he seems to admit the possibility (but perhaps only as a rhetorical warning) of total thought control and the destruction of imaginative literature.

But now I have entered deep waters, especially as a former political philosopher trying to speak to, among others (I hope), teachers, students, and critics of English. I know that a text is a text, the author's intentions are not always fulfilled in the creative act of writing, and that all texts can be read differently in different contexts (especially political ones), and nowadays they can be broken down (deconstructed ) according to imagination and desire. Therefore, I should not take my interpretations too far, or not at all. The only thing I have to argue is that simple style can be ambiguous and is no guarantee of truth. American critic Hugh Kenër, in an outstanding essay Simple style policy, has shown that the choice of a simple style is as much a rhetorical tool, both for Lincoln and for Orwell, as the choice to write or speak in Ciceronian or Churchillian prose.

High style implies authority and tradition, while simple style implies common sense and the common man, but these are relative and artificial terms. Kenri makes a simple but important philosophical argument and presents a clear literary example. The philosophical issue is very simple because we cannot find the truth of any sentence from syntax, grammar or semantics. "A camel sits on my shoulders telling me what to write" is a better sentence than "Meaning is an epistemological stop order of experience or context-determined interaction between authorial intent, contingently received text, and interpretation subjectively deconstructed', but cannot be true, whereas the bad sentence can be true (unless it is a mere tautology, perhaps even a mundane truth, but even then it can reasonably be interpreted as logically true – true by definition).

In the famous and sobering essay Politics and the English language Orwell implies, citing a lot of bad and biased political prose, that good simple prose is a defense against propaganda. But the essay could be read by propagandists as sensible advice to keep propaganda clear and simple: "Love your leader as yourself," "A cigarette relaxes you." In addition, Orwell's simple style is not suitable for all circumstances. Learning needs some special vocabularies, though much less often than academics think (when they mostly talk to each other). Have you ever tried (I use an Orwellian-like "stealth of attention" tactic) writing obituaries in a conversational Orwellian way? I do. But I won't do it again.

First-person writing must be seen as a literary device before we see it as a possible guarantee of authentic autobiography. Keneri cites the classic case of The Strange and Surprising Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The original title page read "Written by himself, and only a few months later, the astonished reading public realized that Daniel Defoe had mesmerized them without realizing that he was not really the eyewitness." An even more interesting case was Diary of the Plague Year by Defoe, written in the first person under his own name, full of facts, personal accounts, and even mortality statistics drawn from parish records and other sources. There's just one problem: Defoe's date of birth is uncertain, but the real Defoe, not the fictional first-person eyewitness, may have been only four or five years old at the time of the plague; yet the facts and figures, much used and checked by social historians and medical researchers, appear to be true and accurate. He may have interviewed the oldest survivors, searched diligently for the records, and then written the narrative as a fictional Defoe.

While working on my biography of Orwell, an old man pointed out to me that it was not Eric Blair who was beaten with a cane in front of the whole school for urinating on the bed, as Orwell wrote in Those, oh those joys, but someone else. Who knows? But if it was someone else, and if Orwell did not participate in the hanging of a man or the killing of an elephant, does it matter? Do we call him a discovered liar, or do we admire him even more as a skilled writer of narratives or "colorful sketches"?

The difference between an essay and a story is not absolute. Those, ah, those joys, A hanging and Killing an elephant could more naturally be included in an anthology of stories, and the first two, too, in an anthology of polemical writings. Both the narrative and the essay based on direct experience, or purporting to be based on experience, were typical forms of British writing in the 1930s.

Orwell was only one of those who used this literary convention or strategy. Killing the elephant (1936) was reprinted in 1940 in a collection of new writings by various authors published by Penguin, edited by John Lehman, in which ten of the fourteen essays were in the first person and raised the same problem as Orwell's—narrative or essay? Lerman does not use either term in the introduction, only "writing"; indeed, he calls it all "imaginative literature", but then also "a return to the realist tradition of Defoe and Fielding", with "an interest in the speed and power of narrative".

