All Art Is Propaganda but Not All Propaganda Is Art
All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
By George Orwell
Hardcover, 416 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List price: $25.00
"Can Socialists Be Happy?"
From the Tribune 1943
The thought of Christmas raises almost automatically the thought of Charles Dickens, and for 2 very practiced reasons. To begin with, Dickens is one of the few English writers who have actually written about Christmas. Christmas is the nearly popular of English festivals, and even so it has produced astonishingly little literature.
There are the carols, mostly medieval in origin; there is a tiny handful of poems past Robert Bridges, T. S. Eliot, and some others, and at that place is Dickens; merely there is very lilliputian else. Secondly, Dickens is remarkable, indeed almost unique, among modern writers in existence able to give a disarming pic of happiness.
Dickens dealt successfully with Christmas twice — in a well-known chapter of The Pickwick Papers and in The Christmas Carol. The latter story was read to Lenin on his deathbed and, according to his wife, he found its "bourgeois sentimentality" completely intolerable. Now in a sense Lenin was correct; simply if he had been in better health he would possibly have noticed that the story has some interesting sociological implications. To begin with, withal thick Dickens may lay on the paint, however disgusting the "pathos" of Tiny Tim may exist, the Cratchit family do requite the impression of enjoying themselves. They audio happy as, for case, the citizens of William Morris'due south News From Nowhere don't sound happy. Moreover — and Dickens's understanding of this is one of the secrets of his ability — their happiness derives mainly from contrast. They are in loftier spirits because for once in a manner they have enough to eat. The wolf is at the door, just he is wagging his tail. The steam of the Christmas pudding drifts across a background of pawnshops and sweated labour, and in a double sense the ghost of Scrooge stands beside the dinner table. Bob Cratchit even wants to beverage Scrooge's health, which Mrs. Cratchit rightly refuses. The Cratchits are able to enjoy their Christmas precisely because Christmas merely comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because information technology is described as incomplete.
All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other paw, have been failures, from earliest history onwards. Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn't mean "a good place," it means simply "a not- existent place") take been common in the literature of the past three or four hundred years, merely the "favourable" ones are invariably unappetising, and unremarkably lacking in vitality likewise.
By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H. M. Wells. Wells'due south vision of the time to come, implicit all through his early piece of work and partly set forth in Anticipations and A Modernistic Utopia, is virtually fully expressed in ii books written in the early 'twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you accept a movie of the earth as Wells would like to see it — or thinks he would similar to meet it. Information technology is a earth whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries that we now endure from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, affliction, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition — all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to cancel the things that Wells wants to cancel. Simply is at that place anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to alive in a earth like that, not to wake up in a aseptic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Cosmic author said recently that Utopias are now technically viable and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. With the Fascist move in front of our eyes we cannot write this off as a merely empty-headed remark. For 1 of the sources of the Fascist motion is the desire to avoid a likewise- rational and as well- comfortable world.
All "favourable" Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while existence unable to suggest happiness. News From Nowhere is a sort of goody-goody version of the Wellsian Utopia. Everyone is kindly and reasonable, all the upholstery comes from Liberty'southward, just the impression left behind is of a sort of watery melancholy. Lord Samuel's recent effort in the same management, An Unknown Land, is fifty-fifty more dismal. The inhabitants of Bensalem (the word is borrowed from Francis Bacon) give the impression of looking on life as just an evil to be got through with as picayune fuss as possible. All that their wisdom has brought them is permanent low spirits. But it is more impressive that Jonathan Swift, i of the greatest imaginative writers who have ever lived, is no more than successful in constructing a "favourable" Utopia than the others.
The earlier parts of Gulliver's Travels are probably the nearly devastating attack on human social club that has ever been written. Every word of them is relevant today; in places they comprise quite detailed prophecies of the political horrors of our ain time. Where Swift fails, however, is in trying to depict a race of beings whom he does adore. In the last part, in dissimilarity with the disgusting Yahoos, we are shown the noble Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are free from human failings. Now these horses, for all their loftier character and unfailing common sense, are remarkably dreary creatures. Similar the inhabitants of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live uneventful, subdued, "reasonable" lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of whatsoever kind, but besides from "passion," including physical love. They choose their mates on eugenic principles, avert excesses of affection, and appear somewhat glad to die when their time comes. In the earlier parts of the book Swift has shown where man's folly and scoundrelism lead him: simply take away the folly and the scoundrelism, and all you are left with, manifestly, is a tepid sort of beingness, hardly worth leading.
Attempts at describing a definitely other- worldly happiness accept been no more successful. Sky is equally corking a flop equally Utopia — though Hell, it is worth noting, occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly. It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Well-nigh all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that information technology is indescribable or conjure upward a vague moving-picture show of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is truthful, inspired some of the best poems in the earth:
Thy walls are of chalcedony,
Thy bulwarks diamonds square,
Thy gates are of right orient pearl
Exceeding rich and rare!
Or:
Holy, holy, holy, all the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns nigh the glassy sea,
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before Thee,
That wast, and art, and evermore shalt be!
Excerpted from All Fine art Is Propaganda: Disquisitional Essays by George Orwell. Copyright © George Orwell. Compilation copyright © 2008 by The Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Visitor. All rights reserved.
All Art Is Propaganda
Critical Essays
Hardcover, 374 pages |
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