![]() The end of life is completely predictable in its beginning, the beginning merely a manipulated preparation for the end. ![]() Orwell’s profoundest insight is his insistence that in a totalitarian society man’s life is completely shorn of dynamic possibilities. Whatever one’s disagreements with Orwell’s politics, and they are numerous, one must honor a writer who with his last-breath kept pleading with modern man not to let himself be reduced to an ultra-modern slave.ġ984 is limited in scope: it does not investigate the genesis of totalitarianism, nor the laws of its economy, nor the prospects for its survival it merely presents a paradigmatic version of its social life. There is a kind of woeful rightness in the fact that Orwell died shortly after completing 1984, that it shows the strains of his harsh and exacerbated impatience. It is a book written from the total energy of an aroused man, with all the passion and percipience at his command a book clearly the product of fear, as there is every reason it should be a book which, in addition to its public relevance, has a distinct undercurrent of personal tragedy. That George Orwell’s 1984 is a work of major significance, as a political document if not as a novel, and that it is probably the best delineation of totalitarian society we have, is by now clear to anyone who has read the book. Marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Irving Howe 1984 – Utopia Reversed Orwell’s Penetrating Examination of Totalitarian Society (November 1950)įrom The New International, Vol. Howe Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page Irving Howe: "1984" - Utopia Reversed (November 1950)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |