幼儿园小班泥工步骤图:【全球书评】乔治·奥威尔永不褪色的魅力

全球书评】乔治·奥威尔永不褪色的魅力

自1950年1月奥威尔去世之后，便很少被公众探讨，也再也引不起公众的关注与思考。不知道如果奥威尔还在世的话，他会怎么做呢？

然而，正因为这个原因，你会发现，这个原名叫埃里克布莱尔（EricBlair）的许多东西都是未经核实的。针对这些未经核实的内容，有无数传记和研究著作讨论这个问题。他也是少数几位出版文集多达22本的二十世纪作家。当然，出版过多本介绍奥威尔成就及影响力的著作的作家罗登对此颇为了解。他觉得奥威尔常常被公众想象力中的那个虚构的“奥威尔”所取代，并不是一个真实的男人或作家，这一点罗登较为反对，他在书里总是称呼“圣乔治”。他写这本书的目的与其说是为了揭穿奥威尔的身世，不如说是“以一种全新的视角来研究他的一生成就，既非挑战他作品的广泛接受度也非寻找一个新的线索来质疑他。”

本书的第二章节讲述了被称之为奥威尔时代的东德文化，用一个更加通晓的词语叫奥威尔式。他引用了一段看似效仿“1984宣言”的东德数学课本中的问题：“一个在德意志民主共和国水厂工作的工人，向越南民主共和国提供十根水管，每根价值4万德国马克，为了修补那里被美军轰炸机炸毁的灌溉管道。这笔物资总价值是多少？”奥威尔将民主德国的这种反乌托邦式的社会仿造苏联共产党那样写了下来，当然，正式由于这个简单的原因，东德共产党员的生活跟“1984”里描述的如出一辙。罗登写道，难怪当时看到这本禁书的东德人都非常惊讶一个英国人居然可以把他们经历的这种可怕地制度给如此准确的描绘出来。第三章取名为“未经证实的奥威尔”。这一章节罗登主要关注奥威尔的生活和工作。探讨了他曾经为年轻学生上过的“政治与英国语言”课程，并且就奥威尔反乌托邦小说“1984”的传统进行了研究。书中最活泼的地方是罗登对奥威尔一生的大量传记材料进行考证。1945年，海明威究竟有没有在自由巴黎遇见过奥威尔？奥威尔究竟有没有问他爸爸借手枪自卫？是不是正如奥威尔早年的情人JacinthaBuddicom强烈声称的那样，“1984”中茱莉亚这个章节的内容是取材与这位情人的？不过对此，罗登也未给出最后定论。但事实上，他的思想如何继续影响着我们的生活与思考，你可以从他去世后的这六十年里全世界仍有这么多人如此力挺奥威尔中得到答案。

全球书评：乔治·奥威尔永不褪色的魅力

If you were to make a list of all the adjectives that have been used to describe George Orwell, the most popular would be ethical ones: words like honest, decent, trustworthy. These are the qualities that have guaranteed Orwell, who died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, such an extraordinary intellectual afterlife. More than a novelist or journalist or essayist or literary critic, Orwell has become an icon of intellectual integrity -- one of the few writers to live through the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade," and emerge with his political and moral instincts uncorrupted. On the left, he's admired for his genuine socialist principles and personal egalitarianism; on the right, he's admired for the instinctive patriotism and love of English tradition that made him one of the best commentators on the World War II years. And to everyone who writes and thinks about politics, Orwell is the writer who most elegantly exposed the horror of totalitarianism and the degradation of language under the pressure of ideology. No wonder that, as John Rodden writes in "The Unexamined Orwell" (University of Texas Press), " scarcely a major Anglo-American issue has gone by since his death in January 1950 that has not moved someone to muse, 'If Orwell Were Alive Today,'" -- or, more reverently still, "W.W.G.O.D.?"

For that very reason, however, just about the last word you could apply to the man born Eric Blair is "unexamined." He is the subject of numerous biographies and studies, and one of the rare twentieth-century authors to have been honored with a full-dress Collected Works -- a twenty-two-volume set. Of course, Rodden, who is the author of several books about Orwell's work and influence, knows this perfectly well. What he objects to is the way Orwell is too often replaced in the public imagination by " 'Orwell,' the myth, not the man or the writer" -- the image Rodden also refers to as "St. George." The purpose of this collection of essays is not so much to debunk the Orwell legend as to offer "fresh perspectives on him and his work, either by challenging broadly accepted appraisals of his achievement or pursuing new lines of inquiry about it."

This mission statement allows Rodden to range widely, resulting in a pleasantly miscellaneous book. In the first section, titled "If the Mantle Fits...," Rodden profiles a number of intellectuals who have been considered successors to Orwell. None of them resembles Orwell all that closely: Lionel Trilling is more exclusively literary, Dwight Macdonald less accomplished, John Lukacs more conservative, and Christopher Hitchens generally far less serious. What unites them is, first, a noble contrarianism -- the ability to see when their own political "side" was wrong and to say so publicly -- and second, an intense admiration for Orwell as thinker and stylist.

If these writers are Orwellesque, the culture of East Germany, to which Rodden turns in the book's second section, deserves the more familiar epithet Orwellian. His quotations from East German math textbooks, for instance, read like parodies of the propaganda in "1984:" "Workers in the GDR water industry presented 10 water pumps, valued at 40,000 marks, to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, so that the irrigation lines destroyed by US bombers could be repaired. What was the total value of the gift?" Of course, life in Communist East Germany was like "1984" for the simple reason that Orwell patterned his dystopia after Communist Russia. No wonder, Rodden writes, that East Germans who managed to get their hands on illegal copies of "1984" "recalled their astonishment that an Englishman... could describe with such accuracy the regime of terror that they had experienced."

In the third section of "The Unexamined Orwell," Rodden turns to Orwell's life and work, discussing his experience teaching "Politics and the English Language" to young students and examining the tradition of utopian fiction "1984" subverts. The liveliest of these essays, however, are the ones in which Rodden examines lingering biographical mysteries in this well-documented life. Did Ernest Hemingway really meet Orwell in liberated Paris in 1945, and did Orwell borrow a pistol from Papa to defend himself against unnamed assassins? Was the character of Julia in "1984" based on Orwell's early love Jacintha Buddicom, as she vehemently claimed? Rodden can't give the last word on these and other biographical disputes. But the very fact that so many people want to assert their claims on and about Orwell is a measure of how much he continues to matter to us, more than 60 years after his death.