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Orwell
One of the Fontana Modern Masters series. Series Frank Kermode.
Paperback
First published December 1, 1970
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About the author
Raymond Williams
214 books276 followersRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic. He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 4, 2019
کتابی بسیار فنی و عمیق در باب زندگی,افکار و اثار و درک زمانه ی جرج اورول..کتاب در ریشه یابی و شناخت جو حاکم بر ذهن اورول بسیار مناسب نوشته شده.
این کتاب زندگینامه نیست,در واقع برای مطالعه بر اورول و شرایط اجتماعی سیاسی حاکم بر زمان او نوشته شده,
بسیار دقیق و مناسب نوشته شده.و من رو برای تکمیل اثارارول مصمم تر کرد!
این کتاب زندگینامه نیست,در واقع برای مطالعه بر اورول و شرایط اجتماعی سیاسی حاکم بر زمان او نوشته شده,
بسیار دقیق و مناسب نوشته شده.و من رو برای تکمیل اثارارول مصمم تر کرد!
February 17, 2014
Just re-read what is the best short account of Orwell I know. Nails most of the conservatives porky pies about him. He was a democratic socialist until the day he died and his work best understood in this context not as some Ayn Rand prototype...
April 2, 2023
In this 1971 book Raymond Williams presents seven literary criticism essays on George Orwell and his work. One of these essays was later included in his edited book, "George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays."
While the essays provide many insights, other insights are obscured by abstraction. At times the author seems to create a third body problem; one is faced with the planetary reality of one of Orwell's books, the essay provides an accompanying moon, and the third constituent,, the glowing cloud of vapor--the authorial addition. In part, this may result from William's stressing that Orwell was a very complex person. In describing that complexity in his concluding essay, the author engages in a muddled discussion of international politics during and after Orwell's life. He asserts that, "Capitalist democracy would not fight fascism, any more than it would liberate the colonial people or end the poverty that disfigured it in its own societies." He does not make clear if he is saying Orwell held this view, or if it was the climate in England, or is his own view. Writing in 1971, there seems sufficient history to negate this canard. Whatever other "capitalist democracies" he had in mind, the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy, helping arm both Britain and the Soviet Union to destroy their fascist enemies. The United States also showed up for a lot of the fighting, while making clear they were not fighting to protect Britain's colonial empire. As to helping to eliminate poverty at home, the American welfare state came into existence during the Depression. Agencies and programs ranging from infrastructure works to the Civilian Conservation Corps and relief payments helped ease the social damage.
Despite these political anomalies, this collection does justice to Orwell's outstanding literary contributions.
While the essays provide many insights, other insights are obscured by abstraction. At times the author seems to create a third body problem; one is faced with the planetary reality of one of Orwell's books, the essay provides an accompanying moon, and the third constituent,, the glowing cloud of vapor--the authorial addition. In part, this may result from William's stressing that Orwell was a very complex person. In describing that complexity in his concluding essay, the author engages in a muddled discussion of international politics during and after Orwell's life. He asserts that, "Capitalist democracy would not fight fascism, any more than it would liberate the colonial people or end the poverty that disfigured it in its own societies." He does not make clear if he is saying Orwell held this view, or if it was the climate in England, or is his own view. Writing in 1971, there seems sufficient history to negate this canard. Whatever other "capitalist democracies" he had in mind, the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy, helping arm both Britain and the Soviet Union to destroy their fascist enemies. The United States also showed up for a lot of the fighting, while making clear they were not fighting to protect Britain's colonial empire. As to helping to eliminate poverty at home, the American welfare state came into existence during the Depression. Agencies and programs ranging from infrastructure works to the Civilian Conservation Corps and relief payments helped ease the social damage.
Despite these political anomalies, this collection does justice to Orwell's outstanding literary contributions.
January 12, 2024
The Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams, who died in 1988, is widely regarded as a hostile critic of George Orwell, but this 1971 monograph (published as part of the Fontana Modern Masters series - the ones with the groovy Op Art covers) struck me as fair-minded, often insightful and intellectually stimulating even when I disagreed with it.
