Forged Orwell: Famous Quotes He Never Made

I was struck by the quote above when I read it on the Internet. It's quintessentially Orwell:  stark, to the point, against the grain. In fact I was glad others out in Webland had memed the quote as my brain hadn't retained it at all. And the quote's had quite a life out there...

(Spool Note: Liam Neeson?)

Well I'm glad whoever got that tattoo (if it isn't just a bit of Photoshopping) didn't put Orwell's name beneath. Because Orwell never wrote it. At least, Wikipedia can't find it in the original canon (Though the earliest appearances are in academic texts from 1982 and, fittingly, 1984).

It's far from the only Faux-well. Here's another:

This one shares the same sentiment as the former and, for my money, was probably created by someone who once heard the 'universal deceit' quote but couldn't remember how it was phrased. A copy of a copy, if you will. Leastways, I haven't been able to find the source for this one either.

Both the above quotes are at least plausible (I can just about see 'The Guv'ner'* himself wishing he'd written the first). But check out this next one:

Here we have drifted into purest wishful thinking. As far as I can remember Orwell never used the term 'the media' in that sense, neither did most people back in the thirties and forties. More likely, someone with opinions on the current political landscape has replaced the term 'Big Brother' with a bogeyman of our own time. You have to wonder who the creator of this thinks George Orwell actually is.  The Smoking Man?

Here's another, similar example:

It's all over the web this one, but for the life of me I can't find a single recitation that can also give its source (a common result in this endeavor, I found out.). I've never known Orwell to use a colon so early in a sentence. He didn't have to: he wasn't in the business of making bullish memes. Even if he conveyed that idea somewhere in his journalism and this quote is a summarization you have to ask what George meant by 'liberal'. It's possible he was thinking more along the lines of David Lloyd-George than Al Gore.

OK, here a sentiment has been wrapped in new words (please note each quotation above begins differently). Orwell did say this:

"Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf"

-Notes On Nationalism (1945)


Yet in The Tribune column itself he's specifically referring to the British pacifist movement before and during World War II, a viewpoint that neither Orwell nor the general gaze of history particularly entertains (In another column he describes pacifism in the face of Nazi aggression as being more like a mental illness than a political outlook. That's in The Lion And The Unicorn I think. Feel free to look it up). If George Orwell had intended the statement to be a salute to the 21st century US marines or Duck Dynasty I'm sure he would have come to the point. He was good like that.

Also, note the faux-Orwell quote's use of 'rough men' and their opposite, the (presumably) soft men's insistence on lounging in bed. Orwell's statement has been stretched, Flanderized, pumped full of steroids. Orwell's pacifists are at least portrayed as active voices, not limp-wristed somnambulists in onesies.

The faux-quote reeks of the increasing divide in modern day US politics or at least the right wing narrative of it:  the muscular doers of conservatism--White America's survivalist Spartans--having to carry the great democrat dandy, ingrate that he is. And for lack of an Orwell they can truly use they will happily construct one.

On the other hand, my searches turned up almost as many left wing uses of fake quotes, if you count the Occupy Movement and the greater part of Wikileaks and Anonymous. And perhaps that hints toward the cause of Orwell's explosion across social media and the political spectrum simultaneously.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy are newborn sociological beasts, stumbling to walk upright. It makes sense their afterbirth-damp palms would scrabble for a post to lean on, especially one proven so dependable over half a century or more.

And that's what Orwell, or at least the image of him, is:  a dependable post, a firm-but-not-painful handshake, a neighbor whom you can lend your Black & Decker Workmate. Revolutionary movements can find inspiration in any person consensus deems a rebel.

One could get all cantankerous about all this appropriation and downright rapine, start screaming about he who controls the past, 2 plus 2 being 4 and all that stuff. But I don't know as if you can really fight it. Humans make stuff up. You know that.

I'm not as defeatist here as you might think. Not in the long term. I think we have to accept all the beloved writers of the modern era will accumulate spurious quotes and apocryphal tales. All part and parcel of being beloved. It was the same for Homer and the ancients, except this time round technology allows us quick access to the original material and its historical context. Orwell will remain long after our current political zeit has geisted. So I dare say all that accumulation has been rendered harmless.

Or, as Quentin Crisp once said about the state of his home, 'I find the dust doesn't get any worse after the first three months'.

Ah... classic Crisp, that. I think... 


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*One bleary night me and my pals wondered why famous authors don't get rock statesmen-like nicknames such as 'The King' or 'The Boss'. The Guv'ner seemed spot on for George and it's just sort of stuck. Feel free to use it, though right wing libertarian types need not apply (not that I can stop you). To truly earn the use of 'The Guv'ner' one must have a general leaning toward democratic socialism (so we can identify each other from the tinfoil hat brigade on the web) and--and this is the inner sanctum as it were--have a dislike of sugar in your tea. 


