Every Intellectual's Big Brother

Notes

The final volumes of The Complete Works of George Orwell appeared in 1997–1998, edited by Peter Davison (London: Secker and Warburg). This collection has superseded the fourvolume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. But The Complete Works did not appear in paperback until mid-2003 and still is not readily accessible to the non-specialist. For that reason, I have, where possible, cited the 1968 volumes (as CEJL) for references that appear in both sources. prologue 1. The conference proceedings have been published as George Orwell: Into the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Thomas Cushman and John Rodden (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004). Nor were the commemorations of—or controversies about—Orwell limited to the Englishspeaking world, as I discuss below in note 4. 2. The media glare ranged from the serious to the sophomoric, with the latter increasingly overshadowing the former as the centennial date—June 25—approached. For instance, during “Orwell Week” in San Francisco, the George Orwell Centenary Festival was held at Edinburgh Castle and included readings from Orwell’s most important works, film screenings, and “Free Victory Gin.” Patrons were told on Orwell’s birthday: “Show up tonight and tell them ‘cheesebikini is doubleplusgood.’ You’ll get free admission. . . . And remember: four legs good, two legs bad.” Source: http://www .whyteandmackay.co.uk/news.asp?newsid=121. Not to be outdone by the Yanks, the Isle of Jura distillery developed a special nineteenyear -old single malt whiskey in 2003 in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of its most famous visitor. Its promotional campaign for “Jura 1984” began as follows: The remote island setting proved to be the perfect place for both the creation of what was to become his masterpiece, and the limited edition, Jura 1984, a unique and distinctive single malt whiskey. The creation of Jura 1984 adds another unique and Notes original product to our portfolio and is a real first for malt drinkers and Orwell enthusiasts alike. (Ibid.) Not surprisingly, the English were more circumspect: the Royal Society of Chemistry in London marked June 25 by publishing the ideal technique for brewing tea, one of Orwell’s obsessions and the subject of an essay he wrote in 1946. But there were also more serious, even ominous concerns raised during the Orwell centennial conference at Wellesley College. Just about everyone discerned an Orwellian note in the name of the Pentagon’s recently inaugurated Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative, a program that was aimed at mining a vast centralized database of personal information for patterns that might reveal terrorist activities. (The name was subsequently changed to the Terrorist Information Awareness program, in an effort to reassure Americans who have nothing to hide.) 3. As I argue throughout this book, however, Orwell’s stature as an intellectual hero and cultural icon also poses grave dangers for the credulous admirer. Not the least of them is the temptation to allow Orwell’s vision and choices, quite uncritically, to dictate the admirer’s own, which fosters a life quite opposite from Orwell’s. It does not lead to a life of radical independence, but rather to a pathetic abdication of personal responsibility. Invariably , that process occurs when someone allows himself to honor others while remaining unfamiliar with their lived actions, so that he judges not the reputation by the actions, but the actions by the reputation. This tendency dominates celebrity culture, whereby the reader (or, more commonly, the viewer) lives life at a remove, partly through the hero or icon. It is as if one believes: “I can’t do all the things my hero did, so I’ll make him my auxiliary. He’ll think and do and write and speak and act for me.” This could be called “virtual living,” a process of letting other people lead your life for you, make your decisions for you, and carry your responsibility and even receive the blame whenever things don’t work out. It’s sometimes not just a relief to do so, but even a rather pleasurable surrender (in a masochistic sense). Fortunately, even Orwell’s biggest admirers have seldom gone this far—unlike, say, the fans of Elvis. Nonetheless, as I showed in my earlier studies of Orwell, the process has gone much, much further in Orwell’s case than is usually witnessed among intellectuals. Indeed, because intellectuals pride themselves on being skeptical and sharp-eyed, they are often outraged if you point...