Williams argues that the question of identity is central to an understanding of Orwell. When Orwell left the Imperial Police in 1928 and headed for the lower depths he attempted to reject his identity as a member of the English ruling class and create a new one and a new set of social relations. He then proceeded to inhabit a bewildering succession of identities: tramp, plongeur, Spanish Civil War combatant, revolutionary socialist, middle class English intellectual.
In his excellent book Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British British Public School James Brooke-Smith notes the ambivalent nature of the left-wing English public school rebels of the 1930s. Many became communists yet all retained the manners and style of their upbringing and an attitude towards their old schools which oscillated between hatred and an intense nostalgic attachment bordering on love. Orwell both fits into and stands outside of this pattern. He transferred his intellectual allegiance to the working class but never seemed entirely comfortable around them; many working class people who met him remarked on his formality, social awkwardness and apparent aloofness. At the end of his life he was simultaneously criticising the Labour government for failing to abolish public schools and thinking of sending his adopted son to his alma mater - Eton College (‘five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery’, as he once put it). He does, however, stand apart from his contemporaries by the courageous integrity he repeatedly demonstrated; his willingness to put himself in unpleasant and life-threatening situations. He certainly did more to deracinate himself than most and the fact that he was unable to completely transcend his early conditioning seems ultimately less remarkable than the extraordinary effort he made.
Orwell’s rejection of the class ethos he had been educated to was a reaction to his experience of imperialism and Williams notes that, pretty much uniquely among his contemporaries, he viewed injustice and inequality within England in the larger context of the British Empire. His socialism was ideologically light and stressed values such as liberty and decency. It might have benefited from a bit more ideology. He wrote a great deal about class and believed that the differences between the social classes in England were gradually diminishing. He tended to concentrate, however, on largely transitory phenomena such as clothes or accents. What was lacking was any real sense of class as a social and economic system. Williams rightly rejects Orwell’s famous remark that ‘England is a family with the wrong members in control’ as overly sentimental.
He makes a convincing argument for the inherent unity of Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. There was a lot of autobiography in his fiction and a good deal of imaginative creativity in his non-fiction (this point was elaborated on with much supporting evidence by Bernard Crick in his biography of Orwell). Essays like Shooting An Elephant and books like The Road to Wigan Pier are not historical documents but carefully crafted literary works in which Orwell shaped and edited his experience to make a polemical point. When travelling around the North of England in 1936 for Wigan Pier, for example, he was assisted by a grassroots political network of working class socialists, trade unionists and organised unemployed workers, but most of this is absent from the book, Orwell choosing instead to create the narrative of a lone observer discovering the facts by himself. The Labour Movement largely disappears from the story and the depression hit working class communities are portrayed, albeit with immense sympathy, as essentially passive victims.
For Williams Orwell’s attempt to reinvent himself and create new affiliations collapses with the despairing vision of 1984 which he evidently regards as a repudiation of socialism. This seems to me a fundamental misreading. 1984 was clearly intended as a warning, not a prophecy, and it isn’t about socialism at all; it’s about totalitarianism. Orwell drew on both fascism and communism to create his nightmare society and also on totalitarian tendencies in the capitalist democracies. There is plenty of evidence that he remained a radical socialist to the end. His main criticism of the post-war Labour government was that it was not socialist enough.
Williams is on much firmer ground when he proposes that the essence of Orwell lies in his paradoxical nature. Orwell was, in many ways, a mass of contradictions: an English patriot and a revolutionary socialist; a rebel with a strong fatalist streak; a radical who was temperamentally conservative. These are not phases in his development but overlapping tendencies found throughout his work. In most good Orwell essays there is something to annoy almost everyone. His sheer contrariness and multifaceted individuality continue to make him wonderfully readable.
I first read Orwell in my late teens and have been reading and re-reading him ever since. I still admire his work as much as I ever did but my understanding of it has certainly shifted over the years. These days I tend to see past the plain speaking ‘honest George’ persona telling it like it is (as Williams comments Eric Arthur Blair’s greatest fictional creation was George Orwell) and appreciate much more Orwell’s artistry as a writer, the complexity behind the deceptively simple prose style and the sheer slipperiness of his thought. The more you get to know him the more fascinatingly mysterious and elusive he becomes.
