george orwell's achievements & leagacy - (1 mb pdf) - Arvind Gupta

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The Road from George
Orwell: His Achievement
and Legacy
Alberto Lázaro
Editor
PETER LANG
The Road from George Orwell:
His Achievement and Legacy
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Alberto Lázaro (ed.)
The Road from George Orwell:
His Achievement and Legacy
PETER LANG
Bern (cid:127) Berlin (cid:127) Bruxelles (cid:127) Frankfurt am Main (cid:127) New York (cid:127) Oxford (cid:127) Wien
Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
The road from George Orwell : his achievement and legacy / Alberto
Lázaro (ed.). – Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; Frankfurt am Main ; New York ;
Oxford ; Wien : Lang, 2001
ISBN 3-906766-79-9
British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great
Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA
Cover design: Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG
ISBN 3-906766-79-9
US-ISBN 0-8204-5337-4
© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2001
Jupiterstr. 15, Postfach, 3000 Bern 15, Switzerland
[email protected], www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the
permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Preface.............................................................................................7
Part I: Re-Evaluations
FERNANDO GALVÁN
The Road to Utopia, or On Orwell’s Idealism...........................15
CHRISTINE BERBERICH
A Revolutionary in Love with the 1900s:
Orwell in Defence of ‘Old England’...........................................33
MIQUEL BERGA
Orwell’s Catalonia Revisited:
Textual Strategies and the Eyewitness Account.........................53
ALBERTO LÁZARO
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia:
A Politically Incorrect Story........................................................71
ANA MOYA
George Orwell’s Exploration of Discourses of Power
in Burmese Days..............................................................................93
URMILA SESHAGIRI
Misogyny and Anti-Imperialism in George Orwell’s
Burmese Days................................................................................105
Part II: Orwell, History and Dystopia
ZOË FAIRBAIRNS
1984 Came and Went.................................................................123
BEATRIZ DOMÍNGUEZ GARCÍA
The Retelling of History Through Her Story...........................139
ELIZABETH RUSSELL
Looking Backwards and Forwards from Nineteen
Eighty-Four: Women Writing Men’s Worlds..............................157
SONIA VILLEGAS
‘History Is Not a Thing of the Past’:
The Theory and Practice of Historical Discourse
in Alasdair Gray’s A History Maker............................................179
JUAN FRANCISCO ELICES
The Satiric and Dystopic Legacy of George Orwell
in Robert Harris’s Fatherland......................................................199
BEN CLARKE
Orwell and the Evolution of Utopian Writing.........................225
Preface
Following a tradition that goes back to 1987, the Department of
English Philology at the University of Alcalá, Madrid, organised
the VIIIth Conference on English Literature in May 2000. On this
occasion, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of George Orwell’s
death, a wide range of papers on this significant and
controversial literary figure were presented. The main purpose
of the conference was to re-examine George Orwell’s work and
thought in the light of contemporary theoretical concerns, as
well as to discuss the mark he has left in British literature in the
second half of the twentieth century, particularly on political
satire and the development of dystopian fiction.
Fifty years after his death, George Orwell is generally
recognised as a leading exponent of twentieth-century English
prose and one of the most influential satiric writers whose
works have merited detailed scholarly attention. A wide range of
editions of his novels, essays, journalism and autobiographical
works are within the reach of the general reader, and his art has
been discussed by numerous critics and literature specialists
from many different approaches. There is no doubt that one of
the reasons for the lasting appeal of his work lies in the qualities
of its prose, as John Fowler suggests in The Language of George
Orwell (1995), an excellent study of the writer’s style. But it
seems to me that Orwell is recognised more as a political writer
than a master of style, although it cannot be denied that his
writing is of excellent quality. Regarding his politics, Orwell
seemingly managed to serve different Cold War political
ideologies simultaneously, as Alex Zwerdling suggests in his
analysis of the writer’s left-wing ideas entitled Orwell and the Left
(1974). Then, when the year 1984 came, critics celebrated
Orwell and discussed his dystopian ‘predictions,’ like Tom
Winnifrith and William Whitehead in 1984 and All’s Well?
8 Preface
(1984). Finally, in the closing years of the twentieth century
political issues continue to be at the very forefront of Orwell
criticism in such books as Paras Mani Singh’s George Orwell as a
Political Novelist (1987), Adriaan M. de Lange’s The Influence of
Political Bias in Selected Essays of George Orwell (1992) and Stephen
Ingle’s George Orwell: A Political Life (1993). Most of the papers
presented at the Orwell conference in Alcalá also testify to the
political controversy that his work has continued to arouse.
The present volume contains a selection of twelve of the
papers that were read during the conference. They have been
divided into two thematically arranged sections. While other
divisions suggested themselves, I settled on the present
organisation as best hinting at the central aim of the individual
pieces. The essays of the first section entitled ‘Re-Evaluations’
provide new insights and fresh ways of viewing familiar issues
such as Orwell’s controversial political thought, the
representation of race and gender in his early fiction, the
narrative strategies of his documentary prose and the impact of
censorship on his writing. The second group of essays explores
the legacy of Orwell’s dystopian fiction in later novelists like
Zoë Fairbairns, Alasdair Gray, Robert Harris, Julian Barnes and
Ben Elton, as well as issues of history and language that are
raised in Orwell’s writings and dominate twentieth-century
fiction.
In the opening piece, ‘The Road to Utopia, or On
Orwell’s Idealism,’ Fernando Galván offers a key to
understanding the political and aesthetic contradictions of
Orwell’s complex personality. The apparent inconsistencies and
paradoxes in Orwell’s thought and work, it is argued, are the
product of his inveterate idealism and the continuous process of
change in which he lived. Galván also goes on to draw a parallel
between Orwell’s idealism and the quixotic spirit. All this is
thoroughly developed and supported with an analysis of some
of Orwell’s essays and journalism, his war memoir Homage to
Preface 9
Catalonia, and the traces left by his Spanish experience in his late
fiction.
In a similar vain, the second essay, ‘A Revolutionary in
Love with the 1900s: Orwell in Defence of “Old England”’ by
Christine Berberich, also addresses the apparent contradiction
of a Socialist Orwell with revolutionary ideas admitting
sentimental feelings for a pre-1914 England. Orwell is seen here
as a writer who managed to combine in a unique way his
adherence to progressive Socialist principles and a conservative
patriotism for things English. Berberich thus provides a
straightforward account of the centrality of ‘Englishness’ to
Orwell’s world view, particularly as it is expressed in essays such
as ‘My Country Right or Left,’ The Lion and the Unicorn, ‘As I
Please,’ ‘Notes on Nationalism,’ ‘Such, Such Were the Joys,’ The
English People and some of his London Letters to Partisan Review,
as well as his novel Coming Up for Air.
The following two essays are devoted to Orwell’s account
of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Miquel Berga, in
‘Orwell’s Catalonia Revisited: Textual Strategies and the
Eyewitness Account,’ suggests that Orwell’s book on Spain
should not only be viewed as a valuable historical document,
but also as a central literary work of the 1930s that makes use of
a series of carefully planned textual strategies. Berga shows how,
more than sixty years after its publication, Homage to Catalonia
can be read as a postmodernist text of metahistory, in which
Orwell very effectively assumes the dual process of
‘narrativising history and historisicing narrative.’ On the other
hand, my essay ‘George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: A
Politically Incorrect Story,’ focuses on the troubled publishing
history of this book in Spain and the difficulties it had with the
Spanish censorship office during the Franco regime, until a
much distorted version was published in 1970. After discussing
the multiple cuts and changes indicated by the censors, the
article ends with a denunciation of present-day Spanish and