George Orwell's Box

How Orwell’s Defense of Writing Led to Its Undoing

In his poem Works and Days, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod tells the famous story of Pandora, a young woman who unleashes evil into the world by lifting the lid of a mysterious box.¹

Thousands of years later, George Orwell opened his own troublesome box.

In his essay Why I Write, Orwell describes his evolution as a writer and his struggle to find his voice, lamenting that the majority of his early writings were derivative of Romantic or Georgian poetry— “ghastly failure[s],” as he describes them. It wasn’t until he fought in the Spanish Civil War that he had an epiphany about his purpose as a writer:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

He could never have predicted how much trouble he would stir with these very words.

Across literature departments today, political writing is not simply one possible permutation of the written word—it has become the sole purpose of literature. English professors routinely indoctrinate students into this tradition, claiming that all literature is political and demanding that students understand classic texts through Marxist, postcolonial, or queer lenses—literary “schools of thought” that reek of leftist political bias. Similarly, in his famous book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster argues that “all writing is political on some level.” Taught across English departments across America, Foster’s reductive essays have paved the way for angry Palestinian writers and edgy influencers to promote the broken idea that all literature is political. As a result, we have lost sight of literature’s more noble purpose—to speak to a more fundamental element of what makes us human.

Would Orwell have wanted all of this to happen? I doubt it. Earlier in the essay, he identifies the “four great motives” of any writer. Only one of these motives is political.

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful business men – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Orwell does a decent job of identifying core motives behind great writing, but I do not believe that all of these motives hold equal weight in a writer's process. I do not disagree that many writers are motivated by vanity—most writers I have spoken to certainly evince inflated egos, and even I admit that I am partially motivated to write because I believe that my ideas are just that good—but in my understanding, the noblest backdrop to writing is point (ii): the writer’s predilection towards the aesthetic experience. At the end of the day, writing is an art form, and art relies on beauty rather than politics to survive. After all, if Shakespeare had written Othello with the primary purpose of exposing racism, Othello would have been long forgotten. We do not read Othello because we are interested in learning about racial discrimination in Shakespeare’s time, though that is certainly an ancillary function of the play. We read Othello because of the language that brings the story to life.

All of this is to say that literature can be political but is not political by default.

In introducing point (iv), however, Orwell opens a modern Pandora’s box, insisting that “no book is genuinely free from political bias.” While that claim in itself might be true (though I have my doubts), it does not mean that literature is in itself inherently political—or that the purpose of literature is to drive political change. These more contemporary claims that have infested the literary academy take Orwell’s statement to absurdity, misunderstanding his fundamental claim: Orwell is not saying that the purpose of literature is political change. Rather, he states that politics can be fused into art, placing art at the forefront of literature. The problem, however, is that in introducing the idea that all writing carries an inherent political bias, Orwell paves the way for the more progressive claim that all literature is inherently political.

Given Orwell’s background in journalism, I understand where his ideas come from, but even Orwell himself—whose books certainly are political—does not make the claim that literature is rife with political bias; instead, he focuses on writing as a craft, claiming that his prose improved when he sorted out the primary purpose of his writerly toils. What contemporary literary critics miss, therefore, is that Orwell’s primary claim focuses on literature as craft rather than literature as a political vehicle.

After all, there are plenty of great works of literature that carry no political bias whatsoever. The example that most readily comes to mind is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, an “Idea novel” that certainly explores political themes but does not insert an ideological opinion in any of its explorations. Mann addresses politics from the humanistic perspective rather than from any sort of political vantage point; without knowing Mann’s own politics, one could read the entirety of The Magic Mountain without once gleaning a political “message” one way or the other. Instead, Mann explores politics from a philosophical angle and, in fact, pokes fun at one character’s belief that politics are necessarily “bound up” with literature. That is to say, while it may be difficult to write a work of literature without referencing politics, the presence of political ideology in a piece of writing does not make it inherently political.

I do not mean to claim that literature cannot be political. Certainly, Orwell’s own novels are the best examples of political books—at least among books that I would consider literature. His contemporary Arthur Koestler, who fought in and was inspired by the same war—the Spanish Civil War—that gave birth to Orwell’s writing also wrote a political novel—Darkness at Noon. Animal Farm, 1984, and Darkness at Noon are indeed “political” novels, but that is not their sole purpose—nor would we read them today had their primary purpose been to “push the world in a certain direction,” as Orwell claims. Instead, we read these books not only because they contain a political message but also because their authors demonstrate a mastery of craft. We read these books because, beyond their political function, they also serve as works of art.

Never in any of his writings does Orwell maintain that the purpose of all literature is to drive political change—he simply cites this aim as one of many backdrops that a writer may bring to the table in crafting his magnum opus. And if we read Orwell’s own artist’s statement again—What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art—we see that he places art before politics. According to Orwell, a piece of political writing cannot exist without an artistic dimension to ground it in a far more important tradition: that of the human aspiration towards beauty. Orwell’s sentences, after all, are very well-written, and I do not believe I am being presumptuous in assuming that Orwell would disagree with today’s push to make all literature into a political statement. Yet in putting forth the claim that “no book is genuinely free from political bias,” Orwell has opened a sort of Pandora’s Box, paving the way for ideologically-charged literature departments to reduce literature to a political vehicle.

Perhaps Orwell is to blame for the over-politicization of literature, or, perhaps, he has been grossly misinterpreted by a society that has lost sight of the importance of aesthetic beauty.

Ultimately, however, we must ask not whether politics can figure into literature—for it certainly can and often does—but whether politics ought to eclipse the aesthetic dimension of a given work of art. The danger of misreading Orwell is that when political message becomes the primary metric by which we evaluate literature, we risk poisoning great works of literature that deal with more universal themes—or forgetting entirely that the lasting power of a novel lies not in its ideology but in its ability to reflect the human condition.

If Orwell opened a modern Pandora’s box, it is up to us to decide what we do with its contents: whether to use his ideas to enrich literature with human purpose or reduce it to propaganda. After all, it is beauty—not bias—that gives literature its staying power.

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1. Hesiod actually describes the container as a jar, but for the purposes of adhering to the better-known idiom “Pandora’s box,” I shall refer to it as a box.