Humiliation and Orwell

[chickenfeet]

In the great Humiliation stakes minx_minx with Animal Farm beats out, by one point, cassandre with 1984. Once again, there were quite a few books of the sort that people feel they ought to have read but hardly anyone has. Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Conrad always seem to be solid contenders in that department.

I'm both surprised and fascinated that Orwell is still so widely read. My follow up Orwell poll shows that almost everybody on the flist has read 1984 and Animal Farm and that maybe half have read at least something else by Orwell. Interestingly, other than 1984 and Animal Farm, the non-fiction appears significantly more popular than the fiction. In fact all the non-fiction titles outscore all the other fiction titles.

My hypothesis that the popularity of 1984 and Animal Farm is largely due to their place in the school curriculum didn't really stand up. Roughly 70% of 1984 readers and 60% of Animal Farm readers did so of their own volition.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I am a Frog. I discovered Orwell on my own, aged 21; and I'm not understating it in saying it changed my life. More specifically, the essay How The Poor Die in Inside The Whale (and afterwards the rest, natch.) Once you learn a truth, Orwell said elsewhere, it cannot be unlearned. The minute I saw how the complete absence of bathos cut through everything to show things clearly from 60 years away, I was unable to stand the pathetic fake sentimentality of 95% of contemporary French journalism. Led me to work on the other side of the Channel in short order.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Orwell, it seems to me, stands in a long tradition of English reportage of reporting awful things, as they are, without exaggeration, relying on the sheer awfulness to speak for itself. Engels The Condition of the English Working Class and the work of Rowntree in York and the Webbs in London stands in the same tradition.