Bloom's Modern Critical Views African American Fyodor Dostoevsky Toni Morrison Poets: Wheatley– W.E.B. DuBois Joyce Carol Oates Tolson George Eliot Flannery O’Connor African American T.S. Eliot George Orwell Poets: Hayden–Dove Ralph Ellison Octavio Paz Dante Alighieri Ralph Waldo Emerson Sylvia Plath Isabel Allende William Faulkner Edgar Allan Poe American Women F. Scott Fitzgerald Katherine Anne Porter Poets, 1650–1950 Robert Frost Marcel Proust Hans Christian William Gaddis Thomas Pynchon Andersen Thomas Hardy Philip Roth Maya Angelou Nathaniel Hawthorne Salman Rushdie Asian-American Writers Robert Hayden J. D. Salinger Margaret Atwood Ernest Hemingway José Saramago Jane Austen Hermann Hesse Jean-Paul Sartre Paul Auster Hispanic-American William Shakespeare James Baldwin Writers Mary Wollstonecraft Honoré de Balzac Homer Shelley The Bible Langston Hughes John Steinbeck William Blake Zora Neale Hurston Amy Tan Ray Bradbury Aldous Huxley Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Brontës John Irving Henry David Thoreau Gwendolyn Brooks James Joyce J.R.R. Tolkien Elizabeth Barrett Franz Kafka Leo Tolstoy Browning John Keats Ivan Turgenev Robert Browning Jamaica Kincaid Mark Twain Albert Camus Stephen King Kurt Vonnegut Truman Capote Milan Kundera Derek Walcott Miguel de Cervantes Tony Kushner Alice Walker Geoffrey Chaucer Doris Lessing H.G. Wells G.K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis Eudora Welty Kate Chopin Sinclair Lewis Walt Whitman Joseph Conrad Norman Mailer Tennessee Williams Contemporary Poets David Mamet Tom Wolfe Julio Cortázar Christopher Marlowe William Wordsworth Stephen Crane Gabriel García Jay Wright Don DeLillo Márquez Richard Wright Charles Dickens Carson McCullers William Butler Yeats Emily Dickinson Herman Melville Émile Zola John Donne and the Arthur Miller 17th-Century Poets John Milton 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 An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 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 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. 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. 1