by

Chris Hanley

For the flyblown words that made me spew

Still in his ears were holy,

And he was born knowing what I had learned

Out of books and slowly.

But the thing I saw in your face

No power can disinherit:

No bomb that ever burst

Shatters the crystal spirit[i].

In his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, Orwell makes a rueful confession about the direction his career might have taken in an ideal world. “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties”[ii]. Political allegiance is something he comes to almost by accident, the remunerative side-line-turned virtuous necessity with which he must make a compromise. “As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer”[iii]. In these statements fictionally beautiful writing is opposed to the politically responsible, but Orwell’s long-term ambition was to turn beauty into necessity by amalgamating the two in a single virtuosity, “to make political writing into an art”[iv]. That he was successful is evidenced by the later fictions, the strongest of his oeuvre. Gordon Bowker notes that Animal Farm “is widely considered Orwell’s finest achievement…Most reviewers greeted the book as a minor masterpiece”[v]. Orwell says Animal Farm “was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose”[vi]. Animal Farm in my opinion is indeed remarkable, both for the depth of its appreciation of human motives, and for the simple acuity with which this appreciation is expressed (“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”[vii].) However, Orwell’s explanation of the compositional economy that enabled him eventually to write so well is inconsistent or even contradictory. When his trajectory as a writer is under consideration, this inconsistency is as significant as the stylistic ‘resolution’ of the artistic and the political at which Orwell aimed and at which he eventually arrived. By way of introducing the inconsistency, we can invert this ‘resolution’ account of Orwell’s progression as a writer, which explains his career in terms of fusion of aesthetic and political priorities. Instead we can ask

• Why do the ‘aesthetically inspired’ early novels, works which pre-date Orwell’s political partisanship, apparently lack the purposefulness so manifest in the political work?

• What are we to make of the later ‘pamphleteer’ work, the political journalism and documentary writing that purports aesthetic ‘neutrality’, issuing from the pen of an instinctively ‘ornate and descriptive’ writer?

In the final paragraph of ‘Why I Write’, Orwell explains “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality. Good prose is like a window pane”[viii]. Taken together these statements tread heavily upon one another. The window pane through which a political writer is viewed must reveal writerly design, the biases and personality of the writer. As it must, the effacement of a writer’s personality cannot be maintained as a condition of good writing. Of course, with the phrase ‘window pane’, Orwell wants merely to represent an aesthetic of prose writing, a simple and pared-down-to-essentials style that suits its subject and pleases its reader. However the relationship between style and writerly intention is, to say the least, a complex one. Orwell treats this subject with a simplicity which is misleading, and actually disguises his lack of clarity when thinking about aesthetics and aesthetic motivation.

In the same essay, Orwell attempts to define the four “great motives” for prose writing. Along with “sheer egoism”, “historical impulse” and “political purpose”, Orwell lists “aesthetic enthusiasm”. He defines the aesthetic motive as

Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed[ix].

George Woodcock, in The Crystal Spirit, points out that aesthetic theory was for Orwell “one of those realms of thought in which he felt least happy”[x]. Regarding Orwell’s definition of the aesthetic motive, Woodcock argues that “While the first two items in this list are valid enough, the third is not, since all experiences are not aesthetic, and mere communication is not art”[xi]. The third item, in its implicit postulation of the social responsibility of the individual, in fact is a proper foundation for a definition of political purpose. If there is a component of experience which ‘ought not to be missed’, the immediate question is, by whom should it not missed, and why? The answer must be that other people should not miss the experience, because it has a relevance to them that the writer is obliged to share. Feeling the success of his writing hinges upon the value of the social experiences for which he is responsible, the artist leaves the realm of pure aesthetics and becomes political.

This confusion of the aesthetic with the political is in evidence again when Orwell expatiates upon his ambitions as a political writer. Of his compositional preferences he claims “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience”[xii]. His explanation for this is “I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood”[xiii]. There is an elision in evidence here. Orwell offers an argument from social valuation (“the world view that I acquired”), essentially a political explanation, to support a statement made about aesthetics. It is not possible that Orwell does not understand the difference between the two terms. Rather, there is a constitutive error – the political is inseparable from the beautiful in his mind, or to put it another way, writing is beautiful in as much as to some extent it has a social function.

A reply to the first of the bullet-pointed questions above suggests itself. Orwell’s early aesthetic ‘offenders’, particularly A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying should be situated firmly within his trajectory of political purposefulness. The explanation in ‘Why I Write’ which Orwell provides of his aesthetic impulses, can be seen as a failed attempt to put into words what was ‘really’ going on in these early works. His later statement that these books “lacked political purpose”[xiv], from this viewpoint, is a misunderstanding of his own aesthetic ideas and practice. This is returned to immediately below.

Another possibility, in response to the second bullet point, is that the later ‘decision for politics’ was in some sense also ‘a decision for aesthetics’, a decision founded on Orwell’s intuition that at the bottom of a writer’s motives “lies a mystery”[xv]. This idea will for most of this paper justify close consideration of Orwell’s explicitly political journalism and documentary work. Orwell’s conception of the writer’s mystery as an effacement, an abyss or a void, will disclose itself in two alternate yet connected conceptions. Their relationship is the cornerstone of this paper’s view of authentic political decision, its sources and its conditions, its potential and its effects, as experienced by Orwell.

