WI: George Orwell lives to be 80

If he'd have lived longer, he might (according to his friend and critic TR Fyvel) have become a little passé. Don't get me wrong, one of my favourite writers, but his time was undoubtedly the 30s and 40s, not further on. Even at the time, 1984 harked back to an age already passed; a bombed-out London reminiscent of the Blitz, Fascist/Communist tendencies within British society etc, were all drawing on themes he'd explored in previous essays. Even Winston Smith's conversation with an old 'working class' man on one of his trips out sounds really like the speech he heard amongst tramps in Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell by the time of his death was certainly a great writer, but as for the themes of his works, they were stuck in the past, and I highly doubt that after 1950 we'd see any of his writings get any more popular upon the strength of their own merit (rather, 'Orwell was rather good with 1984 wasn't he...and look, he's got another one out on the shelves, might as well buy that').

1984 remains as pertinent today as it did when Totalitarian regimes ran rampart in Europe. I don't think its message will ever get weaker even as time goes on and the world continues to democratize.
 
1984 remains as pertinent today as it did when Totalitarian regimes ran rampart in Europe. I don't think its message will ever get weaker even as time goes on and the world continues to democratize.

I do agree with you, but in many ways, 1984 has lost some of its meaning. You could argue that we live in a world like 1984 (CCTV, wars that aren't quite winnable etc...) but if we do, the method of control used by the "Inner Party" is much more subtle than Orwell imagined it. Of course I don't believe that we live in anything like 1984 minus the extreme poverty but you can argue it with some degree of weight.
 
He'd no doubt take great interest in events like 1956 in Hungary. I don't think he'd be polticially very active but he could be something of a rallying point for communists and other leftists disenchanted with the USSR post-war.

It should be remembered that Orwell died at a very unique time which is reflected in his division of the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His attention could only have grown with regards to America, at the very least its growing domination of Britain and Western Europe.

Actually given his interest in superstates, how might he view the EEC?
 
Have heard it claimed that the coming of rock music and related youth movements might have been his undoing, in that it would have been the point where he mutated into a fogey/reactionary and thus inadvertently/unknowingly tainted his own legacy. I think his main body of work was strong enough to survive that, but can see the point; that was definitely the moment when a lot of significant thinkers of his generation began to embarrass themselves.
 
He'd no doubt take great interest in events like 1956 in Hungary. I don't think he'd be polticially very active but he could be something of a rallying point for communists and other leftists disenchanted with the USSR post-war.

It should be remembered that Orwell died at a very unique time which is reflected in his division of the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His attention could only have grown with regards to America, at the very least its growing domination of Britain and Western Europe.

Actually given his interest in superstates, how might he view the EEC?

We did this on soc.history.what-if. ( https://groups.google.com/d/topic/soc.history.what-if/1yza5Xl11yU/discussion )

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Orwell was a mixture of petits-bourgeois self-loathing and moralistic righteousness. As I've previously mentioned, he is my kind of class-traitor.

1956 doesn't necessarily do much more for Orwell. EP Thompson and Reasoner/New Reasoner pushed the CPGB tendency to Humanism as far as it could be within reformist/humanist communism. Orwell, lying outside of the party tradition, but outside of Trotskism, and with his nationalist (Lion and Unicorn) turn can we really accept that Orwell will be what the international proletariat needs in 1956: a Miklos Gimes, a Mario Tronti, a Raya Dunayevskaya, an Anastas Mikoyan, a Cornelius Castoriadis. No. Orwell is grossly undertheorised.

If we look at Orwell's moments of correctness, it is when he's deeply connected to mass moods of a self-organised British working class. 1936. 1944. The British working class movement in 1956 was not sufficiently prepared to lead Orwell left over workers' self-control and self-defence in Hungary.

Orwell will also be significantly damaged by the broadening of the proletariat's self-conceptions and cultural expressions during the 1960s. He won't be able to cope with Beatlemania let alone bohemianism.

yours,
Sam R.
 
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