February 28, 2006
Eponymous II Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I always used to wonder what the term “Dickensian” meant. The Dickens novels I had read were distinguished by their sweeping grandeur, covering many different social classes, geographical areas, literary and conversational styles, and moods and humors. I assumed that “Dickensian” was meant to describe something similarly broad-ranging or ambitious, and it took me years to figure out that in fact it refers specifically to grinding poverty. I’ve never figured out why that is. Similarly, after reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and then encountering the term “Orwellian,” I wondered what it was supposed to mean. Allegorical? Making use of animals? Anti-Communist? But just recently I read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his military service with an anti-Fascist unit in the Spanish Civil War. It was published in 1937, while that war was still going on. Most of the book is devoted to describing the dangers and the physical and mental discomforts that went along with being in a war zone. That part is detailed, pungent, and extremely vivid, and well worth reading. Amid all the grimness, amusing notes often pop up, sometimes unintentionally, as when the author repeatedly and without irony discusses tobacco as a necessity on par with food and water. A few of the chapters, however, are devoted to describing the snake pit of leftist parties, factions, and organizations that struggled for power on the anti-Fascist side. (To his credit, Orwell does his best to keep this political material separate from the rest of the book.) Orwell had come to Spain with no strong allegiance, motivated by simple anti-Fascist zeal. He hooked on with a militia aligned with what was called, in the parlance of the times, the Anarchist faction. As the book goes on, he describes his growing disillusionment with the more powerful, Soviet-backed Communist faction, which came to dominate the left and sometimes seemed to be as much of an enemy as the Fascists. Far be it from me to defend the Communists, or any group fighting on any side in that uniformly awful war. But it’s interesting to note the points of doctrine on which Orwell faults the Communists. The Anarchists, who had seized control in Catalonia, ostensibly on behalf of the workers, were dedicated to revolution. They scorned Soviet-style communism as “state capitalism.” The Communists’ biggest problem, says Orwell, was that they weren’t interested in a working-class revolution in Spain; they just wanted to win the war against Franco. So to gain wider support at home and abroad, they made concessions to the status quo, accepting “bourgeois democracy” (i.e., democracy); letting peasants retain their landholdings; and leaving some businesses in the hands of their owners. In other words, the Communists allowed the people of Spain to choose their own leaders, instead of having labor-union officials run their lives; let them work their own plots, instead of assigning them to collective farms; and permitted shopkeepers to keep running their shops. By so doing, Orwell says, they stabbed Spain in the back and betrayed the workers. So now I understand what “Orwellian” means.
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