Initially my response to the first bullet-point needs clarification.  In ‘Why I Write’, Orwell says

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing[xvi].

As was explained above, the later Orwell could feel quite confident in his power to confer proper form on this important content, knowing that the political and the aesthetic would successfully bed into the work together (though he was not able clearly to comprehend this success theoretically). The difference between what the later, politically engaged Orwell wanted to accomplish, in comparison with his unsuccessful, artistically ambitious earlier self, is however quite apparent in respect of his professed intentions for Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter. In a personal letter in 1935, Orwell remarked of Keep the Aspidistra Flying not that it was intended to ‘get a hearing’, but that “I want this one to be a work of art”[xvii]. Similarly, A Clergyman’s Daughter is unique amongst Orwell’s works for its “absorption in the mechanics and craft of fiction”[xviii]. In particular, Clergyman’s reveals the influence that Joyce’s Ulysses exerted upon Orwell’s technique at the time. According to Orwell’s later, more mature reflection, such early artistic ambitions, whether innovative or derivative, are seen in the light of mistakenness:

I see that it is invariably where I lacked political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally[xix].

Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter are unsuccessful, Orwell later realizes, because they are ‘only’ aesthetic works, lacking the substance and focus of his committed later output.

However, Orwell’s early work is not innocent of political purpose, despite his later claim that his prime motives had been aesthetic.   Several of Orwell’s characteristic political themes emerge in A Clergyman’s Daughter, which is concerned with vagrancy and poverty, with social inequality and the vested interests that sustain it. Clergyman’s is also concerned with society’s loss of spirituality and with mental dominance and submission, themes that nourish his later ideas and writings upon totalitarianism. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, commenting on the same destitute social landscape, is also, according to Bowker, an obvious forbear of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This novel, Bowker realises, “stands in a long continuity of thought”, for which the characters, structure, themes, and “mental topography” of Aspidistra are significant predecessors, “as if Orwell thought ‘I can tell this story better second time around’”[xx].

Both of these early works were however dismissed by Orwell in 1946, when he called them “books I am ashamed of”. He confessed to George Woodcock that Clergyman’s was

written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved[xxi].

Considering the dire poverty that loomed over these works’ composition, it is all the more surprising that Orwell does not trace his political purposefulness back to them. Instead, Orwell ascribes his political awakening to epiphanic experiences he had in Spain’s civil war, and to other events of 1936-7, including his trip to the industrial towns of northern England, after which “I knew where I stood”[xxii]. After this period, the early novels appear to be merely aesthetic failures, incomplete and inconsequential searches for form. But Orwell’s conception of the aesthetic as opposed to the political is, I have argued, inherently confused; he sees the early works as artistic failures, I think, actually because it is their political aspect that is incoherent. In this light, the claim that he was forced to become a pamphleteer washes slightly differently: Orwell was always a kind of pamphleteer, as the wide-ranging, inchoate commitments contained in the early novels make evident. His failure in these works is to find the proper form for his political messages, not in the absence of politics. The later Orwell credits his mature style with the successful introduction of focused ‘content’ to appropriate form, but what he misunderstands is that the ‘content’ actually has always been there – all along his problem has been one of form, and this problem resolves itself when Orwell becomes a ‘pamphleteer proper’, when writing the journalism and documentary works.

Developing the second bullet-pointed question above, Orwell’s confusion of aesthetic and political purposes invites us to ask whether aesthetic motivation is to be found in his ‘proper’ political work. The openings of his three book-length documentary works, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia indicate that it can be found. These works follow the same pattern, establishing a mise-en-scene in which ‘slice of life’ episodes can occur which are typical of Orwell’s experiences. These episodes radiate poetic license, and are not so much incidents recalled as emblematic friezes that combine fact and fiction, reality and aesthetic. One of the most often quoted from Homage to Catalonia is taken from Orwell’s arrival at the Lenin Barracks, wherein he is struck by the face of an Italian militia man (who also became the poetic inspiration for this paper’s heading epigraph). Orwell explains

With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war – the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war stricken towns further up the line…[xxiii]

No doubt Orwell did see a face, or some faces that became furrowed with many lines of memory and association. This particular militia man’s face is a device that allows him to locate this feeling in one place, to frame it as the real encounter of two people, and in so doing to make it simple, personal and authentic.

All his book-length documentary works make a great deal of the experiences of the researcher himself in this way -- as acting in, as enacting what will later be given discursive / philosophical treatment.  I hesitate to say the researcher is Orwell, he is of course a ‘factionalised’ Orwell, or the character “Orwell” as Raymond Williams memorably put it[xxiv]. Orwell the writer inserts details and incidents into Homage to Catalonia that make Orwell the character seem real: There are the grubby details of living conditions on the Aragonese front, including “that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea”[xxv]. The documentarist also talks about the trials of disciplining teenage recruits, which “almost turned my hair grey”[xxvi]. Perhaps most typically in Orwell, there is the apparent heroism verging on negligence, in the midst of which bathetic, even comic anxieties arise. During a courageous defensive action by the POUM militia, after storming a Fascist trench, the narrator admits that he was “all the time encumbered with my rifle, which I dared not put down for fear of losing it”[xxvii]. Orwell the character is made solidly human in this way. His experiences are plausibly sensory and tactile, his actions entangled but intelligible, his difficulties extraordinary but not unreal.

