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THE ORWELL CENTURY AND AFTER: RETHINKING RECEPTION AND REPUTATION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

ANNA VANINSKAYA
ANNA VANINSKAYA*
Affiliation:
Cambridge Victorian Studies Group and King's College, University of Cambridge
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Extract

The Orwell centenary of 2003 has come and gone, but the pace of academic publications that usually accompany such biographical milestones has not slackened. The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell was released in summer 2007, John Rodden's Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings was published in 2006, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, the proceedings of a 1999 conference, came out in 2005. The striking thing about many of these publications, not to mention the ones which emerged out of the commemorative activities of 2003 itself, is that they are more concerned with Orwell's reputation and relevance today than with his oeuvre as such. As many as five chapters of the Cambridge Companion have a “posthumous” focus; the proceedings of the largest centenary conference, George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, raise the issue of Orwell and the war in Iraq more frequently than that of Orwell and World War II.The latter is not entirely surprising for an American conference which featured the “liberal hawk” and former Trotskyist journalist Christopher Hitchens as the keynote speaker, and whose proceedings were edited in accordance with a corresponding political agenda, but it is also indicative of a larger phenomenon, a phenomenon most thoroughly examined by John Rodden in books like George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell. Few imaginative writers have been so compulsively remoulded, coopted, and invoked outside of their proper literary sphere; as Rodden's scrupulous documentation shows, no modern crisis from the Cold War to the war on terror has gone by without an Orwell headline to define it. What, one may ask, are the mechanisms behind this astounding popularity? How are reputations on this vast scale made? Looking at “the writer and his work” will only get one so far; one must also look outward, for the world's perception of Orwell is as interesting and intriguing a subject as Orwell himself. Rodden, the most prolific Orwell critic publishing today, has made this reception history his focus.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 2008 , pp. 597 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Rodden, John, ed., The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Gleason, Abbott, Goldsmith, Jack, and Nussbaum, Martha C., eds., On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Other publications over the last four years include Ingle, Stephen's The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar; an Italian collection of centenary essays edited by Ronfani, Ugo, Orwell: i Maiali e la Libertà (Milano: Bevivino, 2004)Google Scholar; the proceedings of a German centennial conference edited by Lippmann, Bernd and Leide, Steffen, Das Orwell'sche Jahrhundert? Colloquium zum 100. Geburtstag von George Orwell (Ludwigsfelde: Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus, 2004)Google Scholar; and Stewart, Anthony's George Orwell, Doubleness, and the Value of Decency (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; as well as primary sources like Orwell: The Observer Years (London: Atlantic Books, 2003) and Anderson, Paul, ed., Orwell in Tribune (Politico's Publishing Ltd, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 “Orwell and the Biographers” by Gordon Bowker; “Orwell, the Academy, and the Intellectuals” by Neil McLaughlin; “Orwell for Today's Reader: An Open Letter” by John Rodden; “George Orwell: A Bibliographic Essay” by Erika Gottlieb; and “Why Orwell Still Matters” by Christopher Hitchens.

3 Cushman, Thomas and Rodden, John, eds., George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 Rodden, John, George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, 2nd edn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002)Google Scholar; originally published by Oxford University Press in 1989 under the title The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St George” Orwell; Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003).

5 Although classicists have always concerned themselves with questions of literary influence, the institutionalization of reception in Classics is a recent development, exemplified by the Classical Reception Studies Network, the Performance Reception of Greek and Roman Drama project at Oxford, and the Reception of Classical Texts and Images project at the Open University; see also Martindale, Charles and Thomas, Richard F., eds., Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for instance, Bryden, Inga, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar; Alexander, Michael, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 See Lewis, C. S., An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

8 Although some of its constituent fields—bibliography, publishing history, and so on—have been around for a long time, the new book (or more properly print culture) history considers every step in the process from book production and distribution to canon formation and reading habits.

9 Schwartz, Lawrence H.'s Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988)Google Scholar preceded Rodden's book by a year, but the work on reception and reputation that Rodden cites in Every Intellectual's Big Brother, 196–7, and the second edition of The Politics of Literary Reputation, xiv–xv, dates from the 1990s, and there is now a small industry in the penning of afterlives.

10 Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, xii, 71.

11 Ibid., 100.

12 Ibid., xi.

13 Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife, xiv.

14 Hitchens and Crick, for instance, appear simultaneously as contributors to Rodden's volumes and as subjects of his analysis of particular reception scenes (e.g. the Nation, or Orwell biography).