No one thinks that as it is narrated in Simple tales from the hills of Kipling the narrator was under the table when the colonel proposed to Mrs Hackerbay, HG Wales had not even seen the Martians on earth or dined with the time traveler returning from the terrifying future. These were mere literary creations. But Orwell's development of the literary persona of the simple, open and honest man was so successful that he brought the problem of criticism to himself. He had done some, perhaps most, of the things he wrote about in the first person. But if you establish authority over first-person narrative and over honesty, the common reader may admire what he reads more for its truth than for its art, admires the honesty of the man more than the writing; thus any part of the narrative or story can be made to feel untrue (it is likely that Orwell was not present during a hanging in Burma or in a hospital in Paris for as long as he implies), both the essay, the story , the sketch or the article (whatever it may be) and the man is belittled or his merits diminished. And literary critics may underestimate both his imaginative, creative power and his critical skill.

In a very original essay, Politics versus Literature: Exploring Gulliver's Travels, Orwell confronted (as most scholars and critics had not) the moral grandeur of Jonathan Swift, the depth of his hatred and disgust for humanity, but was nevertheless able to acknowledge and describe the traits of his genius . The Swift possessed no ordinary wisdom, but a terrible power of vision, the ability to pick out a single hidden truth and then magnify and distort it. The lifespan of Gulliver's Travels shows that if the strength of faith is behind it, a worldview that passes the test of common sense is enough to create a great work of art.

Orwell's seminal essay Charles Dickens written without using any formal literary theory or academic discourse (he would have said "slang") and at a time when Dickens was looked down upon by almost all serious critics except the nervous F. R. Leavis, with the prevailing proportions of a the highly prolific popular novelist of the Victorian period. He began the rehabilitation of Dickens as one of the great English novelists. Orwell's feeling for Dickens is so strong that the physical and psychological portrait in the closing paragraph is often taken as an unconscious self-portrait. Kipling's position, too, was at its lowest when Orwell wrote the essay Rudyard Kipling, but began to separate the alum from the sugar in Kipling's extremely mixed achievements.

In this essay, Orwell coined the phrase "bad, good poetry," which gives us a way to evaluate mass literature as good or bad in its own right. This enabled Orwell to create original essays which paved the way for a sociology of literature far more tolerant and open than the Marxist interpretation. Orwell never denied the second-hand nature of much of this matter but he, too, could condemn the political morality of Yeats, Pound and even Eliot while acknowledging their genius.

And in In defense of PG Wodehouse he sees him, so good of his kind, as a naive idiot, not a Nazi sympathizer. But the defender of Dickens and Kipling against the scorn of intellectuals and modernists was able to himself, to Inside the whale, to present a brilliant assessment of Henry Miller's surrealism, while being extremely critical (in a somewhat over-the-top essay with major digressions) of the social irresponsibility of Miller and others. He aims at the very god of the common man in literature, more precisely at Wales, Hitler and the State of the World, Orwell accuses Welles of scientific rationalism for failing to take Hitler seriously, underestimating his threat and ability to seduce a crowd.

The people who say that Hitler is the Antichrist, or the opposite, the Holy Spirit, are closer to an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten terrible years have seen him simply as a character in a comic opera, not worth dealing with seriously. All that this idea reflects is the social position of English life. But before one can say he bit the hand that fed him, in the penultimate paragraph he delivers the most beautiful and empathetic lecture on early Wales, full of hearty humour, modeling – as the essay does – different registers ranging from irony, to almost sarcastic levels, the anger he displays in the introduction.

Many of Orwell's sophisticated friends in his later glory days treated him as a naïve and amateurish writer, to be appreciated for his simple honesty and truthfulness rather than his art. Even his second wife, Sonia, highly intelligent and with a literary background that well guarded his authority, told me that he was like the painter Stanley Spencer, which prompted me to note that the naïve visionary had been a prize-winning student at the "School of Slade's Art". And once she shouted at me over lunch, irritated by such relentless pedantry, "But of course he killed a dirty elephant, as long as he said so, didn't he?" Orwell's other biographer, Mjakell Shelden, agrees with him. He has no doubt that Killing the elephant it's autobiography, just like All about the outline, A hanging mean they rely on real experiences. It is a shocking work whose emotional power comes from the slow but steady accumulation of details." But there are many "shocking" stories that we know to be fiction: knowing they are real is part of what makes them "shocking". Hugh Kenner is right: the truth of a statement cannot be deduced from syntax.

