Why We (Still) Read Orwell

The 1930s and 1940s in Britain—the peak of Orwell's career—are conceived as a period notable for the sustained intersection of politics and art, for the pursuit of political commitment through literature. A place could be made for the literary writer in the important public debates of the time because, in the recent words of Judge Richard Posner, "the literary imagination is equated to the possession of a social conscience" (2001, 233). George Orwell remains an avatar for the writer of such social conscience, one who seeks to reconcile literary concerns and civic engagement. The continued reliance on Orwell as an exemplar for how we should think about the crucial intellectual and political issues of our day is revealed in two recently published books; both use Orwell's works and life, his causes and his conscience, as a way into debates spanning over 75 years and as a conduit through which writers and issues can meet.

The first, Kristin Bluemel's excellent George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, revisits the 1930s and 1940s as a crucial period for the history of modernism and for public intellectual life. Her study calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between modernism and the years leading up to the Second World War. The other publication, the valuable On Nineteen Eighty-Four:Orwell and Our Future, an anthology edited by Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha Nussbaum, revisits Orwell's classic novel in the context of a post-9/11 world. These books are important for anyone seeking to examine the relationships among politics, culture, and literature; they investigate the philosophical and social ramifications of the world we live in now as they play out in new readings of Orwell's work and his time.

The writers of the interwar period have traditionally been read as eschewing formal experimentation for a literature of engagement; they called for poetry to be a vehicle for political commitment; they believed they were speaking truth to power with the voice of the people. The 1930s and 1940s may be considered a key moment in modernity, a moment that saw the breakdown of the British imperialist project and the rise of the regimes that would scar the century. While later studies of the 1930s, like Valentine Cunningham's 1988 book British Writers of the Thirties, sought to move beyond defining the period simply as "The Auden Generation" (to note Samuel Hynes' characterization), the critical vision of the decade still bracketed it off from what came immediately before—modernism—and after—the Second World War. Bluemel, with her model of "intermodernism," widens the scope of the study of the period in some very smart and provocative readings of several all-too-neglected figures of interwar British literature. In doing so, she reveals how this decade is a key moment not only in modernism but in modernity.

Bluemel focuses her consideration of the 1930s and 1940s on Orwell in order to show the ways in which Orwell serves as both insider and outsider; he is a key figure of the mythology of the decade and a conduit through which other important writers moved and made their own movement. He was never part of "The Auden Generation," and has thus been construed as an outsider, yet this participation renders him a central player in public and literary life. He was part of the imperialist project through his time in Burma, the socialist project through his joining the struggle in Spain and through his writing, the working-class project through his study of miners, and he responded to the concerns surrounding the rise of totalitarianism in his later novels. It is this aspect of Orwell's persona—a writer engaged with the most crucial issues of his time—that makes him...