Orwell and Empire: Anti-Communism and the Globalization of Literature
2008; Issue: 28 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1110-8673
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
ResumoThis article explores the process through which British colonialism was rearticulated by the institutions and discourses of American anti-communism. Focusing on George Orwell, the author provides critical account of the British and governments' efforts to advance the distribution of George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four--through adaptations, translations, films, cartoons, and subventions. The article concludes that these endeavors did less to disseminate cultural values, than they did to reproduce existing social relationships. ********** For decades, George Orwell's blue quarto notebook, filled with the names of one hundred and thirty-five crypto-communists and fellow travelers, languished, mostly unexamined, in the George Orwell Archives in London, attracting only passing interest from the few scholars granted permission by Orwell's estate to examine the material. In his 1980 biography of Orwell, Bernard Crick, for example, made only brief allusion to the list, writing that Orwell worried about infiltration ... and kept notebook of suspects. (1) Many of those listed, Crick said, plausible as possible underground or front members, but few seem far-fetched and unlikely. (2) A decade later, Orwell's authorized biographer Michael Shelden speculated that Orwell was engaged in continuous exercise of determining who was sincere and who was not. The notebook was primarily to satisfy [Orwell's] own curiosity, Shelden wrote. (3) The notebook included the names of those whom Orwell suspected of having affiliations with the Communist Party, or sympathies with the idea of communism. (4) Among them, he mentioned poets such as Stephen Spender, whom he described as sentimental [communist] sympathizer, very unreliable, and easily influenced. (5) George Bernard Shaw was, he wrote, no sort of tie-up, but reliably on all major issues. (6) The historian A. J. P. Taylor was anti-American; Isaac Deutcher was a sympathizer; Richard Crossman was political climber and too dishonest to be an outright f[ellow] t[raveler]; J. B. Priestley was a strong sympathizer, very anti-USA, and makes huge sums of money in the USSR. (7) The Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid was reliably pro-Russian and very anti-English. C. Day Lewis was not completely reliable and the Irish playwright, Sean O'Casey, was very stupid. (8) Orwell's notebook of crypto-communists and fellow-travelers inscribed communism in the form of various threats to the homogeneity of English culture. He observed, for example, that the historian Isaac Deutcher was Polish Jew; that Ian Mikardo, columnist at the Tribune, was silly and Jewish; that the writer Cedric Dover was Eurasian; that Paul Robeson was US Negro and very anti-white; that the MP Konni Zilliacus was Finnish and Jewish; that the biologist J. D. Bernal was Irish; that Louis Adamic was Jugo-Slav and very anti-British; that Vera Dean was Russian; and that the French intellectual E. Mounier, author of La Pensee de Charles Peguy (1931) was slimy. (9) Indeed, Orwell once wrote to his friend Dwight McDonald that he could smell crypto-communist. (10) Irish and Scottish writers, such as Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, and Hugh McDiarmid, were recast and refashioned as communist threats: think we should pay more attention to the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island, Orwell wrote in 1946; They may look unimportant now, but, after all, the Communist Manifesto was once an obscure document, and the Nazi party had only six members when Hitler joined it. (11) From the one hundred and thirty-five names in the notebook, Orwell drew up more limited list of thirty-five, which he sent to the Information Research Department (IRD) on May 2, 1949. (12) It isn't sensational and I don't suppose it will tell your friends anything they don't know, he wrote the IRD; At the same time it isn't bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed. …
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