Englishman Writing: Self-Reflexivity and the Poetics of Prose

Alex Woloch's invigorating and nuanced reading of George Orwell's non-fictive, political prose in Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism is the latest, and perhaps the most literary critical, of the many book-length analyses of the writer. Woloch's book speaks to several antecedents: Alok Rai's George Orwell: The Politics of Despair, which charts Orwell's movement from vigorous rebellion to a politics of despair and pessimism; Stephen Ingle's George Orwell: A Political Life, in which Ingle elaborates on Orwell's attempt to universalize working class values; and Robert Colls's more recent George Orwell: English Rebel, which argues that Orwell's mobile and situationally critical mode makes it difficult to pin down his politics, moving between socialist, liberal, and conservative.¹ Woloch, in contrast, argues that Orwell's politics, his avowed commitment to "democratic Socialism," always emerged in and through the process of writing, that the writing practice itself produced a politics that eschewed any complacent assertions. The originality of Woloch's contribution—and it is brilliant in its deliberate analysis of the rhythms of Orwell's deceptively clear prose and Kermodian attention to form—lies in slowly and carefully revealing the ways in which Orwell's work layers politics, thought, and prose. Woloch demonstrates the tensions—syntactical, political, and structural—evident in Orwell's long and prolific career, through detailed and focused readings: in the first half, he offers new analyses of some of Orwell's best-known and most thoroughly studied works, including "A Hanging" (1931), "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the essay collection Inside the Whale (1940). In the second half, which really is a tour de force of formal literary criticism, he presents an extended study of "As I Please," Orwell's column for the Tribune that ran from 1943 to 1947.

Woloch points to what he sees as "an internal tension, and drama, within Orwell's writing practice: between writing as (consummated) idea and as (propulsive) form" (52). Even as Orwell's writing is motivated by his investment in a set of discrete political values (democratic socialism), what becomes evident in Woloch's argument is that the internal tensions of Orwell's clear prose and his famous casual asides point to a relentless skepticism of any stable and permanent political position or even permanent thought. Orwell's prose enacts a continuing oppositional stance—a sustained negative state. For him, writing as form disrupts complacency of thought. In other words, a self-aware compositional practice is attentive to the pitfalls of habituated thought. To write well and clearly is to be self-aware of the practice of writing; to write is to be self-reflexive in the moment of writing and to bring a multifaceted attention to the discourses of thought and composition, as well as the genealogies of word, syntax, and phrase. This, of course, makes Orwell's writing practice deliberately political, and Orwell follows this through to its logical end, where he problematizes easy proclamations and praxis. In his readings of Orwell's columns from "As I Please," Woloch unpacks the ways that "oppositions and instability" are generative of socialism (311). For Orwell, democratic socialism—like thought, like writing—needs to aim toward something, but because it emerges in opposition to the status quo of persistent inequality and entrenched hierarchies, it "can never stably or durably transcend the negative state out of which it arises"; it cannot move beyond its oppositional nature (310). If it does, it ceases to be socialist thought, and moreover, it ceases to be either productive or effective. Woloch's reading, then, situates Orwell's negative state alongside Adorno's negative dialectics. The negative tentativeness—the instability and tension—is necessary to effective democratic socialist praxis, just as it is instrumental in unthinking hegemonic common sense through writing.

The previous statement might seem hyperbolically ironic, given how Orwell has typically been seen as one of the patriarchs of common sense, and...