In Homage to Catalonia the documentarist is permitted, again and again, to anchor himself in the small business of reality, and in so doing to enact his observational neutrality and sincerity. Orwell intertwines contrived and embellished episodes, like his symbolic encounter with the militia man, with this ‘realistic’ framing. These episodes are aesthetically charged yet purport to continue the observational ‘sincerity’ and consistent objectivity of the narrative. In another example, on the march with his militia column to the Saragossa front, Orwell the character ‘incidentally’ notices a youth from the cavalry “…who pranced to and fro, galloping up every piece of rising ground and posing himself in picturesque attitudes at the summit”[xxviii]. It is possible that the cavalry youth continually preened in this way, but unlikely, surely. It is more likely that the youth struck a pose once, and that Orwell’s imagination took over from there. Even if things did happen in the way Orwell tells it, their narration is incongruous with the style of rest of the passage. This episode is sudden and visual, like movie stills inserted in a passage of prose.

The aesthetic way of seeing is here so knotted with its political subject, that the writing in a sense effaces the act that composed it. The creative ‘contrivance’ which is the writing’s aesthetic purpose, is displaced onto the political, ‘real’ world of the documentary itself. The world of the documentary appears to rise up to meet ‘Orwell the character’’s eye, and this documentarist-narrator sees it objectively and sincerely, ‘as it actually is’. Precisely because the question of artistry is not posed to the narrator, what might be called a political ontology is founded in the world of the documentary. This world comprises, in essence, a centre of knowledge and the things it knows about. It is an ontology similarly evoked by Lacan’s teaching on the psychological isolate, which “is not separable from a cosmology, it is, in the cosmos, the centre from which, according to the inflections, what is contemplation or harmony takes place”[xxix]. The centre of knowledge, the ‘thing that thinks’, defines the cosmos, the universe of ‘things that can be thought about’ by the very act of contemplating them. The cosmos, the universe of thinkable things, harmoniously acts as an external guarantee for that act of contemplation, and for the thinking centre itself. Centre and cosmos define each other.

The same is true of Orwell’s documentarist and the world he observes; the consistency of cosmos and observing centre are conferred upon each by the other. The world of reportable things simply shows itself to the observing centre, a centre which, observing the world, is guaranteed as a centre of observation and therefore of knowledge. There is an artifice at work that is unacknowledged, and its origin is to be found in Orwell’s confused thinking about the political and the aesthetic. Because the style of Catalonia purports to be political-factual, and not aesthetic, the mutually reinforcing self-evidence of observer and observed world is not in question.

This stylistic ‘knotting’ of the political and the aesthetic, is the compositional reflection of a deep-seated antinomy in Orwell’s thinking about truth. The concept of truth is one Orwell was at great pains to defend, and he did it with increasing subtlety but diminishing sureness as his career advanced. By our contemporary standards, Orwell was not much in the habit of reflexive critique. That is to say, he was critical, but did not reflect often, at least in print, upon the conditions of validity on which a viewpoint can be based. There is evidence of such reflection, however, in the essay ‘The Prevention of Literature’ from 1946. In this essay Orwell argues that intellectual liberty comprises

the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self deception from which every observer necessarily suffers[xxx].

The implications of this line of thought are a commonplace for contemporary readers, namely, truth is not objective, it is a constructed preference. In an article from 1948, ‘Writers and Leviathan’, Orwell makes exactly this point about standards in literary judgement:

I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever…every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference[xxxi].

However Orwell could not always prevent his own instinctive preferences from overshadowing his grasp of truth. The critical reflection in evidence in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ and ‘Writers and Leviathan’ extends only so far; Orwell is only really concerned with ideologically motivated distortion of judgements and preferences by post-war doctrinaires. These dishonesties are denounced in order to preserve a higher entity, the ‘true nature’ of the artist, who should remain uninvolved in politics. However Orwell has not fully digested the implications of his thinking, and does not see the argument through to its logical conclusion. The conclusion that he should come to, is that ‘true nature’ is also ‘only’ an instinctive preference, one he supports in opposition to the twisted truths of the dominant orthodoxies. Orwell’s contextualising and situating of his own viewpoint, as evidenced above in ‘The Prevention of Literature’, remain for him incidental to the ‘truth’, which he does not recognise as ‘only’ his own instinctive preference. He therefore renounces at the last moment an apparently inescapable conclusion: That ‘the viewpoint’, stands in a relation of productivity to ‘the truth’, and is not simply a side-effect of the truth itself.

One sees the necessity of Orwell’s standpoint when the atrocities inflicted on truth during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War are taken into account. Barbaric irrationalities strived for precedence: Show trials, propaganda, smear and insinuation, falsehoods in the press, and so on. Orwell feared the extinction of objective truth even as an idea, and defended it stoutly. But in attempting to reconcile this moral obligation with the freedom of artistic expression, time and time again he was drawn into spurious arguments and self-contradiction.

