LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/2. GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950)


Orwell died in 1950, when the Desperadoes were just being born, but his work definitely belongs to the Desperado age, owing to several essential features:

● Orwell was born in Bengal, which makes him one of the displaced writers, who are familiar with more than one geography, whose mind is open to many worlds at once. He also travelled extensively, which adds a broader horizon to his internationalist spirit.

● His sensibility is fairly dry and his imagination mechanically defamiliarizes and overturns. He creates a profile for dystopia as a wanted species. His plots and heroes do not expect sympathy, they mean to scare the reader into taking refuge into his own sensibility, into a desire to stay away from the universe of the work. He makes the reader feel happy he is not one of the participants to the book. The Desperado usually views in his mind such a reader who can dissociate himself from the characters and examine them coldly. Unlike other, more recent authors, Orwell does not aim at capturing the reader’s good will, he only wants to give warning. His 1984 is a repelling dystopia, which impresses the reader’s sensibility by the strength with which it rejects his own emotions. Dryness is used as a weapon against sentimentality, but also as a device to achieve defamiliarization and thus appeal to the reader’s curiosity.

● Orwell’s novels are built by accumulation of detail, which is a Desperado technique. The order is crystal clear, but the reader is supposed to remember everything if he is to make sense of the story. Orwell’s imagination is matter-of-fact. He demonstrates by surrounding his thesis – Beware of totalitarianism – with a very concrete environment, which creates a dark mood. Winston Smith does not enjoy his dystopic adventures as much as Lanark enjoys his. The joy of creation is replaced by Orwell’s reporting zest.

● Deprivation, the crisis of material civilization are Orwell’s main weapons in outlining his world. Lessing had the same view in The Memoirs of a Survivor, and Huxley in Ape and Essence. Desperadoes try to change what could be perceived as an end of life into the beginning of an unsuspected existence. They push it into the dark area of dystopia, but gradually fall in love with their own imagination and the reader follows them enjoying the nightmare more than any idyllic image. The writer imagines the worst, and the reader loves the negative image, which is the substance of most books. Deprived of the usual emotions triggered by literature, the reader discovers a new way of feeling: he loves the author’s lovelessness, he loves the heroes in spite of themselves. He argues with the author, and, as the author expected all along, he wins: his sensibility is enriched by a new mode, the dystopic involvement.

● In 1984 Orwell creates his own words in order to convey dystopic realities. ‘Thoughtcrime,’ ‘doublespeak’ and many others have become popular, though never used in the real communist regimes, because they are far too explicit. The trouble with these words are that they explain when they should suggest. Directness kills the message and Orwell’s novel ends more like a thesis to be demonstrated than a novel which can capture our emotions. Whether Orwell wanted his readers to side with him emotionally, we shall never know, as we shall not know this about any of the Desperadoes, even about those who claim they want to amuse, to win the reader over. All Desperadoes have a very strange way of showing their love for the reader, and were it not for their forceful creative impulse, we might easily mistake their love of complications for a desire to destroy the pleasure of the novel for us.

● While reading Orwell, the reader constantly feels on the verge of tears. He feels the same in Ishiguro, Barnes, Lessing and many others. The Desperado writer is not cheerful. He burdens his reader with his misgivings and worst fears. He trusts us with his tensions, and expects us to make the best of it, to rejoice where he could only mope. The Desperado reader must master a yoga of despair in order to accede to the serene core of the text, which is, ‘You are safe, and I, the author, keep you unharmed.’

● The need for a diary, whether a real notebook (see the multiplied Golden Notebook by Lessing) or a mental recording of life as it happens to the hero, is recurrent with Desperadoes. Orwell’s hero in 1984 longs for a diary which he does not even know how to begin. This diary is a way of fighting daily fears, recapturing one’s intellect, which the plot, the surroundings, the crowds of minor characters menace to stifle (see the missing schedule in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled). It is a crutch for memory. This real or imaginary diary (which is the novel itself in the long run) relies heavily on the fact that any Desperado novel only has one, all-absorbing hero, while the rest are just a mob around him, enhancing him. The diary is the Desperado character’s identity card.

● Orwell’s characters, like all Desperado heroes, are solitary beings. Solitude is the sea Desperado characters have to cross while they remember, meditate, slip into nightmares. Even when they talk to another character, they do not hear and are not heard. Their only interlocutor is their own mind, inside which the author lies coiled and ready to unfurl his plot.

● Orwell’s hero, like other Desperado protagonists, creates his island of intimacy, where he feels at ease. The room in the prole district, the cup of coffee, the forbidden love, the forbidden memory of the past, escape from the telescreen (false, as it proves in the end), are the concrete elements Orwell imagines to make his character feel happy, feel free. Other writers resort to memories (Ishiguro), tenderness (Swift), childhood (Lessing). All these are a moment’s refuge, soon overwhelmed by the turmoil of incidents. Yet we cannot decode the meaning if we do not find these islands of privacy, which are the key to the author’s own sensibility, forbidden by the narrative, hidden by indirectness, yet palpable to the soul of the intent reader. The author is there, and so is his lyricism.

● Orwell, like many Desperadoes, writes a handbook of despair. He pushes the nightmare to its outskirts. Lessing pushes psychological analysis to the border with insanity, Ishiguro pushes revolt to the inaudible howl of the badly bruised soul. All Desperado books are tenacious of suffering. Whatever the Desperado author writes, he feels cornered, exposed to the utmost danger. He also writes dangerously, and we read in the same way, or we do not read at all.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)