George Orwell

These days we watch something called Big Brother for amusement. Thanks to the Dutch television producer John De Mol, who first came up with the concept of shutting a bunch of people in studio / house and to follow them 24-hours a day with cameras. The hit format was subsequently sold worldwide. Big Brother as the name of De Mol’s success show; it would have amazed George Orwell.... De Mol was not especially original; experiments into human behaviour using cameras have been done by psychologists for years. But De Mol was the first who saw and sold it as entertainment.

The name Big Brother is certain to have been made up by some editor who had read or heard about the cameras in the book 1984 by that same Orwell. It is rather improbable that the heirs of Orwell protested. Because the world famous peep show has absolutely nothing to do with the macabre vision of the future that Orwell sketched in his most famous novel. In that book Winston Smith – Orwell introduced him in the passage quoted above – is an inhabitant of a sinister totalitarian state. The leader of this state is called Big Brother. Think about those types in places like North Korea who try to realise their Utopia, or of the other ‘big brother’, Brother Number 1 Pol Pot.

In a totalitarian state there is no place for individual feelings of love and beauty and absolutely no place for freedom of speech. Everything is for and by the State. Everything is for the glory of Big Brother. In order to consolidate his power the leader knows that he has to have total control. There is no place for objective thought. History does not exist, the story is written anew each day. The thought police is his most powerful weapon; every inhabitant of Orwell’s Utopia lives in a house in which the cameras are directly connected to the controlling authorities. Winston Smith’s human feelings – he is in love and therefore sometimes withdraws himself from the gaze of the eyes of Big Brother - do not square with the social paradise in which the state and not the citizen determines what happiness is. Orwell’s dark vision of humanity is nowhere so unpleasant as at the end of 1984: a civil servant of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith declares, just before a bullet is set to bore its way through his head, his immense love for and loyalty to Big Brother. And in doing so he has lost his last shreds of human dignity. The book is mostly mentioned in the same breath Aldous Huxley’s anti-Utopian Brave New World. Not unfairly, because both writers had quite a few doubts about morality and ‘progress”. But Huxley did offer certain solutions to the people by giving them the drug Soma and packaged his criticism as satire. Orwell by contrast offered not a shred of hope....

Animal Farm is if anything even better known than 1984. This too is about a totalitarian state. The setting is a farm. The farmer is a heavy boozer and the animals decide to take over the running of the place. The book is barely 100 pages thick, but Orwell did not need any more to make it clear that in the end it would make no difference whether the animals themselves or a drunken farmer ran the show. Of course it is a satire on the Leftie groups of those days who praised the Soviet system. The left-wing intelligentsia must have nothing to do with the biting criticism of communism. On the contrary: it was the time of all power to the workers, study as a human right, even for dummies, in which art that did not value every illiterate,

was called elitist. Because are not all people equal? In Animal Farm the pigs, who announced themselves to be leaders (equal!!!) giving this a twist that has become one of the most quoted phrases in literature: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” To the leftie world-improvers, Orwell had come down in their estimation. They argued that such an observation was proof of an embittered reactionary. In their turn, the right had their own problems with Orwell. Had he not fought for the communists against the fascist Franco regime in Spain? Apparently not everyone understood that you could fight against fascism, without being a supporter of some other dubious ideology. And that was that. What Orwell ultimately did in his work was to pose questions and offer criticism of parties, religions and other powers that knew with certainty what was good for people. Think for yourself... Homage to Catalonia is for me Orwell’s master work. Nowhere else does the idealist, writer, journalist and fighter come together better than this, thanks to the sobriety of this penetrating, personal report of Orwell’s experiences at the front during the Spanish civil war. It has parallels with that other masterpiece describing the experience of writers at war, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Which is not especially surprising: both men were writers, observers who participated. Only Graves did it years before: his narrative comes from World War 1. Orwell did not describe war as heroic. In his memories, people were central. It was not about battles, not about politics or military strategy. It was all about the individual, in circumstances in which they were compelled to act inhumanly. There is so much to say about it, but this quote actually sums it al up: “One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not the latrine in our barracks did its necessary.... I thought: “Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison...” Orwell was no pacifist, but a realist who was aware that the individual is always subordinate to the ruling class. A bullet wound in his throat put an end to Orwell’s military ambitions. A happy accident, otherwise this detailed analysis of soldiers, their feelings and the images burned into their retina might never have come about.

Down and out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1928 Orwell had already begun the research for this book, his debut. There he was from one day to the next a tramp. First he explored for a while the hostels for the homeless in London. If you read it you cannot help but be reminded of the saddest tales out of Dickens. Hours in the queue for a cup of soup, after which the compulsory sermon from the pastor, followed by a spot of de-lousing and going to sleep on your wooden bed with eyes half open to make sure that your neighbour does not pinch your most valuable possessions: your tobacco and your blunt razor. “A tramp without a razor loses his dignity,” Orwell discovered, who back then was still known as Eric Blair (he was born in Burma as the son of a colonial civil servant and an attentive mother.) The passages that take place in Paris are brilliantly written. Orwell had a hawk eye for strange types and bizarre circumstances. Let’s keep it short: anyone who has read the book, in the Year of our Lord 2006, will never again allow a snack to slide down their throat without thinking about what the plongeur (that was his job: the man who officially in a restaurant washes the plates, but who in reality functions as a Jack-of-all-trades) did when he was treated worse than bad. He pissed over the customer’s steak. Humour, comedy, tragedy and journalism at its best.

The novels of Orwell are still readable. The semi-autobiographical “Coming up for Air,” is an especially fine, melancholy book about Orwell’s alter ego George Bowling. An insurance broker with a safe-but-fusty existence; wife, children and stuck fast in the in the groove of day to day existence. When Bowling wins a modest amount, he decides to keep it all for himself and use it to make a pilgrimage to the village of his birth, Lower Binfield. As a child he was happy there, the village was paradisiacal and later he had a girlfriend. The Lower Binfield that Bowling sees after 40 years brings his illusions to an end. Everything is just as complacent, ugly and contentless as in his current life. Philosophically considered, Orwell writes here that happiness is an illusion for masking unhappiness. A cruel joke. The war clouds that presage the arrival of World War 2 to cover the daydreams of Bowling reinforce that idea. The other novels also all take place in the petty British milieu out of which the main characters try to escape. It always eludes them.

The letters and essays of Orwell have been collected together. All worth the effort. Such, such were the joys offers a depressing picture of Orwell’s time at a sombre public school. Typically British. Also typical of Orwell to attack it in such a brilliant and moving essay. A Hanging is the report of the execution of a Burmese soldier to which Orwell is a witness: “It is strange, but until that moment I had never stood still and pondered what it meant to destroy a person who was healthy and fully conscious.” And then he describes how glances were exchanged, how an officer who had to hang the noose, grumbled whether it could not have been done after coffee. As a spectator he was astonished at the systematic approach of the ‘hanging’.

Orwell died in 1950, apparently of TB, somewhere on an island off the Scottish coast. His writing was not working out any more, he sought out solitude and felt disillusioned. The only thing that still gave him pleasure was motorbike riding. Not exactly something for someone with TB, but again it was appropriate for Orwell. It is a bitter irony that 1984 (he wrote it in 1948) in 2006 appears to be more a prophecy than a futuristic speculation. We have long since invited Big Brother inside. Not via the cameras of the amusement industry. But via the cameras that are now capturing images in every street, every bar, during every event and on every road. And also via the PC, Big Brother knows more about us than we can imagine. If only we knew who Big Brother is.....