In a 1944 review entitled ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’ Orwell’s train of thought is strikingly tendentious. His abhorrence for his subject emanates from every syllable; he can no more contain his disgust than he can acknowledge Dali’s artistic merit, although he does concede at one point that “Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts”[xxxii]. However, against his personal distaste for Dali’s work Orwell sets its right to fulfil its own function, to exist uncensored, as art should. It is in trying to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, personal feelings and artistic principles, that the argument becomes incoherent. The solution, Orwell argues, is

to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.

But a few lines further on, he says

In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman’. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being[xxxiii].

The contradiction here is obvious. In the first extract, art and social value are indifferent to one another, and in the second social value is the measure of art. The first passage is strongly reminiscent of Nineteen-Eighty Four’s ideological schizophrenia, doublethink. In that novel, sustaining two contradictory thoughts at one time is presented as a kind of dehumanising madness, precisely because there is no possibility in its totalitarian world of discerning which of them is true. In ‘Benefit of Clergy…’, Orwell is unable to sustain two co-existing but equally ‘true’ ideas, (or, two ideas existing equally beyond the reach of truth), and therefore must validate the thoughts according to a third criterion (“this is a good book or a good picture…”) and the doublethink equilibrium departs.   

Orwell is unable to sustain the doublethink because he does not believe in it. The doublethink antinomy poses an ‘abyss’ or groundlessness of calculation which is inimical to his conviction that truth, moral obligation and commitment exist within decidability. The ‘decision’ for or against Dali must be made, and having arrived at the unsustainable limit of reason, Orwell’s choice becomes instinctive. Orwell ‘irrationally’, instinctively, prefers morality over art, as for him it is the ‘truth’ of the matter. It is an instinctive preference that purports to be the rational conclusion of the thinking process itself, though this process actually has been suspended by the way Orwell conceives of humanity and of art, as existing in autonomous and incommensurate spheres for rationality.  

Thus decision is unrelated to any rational definition of truth; it is instead the result of an irrational attachment which overrides the logical train of argumentation. Orwell harboured many such antinomian attachments, irrational preferences that warped and refracted his logical clarity, of which his attitudes to machine civilization and empire stand out as examples. He was more self-conscious however, and painfully aware of his instinctive preferences, in relation to social class. A meditation from The Road to Wigan Pier reveals Orwell’s acute understanding of the intractable class problem:

To get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable as the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life. And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me[xxxiv].

It is a passage of some restraint and humility in comparison with the bruising style in the examples above. There is acknowledgement that the personality ‘Orwell’ is not the rational centre, or ego of the man; rather the man is the enactment or embodiment of a prior social economy, an organisation or structuration of selfhood that is hidden and barely knowable. There is a quandary or impasse for this narrator, because he must exceed the domain of what he knows, surpass what he is, to approach the solution; but he must do it as he is, as this rational being attempting to gain purchase on his irrational foundations. He faces the problem of altering the irrational through rational means, but of course the ‘rational’ being is itself an ‘irrational’ preference, a delimitation and accumulation that presents itself as selfhood.

This instance is exceptional, rather than being typical of Orwell. Often he harboured furious prejudices that at times led him to excesses of swingeing and ludicrous rhetoric. His writings on pacifism are a good example. At various times he accused its adherents of being power worshippers and “objectively pro-fascist”[xxxv]. In a letter to the Tribune from December 1944, he comes close to, at least indirectly, recanting these excesses, claiming “The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult”[xxxvi]. He admits of political opponents that “It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or scoundrel, or both, than to say what he is really like”, adding in the most Wigan Pier- like note, that this is a “habit of mind”[xxxvii].

Similar examples, including Orwell’s blanket treatment of intellectuals, whom he repeatedly slaughtered in print, and other subjects, could be here adduced. To put the matter perhaps over simply, in his journalism Orwell attempts the calculation, the rational, fair, objective analysis of his subjects; but this attempt is founded upon irrational preferences, decisions for or against that are outside or beyond rational calculation.

Lacanian terminology conveniently explains the double-sided nature of Orwell’s thinking. From a Lacanian perspective, the distinction is between the imaginary and the point de caption. Rational arguments are the imaginary elaboration of points of investment, which are the quilting points or “knots of subjectivity”[xxxviii]. These knots are the basis of imaginary ‘protection’ for the subject, they are the basis “to which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity”[xxxix]. Orwell’s rational arguments are given consistency and unity by the irrational attachments on which they stand. Without the rational ‘cloaking’ of imagination, the points de caption are exposed for what they are, arbitrary and irrational preferences. As their exposure threatens subjective dissolution, these knotting points are veiled by the subject’s sense of wholeness, selfhood and rationality: they are imbricated in the imaginary. Irrational preference makes itself felt in Orwell as the nucleus of conviction that more or less conscientiously and substantially corroborates the logical process. But irrationality insinuates itself in that process also as pressures and anxieties. The imaginary examines and confronts the limits of its own protective reach; the subject demands of himself ‘what am I?’ ‘What is the subject?’

