George Orwell Past and Present: A Conversation with Biographer D.J. Taylor
I am pleased to share the third and final conversation in our series on George Orwell's 1984. Our guest is D.J. Taylor—biographer, novelist, and literary critic. Taylor has produced not one but two definitive biographies of Orwell. The first, Orwell: The Life, was published in 2003. Twenty years later, after a trove of letters and documents surfaced, Taylor returned with Orwell: The New Life. He also authored a biography of the book 1984 and "a reader's guide to George Orwell" titled, Who Is Big Brother?
Taylor is the ideal guest to help us explore Orwell and 1984's past, especially the time when Orwell was writing the novel. Taylor is able to transport us to Orwell's own present, so we can better understand the author and the book in our own world today. Taylor is also the ideal guest to illuminate the ways Orwell and his work have been used and misused over the years by politicians and pundits, from all ideologies, who claim Orwell as one of their own. Of course, this was part of the motivation of choosing 1984 for the summer book club—to develop the ability to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the world's most well-known political novelist and his most famous novel. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
A few snippets from our conversation:
On Orwell no longer being just a writer, but a symbol too:
"So, as you say, there doesn't come a day when some newspaper columnist or some radio jock invokes him in some way. What this means is when a writer stops being a writer and becomes a signifier, becomes larger than the books they created, obviously their memory and their message is being invoked by people who, in some cases have not [read] a word that they have [written], but just know that Orwell is out there, in the ether, and a part of political discourse."
How Orwell's daily life made it into 1984:
"But it's more than that. From 1943 onwards, he was working for a magazine called Tribune, which had premises in the Strand, which is to the east of Trafalgar Square. . . . In fact, the topography of 1984—Victory Square, the Ministry of Love—it's all taken from Orwell's bus ride home in the evening. So Trafalgar Square is Victory Square; the Ministry of Love is the University of London Senate House. All kinds of aspects of the novel's geography are taken from wartime London.
"And also the great thing about the world of Oceania in 1984, and Airstrip 1, its capital, is the bomb sites, and the debris, and the sense of dereliction and decay. And so, essentially, what he's doing is transporting the landscapes of war-torn Britain forward to this mythical 1984 period 40 years later. So it's a very clever kind of transposition of his own world into this dystopian world. And I think that was part of the novel's appeal to its original audience, in that people [in London] who read it in 1949 thought, 'That's the world outside the window.'"
And in case you missed it! Check out our other two expert conversations from this summer, with Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance and Steven Pinker on "common knowledge."
