Combining a political goal with an artistic one was a conscious goal of George Orwell. The British writer, born in India in 1903, expresses it clearly in one of his emblematic novels: Animal Farm (1945). A text that the author was able to publish years after his return from Spain, after participating as a fighter in the Republican camp and integrating the militias of the POUM, the Workers’ Party of the Marxist Association. The civil war in Spain radically changed the writer’s scale of values and his writing was exclusively dedicated to exposing what he called “the Soviet myth” to denounce the totalitarianism of the Stalinist regime. Orwell notes, “The outlines of the story lived in my head for about six years before I finally got around to writing.” His words are the unmistakable example of the true author’s mind, in which his work seems to be written in his head before it is committed to paper. Orwell’s statement is contained in the “Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm,” one of the nine essays in that work entitled “Why I Write.”
For Sebastian Martínez Daniell, the translator of these essays, Orwell believed that “the creation of a text, its editing and its dissemination are practices that, in one way or another, border on the sphere of failure, impossibility, shipwreck.” The author of the prefaces wonders whether this failure that Orwell speaks of is due to his failed attempt to intervene in political and social reality from literature. It also marks a second Orwellian failure, the abyss that opens between life and word, between world and language, between content and form of a literary work. Orwell set out to transform political writing into an art, and his aim was to create literature with clear, accessible political content, without abandoning the aesthetic interest of prose.
These essays by George Orwell represent an aspect of the novelist and journalist that is less known to the general public. They are essential reading for understanding the place of literature in times of great historical upheaval, such as the author experienced in the first half of the 20th century. In his essays, Orwell discusses the English language and contemporary criticism, analyzes Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and intervenes in a debate about the character of William Shakespeare, polemicizing with the essays of Tolstoy, dedicated to the defense of the great English playwright, especially his tragedy King Lear. Orwell believes that the most important thing that connects us to Shakespeare’s work is language. This is the “main connection” to a Shakespeare who was “fascinated by the music of words.”
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
The obsession with achieving a transcendent synthesis between aesthetic and political experiences, with their successes and deviations in historical experience, is reflected in these essays by Orwell, translated into Spanish, now reaching the reading public. Without a doubt, these texts contribute to a debate that continues to be relevant when it comes to thinking about literature, its purposes and its possibilities in times of post-truth and upheaval.
Why I write. Essays on Literature and Purpose
Author: George Orwell
Genre: Essay
Other works by the author: The Days of Burma; The clergyman’s daughter; animal farm; 1984; Homage to Catalonia
Publisher: The Cursed Part, $22,000
Translation: Sebastián Martínez Daniell
About The Author
