George Orwell - Selected Essays

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment (p. 233). At first sight, Jonathan Swift may seem an unlikely figure to appeal to George Orwell: the early eighteenth-century Irish churchman, known as the gloomy Dean, who wrote elaborate and savage satires on human folly appears worlds removed from the mid-twentieth-century journalist, novelist, and self-described democratic socialist. But, as so often in Orwells best essays, an element of unacknowledged identification is what quickens the pulse of his prose, especially when it allows him to catch readers off guard or to make them uncomfortable. For it could be said that one of the most central and enduring of Orwells themes as an essayist and journalist was precisely the follies of the progressive party of the moment, that is to say, principally the actions of those on the Left who took a sympathetic, or at least protective, view of Soviet Russia as a society attempting to realize the ideals of solidarity and social justice. Orwell understood that his reaction, like Swifts, could be seen as perverse, as concentrating his critical fire on those who might seem like natural allies. Yet the element of perversity is also part of what recommends this stance to Orwell, since he sees it as a kind of strength, a form of autonomy, especially in suggesting that the individual in question is unlikely to kow-tow to the orthodoxies of the moment. And driven may seem to absolve both Swift and, by implication, Orwell himself from the responsibility of having freely chosen such a mulish political stance. It is the times that are out of joint, so out of joint that one has little choice: one is simply driven to this. In such cases, the progressive party of the moment has a lot to answer for.

The essay on Gullivers Travels, in which this remark occurs, brings together several of Orwells preoccupations. He not only recognizes the satisfactions of a kind of Tory anarchism when the progressive forces of the day are all cant and humbug: he also wants to insist, against orthodox Marxists as well as against a residual urge in himself, that one can enjoy a work of literary art even while disapproving of its politics. He admires Swifts ability to make satire entertaining as well as pointedit was one notable expression of that effort to make political writing into an art that Orwell declared to be his own overriding aspiration from the mid-1930s onwards (p. 230)but he was no less drawn to Swifts delight in thrusting the disagreeable, animal aspects of life beneath the readers nose. (That organ was called into play with unusual frequency in Orwells writings, as he gleefully dwelt on a range of repulsive smells.) And there was, too, a temperamental affinity between two writers who, despite occasional lapses into optimism, seemed compulsively drawn to an Eeyorish view of themselves and the world.

Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gullivers Travels is an essay, an example of that shortish, personal, sometimes meditative, sometimes argumentative, prose form in which Orwell excelled. Yet since his death in January 1950, his reputation has rested primarily on