How AreGeorge Orwell’s WritingsaPrecursorto Studies of Popular Culture?
Abstract
George Orwell is known as an acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer, and journalist. But Orwell also wrote widely on a number of themes in and around popular culture. However, as During (2005) observes, even though Orwell’s writings might be considered as a precursor to some well-known themes in studies of popular culture his contribution to this area still remains relatively unacknowledged by others in the discipline. The aim of this paper is simply therefore to provide a basis to begin to rethink Orwell’s contribution to contemporary studies of popular culture. It does so by demonstrating some comparable insights on culture and society between those made by Orwell and those found in the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. These insights are also related tofour main areas of discussion: debates in contemporary cultural studies about the contested pleasures of popular culture and experiences; the relationship between language and culture; how social class needs to be defined not just economically but also culturally; and how one might escape cultural relativism when writing about popular culture. The paper concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofar that some of the cultural themes he explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon.
Key words: George Orwell; language; nomad;pleasure; popular culture; social class
Contact Information:
John Michael Roberts, Department of Sociology and Communications, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
Email:
Published in Journal for Cultural Research2014, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 216-232,
Introduction
It is sometimes said that George Orwell stands in the tradition of a peculiarly English conservative approach to studying popular culture, whose luminaries includewriters such as F.R. Leavis. In this tradition ‘mass’ culture is criticised for duping people, justifying in the processthe need for elite culture to overcome this herd mentality (Johnson 1979: 93-149).In his critical introduction to cultural studies, however, Simon During suggests that Orwell actually stands in a radical twentieth century cultural traditionthat attempts to expose the manner in which certain social groups remain ‘invisible’ in dominant cultural beliefs and practices. Orwell for example tries to show how working class culture contains seeds of an alternative and often defiant belief system to that of dominant cultural mores of his day.During thus claimsthat Orwell,‘produced work similar in some way to contemporary cultural studies but in different institutional settings and often with relatively little acknowledgment’ (During 2005: 35).
Certainly some leading figures in the establishment of cultural studies hold both attitudes towards Orwell, seeing him as a conservative cultural commentator and as a precursor to a more sophisticated analysis of popular culture.Richard Hoggartfor example chides Orwell for having a misty-eyed view of working class culture as seen through ‘the cosy fug of the Edwardian music-hall’ (Hoggart 1971: 17), but then later in the same book draws approvingly on Orwell’s description of working class attitudes to the ‘purposiveness of life’, particularly their popular beliefs on free will and the individual (Hoggart 1971: 95). Raymond Williams is arguably even more ambiguous in his attitude towards Orwell. In Culture and Society, published originally in 1958, Williams praises Orwell as ‘a fine observer of detail’ (Williams 1983: 286) about popular culture, as somebody who uses language to further the cause of liberty and truth (Williams 1983: 288) and who does so through character traits of being ‘brave, generous, frank and good’ (Williams 1983: 294). Fast forward some years later and Williams is markedly more hostile towards Orwell. His ‘disgraceful attack’ on pacifists and revolutionaries during the Second World War causes Williams to declare that he can no longer read Orwell (Williams 1981: 385).[1]
Perhaps the ambiguous reception that Orwell has received in studies of popular culture is one reason why there have been few attempts to explore his contribution to themes in the discipline.Turner for instance devotes a chapter of his book to ‘the British tradition’ in cultural studies without once mentioning Orwell (Turner 1990: chapter 2), which is true also of a similar book by Barker (2008). Strinati (2004) mentions Orwell but only to suggest how he is principallyworried by how ‘Americanisation’ violatesEnglish popular culture and working class communities, whileRojek (2007: 113) briefly alludes to Orwell in relation to cartoon animation but makes no further substantive observations about his numerous writings on popular culture.
Some writers on culture and popular culture therefore take us tantalisingly close to explaining why Orwell might be considered to be an important forerunner to contemporary studies of popular culture although clearly they do not take us far enough, including During who only hints at Orwell’s achievements in this respect. But if it is the case, as Hartley (2003: chapter 2) notes, that early- to mid-twentieth century British literary studies helped in the formation of contemporary cultural studies through works that took cultural questions seriously and which were printed in affordable books, it stillremains a mystery exactly what Orwell’s contribution might be for a serious and scholarly consideration of popular culture, or why this famous writer might be said to be a forerunner to the investigation of popular culture.
The purpose of this discussion is to take seriously During’s claim that Orwell’s work stands as a relativelyunacknowledged precursor to later studies of popular culture byinvestigating this issue in more depth than is customary amongst scholars.This task will not however be carried out through a historical analysis, which has anyway already been partly accomplished in different ways by Bounds (2009) and Newsinger (2001). Instead the paper adopts a different approach. It takes three distinct but interrelated areas that have become established in scholarly accounts of popular culture and then seeks to map out how Orwell also explores these areas in his own unique manner. By proceeding in this way it becomes possible to examine whether Orwell’s analysis of culture finds unacknowledged parallels and similarities in contemporary studies of popular culture.The paper therefore has at least one original slant to it to the extent that there has not beena comprehensive discussion of Orwell’s contribution to some of the themes found in popular culture studies.[2] In this respect the paper has three main sections.
The first section outlines how Orwell’s approach to popular culture is similar tothe idea presented by many cultural theorists that popular culture is complexly structured by different social forces that in turn give rise to contested meanings in and around cultural objects. In particular, Orwell would without doubt agree with those theorists who argue the contested nature of popular culture is due in part to the pleasure popular culture gives to people to create their own meanings in society.
This line of reasoning is continued in the second main section where Orwell’s views on language and culture are analysed. By drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his theory of language as a dialogic process, we will see that for Orwell words are always mediated by conflicting ‘accents’ that refract and internalise various social processes. To stabilise these dialogic conflicts a hegemonic power aims to construct ‘monologic’ language forms; forms that Orwell is alert to and indeed seeks to expose. But far from reducing social life to language, the paper argues that for Orwell words and utterances are always mediated through non-discursive forms such as that of social class.
This point takes us onto the third main section, which revolves around the relationship between social class and culture. Here, we see that Orwell explores social class as a cultural phenomenon in much the same way as is found in the work of some contemporary cultural and social theorists. In particular, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the relationship between culture, the body and class will be especially relevant in fleshing out Orwell’s insights on similar issues. Indeed,this discussion will open up a space to show how other cultural and sociological categories apart from language, suchas the body and space,are crucial elements to his analysis of social class.
But another important question still remains unanswered and one which has troubled critics. To what extent canOrwell escape cultural relativism in order to make critical observations of other social identities outside the confines of his own middle-class context? Certainly, Orwell has been accused of simply imposing his own middle-class sensibilities on those he writes about. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari the fourth section of the paper argues that one possible answer to this dilemma is to see Orwell as a ‘nomad’ who manages to assemble some of the ‘molecules’ associated with other social identities into his own identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofarsome cultural themes he explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon. The conclusion therefore also rejects a common criticism which states that Orwell’s view of culture and society is based in a naïve and simplistic empiricism.
The Contested Pleasures of Popular Culture
Storey (2012) observes that to find an agreed view about what constitutes popular culture is a fairly arduous task because different theories abound. For example, one view suggests that popular culture is that which is mass produced whereas high culture – opera, Shakespeare, and the like – is endowed with more creative and aesthetic qualities. On this reckoning, popular culture is deemed to be rather worthless next to the more superior aesthetic moral qualities of high culture. However, there is another critical take on popular culture which is arguably best represented by Fiske’s claim that popular culture is the medium where the production of abstract materials of the culture industry are reinvested with new meanings taken from everyday life (Fiske 1989). People therefore have a great capacity to imagine culture in innovative ways through language, symbols, texts, and so on, and to generate new cultural meanings over and above that which is often the preferred dominant way of using culture (see also Lewis 2002: 13).
One important attribute of popular culture is its ability to give people pleasure as they recreate new meanings for cultural objects. Popular culture is thus enjoyable and summons up different types of emotional encounters:love, excitement, anguish, laughter, joy, enthusiasm, tension, and so on. Such emotions and passions are important because they engender a fervent commitment towards cultural products by helping to arrange, express, and manage our everyday feelings (Grossberg 1992; Street 1997). Pleasure, in this respect, is often gained by people making consumer products functional in their daily lives. Whereas elite culture can afford to play no function whatsoever in daily life for those who follow it (think for example of ballet), popular culture, a typical example being football, becomes pleasurable to the extent that it is indeed part and parcel of everyday life (Fiske 1989: 57; see also Fiske 1993: 68).
Orwell views popular culture along comparable lines. In The Lion and Unicornhe suggests for example that popular culture ‘is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities’ (Orwell 1970a: 78). Like other cultural theorists discussed later in the paper,Orwell believes that part of the reason why authorities frown on popular culture rests in the pleasurable ‘unofficial’ subversion that it hands to ordinary people. Seaside postcards, for example, contain bawdy humour and yet for Orwell they also mock conservative sentiments and make sure that ‘on the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time’ (Orwell 1970a: 194).
But there is more to Orwell’s view of popular culture than merely taking pleasure in everyday objects. Indeed, Orwell appreciates that popular culture operates in part through a complex semiotic process of negotiation between audience and text. Of course, the use of semiotics to analyse popular culture has a distinguished history in cultural studies. One approach maintains that a text emits a series of ‘connotative’ codes that frame the way the text is read by bringing together various meanings and certain preferred ways of reading images or narratives. For example, in her early work conducted during the 1970s and 1980s McRobbie (1991) found that British magazines for teenage girls embodied a variety of codes and messages for their respective readership. One such magazine, Jackie, embodies a code which stipulates that romance is far more relevant for girls than sexuality. Through this code, young women in Jackie are formed into three main types: the blonde, quiet, timid, loving, and trusting girl who either gets the boy in the end or is abandoned; the wild, fun-loving brunette who resorts to plotting and conniving so that she gets the man she wants; and lastly there is the non-character, the ‘ordinary’ girl (McRobbie 1991: 101). Like McRobbie, Orwell is similarly interested in how popular texts create specific codes how to ‘read’ them. But he is also fascinated by the way in which audiences actively ‘decode’ messages and reinvest them with alternative meanings. Orwell’s approach on this matter is especiallyclearin his essay on boys’ weekly newspapers.
Boys’ weeklies are categorised by Orwell into two classes. The first tells stories about public school life, while the second deals exclusively with tales of adventure. Although there remain obvious differences between the two, a couple of messages nevertheless recur with some regularity in both. ‘Nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny’ (Orwell 1981: 484). In a 1939 weekly called Gem Frenchman are still ‘Froggies’ and Italians still ‘Dagoes’. Wun Lung, a Chinese boy, ‘is the nineteenth-century pantomime Chinaman with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English’ (Orwell 1981: 484). The same is true for adventure stories. Once again Chinese characters are sinister pigtailed opium-smugglers – ‘no indication that things have been happening in China since 1912’ (Orwell 1981: 490). Codes therefore appear to transmit conservative themes. Importantly, though, these are not merely simple conservative messages – what Hall (2006: 171) terms the dominant-hegemonic viewpoint – but are on the contrary messages which become embedded in specific narratives and plotlines that boys recognise. A conservative bias is certainly conveyed, but ‘in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge’ (Orwell 1981: 484). Take patriotism. This ideal is evident in the papers, explains Orwell, although it has nothing to do with power politics or ideological warfare. Patriotism is, rather, embodied in other codes like ‘family’ that the boys can immediately identify with. This then is a subtle form of patriotism which is ‘more akin to family loyalty’. It is the type of patriotism which prompts people to expect ‘that what happens in foreign countries is none of their business’ (Orwell 1981: 485).
For Orwell, these narratives demonstrate that the publishers of such weeklies always have to react to the everyday lives of their readership – they have to engage in a negotiated process with their audience. Orwell notes for example that boys’ weeklies contain traces of alternative readings that move beyond a small ‘c’ conservatism. After all, the magazines encourage their readers to connect with different characters and this gives readers a space to transgress distinctive moral codes embodied in single characters in the magazines. Instead readers enjoy the potential to rework a number of traits from a number of characters in new ways. This contested pleasurable experience implies that the publishers cannot necessarily expect boys to read the conservative messages as intended.
It therefore appears to be the case that Orwell is aware that texts and language provide resources for ordinary people to create their own oppositional codes that reject dominant narratives (see also Hall 2006: 173). Bounds goes as far as to suggest that Orwell believes popular cultural objects like boys’ weeklies are dialogical and polysemic (Bounds 2009: 69). However, we have still yet to demonstrate this latter point inenough detail. The next section therefore turns to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to address this issue. Bakhtin’s ideas seem especially pertinent in this respect. As Fowler (1995) indicates, Bakhtin’s argument that language is not an impartial abstract linguistic structure but is instead comprised by a living and breathing collision of popular experiences and ideological utterances chimes well with Orwell’s view of language. Moreover, Bakhtin’s work on popular culture and language has been an important reference point for many contemporary cultural theorists in making sense of everyday lived experiences (see McGuigan 1992) and they therefore provide another extremelyuseful perspective on how some of Orwell’s writings fit into the canon of cultural studies.
Language, Culture and Power
One ofBakhtin’s key insightsis that language is inherently dialogical, heteroglossic, and multiaccentual. In practice, this means that everyday language use is contradictory in scope to the extent that it refracts different points of views, different social classes, different ideologies, different identities, and so on. And so working class speech utterances, obviously, may not hold the same understanding of a specific word as their middle class counter-part. ‘As a result’, claims a colleague of Bakhtin’s, Voloshinov, ‘differently orientated accents intersect in every ideological sign’ (Voloshinov 1973: 23). For Bakhtin, this also impliesthat utterances exist in a structured reality and as such obtain a specific identity at different levels of ‘stratification’ (see Bakhtin 1981: 288-292). For example: