Politics vs. Literature E-Book

George Orwell

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and AnimalFarm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. Politics vs. Literature, the fourth in the Orwell's Essays series, is, at heart, a review of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Having been given a copy of the book on his eighth birthday, Orwell knows it inside out, and thinks highly of it; it is 'pessimistic', though, he says – 'it descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind,' designed to 'humiliate man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous.' Using the book as an example of enjoying a book whose author one cannot stand, Orwell goes on to say that he considers Gulliver's Travels a work of art, leaving the reader to reconsider the books on their own shelves.

Leseprobe

politics vs.literature

the orwell’s essays series

i. Why I Write

ii. Politics and the English Language

iii. The Prevention of Literature

iv. Politics vs. Literature

v. Shooting an Elephant

vi. England Your England

vii. Orwell on Reading

viii. Inside the Whale

ix. A Hanging

x. Decline of the English Murder

Politics vs. Literature

An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels

george orwell

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Politics vs. Literature first published in 1946

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2021

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Extra Material © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Cover design by Will DadyExtra Material edited by Tom Conaghan

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contents

Politics vs. Literature

Notes

Extra Material

politics vs.literature

In gulliver’s travels humanity is attacked or criticised from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part i he is the typical eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely outlook skilfully impressed on the reader by the biographical details at the beginning, by his age (he is a man of forty with two children when his adventures start) and by the inventory of the things in his pockets, especially his spectacles, which make several appearances. In Part ii he has in general the same character, but at moments when the story demands it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is capable of boasting of ‘our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and Arms, the Scourge of France’, etc., etc., and at the same time of betraying every available scandalous fact about the country which he professes to love. In Part iii he is much as he was in Part i, though, as he is consorting chiefly with courtiers and men of learning, one has the impression that he has risen in the social scale. In Part iv he conceives a horror of the human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote himself to meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. However, these inconsistencies are forced upon Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly to provide a contrast. It is necessary, for instance, that he should appear sensible in Part i and at least intermittently silly in Part ii because in both books the essential manoeuvre is the same – i.e. to make the human being look ridiculous by imagining him as a creature six inches high. Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a sort of continuity in his character, which comes out especially in his resourcefulness and his observation of physical detail. He is much the same kind of person, with the same prose style, when he bears off the warships of Blefuscu, when he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat and when he sails away upon the ocean in his frail coracle made from the skins of Yahoos. Moreover, it is difficult not to feel that in his shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself, and there is at least one incident in which Swift seems to be venting his private grievance against contemporary society. It will be remembered that when the Emperor of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Instead of being congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a capital offence by making water in the precincts of the palace, and

I was privately assured that the Empress, conceiving the greatest Abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant Side of the Court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief Confidents, could not forbear vowing Revenge.

According to Professor G.M. Trevelyan (England Under Queen Anne),* part of the reason for Swift’s failure to get preferment was that the Queen was scandalised by A Tale of a Tub – a pamphlet in which Swift probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown, since it scarifies the Dissenters, and still more the Catholics, while leaving the established Church alone. In any case, no one would deny that Gulliver’s Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book, and that especially in Parts i and iii it often descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind. Pettiness and magnanimity, republicanism and authoritarianism, love of reason and lack of curiosity, are all mixed up in it. The hatred of the human body with which Swift is especially associated is only dominant in Part iv, but somehow this new preoccupation