Philip Rahv
THE UNFUTURE OF UTOPIA
George Orwell hail been able to maintain an exceptional
position among the writers of our time seriously concerned with political
problems. His work has grown in importance and relevance through the
years, evincing a steadiness of purpose and uncommon qualities of char–
acter and integrity that set it quite apart from the typical products of the
radical consciousness in this period of rout and retreat. A genuine
humanist in his commitments, a friend, that is, not merely of mankind
but of man (man as he is, not denatured by ideological abstractions),
Orwell has gone through the school of the revolutionary movement
without taking over its snappishly doctrinaire attitudes. His attachment
to the primary traditions of the British empirical mind has apparently
rendered him immune to dogmatism. Nor has the release from certitude
lately experienced by the more alert radical intellectuals left him in the
disoriented state in which many of his contemporaries now find them–
selves. Above all endowed with a strong sense of reality, he has neither
played the prophet in or out of season nor indulged in that wilful and
irresponsible theorizing at present so much in vogue in certain radical
quarters where it is mistaken for independent thought. It can be said
of Orwell that he is the best kind of witness, the most reliable and
scrupulous. All the more appalling, then, is the vision not of the remote
but of the very close future evoked in his new novel*-a vision entirely
composed of images of loss, disaster, and unspeakable degradation.
This is far and away the best of Orwell's books. As a narrative it
has tension and actuality to a terrifying degree; still it will not do
to judge it primarily as a literary work of art. Like all Utopian literature,
from Sir Thomas More and Campanella to William Morris, Bellamy, and
Huxley, its inspiration is scarcely such as to be aesthetically productive
of ultimate or positive significance; this seems to be true of Utopian
writings
regardless of the viewpoint from which the author approaches
*
Ninllteen Eighty-Four.
By George Orwell. Harcourt, Brace. $3_00.
