Miseries and Splendours of Scholarship

Reviews Miseries and Splendours of Scholarship J EFFREY MEYERS George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Follr. Edited by Bernard Crick Oxford: Clarendon Press "984. 460. $49.95 George Orwell. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four': The Facsimile. Edited by Peter Davison London: Secker and Warburg; Weston, Mass: M and s Press 1984. 381. £25; $75.00 Wyndham Lewis's prescient political study, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which would have been a brilliant title for Orwel1's novel, begins with similar premises but arrives at quite different conclusions. Written a few years after the Russian Revolution and the Fascist coup in Italy, Lewis's book, like Orwell's, combines satire, political theory, and prophecy. Lewis (who lived in Canada during World War II, taught at Assumption College, and wrote his greatest novel, Self Condemned , about Toronto) sees the post-war world divided between the democratic and dictatorial forms of government: 'The principal conflict to-dayI then, is between the democratic and liberal principle on the one side ... and on the other the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist.' Because the masses are manipulated by the media - 'The contemporary Public [is) corrupted and degraded into semi-imbecility by the operation of this terrible canon of press and publicity technique' - Lewis rejects force as a passing and precarious thing and cynically insists that thought control, getting 'inside a person's mind and changing his very personality, is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours.' In contrast to Orwell, Lewis, the intellectual elitist, asks: 'Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weaknesses of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?' Lewis maintains that the strong ruler is justified in outraging the most elementary principles of freedom because the masses (Orwell's proles) are happier when they are dependent rather than independent. Since Lewis concludes, like Dostoyevsky's Grand lnquisitor and Orwell's O'Brien, that men are essentially weak and crave authority, notfreedom, he inevitably recommends a totalitarian form of government: 'We should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised.... All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufacUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 118 JEFFREY MEYERS tured, will henceforth be spared.." The disciplined fascist party in Italy can be taken as representing the new and healthy type of "freedom." ... For anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be the best.' The heart of Bernard Crick's introduction, the 'Seven Satiric Thrusts'.of Nineteen Eighty-Four, includes three of the themes mentioned by Lewis: the division of the world, the mass media as agents of prolerization, and power hunger and totalitarianism, and adds four others: betrayal by the intellectuals, the degradation of language, the destruction of truth, and the theses ofJames Burnham's The Managerial Revolution ('94')' The first, third, fourth, and sixth ofthese points were mentioned in Orwell's letter to H.J. Willmett of .8 May '944 (printed as Appendix B) and repeated in Orwell's unused introduction to Animal Farm, 'Freedom of the Press,' first published in 1972. So there is nothing at all original in Crick's argument , which fails to distinguish between the true objects of Orwell's satire (nos. 2-6) and the ideas he borrows from Burnham (nos. 1 and 7). Crick's statement that the novel is 'best read as Swiftian satire' repeats an idea stated by V.S. Pritchett, Herbert Read, and Czeslaw Milosz when the book first appeared; his assertion that it is 'deeply rooted ... in contemporary conditions' echoes the argument in my Reader's Guide to George Orwell ('975). It is an excellent idea to bring out a scholarly edition of a modem novel (as Cambridge University Press is doing with the work of D.H. Lawrence) when it is relatively easy to recreate the context and elucidate the contemporalY references. Crick is good on relating Orwell's essays and reviews of the 1940S to the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and revealing the conscious parody of catechism and communion when Winston...