Orwell's Foresight

Eric Arthur Blair, a/k/a George Orwell, has been much on my mind during these fearful times.  We've all read Animal Farm and 1984, of course; most of us had to read them.  Sometimes, the American system of public education requires that good and interesting books be read.  Other times, it might require that Goodbye, Mr. Chips be perused by young scholars.  But I speak of what was read in my youth, and can't speak to what is read now.

But I prefer Orwell's essays and nonfiction, for the precision of their style and their insights into many people and things.  He's said to have been something of a prophet regarding the politics of the future.  I was inclined to agree with this assessment in certain respects, and being an American thought his gift of prophecy was limited or directed to Soviet Communism.  But the profound nature of his foresight is most striking in an essay he wrote regarding W.B. Yeats which I read just recently, and it seems to me that in criticizing Yeats he intuited a world to come.

He treats the poet (one I admire) rather roughly in the essay, not as to his poetry necessarily, but the political, social and cultural views which are reflected in his poetry.  He portrays Yeats as a frustrated aristocrat, essentially conservative, contemptuous of the modern world and its people, drawn to the occult and inclined towards Fascism.  This infatuation seems to have been a characteristic of certain artists and intellectuals of the West of that time--Ezra Pound is the usual example--or at least those of them who were not similarly infatuated with Communism.  According to Orwell, Yeats longs for the chaos of the times to produce an authoritarian civilization ruled by a cultured elite, but fails to see that civilization will not be aristocratic.  As Orwell sees it:  "It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters."

The cynics among us might say that is a very striking description not just of western civilization, but of our global civilization today (we must of course substitute "billionaires" for "millionaires").  The wise jurists sitting on our Supreme Court were wrong to hold that money is speech, as I've noted before, but it is most certainly power, and those who possess that power become an increasingly small and insulated group.  They are served by a host of lackeys who do their bidding and assure that all others will do so as well.  Those who do not or cannot turn increasingly to violence as a means to acquire money and power themselves.

This is a simplification of course, but it seems nonetheless to have a certain ring of truth to it, does it not?  How did Orwell manage to foresee this state of affairs and describe it so well, so succinctly?

It requires a great knowledge of human nature and history, I would say, as well as art.  But also required is a kind of pitiless, almost ruthless, perception.  Orwell seems to have no illusions of any kind, or dreams of any kind.  He assesses but doesn't admire.  His is a grim task; to review, analyze, criticize, and to in most if not all cases to find fault and lay it bare.

This may be a pose, of course.  I imagine a critic is inclined to ferret out defects to begin with, and skillful critics necessarily do so most efficiently.  One at least seems most efficient when detached.  Is this the kind of literary criticism one hears of spoken together with philosophy (philosophy being naught but a kind of literary criticism, I mean)?  Philosophy may be said to consist at least in part of the rigorous criticism of language in its use by others.  Taken in that way, it may be said that philosophy is literary criticism and intend by it a sort of compliment.  But I fear that's not the case, or perhaps I should say not the narrative, there being nothing that is the case that is not part of a narrative, it seems.

Not so much a pose in Orwell's case, I think.  It seems to be more of a way of thinking, and thinking ahead to anticipate the future without the benefit of hope or faith in humanity or God.  And Orwell may have chosen such an approach deliberately, as he writes that it is to be expected given the decline of Christianity that we will face the future hopeless and faithless, at least as those states were conceived in the past we've abandoned.

Perhaps such cold appraisal is required for one to be an oracle.  The priestess of the Delphic oracle was named after the Python, the great cold-blooded serpent slain by Apollo when he established the oracle.  Those who consulted the oracle would claim they could still hear the serpent, hissing.

Ezra Pound and Speculations on Monomania and Madness

I've been trying to read certain of the essays of Ezra Pound.  I find it's not an easy task.

Pound was, by all accounts, a monumental figure in literature during the 20th Century.  He was extraordinarily generous to many authors and poets of the time.  He was clearly able and erudite, and this should be evident to any person who reads his work.

Reading his essays, though, (at least those I've read so far) I can't help but get the impression that something is very wrong with the author.  I wonder if anyone shares this same impression, or if I'm merely so used to reading certain things, in certain ways, that I miss some essential point or pattern.

Pound was, of course, hospitalized for mental disease, and it may be that the essays I'm reading were for the most part written during that period.  If that's not the case, though, I wonder if his manner of writing is peculiar to those who are monomaniacs, as it seems he was.

I'll refer to his essay on the letters exchanged by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as an example.  The essay celebrates them as indicative of the fact that America was, at least at one time, civilized, or at least was home to two civilized men (Pound seems to think America lost whatever civilization it possessed shortly after their deaths).  So he begins the essay, and then something happens.  Various other persons are referred to, from Henry Adams to Romulus Augustulus to Flaubert to Thomas Aquinas.  They are either cited with approval, as it were, or disapproval, as are certain institutions.  Banks, as institutions, don't meet with approval.  Sometimes, but not often, Jefferson and Adams are quoted, though it's not clear if their correspondance with each other is the source of the quotations.  Sometimes, it is clear that it is not the source.  When quoted, they refer to money and interest on money, except at the very end of the essay, where it is noted (approvingly) that John Adams, I think it was, wrote that they should not die without explaining themselves to each other. 

It is a very rambling work, and I finish it feeling that the author intended to say something about Adams, Jefferson and civilization, but just what he intended to say about them is unclear.

Pound was very concerned with usury, and it keeps popping up oddly in the essays I've been looking at, and not merely in those which are actually about usury and economics.  He thinks it is a very bad thing.  He seemed to feel that it is the cause of most, if not all, of the world's problems, and was the primary cause of both world wars.  He said as much on the radio in Italy during WWII, and made anti-semitic statements apparently feeling that the Jews, if they did not create usury, practiced it more than others.

This concern seems to have been an overwhelming one, which he held for most of his life.  When one becomes obsessed, does the object of the obsession become of such significance that it is always there, somehow always relevant to what we are thinking, doing and writing that must be mentioned, regardless of its relevance?  And, is this a peculiarity of brilliant people, or particular kinds of brilliant people?  One thinks of Bobby Fisher, and others--geniuses who are consumed by a very narrow and precise concern, unable to break away from it entirely, anywhere or anytime.  Is this a necessary function of genius?