On the Ethics of Admiration-And Detraction

YOU SEE THE placards waved at every rally of the Christian Right, as well as in many gatherings of the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant sects: "W.W.J.D.?" And yet secular intellectuals are not without their own oracle, and (with the exception of the Marxist Left) the coveted (and presumed) patronage of their patron saint knows no bounds. "The most heterogeneous following a writer can ever have accumulated," said his close friend, George Woodcock, about Orwell's "faithful" (53). "W.W.G.O.D.?" they ask recurrently. (Why not simply an Orwell website, a cyberspace hotline named www.GOD.net?) As a headline in the New York Times Book Review did indeed phrase it in September 2002, on one-year anniversary of al Qaeda's attacks: "What Would Orwell Do?" (Shulevitch). Yes, that question seemingly arises whenever a public issue provokes a major intellectual debate and splits the ranks of the Left and/or Right. Then "St. George" is called to arms, with the battle-certified catchwords from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four of the "Big O" packed in the polemical arsenals of his self-appointed mouthpieces, ready to be fired off at his name-drop. (Indeed, just days after "9-11," the conservative British critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft suggested that British soldiers shipped out to Afghanistan should pack Orwell's essays in their knapsacks.) One could multiply the examples, but the point is clear: More than a half-century after his death, Orwell remains "a writer well worth stealing," as he once said of Dickens. Since his death in January 1950, his soul has been up for grabs. Today, polemically minded intellectuals are still playing what Ben Wattenberg recently referred to in his PBS talk show devoted to Orwell as "that wonderful parlor game" called "How Would Orwell Stand Today?" (One is tempted to reply: Being 100, he wouldn't.) Nonetheless, the "game" often has its illicit darker sides: mantle-stealing, body-snatching, and political grave-robbing. It's an ideological shell game (usually with clever sleight-of-hand), whereby the participants move Orwell's coffin to the left or right. I One recalls the comment of the poet William Empson, Orwell's wartime colleague at the BBC and the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), on reading Animal Farm: "You must expect to be 'misunderstood' on a large scale...." Yes--and he has been. Empson himself reported that his young son, a supporter of the Conservative Party, was "delighted" with Animal Farm and considered it "very strong Tory propaganda" (Crick, 430). Similar misreadings have occurred with Nineteen Eighty-Four--for instance, during the early Cold War era, the last four digits of the John Birch Society's national number were "1-9-8-4." And, as happened with Orwell and both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes the author himself inadvertently contributed to such misreadings. "Orwellian" misreadings have occurred partly because readers have identified so strongly with him that they have projected their own needs and aspirations on him. Their identifications have been variously induced by Orwell's appeal to readers as a "rebel" and an intellectual's "common man," by the perceived moral heroism of his radical humanism, and by the seeming "purity" and simplicity of his literary style, among other factors. And then there are also the darker reasons for confusion: because the catchwords of Nineteen Eighty-Four could be easily turned back on him, because his aggressive "conscience of the Left" stance could seem like a renegade's anti-socialism, and because politically savvy intellectuals noticed the pilgrim crowds swarming toward his grave--and thus deemed it "well worth stealing." Should we then partly "blame Orwell" for cooperating with his kidnappers? Or for a "lack of foresight" as to the uses and abuses to which his work have been put since his death? Not at all. Rather, the scrupulous reader's task is to get down to particulars and see how writers sometimes invite or participate in their own appropriation, to see why a writer was so susceptible to such Orwellian "facecrime," as Winston Smith would have (proudly) termed the "Orwellian" distortions. …