Because of its subject matter and the international environment at the time of its publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four has not received conventional critical treatment. Its defenders often mention that it is flawed in “literary” terms of structure, theme, and character development, yet they eagerly dismiss these quibbles because of their anxiety to publish the political significance and wisdom of the novel. Detractors who might focus upon the weaknesses in the structure and development of the narrative challenge instead the political “meaning” of Winston's story.

The issue is not necessarily whether the literary merits of Nineteen Eighty-Four should be recovered. Andy Croft has written sharply, “Arguing endlessly about the political ‘message’ of this one novel only serves to confirm its exceptional status.”¹ Croft's wish, that the novel would simply go away, is futile. Nineteen Eighty-Four, if only because it has served the political agenda of Western “freedom” for more than 50 years, is here to stay.

Most of the initial criticism did not label the novel as “anti-Soviet” but it emphasized Orwell's warning about “power,” even as it used that very term to sum up the qualities of the book. Veronica Wedgwood in Time and Tide explained, “It is no doubt with the intention of preventing his prediction from coming true that Mr. Orwell has set it down in the most valuable, the most absorbing, the most powerful book he has yet written.”² V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman compared the work to the best of Swift as a pointed depiction of the “moral corruption of absolute power,” and Julian Symons in The Times Literary Supplement offered “thanks for a writer … who is able to speak seriously and with originality of the nature of reality and the terrors of power.”³

Reviewers with other interests, however, pulled the book into the center of the Cold War. It did not require great effort to do this for as Fredric Warburg, Orwell's publisher, wrote in a private summary of the novel: “Here is the Soviet Union to the nth degree, a Stalin who never dies, a secret police with every device of modern technology.”⁴ Samuel Sillen in the Communist Masses and Mainstream protested, “There is a hideous ingenuity in the perversions of a dying capitalism, and it will keep probing for new depths of rottenness which the maggots will find ‘brilliant and morally invigorating.’”⁵ In the United States, the tribute to Orwell's power was overlaid with coded references to his place in the current battle abroad against Soviet-led enemies and at home against “bad” liberals who would not support confrontation with Moscow. The review in the New York Times declared that “no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness.”⁶ Philip Rahv of Partisan Review proclaimed:

This novel is the best antidote to the totalitarian disease that any writer has so far produced. … I recommend it particularly to those liberals who still cannot get over the political superstition that while absolute power is bad when exercised by the Right, it is in its very nature good and a boon to humanity once the Left, that is to say “our own people,” takes hold of it.⁷

Strident opponents of Communism such as Time, Life, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal, hailed the book not only as a challenge to Moscow but as a warning against Socialism.

Other reviewers in the U.S. did move beyond the question of individual power versus State/Party power. Diana Trilling, for example, thought the novel “brilliant and fascinating” but was troubled by the intensity of vision recommended by other reviewers: “the nature of its fantasy [was] so absolutely final and relentless” that she could “recommend it only with a certain reservation.”⁸ Lionel Trilling, perhaps cognizant of Orwell's work from the 1930s, praised the approach to modernism rather than to political systems as such, complimenting the portrayal of all aspects of modern life that could lead to “deprivation, dullness and fear of pain.”⁹

Orwell's death seven months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four reinforced this image of the work as a “Cold War novel.” While Orwell had protested the depiction of his book as anti-Socialist, his early demise left further interpretation to those who eulogized and those who vilified him. Meanwhile, the Cold War had become a total conflict. Five days after Orwell's death, the Truman Administration launched the study that would become NSC 68, the blueprint for a global political, economic, and cultural offensive against the Soviet bloc. Five months later, the Korean conflict took the Cold War into a new military phase.

Yet even these wider commentaries would be pulled back into a Cold War environment. Lionel Trilling is an excellent example. Known for his depiction and defense of the “moral center,” the critic's work was upheld as an example of the superior political as well as cultural and literary sensibility of the American system, and he was allied, often under the misleading label of “the New York intellectuals,” with writers and editors such as Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Sol Levitas, and Dwight Macdonald who had become a vanguard denouncing Communism at home and abroad. (Both Diana and Lionel Trilling would be prominent members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, CIA-funded organizations to challenge the supposed Soviet hold over intellectuals.)

