The Best Australian Essays 2015 (32 page)

Meanwhile, Camus had also left Paris. He was already back in Algeria, picking up his pre-war investigations and criticisms of the effects of colonialism. He had already published a series of articles in Algeria in 1939 on this topic, and now he returned for a series of articles that would be published in
Combat
in 1945. Later, while Camus had completed and published
The Plague
, and was hard at work on what would become
The Rebel
, Orwell was already in Jura, Scotland, working on his last novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
– and dying.

In August 1945,
Animal Farm
was finally published to instant acclaim. Orwell would later send Camus a copy of the French translation of the novel – interestingly, in the French version, the name of the pig, Napoleon, was changed to Caesar, so as not to hurt French sensibilities. Camus, writing
The Rebel
at that time, would have been amused, had he known.

3.

Although Camus was already famous in France for his work from the early 1940s, it was his post-war work – beginning with the publication of
The Plague
– that brought him international renown. Orwell became internationally famous at about the same time. It is from the 1950s onward that the reputations of both figures were truly established. But such reputations – often disproportionate to the work in question – are almost always based on misunderstandings and oversimplifications. For Orwell, this process largely occurred after his death (21 January 1950). Camus struggled against his own growing reputation, often in vain, throughout the 1950s, until his own death on 4 January 1960.

Even here, in these misunderstandings and oversimplifications, a comparison between Orwell and Camus is worth pursuing. Their reputations have been secured, largely through the imposition of a false binary over each of their work, with one half being brought narrowly into relief against the attempted suppression of the other half. The dividing line is between their fiction and their non-fiction, their art and their politics: Camus is seen as a great literary figure, but a poor political thinker, while Orwell as a great political writer, but a poor literary figure.

What is ultimately compelling about these men, however, is that they are both consummate literary
and
political writers. The two aspects of their work – the literary and the political – cannot be pitted against each other. It is the balance between the two that is responsible for the creative force behind each man's work. By reconsidering Orwell and Camus in relation to each other, the prominent aspect of each can be used to rehabilitate the suppressed aspect of the other.

Both rehearsed their literary and political thinking throughout the 1930s. Orwell's thinking evolved more publicly in various book reviews, as well as articles and books. Camus rehearsed his ideas more privately, in his notebooks and unpublished essays, but also in the occasional published book review (in Algeria). It was not until
The Myth of Sisyphus
was published (1942) that his mature ideas on aesthetics would become known, albeit largely ignored. What is essential to note is that, for both men, these ideas, both literary and political, were developed in unison, and were forged in the act of writing, and in response to the same climate of political and social unease.

Although Orwell became famous for his final two novels,
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, their reputation is built on the political message they carry. And to get at that message, the literary and artistic aspects of these works have been pushed to the side. The retrospective appraisal of his pre-war books holds up his non-fiction works (
The Road to Wigan Pier
and
Homage to Catalonia
) and downplays his novels (
A Clergyman's Daughter
,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
,
Coming Up for Air
), except when (as with
Down and Out in Paris and London
and
Burmese Days
) they can be mined for autobiographical and social or political import. His political journalism and essays are seen as the core of his thinking, and
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as popular illustrations of these ideas.

But Orwell himself, very early in his career, argued against this style of reading literature. In one of his first book reviews, in 1930, for example – on Lewis Mumford's book
Herman Melville
– he argues that such interpretation (an ‘unpleasant but necessary word') is a ‘dangerous method of approaching a work of art. Done with absolute thoroughness, it would cause art itself to vanish.' Reducing a work of art to an allegorical message, he said, ‘is like eating an apple for the pips'. In
The Myth of Sisyphus
, Camus also argued against reducing novels to what he called a ‘thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all … the one that most often is inspired by a
smug
thought'. For both men, a novel is not supposed to tell the reader what to think, but rather to create the conditions through which the reader can experience thinking for themselves. This idea became the creative spark that fired also their political imaginations, especially their opposition to totalitarianism.

Throughout the 1930s, both Camus and Orwell saw the problem of the contemporary novel in terms of the tendencies toward either formalism or realism. On the one hand, empty formalism focused on technique, on art for art's sake; on the other, social realism or naturalism revealed the world, but without any structure, or by attaching a simplistic morality to the work. Both men recognised the merits of each, but also the absurdity of allowing each aspect to dominate a work of art.

For Orwell, the two most influential books throughout the 1930s were James Joyce's
Ulysses
and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
. He argued, both publicly (in reviews) and privately (in letters), that
Ulysses
perfectly used various formal techniques to examine, for the first time, both the outside and the inside of the ordinary man, and to bridge the gap between the ‘intellectual' and the ‘man-in-the-street'.
Tropic of Cancer
focused the reader's attention on the brutal and often ugly facts of everyday life. But Orwell also felt that both books went too far in each direction – the formalism of the former, and the brutal naturalism of the latter. He strove to develop his own style that joined the best of both, while jettisoning the worst. Incorporating the political into his writing – thinking about the political in literary terms – is what allowed him to strike a balance.

This is one of the often missed points of his otherwise well-known essay ‘Politics and the English Language'. Although he explicitly states that he is not examining the ‘literary use of language', he is still looking at the use of
literary language
in political writing. The whole focus of the essay is to examine the use of imagery and metaphor, and the misuse of cliché and abstract language – the way that politics uses language to corrupt or prevent thought, and the way we can rejuvenate our language in order to allow and clarify our thinking.

Moreover, the reason Orwell wasn't looking at the ‘literary use of language' in that essay is that he had already done so in a previous one, ‘The Prevention of Literature' – which, in many respects, provides the context and the conditions for understanding more clearly the argument in ‘Politics and the English Language'. (The two essays were written almost in conjunction with one another in late 1945, soon after Orwell and Camus were supposed to meet.)

In this earlier essay, Orwell makes the explicit link between literature and totalitarianism, and shows how a politics that tends toward totalitarianism not only reduces the capacity of literature to be created and read, but also that totalitarianism achieves its own goals, in part, through the very process of preventing literature from being created and read. The reason for this, Orwell argues, is that literature is concerned with increasing consciousness, free thought, the imagination, all of which are anathema to totalitarianism. For him, literary thinking is inextricably linked to intellectual honesty. ‘At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.' For Orwell, reading a novel for its allegorical message, while ignoring its literary context, is a form of intellectual dishonesty. For Camus, such a reading is inspired by a ‘smug thought': ‘You demonstrate the truth you feel sure of possessing.'

This unity of the literary and the political in Orwell's work is central also to his other well-known essay ‘Why I Write', where he explicitly states: ‘What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.' The essay includes an often cited passage, used to supposedly highlight his political writing at the expense of his literary writing: ‘looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a
political
purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.' But this ignores a previous, qualifying statement from the same essay: ‘But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant.'

The context for these passages is created by the main argument of his essay. Here Orwell examines four motivations for why writers, in general – and himself in particular – write: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. ‘I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth [the political],' he adds. It is worth noting that one aspect for which Orwell is renowned – his focus on ‘things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity' – is, for him, the definition of the
historical
impulse, and not, as may be assumed, his
political
purpose.

It was, indeed, the historical context that Orwell found himself in that forced him, albeit against his nature, to become political. But it was his literary thinking – from which his intellectual honesty evolved – that forced him to consider his historical context so clearly, so as to become political. It is for this reason that Orwell, on occasion, referred to himself as a ‘literary intellectual'.

This self-description, and the argument behind it, aptly applies also to Camus. In a 1951 interview, for example, he said:

And yet, where Orwell is praised for his political judgement, albeit based upon a denigration of his literary imagination, Camus is praised for his literary works (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all), but, in the process, he is denigrated for his political thinking – often dismissed as a noble but vague humanism; admirable, but not worth taking seriously.

However, by the time most of the French intelligentsia embraced Communism in the late 1940s and '50s, Camus had already joined and been expelled from the Communist Party (the Algerian branch). At a time when many others – such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – were being seduced by Communism, Camus was already aware of its theoretical contradictions and practical impossibilities. His experiences during the purges of the mid-1940s showed him that today's victims can easily become tomorrow's executioners. His own political thinking – which, like Orwell's, was grounded in intellectual honesty and concrete experience – developed early, through his growing up in poverty in working-class Algeria. What Orwell learned only slowly, and from the outside, about poverty and working-class culture, Camus knew firsthand, from the root source.

Camus sharpened his political sensibilities through his journalism, which forced upon him the practice of keeping an open mind, of collecting the facts for himself, and then thinking through their significance and implications. Take, for example, his 1939 series of articles on the drought and famine of the Kabylia region of Algeria. The lyricism of Camus' prose is often cited, but what is ignored are the dozens of pages full of painstaking detail, facts and figures, and reported conversations with those affected, the attempt to examine the environmental, the social, the cultural, the colonial, the economic, and the political aspects of the situation. Nearly two decades later, these pieces were collected together with Camus' other writings about Algeria. Covering more than eighty printed pages, his preface notes, however, that ‘pieces were too long and detailed to reproduce here in their entirety, and I have cut overly general observations and sections on housing, welfare, crafts, and usury'. These articles are the equivalent of Orwell's investigation into working-class life, published as
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937). When they were first published in June 1939, the political and media uproar led to Camus' blacklisting in Algeria and his self-exile to Paris. Needless to say, he was not blacklisted for his lyricism.

In a series of articles published in May 1945 in
Combat
, Camus examined the changing political situation in Algeria, based on his previous series of articles in 1939, and showed how it had shifted for the worse. More than a decade before the French intelligentsia would see colonialism and the Algerian situation as an ‘issue' worth thinking about, Camus was already warning that the political reality on the ground was leading the country into self-destruction. His practical solutions – suggested in 1939, updated in 1945 – and his early criticisms against French colonialism all went unheeded.