The Transient Paradise

Abstract

Orwell judged Homage to Catalonia to be his best book. Barcelona itself is the central character, and the spine of the book is the three encounters between Orwell and a city tragically altered at each return. The intimacy never fully achieved with the English working class — declared, indeed, so great is the class gulf, to be beyond achieving — is miraculously and movingly consummated on the opening page of the new book. The vision of solidarity between genteel poor and working class, tenuously irradiating the closing pages of Wigan Pier as the one hope of the future, seems incredibly realised. In Christ, says St Paul, there is neither rich nor poor, slave nor free, master nor servant, but the mystic body in which we are all members one of another. The emblematic representatives in Orwell’s secularised version of this ecstatic union are himself as penitent bourgeois and the Italian militiaman who moved him so profoundly in their common pilgrimage to that holy place of the socialist imagination in the late 1930s, embattled Republican Spain. As much as any medieval shrine, Compostella or Canterbury, Spain draws to itself all manner of believers from widely differing cultures and backgrounds: illiterate Italian, Glasgow University student, Belgian army reservist, ex-Imperial policeman.KeywordsSocialist ImaginationSecret PoliceHoly PlaceClassless SocietyCivil GuardThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.