The Road to 1984

Abstract

In an extremely hostile essay, published in 1956 on occasion of American printing of Orwell's early novel, Keep Aspidistra Flying, critic Anthony West said that existence of a hidden wound can account for such a remorseless pessimism. The pessimnism to which West referred was that of world of 1984, although West found that whole body of Orwell's writings-including his first novels-was pessimistic through and through. For West, that pessimism was largely inauthentic. Orwell's despair over poverty, for example, is understood by West to be mostly the mood of a man who feels inadequate and despised because he is not rich. Orwell's indictment of his early school years in essay Such, Such Were Joys, leads West to remark that what Orwell represents as an apparatus designed to cripple him was in actuality an attempt to give boys like him a chance to win best possible start in life. West does not even hesitate to say that Orwell felt cheated by refusal of British to surrender to Nazis: his morbidity could have been satisfied only by a colossal disaster. And in his chagrin, Orwell, says West, consoled himself by constructing a fantasy of universal ruin.' The upshot is that real way of coming to terms with 1984 is to assume its worthlessness except as a contribution to psychopathology of George Orwell, as that work of Orwell's which,