GEORGE ORWELL AND THE TREASON OF THE "CLERKS"

Abstract

In my "documentary approach" to Orwell scholarship, I investigate two "opposed" critical approaches, the historicist and formalist, to determine the extent to which unexamined presuppositions by the critic influence his or her interpretation. As an essayist, Orwell was given to polemicism; as an author, didacticism. This necessitates an examination of the historical context of Orwell's views. The "formalist" critic, for instance, in discussing Nineteen Eighty-Four, will emphasize other works in the anti-Utopian tradition, and tend to neglect the influence of James Burnham and Bertrand Russell. In opposition to this residual legacy of the New Criticism, I emphasize Russell's (largely neglected) influence in showing that the empiricist tradition, and its concomitant concern with the question of objective truth, is vital to an understanding of Orwell's "politics of the plain style." The influence of empiricism and the sceptical tradition (in general) and Bertrand Russell (in particular) on Orwell's politics is traced, as well as the relevance of empiricism to Orwell's rhetoric, and his philosophical interest in the problem of objectivity, a crucial yet little discussed motif of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and which further argues for the significance of the "Benda context" in the "construal" of a more "reasonable" interpretation of the novel.