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PARTISAN REVIEW
gular moral authority as a writer is connected to the reader's sense of
the connection between what is on the page and the lived experience it
articulates and impels. But that life and those writings are themselves, in
addition, vivid refractions of the historical era through which Orwell's
experiences were compounded. They are all confluent elements of a sus–
tained historical episode that ranged from World War One through the
Cold War and made up what most of us in the West think of as the
twentieth century. That episode and century came to an effective end in
1989, five years after Orwell's mythological date, through means and
ways not envisaged in Orwell's admonitory novel but which, as I have
indicated, Orwell elsewhere had made out quite particularly.
The heterogeneous coherences of our relatively short but dreadfully
intense historical epoch are connected in a multitude of respects with the
peculiar coherence of Orwell's life and work. In some senses that coher–
ence seems more in keeping with the nineteenth than the twentieth cen–
tury. As his acquaintance Anthony Powell acutely observed, "In many
ways Orwell was a Victorian figure, for, like most people 'in rebellion,'
he was more than half in love with what he was rebelling against." But
Orwell was equally a modern and a modernist in his self-consciousness, his
inner dividedness, his actings-out and risk-takings, and his radical social
desires, along with his conservative cultural predispositions. In his in–
stance, the challenge of critical fullness is to make out both the neurosis
and the impulses toward balance and autonomy; the determined ordinar–
iness along with the gifts of honesty, intelligence, and courage pursued
with such steadfastness, single-mindedness, and intensity that they become
something like genius. In addition, the critical aim should be to ac–
knowledge the drivenness impelling both Orwell's life and work, along
with the powers of choice that both affected such drivenness and were
swept up into it.
In Orwell, all of these oppositions of forces and impulses are con–
nected; they are not simple or uninflected contradictions. The contra–
dictions are complex, dynamic, and historical - coherent in their hetero–
geneity, as was the cultural epoch in which he lived and wrote. The im–
pulse of those on the left, right, and center to kidnap him for their own
causes is entirely understandable, but none of them can succeed in these
undertakings of theft. He belongs to himself and to the historical world
of which he was an active and creditable part.
