AGAIN: ORWELL AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

...Now 1984 may also be called a masterpiece, but surely of a lower order than The Possessed...

...but we all know that works of fiction often escape the intentions of their authors and can be read as sustaining world outlooks they might not care to endorse...

...I think not...

...Insofar as Dostoevsky's opinions melt into the flow of his fiction and it becomes harder and harder to know with whom his sympathies lie, precisely to that extent does The Possessed become a masterpiece...

...On its own, the book offers no way out of our century's ordeals...

...1984 stands blocklike in its admonitory force, and from it we must all draw whatever political or philosophical conclusions we can...

...The play of his imagination, the reach of his sympathies, and the force of his memories about his youthful radicalism all came together to make the novel far more than the "tract" Dostoevsky said he would have been content to write...

...COULD THEN A SIMILAR CASE be made by a conservative critic with regard to 1984...

...q 236...

...No one is spared, and no one cast into outer darkness...

...it merely reminds us where they might end...

...Gordon Beadle has what I take to be a definitive refutation of the effort made by some neoconservative writers, notably Norman Podhoretz, to "kidnap" George Orwell for their side...

...And that's the claim we neoconservatives make for 1984, not that it was written with the intent of supporting conservatism but that, in its penetration and honesty regarding the total state, it necessarily comes down on the conservative side...

...What makes The Possessed so great a work of fiction is its plasticity of representation, its restlessness of perspective, its willingness sympathetically to enter the minds even of the characters it mocks, and its intimate knowledge of the milieu it burlesques...

...The author of this great novel is not just the older, reactionary Dostoevsky...

...In my judgment, then, it isn't possible to make out a case that 1984 can be read as a conservative fiction, whatever that might mean, any more than it's possible to make out a case that it can be read as a socialist fiction, whatever that might mean...

...Now this would be an interesting case for a neoconservative critic to make, though I feel no further obligation to show him or her how to make it...

...he is also the younger, radical Dostoevsky...

...Dostoevsky's characters are still suffering, thinking, feeling men and women, while 1984 projects a world in which the idea of the human must be recalled, retrieved by its forlorn hero...

...Let us assume a neoconservative of subtle literary habits who says, "Well, yes, of course, Podhoretz is crude and Orwell was—consciouslya man of the left...

...For where Dostoevsky's book is so wonderfully plastic, Orwell's book—through the sheer tyrannical force of his subject—must be fiercely rigid...

...Indeed, the criticisms launched in The Possessed proceed in all directions —toward the right, the left, the center...

...Beadle shows with precise documentation what could be documented several times over: that to the end of his life Orwell remained a writer of the left who—as writers of the left should —frequently criticized the mistakes, myths, and occasional foolishness of the left...

...But if the matter of Orwell's explicit opinions must be regarded as settled, there is another and, from a literary point of view, more interesting question...

...Both Rahv and I wrote essays a good many years ago about Dostoevsky's The Possessed in which we argued that, while Dostoevsky began with the deliberate purpose of making a reactionary case, something else happened when he actually wrote the book...

...It would be an interesting case, for one thing, because critics of leftward inclination, like Philip Rahv and me, have made a similar case with regard to writers of rightist opinion...