Beastly revolt : Orwellian ethics of the body

Abstract

The human body lies at the centre of Orwell’s novels. While poststructuralism is inclined to read the body as a passive surface, Orwell dwells on its objective and physical status as a foundation for moral expression and political transformation. The Orwellian body is construed as visceral, affective and unfathomable. In its painful experiences of want, starvation, disease and torture, the body, however weakly, resists a perverse social and political environment that aims to make it malleable and docile, and cries out for the care and sympathy systematically denied to it. This very insufficiency is the ground for an Orwellian bodily narrative that highlights the body’s vulnerability and resilience in the face of the different totalitarian regimes and abstract ideologies that demand its obedience. Orwell’s ethics is thus fraught with bodily speculations. This approach to Orwell’s novels through the body marks a departure from more familiar political readings of his work, and reconsiders his writings with the methods of a literary criticism informed by theories that engage with the corporeal body. Orwell’s five novels tell a story of the human body in its creaturely or “beastly” revolt, and argue for a more grounded and pragmatic bodily life. Burmese Days engages with the appropriation of the human body in racist discourse, and through the struggle of its antihero with his identities, problematized by his bodily liaison with the Burmese soil and under the pressure of colonial prestige, the novel demonstrates the power of the human body, the one universally shared human experience, to transgress racial boundaries and hierarchies constructed to keep people apart and unequal. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, Dorothy’s female body triumphs at the same time over hegemonic religious ideologies and over the linear narration of patriarchal authority, and drives the novel’s innovative experiment with fragmentary textual structures and poetic visceral language. Dorothy’s final return, a kind of defeat, nonetheless endows with significance the nuanced, contingent and incomprehensible details of bodily life in everyday existence, and Orwell’s later novels will build on the implications of this paradoxical victory. Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming up for Air investigate different forms of bodily revolt against an abstraction effected by modern capitalism and consumerism. Orwell pinpoints the human body as the vital and affective repository for an embodied ethics of care. Nineteen Eighty-Four, finally, shows that the Party’s strategies of surveillance and control are established on physical aspects of the human body which are ironically denied and negated as immaterial in the Party’s collective philosophy. Orwell traces the story of the unruly body in its silent and dogged protest, crystallised in the image of a cyst, as its ultimate hope and final revolt. Each of Orwell’s novels figures a totalitarian regime, be it the British Empire, the Christian God, the Money God or Big Brother. The human body suffers under these regimental frenzies. But its endeavour to sustain, feel and survive makes the brute body a hero, both a symbol and a common embodiment of the oppressed and weak in their pervasive resistance.