Orwell himself seemed to believe that it is harder to lie in short sentences than in long ones, but like many others he confused meaning with truth. Thus, we must be careful not just from Odysseus with flowery words, but also from the man who speaks clearly. I have met politicians who pretend to be tight-lipped and ordinary and who try to "talk bad". Lincoln once remarked that his image as "Honest Abraham" is very useful to Abraham Lincoln, and yet Lincoln was, like Orwell, an extremely honest man. Like Kenner, I do not want to contradict Orwell; rather, I would like to shift the focus from his character to his writing, and present him as a great essayist, rather than the author of two important satires and a few secondary novels that are not read simply because of the fame they have brought. two books and the pleasure that his essays give.

We can endlessly discuss whether Killing the elephant and A hanging they should be classified as essays or as stories, but what we cannot do is to use them without approaching them critically, as autobiographies just because they seem authentic. Because part of the skill of the essayist, as well as of the writer who uses the first person narrative, is not simply to create the famous "momentary illusion of reality", but also an abiding uncertainty as to whether what we are reading is based on fact or it is fiction. A good essay is speculative and open-ended: the reader is engaged in a lively conversation, and even when it is debated, it is not treated in a didactic manner or as a heated polemic. The common man does not accept being forced upon him and likewise not showing him that you understand more so he must believe you, he sees this as a sign of frivolity and will seek a serious examination from someone else more reliable and less complicated. I have met many non-university readers of Orwell (it is hard to think of any other serious author who is still so widely read by the general reader in English-speaking countries) who are as annoyed as Sonia at having the literal truth about anything that he was saying. I can hear his harsh and bitter laugh.

Orwell could use satirical humor for serious purposes rather than clear moral arguments, in a way that is as appealing and understandable to the average reader, but always without offending the reader:

Sometimes you get the impression that the words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw you to them with magnetic force like juice drinkers, nudists, sex maniacs, Quakers, charlatans, pacifists and feminists in England...

Te Road to Wigan Pier he mocks those who think they can remove class differences as easily as going to "summer school" where the proletarian and the penitent bourgeois are supposed to embrace each other and be brothers forever. Oh yes, there can be mixing on equal terms “like the animals in one of those Happy Family cages [at a fair] where a dog, a cat, two skunks, a rabbit and three canaries keep a truce while the eye of the director of the show watches over them". Orwell was a socialist, but mind you, of a peculiarly English kind, and he strongly believed that efforts should be made to eradicate class differences.

It is this kind of enlightening, sad and wise humor that readers of his weekly column in Opinion during the war, or so they expected, as he improved the mechanics of the polemics, changing tone and pace with the skill of a good essayist. This image of Orwell is very different from the "Orwellian" image of 1984-s. The lighter tone of Animal farm it is more typical of his best writings and more "Orwellian": the lover of nature and small and strange things; the humanist, the misogynist, and the humanist who makes fun of his own pessimism.

Orwell told readers to Opinion that he would make the worst possible prediction for 1946: it would be as bad as 1945. His essays often present obscure paradoxes to provoke thought. But while GK Chestertoni did this fantastically with great literary style, Orwell's voice is conversational. He could even reflect on the nature of humor without overdoing it, because he saw comedy and tragedy always close to human life. In the essay Art by Donald McGill, analyzing the moral depths of vulgar, comic folk postcards, he says that we all have in mind both Don Quixote, the hero and saint, and Sancho Pancho, the "unofficial self", the voice of the belly protesting against the soul".

A dirty joke is of course not a serious attack on morality, but it is a kind of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were different. So it is with all other kinds of jokes, which always whip up fear, laziness, dishonesty, or some other quality that society cannot afford to support. Society must always demand a little more from human beings than it will actually receive. It must require discipline and real sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes and be faithful to their wives, it must make men think it is glorious to die on the battlefield and women get exhausted by giving birth. All of what one might call official literature rests on such conjectures.

I have never read the pre-battle declarations of generals, the speeches of Fuehrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, the national anthems, the tracts of the anti-alcohol movement, the papal encyclicals, the sermons against gambling and the use of anti-drugs. pregnancy, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of cheers from millions of ordinary people to whom these lofty sentiments mean nothing. However, strong feelings always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more from their followers than those who offer safety and a good time… But the other element in man, the lazy, the coward, the debt-ridden adulterer within us all cannot be completely suppressed and needs to be heard from time to time.

