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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Harold Bloom and George Orwell

From the little book "Bloom's notes to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four":

...this is not said to beat up on Nineteen EightyFour, but to point out that we do not go on reading the book because Orwell possessed a large talent for prose fiction. He did not; he was a moral and political essayist who had the instincts of a pamphleteer. A great pamphleteer, like Jonathan Swift, is a master of irony and satire. Here again, Orwell plainly is deficient. His literalness defeats his wit, such as it is, and his only ironic gift is as a good parodist of political slogans.

And yet Nineteen Eighty-Four survives and will have life whenever we are threatened with totalitarian utopias, whether political, economic, social, or theocratic. "Political correctness," our now-passing rage of liberal conformity, is very much an Orwellian phenomenon, and our universities, wretched parodies of what they are supposed to be, are veritable monuments of newspeak and doublethink.

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