Williams argues that the question of identity is central to an understanding of Orwell. When Orwell left the Imperial Police in 1928 and headed for the lower depths he attempted to reject his identity as a member of the English ruling class and create a new one and a new set of social relations. He then proceeded to inhabit a bewildering succession of identities: tramp, plongeur, Spanish Civil War combatant, revolutionary socialist, middle class English intellectual.
In his excellent book Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British British Public School James Brooke-Smith notes the ambivalent nature of the left-wing English public school rebels of the 1930s. Many became communists yet all retained the manners and style of their upbringing and an attitude towards their old schools which oscillated between hatred and an intense nostalgic attachment bordering on love. Orwell both fits into and stands outside of this pattern. He transferred his intellectual allegiance to the working class but never seemed entirely comfortable around them; many working class people who met him remarked on his formality, social awkwardness and apparent aloofness. At the end of his life he was simultaneously criticising the Labour government for failing to abolish public schools and thinking of sending his adopted son to his alma mater - Eton College (‘five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery’, as he once put it). He does, however, stand apart from his contemporaries by the courageous integrity he repeatedly demonstrated; his willingness to put himself in unpleasant and life-threatening situations. He certainly did more to deracinate himself than most and the fact that he was unable to completely transcend his early conditioning seems ultimately less remarkable than the extraordinary effort he made.
Orwell’s rejection of the class ethos he had been educated to was a reaction to his experience of imperialism and Williams notes that, pretty much uniquely among his contemporaries, he viewed injustice and inequality within England in the larger context of the British Empire. His socialism was ideologically light and stressed values such as liberty and decency. It might have benefited from a bit more ideology. He wrote a great deal about class and believed that the differences between the social classes in England were gradually diminishing. He tended to concentrate, however, on largely transitory phenomena such as clothes or accents. What was lacking was any real sense of class as a social and economic system. Williams rightly rejects Orwell’s famous remark that ‘England is a family with the wrong members in control’ as overly sentimental.
He makes a convincing argument for the inherent unity of Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. There was a lot of autobiography in his fiction and a good deal of imaginative creativity in his non-fiction (this point was elaborated on with much supporting evidence by Bernard Crick in his biography of Orwell). Essays like Shooting An Elephant and books like The Road to Wigan Pier are not historical documents but carefully crafted literary works in which Orwell shaped and edited his experience to make a polemical point. When travelling around the North of England in 1936 for Wigan Pier, for example, he was assisted by a grassroots political network of working class socialists, trade unionists and organised unemployed workers, but most of this is absent from the book, Orwell choosing instead to create the narrative of a lone observer discovering the facts by himself. The Labour Movement largely disappears from the story and the depression hit working class communities are portrayed, albeit with immense sympathy, as essentially passive victims.
For Williams Orwell’s attempt to reinvent himself and create new affiliations collapses with the despairing vision of 1984 which he evidently regards as a repudiation of socialism. This seems to me a fundamental misreading. 1984 was clearly intended as a warning, not a prophecy, and it isn’t about socialism at all; it’s about totalitarianism. Orwell drew on both fascism and communism to create his nightmare society and also on totalitarian tendencies in the capitalist democracies. There is plenty of evidence that he remained a radical socialist to the end. His main criticism of the post-war Labour government was that it was not socialist enough.
Williams is on much firmer ground when he proposes that the essence of Orwell lies in his paradoxical nature. Orwell was, in many ways, a mass of contradictions: an English patriot and a revolutionary socialist; a rebel with a strong fatalist streak; a radical who was temperamentally conservative. These are not phases in his development but overlapping tendencies found throughout his work. In most good Orwell essays there is something to annoy almost everyone. His sheer contrariness and multifaceted individuality continue to make him wonderfully readable.
