Summary
Writer read in “Tourism among the Dogs”, the ninth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, through Stansky and Abrahams’s biography: a writer whose down-and-out material persuaded readers he spoke as one of the oppressed, while his political writing was sustained from the security of bourgeois life and his plain style became the model for seemingly opinion-less Western journalism (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.110-113).
Details
- His works in this essay include Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia (from Spain, 1936–1937), Animal Farm and 1984 (PDF p.110-112).
- Gordon Comstock, hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is “only fitfully aware of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed” (quoted PDF p.110).
- In Down and Out he writes of hitting absolute bottom: “you have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” (quoted PDF p.111).
- His social patriotism blocked serious analysis in “England Your England”, whose homey formula is “a family with the wrong people in control” (PDF p.111).
- His claim to Ukrainian readers of Animal Farm of a commitment to socialism in 1930 is, in Said’s account, plainly an untruth, and in 1935 he was unaware “that Hitler intended to carry out the programme of Mein Kampf” (PDF p.112).
- He consistently referred to English radicals as “the pansy Left” and had no knowledge of Marx or of the Marxist and socialist traditions (PDF p.112).
- In essay 11, Orwell is one of the European prestige figures — with Sartre and Silone — whose prestige Walter Lippmann matched with a much wider audience, without an intellectual’s mission (PDF p.125).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Walter Lippmann