THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the vanguard and the undoing of the animals’ revolution. Pigs may at times look suspiciously human (despite their
four legs), they may traditionally be associated with greed and laziness, but they are also proverbially supposed to be
incapable of flight. Their revolution remains earthbound, their aspirations all too like those of their enemies. The
corruptions and distortions of language which serve Napoleon’s dictatorial ends in Animal Farm became a particular
concern of Orwell’s last years. In the essay Ppolitics and the English Language’ of 1946 he recognized that ‘if thought
corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’ and argued for a plain English ‘as an instrument for expressing
and not for concealing or preventing thought’. The idea that political language ‘is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable’ is substantiated in the Party slogans picked out on the façade of the Ministry of Truth
in Nineteen Eighty four (1949): ‘WAR IS PEACE’; ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’; ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’. In Nineteen
Eighty-four Stalin’s Russia blends with bomb-scarred post-war Britain, Kafka’s dark fantasies of incomprehension
and impersonal oppression with Koestler’s nightmares of totalitarian logic and Huxley’s dystopian vision of an
ordered scientific future. Purges and vaporizations have become ‘a necessary part of the mechanics of government’
and the Party’s prospective Newspeak dictionary will not simply cut the official language ‘down to the bone’, but also
serve to ‘narrow the range of thought’. The Party’s aim, O’Brien explains to Winston Smith, is to create a world
where there are no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement; the ‘intoxication of power’ will remain, a
‘thrill of victory’ which is expressed in an excited mental picture of ‘a boot stamping on a human face-for ever’. In
Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend the nature of a self seeking, individualist society obsessed by the power of money is
typified by the phrase ‘scrunch or be scrunched’. For Orwell, who was amongst the first modern critics to take
Dickens’s fiction seriously, the scrunching has become
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the prerogative of a Party which has relieved the individual of responsibility and which enforces acquiescence. His
‘modern fantasy’ does not suggest a retreat from the real world but a monitory response to what he readily recognized
was a ‘profoundly disturbed age’.
Looking at Britain at War
One of the most striking and popular visual images to emerge from wartime Britain was John Armstrong’s modestly
surreal painting Can Spring be far Behind? of 1940. Armstrong, who was employed with Henry Moore, Graham
Sutherland, Paul Nash, and John Piper as an Official War Artist, drew an outsize tulip sprouting from the bombed
ruins of houses and factories set against a purplish early morning sky. His poetic title, derived from Shelley’s ‘Ode to
the West Wind’, enforces the idea of a spring of hope succeeding a winter of destruction. Unlike the battles of the
First World War, the bombing raids of the Second World War brought death and dissolution to what was known as
‘the Home Front’. The Luftwaffe campaigns of 1940 and 1941 left a good deal of Britain’s industrial and cultural
heritage in ruins, but the shells of buildings and the piles of rubble, which by 1945 had spread over the whole of
Europe, took on a certain suggestive power. Domestic interiors exposed as façades collapsed, camouflaged factories,
doors distended by sandbags, bodies huddled in bomb-shelters, corpses distorted by hunger or pain, and human faces
preposterously hidden by gas masks had confounded life and art, vision and reality. If the churned moonscapes and
the twisted metal of the Western Front had seemed to insist on a new kind of responsive art, the artists who
confronted the violent fragmentations, waste lands, and unforeseen juxtapositions of the Second World War were to
some degree already equipped with a post-impressionist and post-Eliotic vocabulary with which to articulate their
reactions.
The impression of a shifting relationship between objects and concepts, and a Freudian stress on the significance
of the unconscious, had become particular features of the publicity generated by the rise of the Surrealist movement.
The international exhibition of the work of the Surrealists held in London in June 1936 had included the work of
some sixty-eight artists, fourteen of them British. The near suffocation of Salvador Dali as, kitted out in a diving suit,
he inaudibly addressed an audience, may have pointed to the extravagantly absurdist side of the movement, but the
stress certain critics laid on native prefigurings of Surrealism partly explains why British opinion appears to have
been far less provoked by the novelty of the new forms than it had been by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of
1910. As Herbert Read pointed out in drawing a distinction between a ‘classical art’ which appealed to the intellect
and a ‘romantic art’ which drew on ‘irrational revelations’ and ‘surprising incoherencies’, Surrealism could
effectively look back to the work of Blake and
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