In 1951, Trilling would provide the introduction to Homage to Catalonia, finally issued in the U.S.. He wrote that Orwell told the truth “in an exemplary way, quietly, simply, with due warning to the reader that it was only one man's truth.”¹⁰ Orwell was the “moral center”:

Orwell's native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind; they have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral certainty, a directness of relation to moral—and politica—fact.¹¹

Trilling might have aspired to transcend politics with his criticism but, by the time of its appearance, the issue of the “truth” of Nineteen Eighty-Four had become part of the campaign against Communism.

More importantly, if Nineteen Eighty-Four was to be enshrined as a “great” novel, its literary significance would have to be considered, if only in conjunction with its political impact. Orwell's novels of the 1930s had had a mixed reception, and some of them had disappeared from critical view by 1950. While Animal Farm had brought acclaim, there was always the possibility that it would be the exception that would prove the rule. Tom Hopkinson's tribute to Orwell in 1950, wittingly or unwittingly, slights Nineteen Eighty-Four by omission: “I know only two present-day works of fiction before which the critic abdicates: one is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the other Orwell's Animal Farm.”¹²

In the end, however, Nineteen Eighty-Four would be both exalted and limited by its place in a larger political and cultural conflict, one which continues today. Isaac Deutscher's 1955 essay, “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” may be derided by Orwell's defenders but as a summary of the reception and recycling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it has no equal. For Deutscher, Orwell's creation was now out of the author's hands:

The novel has served as a sort of ideological super-weapon. … A book like 1984 may be used without much regard for the author's intention. Some of its features may be torn out of their context, while others, which do not suit the political purpose which the book is made to serve, are ignored or virtually suppressed.

The political had conquered the literary:

Nor need a book like 1984 be a literary masterpiece or even an important and original work to make its impact. Indeed a work of great literary merit is usually too rich in its texture and too subtle in thought and form to lend itself to adventitious exploitation. As a rule its symbols cannot easily be transformed into hypnotising bogies, or its ideas turned into slogans.¹³

Julian Symons had illustrated this shift from the literary to the political in his obituary of Orwell in 1950: “Nineteen Eighty-Four, in spite of its great popular success, is a book marked by George Orwell's faults, and yet even in its passages of crude sensationalism the clean hard style holds the book together, even in his most extreme pessimism, hope in libertarian socialism is never quite lost.”¹⁴The Times was even starker in its opinion: “In a less troubled, less revolutionary period of history [Orwell] might have perhaps have discovered within himself a richer and more creative power of imagination a deeper philosophy of acceptance.”¹⁵

Irving Howe, writing in 1956, would further prove Deutscher's point. Howe, through his writing and his founding of the journal Dissent, had put some political distance between himself and other anti-Communist critics while remaining a “mainstream” intellectual. He upheld Orwell in this spirit of courageous dissent, “In 1984 Orwell has seized upon those elements of our public life that, given courage and intelligence, were avoidable.” However, he had to admit that Nineteen Eighty-Four “is not, I suppose really a novel, or at least it does not satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to the novel.”¹⁶

A pattern had been established. If a critic approached a troublesome literary junction, he/she veered towards safer political ground. Richard Rees, Orwell's initial sponsor and good friend, was unsettled by the torture scenes. Like Julian Symons, he passed this off as the result of Orwell's health and then reassured himself: “It is … an example … of the remorseless honesty from which his work derives its rare vitality and its unmistakable touch of nobility.”¹⁷ George Woodcock wrote in 1966, “In comparison with … dubious disciples, Orwell still shines out, half a generation later, as a noble and colourful figure, large in act and vision, the almost complete opposite of the narrow-visioned academics who have closed in during the present generation on the literary worlds of both Britain and North America.”¹⁸ George Steiner reverted to Cold War justification in the New Yorker in March 1969: “Nineteen Eighty-Four is a close imitation [of We], and Zamyatin's seems to me the subtler, more inventive fiction. … Both the strength and the ambiguity of Orwell's fantasia stem from a latent identification between Stalinist terror and the inhumanity of a supertechnology. The result is a harrowing but somewhat forced and unsteady parable.”¹⁹

This safe reception of Orwell the man had become more than a retreat from literary criticism, however. In the 1960s, when troubling social questions were prompting a re-examination and re-definition of the “Left,” political qualms were also being set aside. Both Rees and Woodcock, for example, are unhappy with Orwell's treatment of the poor whom he supposedly championed. Rees wrote of the author's “unrealistic attitude towards the urban working class” and his depiction of “proles” as “comic postcard figures.”²⁰ Woodcock notes the equation of proles with animals.²¹ Such doubts cannot stand by the final page. As Woodcock, ironically retreating into a brief consideration of “style,” concludes, “In that crystalline prose which Orwell developed so that reality could always show through its transparency, lies perhaps the greatest and certainly the most durable achievement of good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive.”²²

Only in 1971 would a critic challenge this construction of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Raymond Williams, in a powerful extended essay, took on Orwell the personality by arguing that the author himself had fashioned his “identity” as “an imperial police officer, a resident of a casual ward, a revolutionary militiaman, a declassed intellectual, a middle-class English writer.” For Williams, this did not necessarily devalue Orwell the writer:

[He] could connect as closely and with as many different kinds of people as he did, precisely because of his continual mobility, his successive and serious assumption of roles. When he is in a situation, he is so dissolved into it that he is exceptionally convincing, and his kind of writing makes it easy for the reader to believe that this is also happening to himself. The absence of roots is also the absence of barriers.²³

The problem for Williams is that the “last” Orwell was one who could be enshrined and upheld by enemies of socialism: “If the only effective social contrast was between ‘democracy’ and ‘communism,’ then some sort of accommodation with capitalism … was at first temporarily and then habitually conceivable. Having made this accommodation, and the corresponding identification of ‘communism’ as the sole threat, it became harder to see and to admit what capitalist imperialism was still capable of doing: what, in the years since Orwell died, it has done again and again, in repression and in war.”²⁴ It was not just that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four had equated proles with animals; it was that, in his accommodation with capitalism, the character of ‘Orwell’—a man physically and intellectually alive and conscious and tough and persistent—moved these feebler and less conscious figures in an undifferentiated theatrical landscape.”²⁵

Williams's analysis may have reconfigured the author and his work as socially contingent but it continued to depend upon Orwell the personality: “He is still there, tangibly, with the wound in his throat, the sad strong face, the plain words written in hardship and exposure. But then as we reach out to touch him we catch something of his hardness, a necessary hardness.”²⁶

The possibility of a new approach to Nineteen Eighty-Four awaited the consideration of the novel's treatment of gender. In the 1984 volume Inside the Myth, Deirdre Beddoe considered Orwell's “heroines” from Elizabeth Lackersteen to Julia, as well as the characters of his documentaries, as caricatures which ignored the actual experience of women in the 1930s and 1940s. The political author succeeded in part because he wrote out the political, economic, and social experience of 50 percent of the population: “Orwell altered the record of the past, so far as women are concerned, as efficiently as if he had been in the employ of Minitrue. He was part of a conspiracy of silence.”²⁷

It was Beatrix Campbell who broke new ground, however, in her linkage of Orwell's treatment of gender to his treatment of class. She shook up the stagnant debate over Orwell as “good” or “bad” socialist, exposing his lack of a practical economic and social approach through his depiction of the prole washerwoman: “The imagery contains pathos, isolation, inertia, defeat: it incites pity and philanthropy rather than protest and politics.” Indeed, women finally become the enemy: “Among the middle class and the upper class, women are targets of his acidic class contempt, expressed in the same vein as the mother-in-law joke. It's the ‘Brighton ladies’ and rich women lolling around in Rolls Royces whom he can't abide.”²⁸