To return for a moment to the matter of the first-person fictional self: would it really matter if the same great chorus of ordinary people shouted, “Go away, Governor, you've never read any of these declarations and other things of the generals before the battle in your life". Because this passage is a good example where Orwell uses the comic to be profound and it shows the serious nature of the comic. He argues an important theoretical issue in plain language, as in the passage quoted earlier, when discussing the difficulties of overcoming barriers between social classes, he avoids theoretical discourse and makes the observation seem casual, being deep and morally disturbing that the classes actually meet as equals only in "summer schools". When I have read this passage to mixed audiences, it evokes pleasure, provokes laughter of acceptance, but the academic audience resists, sees it as contemptuous, patriotic, romantic and not "theorized".

Orwell's use of simple style also reveals something surprising to the most logical writer: an almost metaphysical power for the value of ordinary things, a kind of secular compassion. Although he was an agnostic, his language is steeped in the images of the Protestant religion, with the feeling that everything in the world is part of God's purposeful creation and his "wonderful providence". Take for example George Bowling, the plump, sweat-covered itinerant merchant in his immediate pre-war novel, Air outlet. Bowling, an ordinary lower-middle-class man if ever there was one, is bored to death with his boring wife, boring job, bad children, and is nostalgic, almost consumed with nostalgia; so he disappears for a few days – not to live with another woman, as Hilda suspects, but to recall childhood episodes and reminisce. He pondered:

I have always had a special feeling for fishing. You may think it silly, no doubt, but I have some kind of desire to go fishing even now, when I am fat, forty-five years old, with two children and a house in the suburbs. Why? Because in a way I am sentimental about my childhood—not about my particular childhood, but about the civilization in which I grew up and which is now, I think, coming to an end. And fishing is typical of that civilization. As soon as you think of fishing, you think of things that don't belong in the modern world. The very idea of ​​sitting all day under a willow tree by a still water spot—and the possibility of finding a still water spot to sit by—belongs to the time before the war, before radio, before airplanes, before Hitler. There is a kind of peace even in the English names of freshwater fish. Beetle, pilot fish, cod, sole, fish whisker, carp, cironka, mullet, muskrat, nijle. They are strong names. The people who gave these names had never heard of machine guns, lived in fear of being robbed, nor spent their time sipping aspirin, going to the movies, and thinking about how to escape the risk of being forcibly taken to a concentration camp. .

I wonder if anyone goes fishing these days? There are no fish left to be caught anywhere within a hundred and fifty kilometers of London… who fishes any more in mill streams, ditches or large ponds? Where are the English freshwater fish now? When I was a child there were fish in every pond and stream. Now all the ponds have been drained, and when the streams are not poisoned with chemicals from factories, they are full of rusty cans and motorcycle tires.

Note that this approach is similar to it Some thoughts on the common toad. And leaving aside the characteristically comic, bitter excess of the last paragraph, think about the feeling that "strong" names evoke, and recall the passage from Why do I write? where he talks about his love of "the surface of the earth" and "the pleasure of solid objects and scraps of useless information". Although it was secular, it seems that all things in nature, even impossible things have spiritual value and should be loved, respected; does it imply a proper, almost sacred order between man and nature that factories, aspirin, and bombs threaten and can destroy if the proto-ecologist is not checked?

A strikingly similar passage occurs in the work of another British secular writer HG Wells. It is not easy to escape Protestantism, certainly not simply by not believing in God. Wales becomes Pietist[6] not only to fish, but to beer bottles. In the Welsh novel The story of Mr. Poli, poor old Paul has run away from the boring wife and the boring store, burned it down in fact (no writer is a role model for feminists or free marketers) and run off to do some "research", of course.

The closer he got to the place, the more he liked it. The windows on the ground floor were long and low and had pleasant red curtains. The green tables outside were pleasantly filled with memories of drinks of yesteryear…

Leaning against the wall was a broken oar, two boat hooks, and the dirty, frayed red cushions of a pleasure boat. One climbed three flights of glass steps to the glass-paneled door and squinted to see a wide, low room with a bar and a beer machine, behind which were many bright and useful bottles in front of mirrors. , large and small tin containers and inverted bottles tied upside down on brass wire, with caps replaced by beers, a white porcelain keg labeled "Shkurre" and cigar and cigarette boxes, and several beer kettles as sculptures, a beautifully framed and glazed hunting scene showing the most elegant people taking wine, and … satirical verses against cursing and credit-seeking, three very red, blood-red apples, and a round clock.