Existential anxiety runs in a continuous thread throughout Orwell’s oeuvre, though it appears at different times in various guises. The self effacement that haunts the author of 1946’s ‘Why I Write’ is prefigured in 1935’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying as a sense of creative absence for its fabulist Gordon Comstock; he withdraws from the world to “the abyss where poetry is written”[xl]. Similarly in A Clergyman’s Daughter, religious belief and self-realization are for Dorothy Hare tied up with “a deadly emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things”[xli]. However, Orwell was most forcibly assailed by anxiety when he reflected that something in human nature had nourished totalitarianism. In his review of Russia under Soviet Rule from 1939, Orwell writes

…we cannot be at all certain that ‘human nature’ is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows [xlii].

This passage contains in proposition what was to become a chilling conviction for Orwell in later life: that human nature is an abyss and mankind is not naturally good; that there are no guarantees for decision, so what it is necessary to do may not be the right thing, and the right thing to do may never be done. There are instances in which Orwell merely sounds uncomfortable with this realization, and times when he is closer to outright despair, as in an example taken from a 1946 letter to Tribune:

When one considers how things have gone since 1930, or thereabouts, it is not easy to believe in the survival of civilisation…exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another. Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is run by secret police forces. Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before. The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about[xliii].

It is a hellish picture of what humanity is capable. Paranoid and rapacious power devours the weak, irrational and reactionary decision- making subsumes human action and motive. Human nature has been cast adrift, and supplanted by realpolitik in its most brutal and unconcealed form. Orwell’s extreme pessimism is not surprising when we consider the context. He was writing in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the shadow of European totalitarianism and its intercontinental successor, the Cold War. He was also, as Bowker points out, experiencing bouts of illness that must soon have made themselves felt as intimations of his own death[xliv]. That Orwell was also labouring with Nineteen Eighty-Four at this time can be seen from the outline of its themes in the Tribune letter. That novel is acutely concerned with the undermining of human dignity and resilience, and wonders how far our natures can be stretched before breaking. Whilst torturing Winston Smith, Party member O’Brien tells him

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us…Men are infinitely malleable…They are helpless, like the animals[xlv].

We find in this scene the crystallization of Orwell’s pessimism, and an answer for the question of subjectivity posed above (‘what is the subject?’). According to this viewpoint, there is no subject; there are only irrational attachments, the most powerful of which is the desire for power. Therefore the decision to be a rebel, which is made by Winston Smith, or to be a writer or to be a religious believer for that matter, is a decision ‘from nowhere’, from the seat of attachment on an underlying emptiness. Such decisions cannot look for an external guarantee, such as might be represented by ‘truth’, or ‘art’, or ‘God’. They must take their chances, ‘bumping up against reality’ as Orwell himself might put it.

This view of the human condition rubs against the grain of Orwell’s middle-period writing, in which he was at great pains to set human existence on solid ontological foundations. For example in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) Englishness, or less frequently Britishness, is conceived as a communion of spirit, something vital and eternal which ties the nation together. Whilst the thrust of the piece is towards social revolution, Orwell employs English vitalism to urge and exhort patriotism in the face of the European threat: “…it is your civilization, it is you”[xlvi]. Other works from that period make a similar case for continuity and community. In ‘Inside the Whale’, for example, he talks about the “human heritage”[xlvii]. This, he contends, is what writers run the risk of abandoning if their writing becomes politically motivated, responsible, as opposed to subjectively free.

In ‘Inside the Whale’ the relationship of literature with objective truth is subsumed by the importance of a writer’s individual integrity, “…being able to care, of really believing in your beliefs, whether they are true or false”[xlviii]. Raymond Williams notes of ‘Inside the Whale’ that “This is his prescription for a writer, under the dangers of his time, but in a more general way it marks his real discouragement”. Orwell was, Williams argues, so “disillusioned…he had to make what settlements he could find” [xlix]. I think Williams has half of it here. At the onset of war it surely was Orwell’s feeling that writing must be kept subjectively free at the cost of political quietism. But Orwell did not apply to life in general what he reserved for literature, arguing that political passivity in 1940 is “the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility”[l]. Political battles must be fought, but there is no place for writing in them, nor the subjective truths and emotional sincerities writing contains. The world of public and political events, the looming tumults of the “world process”[li], are indifferent to this human heritage. To preserve its inheritance therefore, humanity must remain aloof from the process, ‘irresponsibly’ refusing to make itself ‘objectively’ worthy.

Subjective freedom is given a specific inflection in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. A native trait that Orwell makes much of is

the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower lovers, but also a nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, crossword-puzzle fans[lii].

English privateness is significant, because it is typical of an indigenous communality. It is therefore inimical to ‘official’ prescriptions for native English culture:

All the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’[liii].

In this work Orwell roots a popular and representative patriotism in ordinary English life as opposed to nation-state politics. The same motive is apparent in his treatment of state administration, against which he detects a popular reaction in favour of individual liberty:

Like all other modern peoples, the English are in the process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction[liv].

If ‘Inside the Whale’ opposes a ‘private’ subjectivity to a ‘public’ one, here the same subjectivities are at stake in an extended form. ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ opposes the ‘private and unofficially public’, to the ‘officially public’ or ‘political’. These two versions of subjectivity are inimical because of the threat posed by the political sphere to the private domain. The latter can exist only when not known by the former, by being unintelligible to it, being of a different kind. If it is invisible to administration, private life can remain as it is. However, officialdom threatens to administer the private and unofficial and thereby to change it, by making it a public object (“numbered, labelled, conscripted, co-ordinated”). In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, therefore, Orwell redeems subjectivity by driving it underground. Sincere, authentic humanity must stay beyond the reach of the co-optive knowledges with which nation states administer and define themselves.