 

Elitism Is Ignorance: That Kristen Stewart 1984 Adaptation

Hollywood announces a film starring Kristen Stewart based on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and, quicker than you can say 'knee jerk nerd elitism' the online community ladles out a big gravy boat of scorn 'n' LOL.

io9 worked the handle with this article: Kristen Stewart joins a "romantic" remake of 1984 because life is pain.

First off, never trust a blog post that begins with 'Oh my god. OH MY GOD". Not even Desmond Tutu's. But that's by-the-by.

io9's post both lead and typified the general reaction in the online SF community, which could be summed up as shocked, mocking and possessed of an atrophied memory of the novel itself. An Orwell fanboy/girl can find something to frown at in each paragraph.

"Yes, Kristen Stewart just called a movie based on George Orwell's literary masterpiece about a dystopia where a privileged elite rule the masses of humanity by brutally taking control of society and eradicating their individualism, as well as controlling their language, history, and even their thoughts "a really basic concept."

For someone claiming to be more knowledgeable than Ms Stewart about '84, you'd think they'd have found 'privileged' an, at best, fuzzy term. It gives the impression of opulence, of grapes dangled in mouths and new years honors proffered like cigars. Of hypocrisy. But it's a term someone who hasn't read the book in decades would use.

Twitter last week

The Inner Party is hardly a privileged elite in any classic sense. Judging by O'Brien's pad their living standards are maybe just less than a single person with a job in the western world. A privilege of just-enough in a world of manufactured not-enough. A 'fanatical elite' would have rung truer. A nightmare elite. They are the ultimate result of a nightmare logic, beginning with chieftains and continued through kings, CEOs and dictators: the science of domination perfected. A major strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the slow reveal of that fact. O'Brien's explanation of his own kind's philosophy hasn't lost the power to chill:  

 "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

You could not enter the Inner Party via heredity. Instead, intelligent orphans were selected by the original instigators of the revolution who brutalized them into the uniquely dark brand of political zen described above. So, privileged... yes, technically, but it's only an adjective of use to someone who's long forgotten the political speculation of Orwell's novel.


Which brings me to io9's derision of Stewart's comment that the film has 'a really basic concept'. Well, yes, it does, actually. Individuality against oppression, thought against control, emotion against the machine. That sort of thing (though I'm sure, dear reader, you can probably do better). Orwell intended it to be direct, as 'clear as a window pane'. You can't help but feel anyone who believes it complex does so merely because they are aware it is an important book and therefore must be difficult. Someone who hasn't read it, essentially, or at least not for some time. Ms Stewart's take seems far more fresh than io9's.


 Anyhoo, that's one paragraph. Don't worry, I'll leave it at that. But I'll just leave this here link about '84 being the novel most often claimed to have been read.


But the biggest problem the critics have with this film (aside from Stewart being in it) is that it's a 'romantic interpretation of the novel' (Here's a load of people on Twitter complaining about it). The argument seems to go that Orwell wasn't silly enough for that kind of thing. He was busy fighting totalitarianism dammit!


But this misses the point that love is a political act. Perhaps we secular western heterosexuals have lost sight of that fact, though I imagine a gay rights campaigner in Uganda, say, would tell you as much. Orwell's great strength as a political writer is in never losing sight of the personal, the intimate. In his essay, Some Thoughts On The Common Toad, he defends a personal love of nature against the politicos of his time (and indeed ours) who see it as a waste of time that could be usefully spent on fighting the system:

Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?

That idea is woven into the very substance of Nineteen Eighty-Four (For my money it's what gives it the edge over both Brave New World and We). One senses The Party fear and detest 'Pleasure in the actual process of life' more than actual revolutionary thought. Their scientists, we learn, are working on eliminating the orgasm, their education system on making stars nothing but irrelevant lights. Love--romance--is enemy number one. Forget Goldstein.


For that reason I can't comprehend what people are talking about. I've always found '84 an intensely romantic book in its way and wouldn't take offense at anyone portraying it so in film.


The romance is far from ephemeral: Julia's note to Winston finally inspires him to truly subversive acts and the Party finally breaks him using Julia. Yes, it's probably true argued Julia is a two-dimensional figure who merely serves to bring the protagonist to action (the 'manic pixie girl' as modern parlance has it) but I'd say to that that no one in 1984 is fully rounded and that the author intended it that way. The Party won't permit fully rounded people. It demands the broken, the tamed, the neutered. But that's what makes Nineteen Eighty-Four's love story so very tender.


I look forward to the film and I look forward to the demographic who dig The Hunger Games discovering Nineteen Eighty-Four. After all, how can it possibly damage the novel? How?

Behind all the snark and mocking tweets I sense an elitist sort of ownership, the same kind that took exception to Plath's The Bell Jar being released in a 'chick-lit' cover (as if it's entry into a less rarefied but larger readership was a bad thing). Unfortunately it's a strident ownership of an idea of a book, not the book itself.

I'm sure if they asked Kristin Stewart nicely she'd lend them her copy.  

Orwell On Asceticism

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid."

-Reflections On Gandhi, George Orwell (1947)