"The secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease..."

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens
Basic Books, 2002
(New York)

Why should we care about George Orwell?  Why does he matter?  Does he, in the 21st century, have anything pertinent or relevant to show us?  Isn’t Orwell just a crack-pot conspiracy theorist, whose grim outlook on life compelled him to write of a totalitarian, dark future?  Are his ideas of that future not overblown and overly gloomy (to say nothing of accuracy)?

Well, as it turns out, he is mind-bendingly relevant and still an important read for us advanced 21st century humans.  He died over 60 years ago, yet his voice wafts ever eerily to us over the decades, warning us, scolding us, and in a way shaming us:  the type of shame one feels when being told by a healthy person that eating that chocolate bar will make you unhealthy.  It's not that we don't already know this, it's just that more often than not, we succumb to our frailty.  In relation to George Orwell, this frailty involves a linguistic laziness.



While most people would cite Animal Farm or 1984 as Orwell's most important legacy he is most certainly more important for things other than those two beautiful works.  His essays contain a plethora of infinitely more useful and lasting ideas than any work of fiction he was able to scrape together, a major case in point being "Politics and the English Language," which you can peruse here.

Christopher Hitchens has, in the last 8 years, become very close to being my favourite author.  This is mostly due to his religious views and criticisms, which fall closely in line with my own viewpoints and opinions, but also because he is actually a great writer and very easy to read.  This is something Orwell would have admired in Hitchens.

Why Orwell Matters is a good intermediate introduction to the subject.  The slim volume (211 pages) is an easy read and is laid out and dealt with systematically by Hitchens in a workmanlike fashion.  In turn, Hitchens deals with Orwell's experiences and writings in terms of:  Empire, the Left, the Right, America, 'Englishness', the Feminists, the 'List' (Orwell kept a list of supposed Communists - they were nothing more than educated guesses but yes, a list nontheless), his novels, and the Post-Modernists.  To a student of Orwell, there is nothing here that would surprise or serve to catch one "off-guard," save for maybe Hitchens' own encyclopedic and anecdotal knowledge, especially in relation to Orwell's many critics.  It is a somewhat difficult introduction for a newbie however, and one can easily get lost among the newsprint.

Orwell was a figure lauded and despised by both the Right and the Left, and most of the time one is not sure who agrees or disagrees with Orwell.  Orwell the ardent Anti-Communist is loved by the Right...but the Orwell who warns of a future where every action is analyzed and noticed is despised by those on the Right.  Orwell the Champion of the Working-Classes and Minorities is loved by the Left...yet, the Anti-Communist Orwell that is celebrated on the Right is despised on the Left.  And these are but 2 small examples one can find both in the book and easily from other sources.
The main idea one gets from Why Orwell Matters can also be found, essentially, in the aforementioned essay but also Burmese Days, and The Road to Wigan Pier.  It is Orwell's striking adherence to plain and simple language.  On this very trait, Orwell writes:  "I knew [from an early age] that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts."  In a nutshell, this very fact of his being able to face ugly truths and write about them honestly, is Orwell's most lasting legacy to the world.

It becomes patently clear as one reads Burmese Days that Orwell's outlook on language and proper behaviour stems from his experience of imperialism in the British system.  He was in fact a police officer in Burma in his younger years, enforcing (sometimes violently) the British law on relatively helpless natives - something that he hated intensely and eventually led him to quit.  It also galvanized his outlook on a wide range of subjects, which is obvious in both his earliest and later works.

What I also like about this book is that Hitchens isn't afraid to give Orwell credit, good or bad, where it is warranted.  His famous "list," while not meant to be taken seriously, was probably an error in judgement by Orwell who no doubt did not intend necessarily for anyone to actually see this list.  But, alas, it was made public in the 1980s.  Hitchens defends him honourably but cannot dismiss the base fact that a list was made by a relatively prominent celebrity (at the time).  Orwell's relationship with women and feminists is also illuminated and shown to be fairly disastrous, as is his relationship with homosexuals.  (Orwell definitely does not give women much credit, power, or play in his novels, and arguably, has an anti-homosexual stance in many writings.  Yet, he has also been accused of being a closet homosexual at "worst" and "at least," has been accused of obvious homo-eroticism.  Who really knows?  Or cares...)
In spite of Hitchens' efforts to portray an honest (Orwellian?) portrayal or Orwell, unless one is profoundly well-versed in all of Orwell's many works, one mostly has to take Hitchens' arguments at face value.  One can draw one's own conclusions fairly easily from primary sources, i.e. the texts themselves.

In conclusion, Why Orwell Matters is a nice foray into one of the most influential political writers of the 20th century, but it is for intermediate readers of the subject and author.  If one has no idea that Orwell wrote things other than 1984 or Animal Farm, one could feel a little overwhelmed at times.  And as always, one has to be cautious of a figure like Hitchens, for as much as he is someone I admire and like as a writer he certainly does have a specific agenda - both with this book and his overall political beliefs (including his support of the Bush, Jr. regime in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Orwell matters because he valued truth and aspired to objectivity even as he understood such objectivity was impossible and even undesirable.  His prescience in relation to language and power was uncanny and all-too-accurate.  Very similarly to Hitchens, Orwell advocated and pushed ideas and concepts both abhorrent to and beloved among the Right and Left.  The common vein seems to be, at the very least, a power or desire to "face the unpleasantness" and recognize the poisons within us....and to at least speak of a remedy without bitterness or confusion of the language/power dichotomy.