This paper has argued that Orwell’s ‘decision for politics’ was also a decision for aesthetics. Developing this claim, the paper has argued that Orwell’s political work purports objectivity, but actually is shaped by his aesthetic and instinctive preferences. One of Orwell’s critical political goals, the defense of truth, brought him premonitions of a void or abyss in rationality, which asserted itself in Orwell’s irrational attachments and his anxiety about human nature. Orwell’s premonitions can now be reformulated in a positive and in a negative light, each suggesting a different conception of ‘void’, and a differently inflected understanding of irrationality.

• The first version finds its expression in the discussion above, broadly speaking, from ‘The Prevention of Literature’, to Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this negative instance, political subjectivity is identical with subjectivity per se, which is made up of irrational preferences. ‘Irrational’ here refers to a preference that it is impossible to understand; in psychoanalysis it might be explained in terms of libidinal investment, which is made subjective at its quilting or fixing point.  Exposure of this irrational foundation threatens to unravel the fabric by which the subject is given consistency, and therefore to dissolve the subject entirely, leaving him confronted at the ‘abyss’ of selfhood by the realization that selfhood is nothing. The subject has no choice but to maintain his subjectivity by whatever means are available to him, even if, like Orwell, they entrench him in an “attitude to life” from which he wants to be freed.

• Political subjectivity can also be viewed in a second, more positive way. Because political preference is no more than irrational attachment, it does not have any rational or ideological claim upon truth. Therefore, ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ rationality, the subject can make another kind of political intervention which aims at truth which is non-rational. In this instance irrationality is defined not as a subjective defence against nothingness, but in the sense of privacy and unofficialness, which are not placed in the order of official knowledge. In this case there is not an ontological absence or abyss, as in the negative example above; there is only a void in calculation and decision – an unknowability. Despite seeming politically quiescent therefore, the stances upon subjectivity taken in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ and ‘Inside the Whale’ point towards politics. The political subject imitates the ‘private’ subject because he remains impervious, inscrutable to the knowledges and calculations that are symptomatic of ‘official’ life.

Orwell made two grand-scale renunciations of ‘official’ life. The first of these was when he revolted against his background and upbringing, beginning with his resignation from the Burman Imperial police. He made his decision to resign after much soul searching and furtive, seditious discussion with like-minded Imperial functionaries. In one famous passage he talks about spending a night on a Burmese train with an English serviceman. After cagily sussing each others’ orthodoxy they went on to damn the British Empire, “from the inside, intelligently and intimately”[lv]. In an image underlining the dangerous pleasure of their forbidden discussion, Orwell memorably describes them parting in the morning, “…as guilty as any adulterous couple”[lvi].

Orwell’s time in Burma had a profound effect on him. It made him re-think absolutely his attitude to Empire and to authority in general:

I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants[lvii].

This repudiation of what he had been, culminated in the tramping exploits that are recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell was compelled by a new but as yet unclear feeling that the oppressed lay much closer to home than Burma:

I knew nothing of working class conditions…Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes…What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable altogether…I should have touched bottom, and – this is what I felt: I was aware then that it was irrational – part of my guilt would drop from me[lviii].

Orwell’s choice of words (“getting out”, “touch bottom”) suggests he wanted to abjure his ‘respectable’ subjectivity, as it stood, altogether, attempting instead to explore some ‘ground zero’, some absolute nowhere of subjectivity, in a radical gesture of renunciation. With Derrida, we might say Orwell made an ethical decision, (‘decision’ being that which cannot be known,) because it was made outside of the subjective knowledge that Orwell’s background had given him. (Derrida’s ethical decision, like Orwell’s, has an “irreducibly ‘tragic’ and ‘guilty’” quality, existing as it does, “in the face of impossibly overwhelming obligations”[lix]). Because Orwell’s decision did not proceed from the known, it cannot be absorbed by socio-political knowledge. It is what can be called an irrational intervention, a genuine political act. An act, in fact, of pure will.

Orwell ultimately came to see this early period as a failure. As was explained above, he saw in himself deep-rooted attachments to bourgeois habits, arguing that revolutionary sentiment in the bourgeois “draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed”[lx]. In The Road to Wigan Pier he claims that movement towards socialism, to which Orwell was becoming strongly inclined, is obstructed by the same prejudices on the proletarian side as on the bourgeois, resulting in working class people wanting to climb the social ladder rather than dismantle it. Amongst other obstacles to the establishment of socialism in England, he blames the stupidity of its ideologues, and the bleakness of the mechanized future they prophesy. Putting it perhaps too simply, despite what was being said about the abolition of class distinction in 1936, the state-of-affairs in which the abolitionist feeling existed, effectively opposed the blossoming of the feeling into successful action.