15 Thomas Cushman's Introduction to Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell, 19. Of particular interest with regard to this appropriation are the Introduction; Ian Williams's “In Defense of Comrade Psmith: The Orwellian Treatment of Orwell”; Hitchens's own “George Orwell and the Liberal Experience of Totalitarianism”; and Todd Gitlin's “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” On the other hand, contributions such as John Rodden's “On the Ethics of Admiration—and Detraction”; Jim Sleeper's “Orwell's ‘Smelly Little Orthodoxies’—and Ours”; Erika Gottlieb's “Orwell's Satirical Vision on the Screen”; and the chapters in the section on “Orwell Abroad” offer historical overviews, personal testimonies, or theoretical statements that escape this specific bias.

16 Paul Berman, in a review of the first edition of The Politics of Literary Reputation, “The Business of Immortality,” New Republic, 12 Mar. 1990, also concludes that Rodden's “theoretical apparatus offer[s] a good model for the writing of cultural history,” and demonstrates how it could be applied to the phenomenon of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

17 Weinroth, Michelle's Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997)Google Scholar is notable; others range from Gill Cockram's examination of the various audiences (positivists, New Liberals, socialists) for John Ruskin's economic thought in Ruskin and Social Reform: Ethics and Economics in the Victorian Age (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), to Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert's Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, to collections like Havely, Nick, ed., Dante's Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is also a separate tradition of scholarship on Shakespeare reception at home (via performance) and abroad (in translation), not to mention studies of the reception of important thinkers like Darwin and Marx.

18 But without any kind of unifying theoretical framework, though the project was born out of the intersection of reception theory and material book history. The series ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and includes philosophers, historians, and scientists in addition to major writers. But it does not go beyond the middle of the twentieth century, nor does it consider non-canonical but influential authors (the closest is H. G. Wells). See also the Roundtable on “Victorian Studies on the Continent of Europe,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12/2 (Autumn 2007), 286–319.

19 Secord, James A., Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

20 See McLaughlin, “Orwell, the Academy and the Intellectuals,” in Rodden, Cambridge Companion, 160–78 for a detailed breakdown of the statistics.

21 Crick, Bernard, Crossing Borders: Political Essays (London: Continuum, 2001)Google Scholar; Stansky, Peter, From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper: Studies in the Radical Domestic (Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999)Google Scholar.

22 For a different treatment of Orwell's association with Burma see Larkin, Emma, Secret Histories: A Journey through Burma Today in the Company of George Orwell (London: John Murray, 2004)Google Scholar, republished by the Penguin Press as Finding George Orwell in Burma (New York: Penguin, 2005).

23 Lynette Hunter, “Prescience and Resilience in George Orwell's Political Aesthetics,” in Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell, 229, 235.

24 McLaughlin, “Orwell, the Academy and the Intellectuals” in Rodden, Cambridge Companion, 168, 165, 173.

25 For an American perspective see Brantlinger, Patrick, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

26 Schwartz, Lawrence H.'s Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988)Google Scholar preceded Rodden's book by a year, but the work on reception and reputation that Rodden cites in Every Intellectual's Big Brother, 196–7, and the second edition of The Politics of Literary Reputation, xiv–xv, dates from the 1990s.

27 Lazaro, Alberto, ed., The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy (Bern: Lang, 2001)Google Scholar.

28 Maev Kennedy, “How to Make a Perfect Cuppa: Put Milk in First,” Guardian, 25 June 2003.

29 Gavin Bell, “The Road to Big Brother's House,” Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2003; and Fiona Sims, “Orwellian Malt,” Caterer and Hotelkeeper, 17 July 2003.

30 John Ezard, “Blair's Babe: Did Love for This Woman Turn Orwell into a Government Stooge?” Guardian, 21 June 2003.

31 LexisNexis and other databases were used.

32 Jane Sullivan, “Orwell's 100th Causes a Doublethink,” Sunday Age, 20 July 2003.

33 Jim Dooley, letter, “Government Lies,” Ottawa Citizen, 22 July 2003.

34 Bernard Crick, letter, “Orwell's ‘Premature Anti-Stalinism’,” Guardian, 24 June 2003; Fiachra Gibbons, “Blacklisted Writer Says Illness Clouded Orwell's Judgment,” Guardian, 24 June 2003; Corin Redgrave, “Idealists and Informers,” Guardian, 28 June 2003; Patrick Goldring, letter, “List Based on Spite,” Guardian, 28 June 2003; Scott Lucas and D. J. Taylor, “Take Two: Orwell: Saint or Stooge?” Guardian, 28 June 2003.

