A very interesting article on the impact of Orwell's writings. I had occasion to reread 1984 last year, the first time I had read the book since before the year in its title, and it is still striking how vivid its imagined future era--fortunately not realized in the year of the title--is. I have more than tripled my years on earth since the first time I read through 1984, but it continues to have an unmatched ability to disturb with real-life observations of human capacity for evil, while retaining just an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope in the appendix on Newspeak, carefully written in the past tense and including a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. Not a literary novel, but a great novel nonetheless. And Animal Farm and many of Orwell's essays are also must-reads.
"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning." - George Orwell (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) :)
Well, it's an easy argument to use against people you don't like. The article's point is true though. As a novelist he really wasn't that outstanding, his prose is repetitive---it's not as if 1984 wouldn't have benefited from another editing round.
More than that, his characters and societies in 1984 are so one-dimensional as to be completely unrealistic, and therefore frankly pretty boring. In the real world (even in the worst totalitarian dictatorship, or in e.g. prison torture camps) motivations and relationships are always complex and usually confusing. 1984 is much more of a fairytale than “great literature”; the latter requires sympathetic human characters. (For instance, compare with Shakespeare’s heroes and villains.) I think one of the reasons that 1984 and Animal Farm have been so enduring is that their simplicity allows people to ignore Orwell’s actual intentions or message.
Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia are much more rewarding reading than 1984 or Animal Farm.
There are few books that I read in which I say to myself "Man that is a well written piece of literature that could not benefit from a bit of editing"
I think that 1984 was a good book, maybe even great, but I would not say that it did not get a little long in the tooth and repetitive near the end. Don't get me started on the dan brown novels and the male chauvinistic nature therein. I just don't get why he needed to include a clueless female character in every book he has written just to provide someone whom the main character can lecture condescendingly.
BTW. this is coming from a guy who is not overly sensitive to female equality issues but was smacked in the face by them after reading the Da Vinci Code.
The Quixote's prose is confusing and repetitive, but it is a great book. Why is style now more important than theme? And why the fuck is Joyce's Ulysses more important than 1984?
The first time I read "1984" was during the "smoking gun" talks that congress was having about Iraq. I was amazed that in a classroom of thirty people I was the only one that was drawing the parallels between the novel and the then current political climate. That's when I realized that very few people have meta-cognitive abilities and are able to learn from past mistakes whereas others are doomed to constantly repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Orwell was in tune and aware of political thought like no other and it is a shame there aren't more like him during modern times.
