Orwell and our Death Fetish.
We have an unavoidable duty to turn our attention away from the trivial, to nurture the springs of creativity and reasoning that make us something more.
George Orwell was an artist, a true writer and creative. A deep thinker, deeply political and deeply adept at his craft. Art fascinates because it seems simultaneously to be the highest expression of human potential and also a complete waste of time and energy. I am never quite sure which. But if I resist that pithy dichotomy for a moment, I think that the idea that Art might be transformative is central to a kind of bubbling, low level thesis that I have about the nature of Art media and reality. Art has a deep effect on us and it is this effect, magnified by modern technology and media that shapes much of our modern reality.
Listen to him write; listen to that now old fashioned voice from 1948, crafting each sentence so well in our own age of ‘8 minute reads’.
It was the age when crazy millionaires in curly top-hats and lavender waistcoats gave champagne parties in rococo house-boats on the Thames, the age of diabolo and hobble skirts, the age of the ‘knut’ in his grey bowler and cut-away coat, the age of The Merry Widow, Saki’s novels, Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends, the age when people talked about chocs and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly, when they went for divvy week-ends at Brighton and had scrumptious teas at the Troc. From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breathe forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates — an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that his oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last for ever, and was part of the order of things.
Such, Such were the Joys. 1948
What a relief. No entrepreneurs or YouTube, just the innocent and not so innocent challenges of everyday life. Class and relationships and human things that we all take for granted. There is darkness there but, also an honesty and a commitment to the human. A vulnerability in the writer and a rolling set of subjects that is reassuring in its warmth and the keenness of its vision. He skewers the pretensions of his society with an accuracy that strikes true in the mind. This is evidently the true experience of a man schooled in writing and in living, we can rest easy in his capable hands as he takes us back through the ages.
Unfortunately; Orwell has become a name synonymous with high school essays and the grey drudgery of forced literacy. His books carry great warnings about the dystopian dread of his settings. His books are thematic and strongly written and perfect for the school child; not because of their easiness or simplicity or school yard suitability but because their clarity is startling, their expression pitch perfect and their atmosphere all encompassing.
This appeal that makes Orwell so universal is inherent in all truly artistic works, works that are crafted aesthetically to such a refined degree that their meaning penetrates the babble and noise and strikes one deep in the guts, a visceral impact that forces you to take notice.
Look at this quote.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Of course, we say. Of course that is true. Its truth shines forth and grabs the attention. For Orwell, the power of language was deeply suspect, he would recognise the modern marketed world deeply and quickly, he would see how the power of language has allowed huge shifting markets to be harnessed by corporations in the interests of profit. His simple reversal of syntax exposes something that we have all suspected. As humans we are susceptible to the power of language and it changes us. Modern studies of embodiment have looked at similar ideas.
Congruence between the recipient’s bodily expression of emotion and the sender’s emotional tone of language, for instance, facilitates comprehension of the communication, whereas incongruence can impair comprehension. Taken all together, recent findings provide a scientific account of the familiar contention that “when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”
Incongruent emotional signalling, the scientists say; where we signal our emotional state with our expressions and body language but in a way that does not match our spoken message, actually corrupts the ability of others to understand us. This has massive ramifications. Regardless of our ability to reason, the content of the message, our logical capacity. Our ability to process is ‘corrupted’ by visual stimuli. There are, I suspect, many angry looking prisoners in Jail, bemoaning the unfairness of life, whose crime is that they look like angry criminals and not because they are angry, or criminal.
An incongruence in language that can transform, or destroy a life.
If language; whether visual, or spoken, can corrupt thought; as Orwell suggests, then the language and visual communication we consume might likewise corrupt our thought and in the modern world we have more than a little visual and aural messaging. We drown in it. Are we corrupted by this messaging? Is it even possible that we are not corrupted?
Way back in time, perhaps quite clearly in the age of the Romantic, a place of ruffled skirts and gentlemen callers with rugged looks and dark passions. A general predilection was re-discovered in the reading markets of europe and the colonies. A predilection for the problematic reefs of human existence, the troubled relationships, the secret desires, the hidden anger and hatreds of parlours and society and noble families.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
As time passed and wars began. It was discovered that this hunger for the dark in human society still grew. Reading markets formed that would take a hundred years to mature into internet fed rivers of media and video and books and commentary. People want to read about the complications and trials of life so that they might understand their own and with the rise of new political movements and the shifts of governments towards authoritarianism and oppression, the new dark in fiction was that fear that the future of the world might be one where the most evil depths of human nature reign supreme in the highest of places. Franco and Mao, Mussolini and Pai Mei. Darkness and Power lead to Dystopia and authoritarianism and suffering and when they re-emerge in books and film, they might warn us of the perils and guide us past the reefs.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984
This Dystopian business boomed and we consumed.
In teaching we love it. The darker the better, for suffering is universal and even teenagers sense that this is something which they will become familiar. 1984, Brave New World, the Hunger Games are all stalwarts of the educational scene. Top it off with Conrad and Heart of Darkness as they finish their schooling.
“We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In film we love it. Avatar. Alien. The War of the Worlds. It goes on and on. We imagine ways to be tortured and persecuted and sliced and diced and fricasseed. We imagine Autocratic governments and Totalitarian nightmares, Twisted realities where we are purged once a year, hunted down and killed and culled. Our futures are coloured by our imaginings.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
During the cold war we demonised the Russians and set our movies in Vietnam, fighting the battles we had already lost the decade before. A film war by proxy where we could imagine confronting our enemies and actually winning . An imagined state where the status quo is one of turmoil and violence and destruction. Violence in some sub genres of film is the currency of commercial success. On a societal level, you lose to a communist government then making 50 movies which pretend you won then that must be better than acknowledging the painful truth. We dig up the Holocaust and Year Zero. We place mad generals in space and on Nuclear Warheads. We imagine societies a moment from our own or a lifetime apart from our own with Darth Vader and his futuristic totalitarian state.
Of course. We do not pay any real attention to what all of this might be doing to us. All of this imagining and imagery and despair.
It’s not just negative to question this relentless focus on the darkest elements of humanity. These stories are not all really acting as a warning or arising out of reflection. We are wallowing, bathing, swimming; in a cornucopia of suffering and darkness. We have banished beauty to the wings and we mock her. A new girl is in town and she is Bad with a capital B.
Our society promotes the worst elements of our humanity and imagines threat and despair and suffering. We routinely start TV shows with dying children. We celebrate the perfect head shot in games, we teach despair in our schools and what we imagine comes forth. In film, in books and in TV we fetishise death and despair.
How do these images and ideas corrupt us and do we know of our corruption. Dare we dismiss the volume and content of the media world in which we live. How would we know if we were corrupted? Do we know?
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984