35 The centenary editions are too numerous to list. The biographies include Spurling, Hilary's The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (London: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar; Bowker, Gordon's George Orwell (London: Little, Brown, 2003)Google Scholar; Taylor, D. J.'s Orwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003)Google Scholar; and Lucas, Scott's Orwell (London: Haus, 2003)Google Scholar. Lucas also produced an anti-Orwell diatribe entitled The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (London: Pluto, 2004) which made him persona non grata with many Orwell scholars.

36 Terry Eagleton, “Reach-Me-Down Romantic,” London Review of Books, 19 June 2003; Stefan Collini, “The Grocer's Children: The Lives and Afterlives of George Orwell,” Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 2003; John Carey, “The Invisible Man,” Sunday Times, 18 May 2003; Bernard Schweizer, letter, “‘Radicals on the Road’,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 Jan. 2003; Louis Menand, “Honest, Decent, Wrong: The Invention of George Orwell,” New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2003, 84–91; Leon Wieseltier, “Aspidistra,” New Republic, 17 Feb. 2003, 42.

37 Margaret Atwood, “Why Animal Farm Changed My Life,” The Age, 12 July 2003; Thomas Pynchon, Foreword, Nineteen Eighty-Four: Centennial Edition (New York: Plume Harcourt Brace, 2003).

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40 Quoted in Marks, Peter, “Reputations: George Orwell,” Political Quarterly 70/1 (1999), 88Google Scholar.

41 Hitchens, Christopher, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar, is one of the better-known Orwell defences of recent years; Simon Schama titled the final episode of his documentary “The Two Winstons,” see A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire 1776–2000, vol. 3 (New York: Hyperion Miramax Books, 2002).

42 Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, 3.

43 See Menand, “Honest, Decent, Wrong.”

44 “Blair-mania,” Economist US Edition, 28 June 2003; Peter Jones, “Language Barriers,” Spectator, 14 June 2003.

45 Daphne Patai, “Third Thoughts about Orwell?”, in Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell, 200.

46 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 3Google Scholar.

47 Ian Williams, “In Defense of Comrade Psmith,” in Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell, 61.

48 Beauchamp, Gorman, “Orwell, the Lysenko Affair, and the Politics of Social Construction,” Partisan Review 68/2 (Spring 2001), 266–78Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., 267.

50 Ibid., 278, 277; original emphasis.

51 Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)Google Scholar; Miller, James, “Is Bad Writing Necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language,” Lingua Franca 9/9 (Dec./Jan. 2000), 33–44Google Scholar.

52 Beauchamp, “Orwell,” 275–6.

53 Eagleton, “Reach-Me-Down Romantic,” 7–8.

54 See Miller, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?”; and Davis-Undiano, Robert, “Back to the Essay: World Literature Today in the Twenty-First Century,” World Literature Today 74/1 (Winter 2000), 4–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Posner, Richard A., “Orwell versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire,” Philosophy and Literature 24 (2000), 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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60 Ibid., x. Cf. Bernard Crick, “E Blair on T Blair's Call to Arms,” Guardian, 23 March 2003.

61 Jonathan Rose, “Abolishing the Orgasm: Orwell and the Politics of Sexual Persecution,” in Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 29.

62 Brannigan, John, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four consistently make it into the top ten of various national lists and polls of “best” or “favourite” books.

64 Shattock, Joanne, “Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? Revising the Canon, Extending Cultural Boundaries, and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity,” Literature Compass 4/4 (July 2007), 1280–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/, accessed 18 Aug. 2007.

65 Rodden and his contributors are not the only ones to take this road; see Averill, Roger, “Empathy, Externality and Character in Biography: A Consideration of the Authorized Versions of George Orwell,” CLIO 31/1 (Fall 2001), 1–31Google Scholar; Marks, “Reputations.”

66 Sanders, Valerie, “Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? Historicism, Collaboration and Digital Editing,” Literature Compass 4/4 (July 2007), 1292–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife, xiv.

68 Rodden admits as much in Every Intellectual's Big Brother, 1; and Scenes from an Afterlife, xv.

69 The title of a section in Cushman and Rodden, George Orwell.

70 Rodden, Every Intellectual's Big Brother, 4.

71 Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife, xv.