I first read Orwell in my late teens and have been reading and re-reading him ever since. I still admire his work as much as I ever did but my understanding of it has certainly shifted over the years. These days I tend to see past the plain speaking ‘honest George’ persona telling it like it is (as Williams comments Eric Arthur Blair’s greatest fictional creation was George Orwell) and appreciate much more Orwell’s artistry as a writer, the complexity behind the deceptively simple prose style and the sheer slipperiness of his thought. The more you get to know him the more fascinatingly mysterious and elusive he becomes.
June 25, 2023
*On Eric Blair's, a.k.a. George Orwell's, 120th birthday I decided to pick this up &
*Read it in one sitting as an homage to a multifaceted, paradoxical
*Writer I've wanted to acquaint myself with for some time. Raymond Williams offers a well-informed, succinct,
*Erudite & frank picture of Orwell's
*Life, national/self-identity, experiences, influences, personal development & legacy; showcasing how his political
*Leanings, radical attitudes and socialist views were the driving forces behind not only the subject matter of his work & career as a writer, but also the impulse & purpose of his becoming a reactionary & conscientious figure involved personally & literarily in the social & political maelstrom of the first half of the 20th century...and beyond
*Read it in one sitting as an homage to a multifaceted, paradoxical
*Writer I've wanted to acquaint myself with for some time. Raymond Williams offers a well-informed, succinct,
*Erudite & frank picture of Orwell's
*Life, national/self-identity, experiences, influences, personal development & legacy; showcasing how his political
*Leanings, radical attitudes and socialist views were the driving forces behind not only the subject matter of his work & career as a writer, but also the impulse & purpose of his becoming a reactionary & conscientious figure involved personally & literarily in the social & political maelstrom of the first half of the 20th century...and beyond
March 10, 2021
Not a word wasted. 50 odd years on from the first time I read Raymond Williams' concise book on Orwell in the Fontana Modern Masters encourages us to read him for what he was. It took me quite a few years to extract the meaning from the author's prose but it became a good companion to reading the Orwell's novels first time round. I can vividly remember my 18 year old self trying to prise meanings of everything whilst riding on the bus from Boston Spa to Tadcaster Grammar School.
A thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile re-read.
A thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile re-read.
February 7, 2017
Good info, interesting things, definitely useful background and thoughts for the class I'm teaching.
February 4, 2024
Asıl adı Eric Blair olan ama George Orwell ismiyle ün kazanan Orwell'in siyasi kişiliği ve zaman içindeki değişimi hakkında ilgi çekici yorumlar ve bilgilendirmeler mevcut kitapta. Dahası, sadece sosyalist bir projeyle değil, aynı zamanda edebiyatla ilgilenenlerin yararlanabileceği tartışmalar ve bir yazar olarak Orwell hakkında yorumlar da var. Fakat kitabın edebi olandan çok siyasi olana odaklandığını belirtmekte yarar var. Bir de, kitabın gereğinden uzun tutulduğu düşüncesindeyim, Williams'ın kısa ve öz olmayan yorumları bazen yorucu olabiliyor; George Orwell'in bizzat yazdığı denemeleri okumak daha verimli ve keyifli olacaktır diye düşünüyorum.
Yeni Sol ekolünün önde gelen figürlerinden olan Raymond Williams'ın 1930 yıllarındaki 'sınıfına ihanet eden' Orwell'i sevip saydığı belliyken, 1940lı yıllardaki "umutsuz" Orwell'in yazılarından bazı unsurları değerli görse de "akıldışılık", "bağnaz" ve "saçmalık" gibi duygusal suçlamalarını yapmaktan çekince duymuyor. Öyle ki Williams'ın yorumlarında adeta sinirden köpürdüğünü düşünebiliyor okur. Solcu, Yeni Solcu da olsa, sözüm ona Sol-Sonrası da olsa tipik solculuğunu yapacak: Kendi dünya görüşünü, ideolojisini doğrulayacak unsurları özenle seçip, geri kalanları ayıklayacak ve "akıldışılık" ve "saçmalama" suçlamalarını da yapmaktan geri durmayacaktır (bazı ileri durumlarda 'sağcı', 'statükocu', 'muhafazakar' diye anlamsız isimlendirme kavgalarına yargıç tavırlarla girecektir de). Günün sonunda kendisini partizan/ideolog ve dolayısıyla da dar bir perspektifle sınırlayan yorumların çoğunlukta olduğu bir kitapla karşı karşıya okur.
