Page 69 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes his life had to flee to Spain. This dreadful experience made him so scared of communism, that he
first expressed it in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938),
which most people consider to be amongst his best works.
After going back to England, George Orwell displayed an absurdly conservative strain in
writing Coming Up for Air (1939). In this masterpiece Orwell uses the nostalgic memories of a
middle-aged man to study the decency of a past England and express his worries about a future
threatened by fascism and war. When war happened, George Orwell was rejected for military
service. Orwell instead became the head of the Indian service of the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC). In 1943, he left the BBC and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-
wing socialist paper linked with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period George
Orwell was a creative journalist, who wrote several newspaper reviews and articles, along with
serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies. Orwell also
wrote several books about England (especially The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that included
patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very different from
that practiced by the British Labour Party.

In 1944 Orwell completed Animal Farm. It is a political tale based on the story of the Russian
Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. The story of Animal Farm revolves around a group
of barnyard animals who takeover and chase their exploitative and unfair human leaders and
set up a democratic society of their own. Ultimately the animals’ power-loving and intelligent
leaders, the pigs, disrupt the revolution. They then form a dictatorship whose bondage is much
more heartless and oppressive than that of their previous human leaders. (“All animals are
equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first George Orwell had a tough time
finding a publisher for his masterpiece, but when it finally got published in 1945, Animal
Farm made Orwell very famous and wealthy.
Despite being one of Orwell’s finest works, Animal Farm was filled with fantasy and wit and
was very splendidly written. It was, however, outshined by yet another masterpiece written by
him called Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). This was the last book written by Orwell and he wrote
this book as a warning after years of brooding on the twin threats of Stalinism and Nazism. The
novel is set in an imagined future in which the entire world is dominated by three continuously
fighting totalitarian police states. The novel’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor
party functionary in one of these states. His desire for truth and his decency leads him to silently
rebel against the government, which spreads its rule by methodically misrepresenting the truth
and uninterruptedly rewriting history to achieve its objectives. Smith has a love affair with a
compatible woman, but they both get arrested by the Thought Police. The resultant torture,
imprisonment and re-education of Smith are not just aimed at breaking him physically or
making him surrender but to remove his spiritual dignity and his independent mental existence
until he begins to love the figure he hated the most: the seeming leader of the party, Big Brother.
Smith’s surrender to the evil brainwashing practices of the prison officers is very tragic, but the
book gets much of its power from the wide-ranging rigour with which it spreads the premises
of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of domination and power over others has attained
its perfected expression in the continuous surveillance and ever-present dishonesty of an
unquestionable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human quality is gradually
being extinguished and suborned. George Orwell’s warning of the possible dangers of
totalitarianism created a deep impression on his equals and on succeeding readers. The book’s
title and a lot of its coined phrases and words such as “Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,”
and “doublethink” became good examples for modern political abuses.

George Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebrides
island of Jura, which he had taken from the profits he got after writing Animal Farm. He worked
between short periods of hospitalisation for tuberculosis. He later died of tuberculosis in a
London hospital in January 1950.

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