Name: LITERATURE - George Orwell
Uploaded: 2018-06-27T12:40:53.000Z
Duration: 13 min 47 s
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was an English intellectual who died in 1950

and used literature for the only reason it ultimately really exists -

to try to change the world for the better.

He was, in the deeper sense, a political writer,

someone who wanted art to help us grow kinder, fairer, wiser.

his momentously popular fable, 'Animal Farm',

which laid out his approach with a characteristic clarity.

What I wanted to do throughout the past ten years

is to make political writing into an art.

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship. A sense of injustice.

When I sit down to write a book, I don't say to myself, "I'm going to produce a work of art."

"I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention,

and my initial concern is to get a hearing."

we therefore have to understand what this most political of writers loved,

What he was in rebellion against, and what he championed.

This is what will give us the keys to understanding his remarkable work,

George Orwell always hated the social group of which he was, despite everything,

From an early age, he had wanted to be a writer.

But George Orwell excelled at never quite belonging.

which was then part of the British Empire,

to economically fragile civil servant parents,

who fought for him to have a classic upper middle class English upbringing.

And then hoped he might become a doctor, or a lawyer.

They sent him to what turned out to be a crippling, mean spirited English prep school at the age of eight.

But he turned against the values and spirit of the English public school system.

He never went to university, and after a stint as an imperial policeman in Burma,

he settled into the life of the odd-jobbing literary intellectual.

Working in a Hamstard book shop, reviewing other people's books,

Nevertheless, Orwell's disdain of intellectuals was a constant.

He accused them of a range of sins, a lack of patriotism, resentment of money,

and physical vigor. Concealed sexual frustraion, pretension, and dishonesty.

He knew it all form the inside, but Orwell's greatness emerge from the rye determination

with which he recognized and came to triumph against such tendencies in himself.

"The really important fact about the English intelligentsia," he once wrote, "is their severance

In left wing circles, it's always felt that there's something slightly  disgraceful in being an Englishman,

and that it's a duty to snigger at every English institution from horse racing to suet puddings.

Orwell's generation of intellectuals, which had witnessed the First World War and the Great Depression,

was obsessed with airy, abstract, large schemes to redeem human kind.

Some were fanatical communists, others staunch defenders of radical capitalism, a few admired the new

authoritarian regimes of Italy, Spain, and Germany, and wanted something similar

Orwell listened, and was for a time, a little seduced.

But he came gradually to champion something far more radical:

The tastes, opinions, needs and outlook of someone he called "the ordinary person".

As a typical product of an English public school,

he was a little exposed in anyone below his own social class.

A tendency compounded by a naturally aloof, bookish and different manner.

But Orwell set out to make up for his lack of knowledge

and gradually came to be the great defender

of what he repeatedly called ordinary life.

Life of people, not especially blessed with material goods,

and yet, nevertheless, love, care for others,

work, have fun, raise children, and have large thoughts about the deepest questions,

in ways that Orwell thought especially admirable.

When he left the privileges of his class behind, and went to work in series of menial service jobs

experiences he was to recount in his book,

"Down and Out in Paris and London" published in 1933.

The book is filled with affection and portraits of life behind stairs in hotels and restaurants

and revels and camaraderie, humor and warmth.

of an assortment of cleaners or shoe rubbers, waiters, chefs

It was a side of life Orwell was further to investigate.

In a book chronicling his journeys around the industrial coal mining of Northern England

again, without sentimentality or reverse snobbery,

over the people he met, and concluded that the average pulp in a coal mining village.

than the British cabinet or the high table of an Oxbridge College.

Orwell especially liked the lack of prudishness and hypocrisy

One thing one notices when he writes, if he looks directly at the common people

They are in veteran gamblers, drink as much as their wages will permit,

and devoted to boardy jokes and use, probably, the foulest language in the world.

Then, as now, there was plenty of information in the news about ordinary people.

But Orwell understood that these news tended to turn people into abstractions.

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LITERATURE - George Orwell

ultimately

reveal

constant

intelligence