But these were merely the background to what was pleasing in the spectacle, which was the fattest woman Mr. Poli had ever seen…[7] But these things are certainly not "simple background"; for Wales they were as much a part of the "rich fabric of life" as the chubby woman. And don't forget that, for Orwell, "the proletarians had remained human." They were not hardened within themselves." What mattered to them, Winston Smith realized, were not the great questions raised by the Party, but "individual relationships, and an utterly powerless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, can to have value in themselves—much like the piece of coral from a bygone era that Winston finds in the antique shop. Do we call all this a kind of logical mysticism, or common sense mysticism? Life is okay, even good, whether we look at it with the simple wonder of a child exploring everything as new, or with the great delight in the mundane of a stoic man who knows he will soon die.

Orwell's simple style and great ability to use the essay as a mode of expression are part of his cult of the ordinary, his belief in common sense and the common man. I find this very attractive. Of course, one must point out and choose what one praises or takes for granted. But an account of how this is done can only be a treatise on phenomenology in the German or French manner, not an English essay.

When considering what Orwell finds mundane or important, it must be remembered that the evidence for his priorities at any given moment must be incomplete. Only after the success of Animal farm he could choose what to do, reject some job offers and accept others, or decide to write without having to go back to writing, like any somewhat obscure writer, without worrying about what magazines were and what their editors preferred and without having to adapt the writing to the form and political color of a particular periodical.

Like the good Aristotelian master of rhetoric, the essayist must know the subject and have something to say about it, but must also know the audience and how to hold their attention. Unlike a modern journalistic essayist such as Neil Echërstën, Son French, Christopher Hitchens, Bernard Levin or Hugo Young (all clearly influenced by him), Orwell cannot be mysterious or enigmatic about every major issue of his time regardless of political engagement, despite the fact that he wrote best, in the broadest sense, on political topics.

Partly he lacked the opportunity (for about two years his only regular column was in Opinion - which had a slightly larger circulation) and partly wanted to convey in his books and essays some humanist and democratic attitudes and views much more than to comment on events: the subject itself was almost irrelevant . In any case, the essayist who is a writer, who is still following his journey, has much more freedom than opportunity. Perhaps this is why so many of the best English essayists have come out of the shadows, coming even from poverty, which has made them, when they have reflected on ordinary life, so much more attractive and interesting to most of us today than the elaborate mannerisms of Joseph Edison, Richard Still, and the old magazine essayists Spectator. /Magazine "Academia/Telegrafia/

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[1] Until the 1964 publication of the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London), it was very difficult to get an overview of Orwell's essays, most of them long forgotten in journals. small ones that were not published before. (This compilation was also quite incomplete.) A few of them were published in Critical Essays (1946) and The Killing of the Elephant (1950), prepared while he was alive. Posthumously more essays were published in the collection England, Your England (1953) and many were included in the mistitled collection Collected Essays (1961). In many obituaries and posthumous reviews in the 1950s, writers and critics, without reading the body of his work, published influential analyzes that focused on the last two famous satires—as did much of the early scholarship on Orwell. , especially in the United States. Therefore, most opinions were cemented before the full range of essays could be read, so that the essays were taken as appendages to his main achievement rather than (as I suspect) his best work. (See Robert Klitzke, "Orwell and the Critics: An Inquiry into the Reception and Critical Debate of George Orwell's Political Works," Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1977.)

note: All notes are by George Orwell. All other notes included specifically for the Albanian reader are qualified as "Translator's Note".

[2] See my entry in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Penguin, 1982.

[3] I thank dr. Peter Marks from the University of Halle for this important and clear point. His thesis, Orwell's Essays (Edinburgh University, 1982), is the only critical work on the subject and deserves a wide readership.

[4] The PPP (Independent Labor Party) was a small formation of left-wing "English Socialists", a union or alliance (less common in Scotland or Wales) of non-Marxist secular moralists, Christian Socialists and independent Marxists (with with Trotsky on international relations), united by egalitarianism and libertarianism, and by a common hatred of the Communist Party. See "Orwell and English Socialism" in my Essays on Politics and Literature (1989).

[5] Anthony Burgess, 1985, Hutchinson, London, 1978, p. 20.

[6] 17th century movement for the revival of piety in the Lutheran Church.

[7] HG Wells, The Story of Mr. Polly, Chapter IX, Part 3.