Mark Dery, The Daily Beast, June 2015:
"...“Good prose is like a windowpane,” Orwell wrote.
But his—and Strunk and White’s—dream of a prose so crystalline it lets us
behold the truth of things unmediated, rather than through the glass of
language, darkly, is really a religious yearning disguised as writerly wisdom.
It’s a dream of time-traveling back to Eden and speaking the Adamic language in
which the signifier and the signified, representation and reality are one. The
trouble, of course, is that style, whatever its elements, is artifice, and
artifice is authenticity’s foe... "
George Orwell:
“... Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow
and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over
from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two
viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until
you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system
before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals,
and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.,,"”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft :
“...And yet for all his fame and stature, Orwell remains
elusive. For one thing, he is impossible to categorize. He was a great
something — but a great what? Scarcely a great novelist: the prewar novels are
good but not very good, and even “Animal Farm” and “1984” aren’t great in the
sense of “Madame Bovary.” To call him a great journalist, as many have done,
means overlooking plenty of mundane (and inaccurate) political commentary. It’s
when he turns to such unlikely matters as boys’ comics and vulgar postcards, as
well as to his central subject of politics and language, that he enters the
realm of deathless literature.
His politics were likewise sui generis. Although he called
himself a democratic socialist, and served with a revolutionary-Marxist militia
in Spain, he was in many ways an emotional and cultural conservative...”
Thomas E. Ricks, ‘Churchill and Orwell: The Fight For
Freedom’, 2017:
“....There are two points to be made here. First,
sensitivity to odor is a tic of much of his writing. Second, and more
unsettling, it is the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the
smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In contrast,
he is always ready to be horrified by mankind.
Another more repellent thread runs through the book—a kind
of quick and casual prejudice against the Jews he encounters. In a coffee shop
he sees, “In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, . . .
guiltily eating bacon.” The animallike “muzzle” in that sentence is
particularly disturbing. At another point he recounts a tale told by his friend
Boris, a former Russian soldier, of being offered the sexual services of a
Jewish girl for fifty francs by her father—“A horrible old Jew, with a red
beard like Judas Iscariot.” Orwell’s playing with this offhand sort of
anti-Semitism appears in some of his other work. It is little consolation that
he is an equal opportunity bigot, as when in Down and Out he approvingly quotes
the proverb “Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t
trust an Armenian.”
The fact of the matter is that Orwell was always tin eared
about Jews. During World War II, Orwell would write extensively against anti-Semitism,
but in the course of doing so he failed to reexamine his own writings of the
previous decade. After the war, he had surprisingly little to say about the
Holocaust, one of the major events of his time. He remained strongly
anti-Zionist throughout his life, but that probably should be seen more in the
context of his enduring distaste for nationalism rather than the anti-Semitism
of some of his early writings. Even so, his friend the journalist Malcolm
Muggeridge would conclude that “he was at heart strongly anti-Semitic.”....”
जॉर्ज
ऑरवेल हे माझे अत्यंत आवडते लेखक. मला सर्वात जास्त आवडलेले त्यांचे
पुस्तक: "
Down and Out in Paris and London", १९३३. त्या पुस्तकाबद्दल मी
पूर्वी लिहले आहे.
त्यांच्या सुंदर, टोकदार, दाणेदार, नेटक्या वगैरे भाषेच्या पलिकडे जाऊन, त्यांच्या मृत्यू नंतर ६८वर्षे पूर्ण झाल्यावर, २०१८साली, त्यांच्या
काही लेखनाबद्दल मनात आलेले विचार.
१. जॉन ग्रे म्हणतात : "
Whatever horrors they chronicled, Orwell and (Arthur) Koestler never
gave up the hope that humankind could have a better future. It did not occur to
them that history might be cyclical, not progressive, with the struggles of
earlier eras returning and being played out against a background of increased
scientific knowledge and technological power. For all their dystopian
forebodings, neither anticipated the 21st-century reality, in which ethnic and
religious wars have supplanted secular ideological conflicts, terror has
returned to the most advanced societies and empire is being reinvented."
कालिदासांनी मेघदूत मध्ये लिहलय "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण" (Our conditions go cyclically up and down like the spokes of a wheel). जे व्यक्ती बाबत खरे आहे तेच समाज, देश याबाबत खरे आहे.
जॉन ग्रे पुन्हा एकदा:
"...
. In Greece and Rome, India and China, for example, history
was understood in cyclical terms as the rise and fall of civilisations.
Advances in ethics and politics were real and worth fighting for, but they
would always be lost in the course of a few generations since – while knowledge
may increase over time – human beings remain much the same. The inherent and
incurable flaws of the human animal will eventually always prevail over any
advance in civilisation. As I’ve put it in The Silence of Animals,
civilisation is natural for humans. But so is barbarism...."
