Read Online Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online
Authors: Julian Barnes
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about itself. ‘Art for Art’s sake’ – a concept Orwell would abhor – is just ‘propaganda’ for Art itself, which the movement was well aware of. Then there is: ‘A novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot.’ Since this dismisses both novelists of the private life and those who (as was common in the nineteenth century) set their stories a generation or two back, out go Austen, the Brontës, Flaubert, James and so on, and so on.
‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’ As an instruction to cub reporters and old hacks – also as a self-instruction of the kind writer-critics issue to the world while actually describing their own procedures – it sounds reasonable enough. But it begs questions, as does Orwell’s other key instruction, from ‘Politics and the English Language’: ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way round.’ Together, these dicta presuppose, and instruct, that writing is a matter of examining the world, reflecting upon it, deducing what you want to say, putting that meaning or message into words whose transparency allows the reader, now gazing through the same windowpane from the same position, to see the world exactly as you have seen it. But does anyone, even Orwell, actually write like that? And are words glass? Most writing comes from an inchoate process; ideas may indeed propose words, but sometimes words propose ideas (or both transactions occur within the same sentence). As E. M. Forster, a frequent target of Orwell’s, put it (or rather, quoted), in
Aspects of the Novel
: ‘How do I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ To Orwell this might seem a piece of pansy-left whimsy; but it probably accords more closely to the experience of many writers.
In
Down and Out in Paris and London
, Orwell enumerated the things about England that made him glad to be home: ‘bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritablehops’. In ‘England Your England’ he celebrated ‘a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans’. In 1993, the Trollope-loving prime minister John Major, with his party split, the currency on the slide and his own authority diminishing, found similar refuge in those seemingly eternal aspects of Englishness:
Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.
Less than a third of those fifty years have elapsed, but many pools fillers now play the National Lottery or log on to Internet gambling sites; global warming is giving the English a taste for chilled beer; while the bicycling Anglicans are being replaced by Muslims driving to the suburban mosque. All prophets risk posthumous censure, even mockery; and the Orwell we celebrate nowadays is less the predictor than the social and political analyst. Those of us born in the immediate post-war years grew up with the constant half-expectation that 1984 would bring all the novel described: immovable geopolitical blocs, plus brutal state surveillance and control. Today, the English may have their sluggardly couch-potato side; their liberties have been somewhat diminished, and they are recorded by CCTV cameras more often than any other nation on earth. But otherwise 1984 passed with a sigh of relief, while 1989 brought a louder one.
Orwell believed in 1936 that ‘the combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman’. That ‘never’ was a risky call. And on a larger scale, he believed throughoutthe Second World War that peace would bring the
‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’ As an instruction to cub reporters and old hacks – also as a self-instruction of the kind writer-critics issue to the world while actually describing their own procedures – it sounds reasonable enough. But it begs questions, as does Orwell’s other key instruction, from ‘Politics and the English Language’: ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way round.’ Together, these dicta presuppose, and instruct, that writing is a matter of examining the world, reflecting upon it, deducing what you want to say, putting that meaning or message into words whose transparency allows the reader, now gazing through the same windowpane from the same position, to see the world exactly as you have seen it. But does anyone, even Orwell, actually write like that? And are words glass? Most writing comes from an inchoate process; ideas may indeed propose words, but sometimes words propose ideas (or both transactions occur within the same sentence). As E. M. Forster, a frequent target of Orwell’s, put it (or rather, quoted), in
Aspects of the Novel
: ‘How do I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ To Orwell this might seem a piece of pansy-left whimsy; but it probably accords more closely to the experience of many writers.
In
Down and Out in Paris and London
, Orwell enumerated the things about England that made him glad to be home: ‘bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritablehops’. In ‘England Your England’ he celebrated ‘a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans’. In 1993, the Trollope-loving prime minister John Major, with his party split, the currency on the slide and his own authority diminishing, found similar refuge in those seemingly eternal aspects of Englishness:
Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.
Less than a third of those fifty years have elapsed, but many pools fillers now play the National Lottery or log on to Internet gambling sites; global warming is giving the English a taste for chilled beer; while the bicycling Anglicans are being replaced by Muslims driving to the suburban mosque. All prophets risk posthumous censure, even mockery; and the Orwell we celebrate nowadays is less the predictor than the social and political analyst. Those of us born in the immediate post-war years grew up with the constant half-expectation that 1984 would bring all the novel described: immovable geopolitical blocs, plus brutal state surveillance and control. Today, the English may have their sluggardly couch-potato side; their liberties have been somewhat diminished, and they are recorded by CCTV cameras more often than any other nation on earth. But otherwise 1984 passed with a sigh of relief, while 1989 brought a louder one.
Orwell believed in 1936 that ‘the combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman’. That ‘never’ was a risky call. And on a larger scale, he believed throughoutthe Second World War that peace would bring the
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