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The Structure of Orwell’s World View

1986; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1986.0028

1913-4835

Graham Good,

Themes in Literature Analysis

T H E S T R U C T U R E O F O R W E L L ’ S W O R L D V I E W GRAHAM GOOD University of British Columbia -Lhe popular image of the Orwellian world is readily described: a world of unrelenting unpleasantness, constant discomfort, petty humiliation, sen­ sory disgust, hopeless misery, and the fear of worse to come. It is like Eliot’s Waste Land without the myths, or like the gloomy side of Dickens’ London, unrelieved by Christmas or good cheer. This image of Orwell’s world is not unfounded, but the monotonous monochrome quality of it doesn’t do justice to the deeper structures and the presence of strong contrasts and conflicts. The atmosphere is not so much one of unrelieved gloom as of very distinct kinds of gloom in high relief. Emphatic differences are the mainstays of Orwell’s descriptions, characters, and narration, both in his novels and his essays, but these differences, for all their sharpness, in fact because of their sharpness, are eventually reduced to indifference. Ultimately it doesn’t much matter which of two opposite qualities an object or person has — they may even have both. The presence of variety in the physical world and choice in the moral world produces, for a time, the illusion of distinctions of value, an illusion which the novels create and then destroy. This essay aims to chart the structures of differentiation in Orwell’s world by showing his picture of the human species: first the physical conditions of environment, bodily characteristics, and functions that make up its outer world, and then the inner world of feeling and perception, with the face, the outward expression of inward states, as the mediator between the two worlds. The laws of opposition within these different areas (such as young and old, male and female, love and hate, etc.) also govern the most fundamental conflict in Orwell, between the inner world of a single human being and the outer world as a whole. The Environment In Orwell’s novels and documentaries, the central fig­ ures inhabit a wide variety of settings: Flory, the timber merchant in Burmese Days (1934), lives in “ a fairly typical Upper Burma town” (BD 17) where the white bungalows of the European quarter are set apart from the crowded and racially mixed “native town.” Dorothy, whose role is E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x i i , 3, September 1986 defined by the title of A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), inhabits an English village called Lower Knype, in Suffolk, which mixes the hideousness of upper-middle-class housing (“the colony of sham-picturesque villas in­ habited by the coffee brigade” — CD 15) with that of the industrial lower class: “higgledy-piggledy rows of vile yellow brick cottages” (CD 14) grouped around the Blifil-Gordon sugar beet refinery. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is set in London, and the declining status of the hero, Gordon Comstock, is measured by his descent from the “mingy, lowermiddle -class decency” of “Willowbed Road, NW” (K A F 27) to a “ filthy alley” (K A F 216) in Lambeth, where “ It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you lose yourself for ever” (K A F 217). The Ellesmere Road where George Bowling lives in Coming Up For Air (1939) is very like Willowbed Road: a lower-middle-class estate he describes as “A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-tenpound -a-weekers quake and shiver” (CUFA 14). Later he undertakes a visit to his birthplace, the old village of Lower Binfield, which he discovers has not been demolished, but swallowed or submerged by “an enormous river of brand-new houses which flowed along the valley in both directions and half-way up the hills on either side” (CUFA 177). It also now contains “two enormous factories of glass and concrete” (CUFA 177), which adum­ brate the landscape of 1984, where the huge towers of the four Ministries dominate the...