Orwell refined and clarified his own stance on socialism after another great renunciation in early 1937. He travelled to Spain in December 1936 with the intention of covering the Civil War for the British press; upon arrival, however, he was struck by the social revolution underway in Barcelona, the absence of privilege, the social equality, the idealism. Orwell decided immediately to sign up with the workers’ militia, “because in that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”[lxi]. Why was it the only conceivable thing to do? Disillusioned by the insincerity and ineffectiveness of English radicalism, Orwell found powerful intent in revolutionary Spain. It was a society, at least at that early stage, attempting genuinely to make itself classless; when Orwell arrived it seemed, in contrast with England, to be outstripping its own state-of-affairs, to be re-founding itself in different conditions with new principles. Of course, it did not last, as the Soviet-sponsored communists systematically discredited and then outlawed the radical workers as the war progressed. But there is no doubt that the early months had a profound effect on Orwell that bordered on the mystical:

one realised that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy and cynicism…One had breathed the air of equality[lxii].

We have a different angle on the ethical decision here (a choice that is ethical because it cannot emerge from within knowledge or calculation). Orwell decided to defend a social state-of-affairs that was beyond knowledge, which could not be arrived at through ‘logical’ extrapolation of current egalitarian ideas. Instead it was “strange and valuable contact”, it was “breathed” in with the air. As Orwell explains in Wigan Pier, social fairness is undermined by irrational reactions against it, made even by those who think they are defending it, on both the bourgeois and proletarian sides. Irrational attachment is therefore not an accident of ‘social unfairness’, but is a condition of social unfairness, because this attachment maintains the structure of privileges as it is. However the Spanish Revolution was an irrational event declaring itself both outside of questions of ‘fairness’ and reactions to them. Its purpose was to emerge from outside these questions in order (to paraphrase Alain Badiou) to bespeak another, genuinely universal fairness. The Spanish Revolution superseded the structure of social knowledges and irrational preferences which, even under the guise of radicalism, maintain the status quo. The Revolution’s provenance was therefore genuinely political.

The Spanish Revolution is also an example of what Badiou has made systematic in the theory of the event, which will need a little contextualisation. The theory of the event exists in a trajectory of writing that as yet is not complete. The principal issues were set out first in Badiou’s 1988 book, Being and Event. They have been refined through the intervening years and we await their definitive re-statement in the forthcoming Logics of Worlds.

Badiou’s work is in part a reaction to what is contemporarily called the atomization of the social fabric, with its concomitant scepticism and relativization of values, our fixation on language as the ‘real’ location of political struggle, and our acceptance of difference and infinite alterity as ends-in-themselves. For Badiou, our realization that things are by their very nature different, is a trifling achievement. Infinite alterity is “quite simply what there is”[lxiii]. It is not uncommon, at present, to find that insisting upon labyrinthine differentiations between things passes for an ethical stance, often accompanied by the admonition to ‘respect differences’. Such a stance, for Badiou, is only descriptive, having done no more than distinguish the nature of the social milieu in which our ethical actions must make themselves accountable.

As a result of our obsession with differences, the “axiom of our contemporary conviction”[lxiv], is that there are only bodies and languages. In the ethical space of infinite differences nothing can be known, because there is no translation; no language is up to the job of describing reality, which is always different from meaning and from itself. Therefore communication becomes an end in itself and our sole accomplishment, while ethics withdraws into the material certainties of the body. Badiou opposes to this ethics of differences, a logic of truths. Truths ‘come to be’ in particular situations, and are “indifferent to differences”[lxv]. Truths address everyone in their situation as they are “the same for all”[lxvi]. Using this logic Badiou is attempting to orchestrate a seismic movement in ethics, away from unprofitable assertion of our infinite differences, and towards acceptance of our sameness.

Truths are for Badiou the result of events. An event is “in a situation but not of it”[lxvii], it brings to pass “something other” [lxviii] than the situation. A situation is a state-of-affairs that is socially structured by the dominance of some individuals by others, although this dominance usually appears to be merely the ‘objective’, ‘natural’ existence of the state-of- affairs itself. When an event occurs, it is unpredictably, originating outside the structuration that makes the situation ‘objective’. The event occurs at society’s blind spot, in the void left behind by its ‘structure-in-dominance’. The event exposes the fault-lines of the structure itself, the bias and privilege sewn up in it, and addresses all the situation’s subjects in the same way.

Probably the most contentious aspect of the theory is the ambivalent relation of the individual to the event. The individual is both the ‘carrier’ of the event and is carried by it. Whilst being a condition of an event’s occurrence, the individual has no hold on it in subjective terms. Its ‘happening’ cannot be proved, only “affirmed and proclaimed”[lxix]. We are again within the arc of Orwell’s experiences in Spain here, the logic of the event coinciding with that of the workers’ rebellion. The Rebellion manifested the social blind spot that in proclaiming itself subverted the ‘normal’ functioning of workers in the social structure as a whole. For Orwell this event represented what is incalculable in subjectivity, that which cannot be explained, but must be proclaimed:

This period…is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life that already it has taken on the magic quality which, as a rule, belongs only to memories that are years old. It was beastly while it was happening, but it is a good patch for my mind to browse upon. I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of that time[lxx].

The rebellion is like “magic”, originating outside or beyond the rationality of the subject. It is an event, a truly political action.

