US killed civilians with atomic weapons and the UK massacred its imperial subjects. The implication is that these Allied powers should not be allowed to mythologize themselves as purely noble and virtuous figures by contrast with their Axis enemies. The political oratory Orwell decries is meant to depoliticize the atrocities of one’s own country, subtracting their horror to leave only the empty formalism of terms like “pacification,” “transfer of population,” “rectification of frontiers.” These terms allow their audience to forget or ignore the horrors that might be evoked by “mental pictures,” smoothing them over with technical jargon. Contrary to Kronman’s allusion, Orwell here argues against the depoliticization of language, and for its repoliticization. Clearly, Kronman’s desire to erase the historical connotations of “master” exemplifies the political language Orwell condemns more than the evocative writing he prefers.
In Mitchell’s gloss, Orwell’s argument is “that the pervasiveness of politics was very bad for language, that it tended to replace discussion with ‘a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”18 While this could be taken to mean that Orwell argues for the depoliticization of discussion or debate, such an interpretation would not be consistent with his account of political speech. When Orwell claims that “political writing is bad writing,” he is not objecting to the intrusion of political concerns into discussions that would be better organized around universal values. Instead, he is objecting to the elision of specific, concrete content in discussions of public policy. Mitchell’s reading is not wrong, per se, but it is potentially misleading. In part, this is because he is repurposing Orwell’s argument as an occasion for his own rhetorical task as editor of Critical Inquiry, arguing for the pertinence of the issue’s theme, “The Politics of Interpretation.” Mitchell makes room for opposing arguments in the journal by acknowledging that Orwell’s authority might be pressed into service by more than one side of current debates—having observed that politics is inescapable, but also that it can be “very bad for language.” Mitchell’s gloss is expedient in establishing the valid and pertinent point that politics has always elicited both interest and opposition among producers and critics of literature, and in that he is certainly not wrong. But his summary would likely mislead those who have not read Orwell’s famous essay, have not read it lately, or have only read about it.
Misreadings, or even reversals of the meaning of a text, seem inevitable in the exchange of approximations and citations of arguments which, especially if they are not central to the rhetorical task, are often presented in the form of a compromise deemed least likely to raise objections from supporters or detractors. This dim bog of “what everyone knows”—where debunked myths and useful innovations blur in a haze of partial recall, expedience and impatience—seems to more or less constitute every “middle ground.” I do not dispute the inevitability of this middle ground, because certainly there are times when we must deal in compromise and sojourn in bogs to reach an objective. But this foggy place is a waypoint, not a destination. Much is lost when Orwell’s argument is so vaguely characterized, as if from a distance. When it is pulled a little closer, its words and their context comprehended firsthand, we are reminded that Orwell’s irritation with political speech is not articulated as a call for autonomously aesthetic writing cleansed of political and historical impurities. It is not aligned with an ahistorical image of close reading, or a depoliticized common sense. What the essay condemns is the euphemistic jargon that depoliticizes state terror and sanitizes the horrors consequent upon state neglect. Orwell pleads with writers to reject facile professional clichés, but his proposals do not primarily aim at restoring the beauty or even the truth of English writing. They aim instead to renew its utility to the moment, to produce writing shaped to its purpose. Orwell clearly hopes that a reinvigorated forthrightness will renew the shock of atrocity dampened by technical terminology, expose the lie of apolitical consensus hiding a status quo brutality, and unveil the exploitation at the foundation of every flawless professional façade.
In revisiting what seems familiar, we often encounter surprises. Without this seemingly inexhaustible novelty of the old, literary studies would have little warrant for its curricula. But just as we reconstruct each time the memories we seem to merely review, so we stand a chance of changing our cultures each time we reflect on we are supposed to know. The obscure power of this process informs our reflection on “the politics of interpretation,” a phrase that recurs throughout the issue of Critical Inquiry that Mitchell frames as a response to Reaganism. That phrase implicates a broad range of personal, professional and social technics of meaning-making. However we may subdivide those technics for the purposes of academic study, analytic examination remains incomplete without a synthetic account of how these various scales and spheres of meaning interact. And however we may compartmentalize these domains of meaning in our personal and professional lives, our apprehensions of particular objects are incomplete without the comprehension of reality that conditions the meaning we make of them, even as it is conditioned by them. To study interpretation is therefore to study how the subject is formed or produced by a social order, and how a social order can be transformed or reproduced by subjects—or in other words, how a self is constructed by others, and how others are constructed by a self.
But when we reconsider Mitchell’s citation, the question arises as to why one might wish to “keep out of politics”—a wish implied by Orwell’s pronouncement of its impossibility. Reagan’s sheltering, permissive persona reminds us that political efforts to support or encourage social changes can threaten unexamined attachments and enjoyments, which are foundational to one’s sense of significance and worth—just as a politics that supports or restores an exploitative asymmetry of power provokes subalterns to demand recognition that their lives matter. Any view that presumes a zero-sum distribution of worth will define politics as antagonism and loss, and this in turn motivates the search for a realm without struggle or death. In other words, the notion that politics is a fight to the death—one that inevitably ends in a master–slave relation—is correlated with the wish for a domain of eternal, universal excellence, truth and beauty. The fallen world implies a higher world above it. The negative reference of each of these worlds to the other—one inevitable but undesirable, the other impossible but irresistible—constructs a sense of stability, and at the same time produces a reality effect of incompleteness or inconsistency, of compensatory losses and gains. In some sense, any academic discipline that imagines itself in terms of Matthew Arnold’s “study of perfection” necessarily participates in this ambivalent structure of interdependent but irreconcilable worlds, in which the necessity of enduring quotidian struggle, strife and cruelty is compensated by an eternal realm of universal value which guarantees the superiority of social structures that shelter and defend it. This is the logic that frames devotional scholarship.
From within that frame, Orwell’s desire to unmask the atrocities of Western humanist and liberal democratic societies might appear to undermine the institutions that keep the inescapable antagonisms of a fallen world in some degree of containment. This fear of undermining institutional stability and authority informs traditionalists and conservatives, from T. S. Eliot’s attachment to the church and “the main stream” of the Western tradition to neoconservative views of culture and religion.19 But in the last decade or so, the exposure and unveiling for which Orwell advocates has been called into question from an apparently different perspective. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, among others, in their arguments for “surface reading,” suggest that exposing atrocity is simply unnecessary in an era of more broadly available information, and of newly obvious government corruption and ineptitude. Though these authors argue on the basis of liberal or progressive values, their arguments entail the same discrepancy between a world of politics, necessarily defined by antagonistic contradictions, and a higher, more beautiful or harmonious world.
Their opposition to George W. Bush’s policies provide the rhetorical occasion for Best and Marcus to question “symptomatic reading,” a term they employ to characterize a range of approaches in literary studies based on demystifying interpretations, which they describe in terms that evoke Orwell’s: “The assumption that domination