Yeni Sol ekolünün önde gelen figürlerinden olan Raymond Williams'ın 1930 yıllarındaki 'sınıfına ihanet eden' Orwell'i sevip saydığı belliyken, 1940lı yıllardaki "umutsuz" Orwell'in yazılarından bazı unsurları değerli görse de "akıldışılık", "bağnaz" ve "saçmalık" gibi duygusal suçlamalarını yapmaktan çekince duymuyor. Öyle ki Williams'ın yorumlarında adeta sinirden köpürdüğünü düşünebiliyor okur. Solcu, Yeni Solcu da olsa, sözüm ona Sol-Sonrası da olsa tipik solculuğunu yapacak: Kendi dünya görüşünü, ideolojisini doğrulayacak unsurları özenle seçip, geri kalanları ayıklayacak ve "akıldışılık" ve "saçmalama" suçlamalarını da yapmaktan geri durmayacaktır (bazı ileri durumlarda 'sağcı', 'statükocu', 'muhafazakar' diye anlamsız isimlendirme kavgalarına yargıç tavırlarla girecektir de). Günün sonunda kendisini partizan/ideolog ve dolayısıyla da dar bir perspektifle sınırlayan yorumların çoğunlukta olduğu bir kitapla karşı karşıya okur.
January 16, 2020
An interesting study - perhaps not spectacular. It's an important high point in the critical literature of the "despairing Orwell" which sees Nineteen Eighty-Four as a final goodbye to the possibility of human progress. Newer studies, for instance Gregory Claeys', argue that this is basically a mistaken approach which says more about the situation in 1970s and 1980s than it does about Orwell, and on balance that seems like a pretty persuasive argument to me. Nonetheless, it was interesting to engage with a forceful and eloquent articulation of this view, which draws out and exposes a number of interesting minor literary critical arguments in the course of making the larger claims about Orwell's changing views. Williams is of course particularly interested in how the Left is dealt with by Orwell (and, in fairness, with how the Left dealt with Orwell), and diagnoses him with some obvious class blindspots, but arguably both of these have become less interesting questions for us than they would have been for Williams' original readers.
October 9, 2023
[Flamingo] (1984). SB. 128 Pages.
A reasonably effective, potted survey of Orwell’s life and work.
The author’s condescendingly defensive posture on Marxism grates a little. Ditto his apparent background with formal literary theory - he sees “problems” to examine, all over the shop.
The Afterword - “Nineteen-Eighty Four in 1984” - was added for this edition. The implied analysis - though a prosaic exercise - is not uninteresting. Oddly, whilst Williams quotes Orwell’s crystal clear assertion that the novel wasn’t firmly predictive, he promptly sets about an attempt to debunk it from that perspective.
A reasonably effective, potted survey of Orwell’s life and work.
The author’s condescendingly defensive posture on Marxism grates a little. Ditto his apparent background with formal literary theory - he sees “problems” to examine, all over the shop.
The Afterword - “Nineteen-Eighty Four in 1984” - was added for this edition. The implied analysis - though a prosaic exercise - is not uninteresting. Oddly, whilst Williams quotes Orwell’s crystal clear assertion that the novel wasn’t firmly predictive, he promptly sets about an attempt to debunk it from that perspective.
April 26, 2015
Looks more like a lecture book than an enjoy-to-read biography. Hence, had to give the credit for subjictive comments. Justifies the good and the bad in Orwell / Blair in aspects of a writer and a socialist democrasist man.
July 17, 2019
A sympathetic introduction to a complex writer.
abandoned-didn-t-finish
April 13, 2013Meh, this is kind of a study guide. Think I'd prefer a really readable biography. Not a hugely hefty annotated one, just a page-turny life story. Also it's dated... Abandoned!
Read
October 4, 2015#teaching Obscurely written in many places but a serviceable introduction to Orwell's thought. Takeaway is that he himself was trapped by doublethink, half revolutionary, half reactionary.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews