Orwell's works have been studied since he wrote them. Each of his books contains a section of autobiography and we can therefore follow the progress of his life and examine his production as a writer at the same time. Criticism has studied his creations along these years.'A critic,' Stephen Hazell says, 'if he's good, can offer to show the reader things about novels he might not see for himself. ( qtd. in Hazell: 13 )
We, then, should experience each word that this writer used in order to have the same 'feeling' Orwell's had when he wrote it. Hazell gives an idea about this 'feeling':
All novels are stories which could be real ones. The majority of Orwell's plots are real facts which happened to him, or maybe he imagines that they could happen, but always it has a piece of reality. It is this what makes that readers feel that stories are a picture of our reality. Hopes, fears, judgements, insights, prejudices, all go into shaping each writer's use of the word, just because it is such a central and powerful word that the novels have a special intimate connection, amongst literary forms, with reality. Then, realism is seen as the single most dominant aspect of the development of Orwell's novels. However, sometimes, aspects of his novels were not seen as real ones. That is, critics say that Orwell changed characteristics that were typical of one culture and place. T.R. Fyvel (1) says: One power of a good novel is, indeed, to take over our minds as we read, and we allow it that privileged entry because we recognise that our first duty to a novel is to experience it. This is not a passive experience, for we are recreating the world of the novel from the signs on the page, and the level of our active co-operation with the novel is the level of its power. If we then wish to increase the value of our experience, our further duty is to evaluate it: to reflect, discuss, reread - and read critics. Orwell worked as a journalist, so we find there's a lot of information relating to popular opinion. It was in the Tribune where he worked from 1943 to 1949, they were the last years of his life. We find in his production some articles of that time. And that it was a job Orwell loved. His friend T.R. Fyvel (2) says: 'To Orwell as journalist, even after he had left his office, Tribune was still his first love.' But not for everybody Orwell was a great writer and person. There's also some critics against him. D.A.N. Jones collects some critical opinions: Raymond Williams says something that summarises Orwell's critics: some critics have delved into the contacts and background of his journey across the industrial north of England. They have found that his experiences, conversation and even his diary notes were in reality sometimes not quite the same as represented in the book. However, to stress this is surely to discover the obvious. Orwell was a polemic writer, he had an awareness of the ordinary life of people, it was the social theory of literary men what made that people loved his way of writing and the way of looking at the world. Writers liked also his way of showing the truth, it was his Îrealâ language, his sympathetic rhetoric and everything he wrote, the best act of looking opinions and democracy of mind through his eyes. Conor Cruise OâBrien says: Orwell should not be treated as a master or a prophet but as a confused and divided man, to be carefully examined.- The only useful thing now is to understand how it happened. The thing to do with his work, his history, is to read it, not imitate it.- Even so, whatever faults we find in Orwell, most of us will have to admit that we've done worse. Going on with another topics, we should explain the importance of politics, attitudes and Orwell's reputation. It is his language and his vision of the life what made that Orwell were know around the world. Orwell's as a writer seem inseparable from the political controversy that attends his writing. This radical controversy is inevitable, because he lived a period plenty of political problems and poverty. In all his literary works there are a liberator or a traitor, a truth-teller, a simplifier, or a slanderer. But there is also a great humanity which comes from an honest man.
Orwellâs emphasis on the depth of civil liberties in Britain and on the feelings that support them is the qualities that define Orwellâs figure. His emphasis on the gentleness of ordinary English life, on these qualities being positive achievements in a world of killing and anger, is again reasonable. The presence in his make-up of the kind of feeling that inspires such programs led to no more than a certain deadening of his feeling and understanding where most of the population of the world was concerned. Raymond Williams talks about Orwellâs experience of the world:
It is Orwell, then, one of the best writers of the 20th English Novelists. He uses satire and also realism in order to write his works. This successful character, Orwell - a man physically and intellectually alive and conscious and tough and persistent - moved these conscious figures (his bookâs characters) in an undifferentiated theatrical landscape. The central significance is not in the personal contradictions but in the much deeper structures of a society and its literature. It is in making his projections where Orwell expressed much more than himself. It is a master of literature. Realising his experience - not only what had happened to him and what had observed, but what he felt about it, the self-definition of ÎOrwellâ, the man inside and outside the experience
© Ana Roig Guijarro
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