All Art Is Propaganda Read Free

Eliot's "Four Quartets," a poem of more profound despair than he admits. He is howlingly wrong when he says that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf. These are minor things. A major thing he was wrong about was the inner logic of totalitarianism: He thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of
1984.
In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin's death. Other totalitarian regimes have repeated the pattern. Orwell was wrong and Orwell contradicted himself. He was more insightful about the distant dangers of Communist thought-control, in the Soviet Union, than the more pressing and durable thought-control of Western consumerism. Nor did he see the sexual revolution coming, not by a long shot; one wonders what the too-frequent taunter of the "pansy left" would have made of the fact that the gay movement was one of the most successful, because most militant, of the post-1960s liberation struggles.
    But there is a deeper logic to these essays, beneath the contradictions and inevitable oversights. The crisis that Orwell was writing himself through in the 1940s was the crisis of the war and, even more confusingly, the postwar. It involved a kind of projection into the future of certain tendencies latent in the present. Throughout these essays Orwell worries about the potential Sovietization of Europe, but also the infection by totalitarian thinking of life outside the Soviet sphere—not just specific threats to specific freedoms, but to deeper structures of feeling. As the philologist Syme says to Winston Smith in
1984
: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?...Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." If Orwell was wrong in some sense about the long-term development of totalitarianism, he was right about its deepest intellectual intentions, about the rot it wished to create at the center of thinking itself. And he was right that this rot could spread.
    One solution would be to cordon off literature from life and politics entirely: This was, in some sense, the solution adopted by the writers of the previous generation—Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound—whom Orwell calls the writers of the 1920s and we now call the high modernists. And yet Orwell did not want to make a special plea for literature; in fact, of all the writers of his time, Orwell was constitutionally the least capable of making this separation. His own writing and politics were the fruit of his specific experience—of imperialism in Burma, of the conditions in the English coal mines, of the war in Spain. He begins these essays with the insistence that "all art is propaganda" (he repeats this several times)—the expression of a particular world-view. In Dickens's case this is the worldview of a classic nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal, a worldview Orwell admires even as he sees its limitations. ("Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.") In the case of boys' weeklies, it is a worldview that is in a sense incidental (precisely because they are
not
art): "These papers exist because of a specialised demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them." Orwell was producing these essays contemporaneously with the great Western Marxist debates over "committed" literature, but Orwell is, to put it mildly, considerably more down to earth. In the case of the boys' weeklies he suggests some reforms: not that