On Orwell on Swift and Aesthetics, with some Arendt.

I have gotten quite a number of new subscribers during the last few weeks. Welcome! So just as a general reiteration, I doubt punditry is the comparative advantage of an academic. Most of my digressions comment only obliquely on current affairs. I also apologize for the manty typos and grammatical mistakes in the first published versions. Usually, I correct a number of these later in the day on second reading.

The day after the election, after writing my digression, I taught my weekly seminar on Utopian/Dystopian thought. The assigned reading was 1984, a text I teach annually. I wanted to connect it with Orwell’s reading of Swift, but in the end most of our discussion was prompted by a striking passage. Early on in 1984, the main character, Winston, starts a diary; and the first entry of the diary is as follows:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didn’t it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—[Emphasis added]

I have commented (here) before on the fact that 1984 is framed by a crowd cheering on the representation of a wanton killing of (Jewish) refugees. We actually don’t know where these refugees are supposed to be fleeing from or trying to get to since in 1984 the Mediterranean is not part of Oceania and itself a border between Eurasia and a kind of political no-man’s land.* It probably doesn’t matter to the function of the film, or the larger story. I leave it to your own imagination to draw your own contemporary comparison.

Elsewhere, I have discussed the Jewish identity of some of these refugees before (although since Oceania itself is multi-ethnic I do remain in some doubt about the significance of this). So I won’t repeat that, and some other time, perhaps, I will reflect on the social identity of the fat man in a society like Oceania with its undernourished population.

Be that as it may, I had never noticed before that while remembering the movie in his diary, Winston is alert to and has aesthetic appreciation of the technical skill of the unseen crew (director and camera men) of the war-movie. (See the emphasized passages.)

Now, obviously, in a society where cameras track all one’s movements, and survival is highly uncertain, a certain alertness to camera-placement becomes second nature. There are many examples of that in 1984, which introduces us to this issue by way of reflecting on the placement of the two-way telescreen in Winston’s living room. And in addition to the political significance of the phenomenon of Big Brother watching everything, there is an aesthetic one. The shot of the child’s arm going up is ‘wonderful’ gives pleasure.

In addition, Winston, who himself is a skilled clerk in the “Ministry of Truth,” evinces here an alertness to the otherwise invisible skilled labor that is presupposed in the representations he experiences at the movie and recalls in his diary. That is to say, he recognizes that propaganda rests on many hidden decisions by skilled craftsmen and technicians. (Presumably mostly the cadres of the outer party.)

Much later in the story (in chapter vii of Part 2) we learn that one of the images in the scene in this movie evokes Winston’s own mother in one of his dreams. As my students noticed the significance of this is, in part, that aesthetically powerful propaganda seeps into our dreams and unconscious. But as it happens, when he awakens and reflects on the dream in which he clearly identifies with the child and identifies his mom with the Jewish mother futility protecting her child, this allows him to unlock other memories of his own last encounter with her mother that he had repressed or set aside and, thereby, he could create a new interpretation of her disappearance.

I wanted to stop here, but the previous paragraph generated an association I want to share.

In Orwell’s (1946) essay, “Politics vs Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels” he treats part 3 of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a diagnosis and attack on totalitarianism. This is, in fact, what Orwell takes to be Swift’s great contribution to political theory. Some people (but not me) would consider Orwell’s interpretation anachronistic. (I have digressed on this issue and terminology here.)

At one point, Orwell notes about Swift’s treatment that “There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious.” The emphasis is in Orwell. It is an important theme for 1984. Part of the significance of Winston’s relationship with or attachment to Julia is to make him conscious again. (This is a reason why he needs a diary to make his thoughts, by externalizing them, concrete.) The dream that allows him to see his mom in a new light occurs while sleeping next to Julia.

He tells Julia that until his dream he had “believed that he had murdered his mother.” Julia misses the implication that Winston had revised his belief and asks, “why did you murder her?” What’s most horrifying about the scene is that she takes it as totally plausible that he had done and won’t confess to doing so. She lacks access to Freud and Oedipus and so doesn’t have our sense of irony (and even comedy) about the situation. Whereas Winston (and the reader) is glimpsing that totalitarianism doesn’t just homogenize thought, but generates a structure of repression that makes not just a kind of permanent war hysteria but all kinds of sadism by other midlevel functionaries possible. (Winston himself will be tortured before long.)

To get to the point: there is a sense in which in reflecting on Swift’s perception on the aims of totalitarianism, Orwell here also hits on (and partially anticipates) a variant of Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil that he expresses as a condition of less consciousness. This is not identical to Arendt’'s banality thesis, but this does involve (recall and here) a kind of lack of genuine individual judgment, and, on a certain reading, a defect in consciousness. Now, in 1984, this point is explicitly applied to midlevel functionaries like Winston of a sort quite capable of ingenious technical skill.