दुर्गा भागवत 'कौटिलीय अर्थशास्त्र" बाबत म्हणतात : "...मॅकिएवेलीत (माक्याव्हेल्ली) इतिहासाचे
पूर्ण भान आहे.
तसे अर्थशास्त्रात नाही...". अशाच धर्तीवर म्हणावे लागेल की ऑर्वेलना इतिहासाच्या मूलभूत स्वरूपाचे भान नाही. ऑर्वेल यांचे वर दिलेले अवतरण पहा , त्यातही प्रगतीचा उल्लेख आहे, तिच्या प्रक्रियेचे वर्णन आहे पण ह्या इतिहासाच्या रहाटगाडग्याचा उल्लेख नाही. हा त्यांच्या लेखनातील एक मोठा दोष आहे.
२. अस म्हटल जात की ऑरवेल खूप द्रष्टे होते. काही बाबतीत त्यांची भविष्यवाणी अतिशय खरी ठरली आहे पण बेन ज्यूडा (Ben Judah) काय लिहतात ते पहा:
"...He predicted in 1941 alone that: the British Empire would be
converted into “a socialist federation of states”; the London Stock Exchange
would imminently be “torn down”; Britain’s country homes would be transformed
into socialist “children’s camps”; and Eton and Harrow faced immediate post-war
closure. He was making claims that were childish even for his time....
.... Orwell’s actual warnings—about homogenization, the
destruction of information, a world without wealth and only unlimited powers of
the state—are now miles away. If anything, the threats to democracy are the
opposite of “Orwellian.”
This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to
Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation,
ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo
chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds
forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state
power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to
keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the
super-rich.
Orwell was no visionary when it comes to economics, either.
Recall his Floating Fortresses in 1984, explicitly designed to eat up
the surplus production of a population. His inability to meaningfully reflect
on the dynamics of capitalism (beyond moralising condemnation), let alone
imagine a consumer society, is a fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from
the postwar era. It is a reminder of how utterly written-off by European
intellectuals the market economy was immediately after the war—and what a shock
the 1950s consumerist takeoff in living standards proved to be... "
३. ऑरवेल यांचा अँटी सेमिटीसम :
वर दिलेले थॉमस रिक्स यांचे अवतरण वाचा आणि, पुन्हा एकदा, बेन ज्यूडा:
"...
Orwell’s books, too, are heavily stained with
anti-Semitism. His 1933 novelistic impressions and imaginings in Down And
Out In Paris And London (where he would regularly visit a Parisian aunt in
the cinquième arrondissement) contains constant and violent caricatures
of Jews. “It would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose,” he recalls.
Whilst the Romanians, plongeurs and tramps Orwell meets have names and
identities, the Jews are only ever Jews—whether it is “a red-haired Jew, an
extraordinarily disagreeable man” he fantasises about punching in Paris, or
when he returns to London and sights “a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, who was
guiltily wolfing down bacon.” These are not feelings that George Orwell was shy
to admit, even in writing. His 1945 musings on the illogicality of
anti-Semitism as an ideology goes as far as to ask, “Why does anti-Semitism
appeal to me?”
The time-stamp on these musings matter when it comes to
judging his reputation as the now bronze-cast moral authority outside the BBC.
This is quite different from judging Shakespeare on whether or not Shylock is
an anti-Semitic caricature, given that The Merchant of Venice was
written at a time when Judaism was a question of peripheral relevance to
Elizabethan writers. Orwell first published the year Hitler came to power."
थॉमस रिक्स तर त्यांच्यावर जास्त गंभीर आरोप करतायत - माणूसघाणे(!)पणाचा :“...the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the
smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In
contrast, he is always ready to be horrified by mankind...”... भारतातल्या घामट उन्हाळ्यात ह्या ऑरवेल यांच टिकण कठीण होत!
आता आणखी एका गोष्टीचा उल्लेख. एका मराठी वर्तमानपत्राने २०१८साली, वर्षभरासाठी, ऑर्वेलयांच्या वर निबंधमाला सुरु केली...का?
माझ्या मते त्याची कारणे आहेत : बऱ्याच शिकलेल्या मराठी वाचणाऱ्या लोकांना (उदा: ऑर्वेल यांच्या) भाबड्या समाजवादाबद्दल वाटणारे आकर्षण, 'नेटक्या' भाषेबद्दल (ज्याचा उदो उदो ऑर्वेल यांनी केला, वरचे पहिले अवतरण पहा) प्रेम आणि जगाबद्दल असलेला त्यांचा आणि त्यांच्या वृत्तपत्राचा काळा-पांढरा असा सोपा दृष्टिकोन ....
"the secret to Orwell’s popularity is not in the facts of his
life, or even in his journalism (though he hardly ever engaged in what we would
call reporting), and certainly not in his prophecy. The secret of Orwell’s
appeal lies in his rhetoric: everything is simple, everything is right or
wrong, and everything—if you only listened to him—can finally be solved."
Artist: Ralph Steadman, 1996