Another vital critique came from Alok Rai in Orwell and the Politics of Despair in 1988 as he sought “a way of engaging with, while not being swamped by [the] polemical quality” of Orwell's work.²⁹ Building upon Williams's approach, Rai seeks “a particular, plausible construction of Orwell [which] is almost uniquely suited to the mythical needs of liberal social democracy,” part of “the ideologically staged confrontation between ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’.”³⁰ Having deconstructed Orwell, however, Rai has to grapple with what is left. His intricate reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which highlights contradictions in Orwell's fable approach to language, ends up with little beyond the “paranoid coherence” of Oceania. In Winston's failure lies “Orwell's own ambivalent radicalism.”³¹ Rai, however, could not resist seeking a happier ending; all he can offer is the injunction to “unfreeze our minds” for a “potentially ‘hopeful’ collectivity.”³²

And so once again the ground was ceded to those with a simpler, more accommodating reading of “Orwell” and Nineteen Eighty-Four, with issues such as gender, class, and politics replaced by reassuring platitudes about “hope.” Patrick Reilly praised the author, with his “deliberate, strategic despair which is meant to save, not stupefy,” but his excellent study of the novel ends with the questioning of salvation, “At the end of Orwell's dark prophecy the self has not only ceased to be sufficient—it has ceased to exist.”³³ This assessment could not stand for Michael Walzer, even as he described the “absolute bleakness” of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

[Orwell] was not dead yet; nor had he withdrawn from the world in order to pronounce a final judgement upon it. He meant to write again. The story of the last man was not intended to be his last word on politics. Nor need it be ours, so long as we speak with the terrifying awareness that was his gift.³⁴

Notes

1. Andy Croft, “Worlds Without End Foisted Upon the Future—Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 186.

2. Veronica Wedgwood, Time and Tide, 11 June 1949, pp. 494-5.

3. V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman and Nation, 18 June 1949, pp. 646-8; Julian Symons review, Times Literary Supplement, 10 June 1949, p. 380.

4. Fredric Warburg, “Publisher's Report,” December 1948, reprinted in Jeffrey Meyers, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 247.

5. Samuel Sillen review, Masses and Mainstream, August 1949, p. 276.

6. New York Times, 12 June 1949.

7. Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, July 1949, p. 749.

8. Diana Trilling, Nation, 25 June 1949, p. 716.

9. Lionel Trilling, New Yorker, 18 June 1949, pp. 78-81.

10. Lionel Trilling, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” in The Opposing Self (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 151-2.

11. Lionel Trilling, “Orwell on the Future,” in Samuel Hynes (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), p. 24.

12. Tom Hopkinson, World Review, June 1950, quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 490.

13. Isaac Deutscher, “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” in Russia and Transition and Other Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), pp. 230-1.

14. Julian Symons, “Tribune's Obituary,” reprinted in Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick, Orwell Remembered (London: Ariel, 1984), p. 275.

15. The Times, 23 January 1950, p. 7.

16. Irving Howe, “Orwell: History as Nightmare,” American Scholar, Spring 1956, reprinted in Politics and the Novel (London: Stevens and Sons, 1961), p. 236.

17. Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), p. 27.

18. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 50-1.

19. George Steiner, New Yorker, March 1969, reprinted in Meyers (ed.), p. 372.

20. Rees, pp. 40 and 104.

21. Woodcock, p. 157.

22. Woodcock, pp. 258-9.

23. Raymond Williams, Orwell (Glasgow: Fontana, 1971), pp. 87-8.

24. Ibid., p.93.

25. Ibid., p. 82.

26. Ibid., p. 94.

27. Deirdre Beddoe, “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell,” in Norris (ed.), p. 153.

28. Beatrix Campbell, “Orwell—Paterfamilias or Big Brother,” in Norris (ed.), p. 130.

29. Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 8.

30. Ibid., pp. 153 and 160.

31. Ibid., p. 139.

32. Ibid., p. 139.

33. Patrick Reilly, The Literature of Guilt (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 113.

34. Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (London: Peter Halban, 1989), p. 135.