Orwell’s experience further reflects Badiou’s evental logic in that the event is followed up with fidelity. For Badiou, fidelity is “a sustained investigation of the truth process, under the imperative of the event itself”[lxxi]. In the passage just above we see exactly that, an irresistible attraction having matured into sustained commitment. The Spanish Civil War was the turning point for Orwell; in its wake came a period of much more astute and mature political thinking, which made Orwell align himself irrevocably with the cause of socialism.

In Badiou’s terms, Orwell’s ‘public’ fidelity is to political subjectivity. Viewed from the opposite direction, he is given consistency, given body, induced by being faithful to Spain, by remaining true to it. Continuing with the terms employed thus far, together fidelity and inducement reveal an authentic form of political action, which pledges faithfulness to an irrational, unknowable intervention. Orwell’s fidelity to the Spanish event makes him politically authentic, because that event made a revolutionary intervention in Spanish politics which is beyond calculation. The event also induces his faith, giving Orwell subjective substance which demands neither rationality, nor its supporting structure of irrational preferences or point of consistency, points de caption. These points of rigid insistence are actually obstacles to political change, as Orwell found with the Wigan Pier prejudices. By premising subjectivity upon the void, as opposed to against the void, the subject can be understood in terms of fidelity to something real that exceeds the known -- as emergence. In other words, the political subject is not to be located here, now, as this or that; these preferences are irrational and personal, they stultify and calcify the social whole. Instead, in a faithful relation with something that irrupts in reality, addressing us all from a situation exposing the structures that have denied it, he or she is sustained, maintained over time by remaining true.

The problem of faithfulness suffuses Orwell’s work, indirectly or directly. It assails all his protagonists as inner crises of various kinds, as artistic anxiety, as religious scepticism, as nostalgic quietism. Faithfulness is at the heart of his political wrangles, his ethical declarations, his artistic judgments. Some of his worst post ‘36 excesses should perhaps be viewed, generously, as subjective attempts to hold true to revolutionary Spain; conversely, some of Orwell’s best analysis of social conditions during the Second World War, draw openly and deftly on his Civil War experiences and their intellectual aftermath. In ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, which was published at the tail-end of 1942, Orwell returns to the inexpressibly enigmatic and valuable nature of the “emotionally widening experience”[lxxii] he underwent in Spain, of which he says “I ask you to believe that it is moving to me”[lxxiii]. Once again the fusion of aesthetic and political is evident in the poem Orwell appended to the essay, of which two verses provide this paper’s heading epigraph. Politically, the poem appreciates the dignity of humanity’s desire for emancipation (“the thing I saw in your face”), having witnessed the distortion propaganda (“flyblown words”) can inflict upon this desire. As an artistic work, the poem is as if an act of homage to a spiritual experience (“in his ears were holy”), sounding the depths of Orwell’s commitment in a way which only poetry makes possible.

Orwell uses ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’ to underline the strategic significance of Spain for the Fascist advance on Europe, and to attack France and Britain for effectively sanctioning the defeat of the Republic through non-intervention. Again he situates truly political subjectivity outside of the knowable. The working classes, he argues, remain the best long-term hope for Fascism’s defeat because, unlike the fundamentally reactionary and bourgeois democratic hierarchies in France and Britain, their motivation is incalculable, unofficial:

sooner or later they must take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled [lxxiv].

This conceit is used by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four and elsewhere. Totalitarian power ultimately is inscribed materially, upon the body. The body figures therefore as a place of political dominion but also as a well-spring of political resistance and courage. The idea is developed in typical Orwellian terms as a bodily fundamentalism, a source and vitality that exceeds knowledge and galvanizes real political decision:

The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them[lxxv].

Once again Orwell writes with impassioned allegiance to his cause, insisting that power and purpose were given to those who like him remained faithful. The working class in Spain stayed true because of their evental sense that something was coming. In ‘Looking Back...’ Orwell critically contrasts the Spanish working class’ steadfastness with the “emotional superstructures”[lxxvi] that warped journalistic coverage of Spain and are distorting the response of the intelligentsia to the European war. Emotions are now being “turned on and off like a tap”, he argues; it is a consequence of “newspaper and radio hypnosis”[lxxvii].

Clearly Nineteen Eighty-Four represents an imaginative extrapolation of Orwell’s thought and feeling in 1942. Winston Smith is faithful to the departed ‘event’ of pre-war democracy, fidelity which emboldens him to resist the Party’s blend of emotional hypnosis and terror. Remaining faithful to Spain, the stance Orwell would be able to take against the European war was made clear to him. The Second World War, he wrote in 1942, repeated and magnified the worst aspects of the Spanish conflict, of which one was loss of “the idea that history could be truthfully written”[lxxviii]. Totalitarianism banishes objective truths, “There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science, ‘Jewish science’, etc.”[lxxix]. The Nazi regime presents its anti-Semitism as simply a ‘truth’ about the destinies of races. This truth is sutured into a state-of-affairs with other Nazi ‘truths’, replacing reality with ‘the reality of the state’. In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four this totalitarian fantasy becomes almost unassailable, as Orwell had feared it would become in Spain. Yet in the novel, totalitarianism provokes the same reaction in Winston as revolutionary Spain had done in his author, by making him faithful to an event.