Inside the Whale
by George Orwell
(Part 3)
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/orwellg/whale3.htm
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Where Miller's work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance of any
of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor
trying to drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it.
I should say that he believes in the impending ruin of Western Civilization
much more firmly than the majority of 'revolutionary' writers; only he does
not feel called upon to do anything about it. He is fiddling while Rome is
burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling
with his face towards the flames.
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When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out
with his penknife, one knows exactly why he did it, even to the point of
feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that
for a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than
emotional sincerity. ... It is the difference between genuine despair and a des
pair that is at least
partly a pretence. And with this there goes another consideration which is
perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an 'untrue' belief is
more likely to be sincerely held than a 'true' one.
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Mr E. M. Forster has described how in 1917 he read Prufrock and other of
Eliot's early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of
poems that were 'innocent of public-spiritedness':
They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed genuine
because they were unattractive or weak. ... Here was a protest, and a feeble
one, and the more congenial for being so feeble. ... He who could turn aside
to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our
self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.
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Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted
that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance;
and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a
mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five
thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine
hundred of them are tripe. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of any
major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.
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