It needs more public-spirited pigs: TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm | Hacker News Reader

It needs more public-spirited pigs: TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm

theguardian.com

29 pointssamclemens11 comments

related: Isaac Asimov's scathing review of 1984

This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.

Nor was Orwell particularly prescient in the strictly social aspects of the future he was presenting, with the result that the Orwellian world of 1984 is incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s.

Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.

He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences.

In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have. All his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy, or stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell wants to indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that under even the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women who have withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are luminous flames in the surrounding darkness. If only because there is no hint of this in 1984, it does not resemble the real world of the 1980s.

Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949. There are only two female characters of importance. One is a strong, brainless 'prole' woman who is an endless washerwoman, endlessly singing a popular song with words of the type familiar in the 1930s and 1940s (at which Orwell shudders fastidiously as 'trashy', in blissful non-anticipation of hard rock).

The other is the heroine, Julia, who is sexually promiscuous (but is at least driven to courage by her interest in sex) and is otherwise brainless. When the hero, Winston, reads to her the book within a book that explains the nature of the Orwellian world, she responds by falling asleep - but then since the treatise Winston reads is stupefyingly soporific, this may be an indication of Julia's good sense rather than the reverse.

In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

I don't know. I'd say Orwell did an excellent job of predicting North Korean society.

1984 is not really science fiction, but a political fantasy showing the worst a society could become with modern technology. As with all dystopias, it is a warning more than a true and consistent world.

I co-ran the UC Davis branch of the Students for an Orwellian Society 10 years ago. The idea of doublethink, of encapsulating dangerous ideas in pithy slogans, of massive government surveillance -- those are all very relevant today. They serve well for helping to frame a debate. But still, I've never felt the urge to reread 1984, which in some ways proves Asimov correct. It's not amazing as fiction, but full of interesting ideas.

1984 describes the world as if the Soviet Union won the cold war. So it does seem to capture some aspects of a leftist totalitarian society like North Korea. On the other hand North Korea is different any many ways, e.g. 1984 doesn't characterize the proles as living in near starvation.

When it comes to applying its ideas more generally, the problem is that everyone wants to use it as ammunition against their ideological opponents. For example opponents of Trump might consider the strong emotions he stirs up comparable with the 2 minutes hate, while opponents to the progressive movements might consider the attempt to erase gendered pronouns from our language as a kind of Newspeak.

Of course, both sides would be correct. That's why Orwell works so well as a logical razor. The question of government is always the degree to which the culture is controlled.

Orwell himself never really settled on an ideology, and were he American today I imagine he'd be deeply unsatisfied with all of our parties/candidates.

I find this criticism and Eliot's of very little value without Orwell's choice of rebuttals. The format of 1984 is very different from A clock Work Orange, which is the closest thing I can think of to Asimov's request. 1984 works on a different level because it doesn't distance the reader from the characters by giving them new vices or unessential tech that we must map to the present. The pigs in animal farm also work very well from Orwell's perspective. I don't think he viewed his class controlling India as an accident, and for all intents he was a civic minded pig that at best understood that his peers were going too far in making an empire with all the unfortunate traits of past empires.

Orwell's "1984" is a barely disguised description of Orwell's WWII job at the British Ministry of Information. See "Orwell, the Lost Writings", which has letters from his time there.[1]

Orwell's job during WWII was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English, with a 1000 word vocabulary[2], for broadcast to the colonies, including India. The British had a scheme at the time to get everyone in the colonies to speak at least Basic English, and this was part of it.

Orwell observed that translation into Basic English is a political act. Some concepts are very difficult to express in Basic English. Political ambiguity does not translate at all.

Hence Newspeak.

As for "part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco," that comes from the Ministry of Information's canteen, described by other ex-employees as "dismal".

"Big Brother" seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of Information, who was actually called that (not to his face) by staff.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-Lost-Writings-George/dp/0877957... [2] https://xkcd.com/1133/

And Room 101 was a meeting room at the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3267261.stm

In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.

But 1984 was clearly not written to be sci-fi; other than the tele-screens it has very little in the way of interesting technology or development. It is intended to be a political story on the dangers of totalitarianism and is normally judged by that standard. Which rightly makes it a classic!

What 1984 has is a ubiquity of surveillance, something that couldn't be done in 1948 when it was written. This is an SF concept: it changes something about 1948 society, and runs the simulation. Nothing could be more clearly sci-fi.

I've always understood good SF to be a thought experiment about an altered reality that reveals something relevant to us, today, right now. Usually it's a philosophical experiment; Philip K Dick was a master of this.

I've never expected prediction of scientific developments from SF, and I don't judge older SF negatively in any way for being "incorrect" in predicting things. Older SF can be less relevant because "now" is not "then", not because it made poor predictions. Predicting things is a mug's game in any case; it's easy to see something coming in any one single dimension (usually it's something we have in some form today, but lighter, smaller, faster, cheaper, more digital, more automated or more ubiquitous), but extremely hard to see it coming in multiple dimensions and the sequencing and interaction between different innovations as they unfold in parallel.

Sibling comments have referred to 1984 as a political fantasy with modern technology; for me, a political fantasy with modern technology is SF. SF as a genre is a very close cousin with fantasy; the chief conceit is more regard for what might be physically possible, and tending to be set in the present or future rather than a mythical past. Star Wars is fantasy in SF clothes (space opera); Star Trek is (usually) SF dressed up as space opera.

Asimov's own predictions weren't always that great (no positronic brains or atomic powered everything yet), but I think he finally explained to me why I felt so depressed and angry reading 1984 with, "Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have." Most dystopian sci-fi is fun to read precisely because it has the very real aspect of "brave men and women who have withstood the tyrants..." That's inspiring. 1984 was valuable, but depressing.

But, why are we talking so much about 1984? This is an article about Animal Farm :-)

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