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irate:
on genre policing (this is not a literary criticism thread)---given that the whole thread was spawned around an attempt to use orwell's novel as a metaphor for understanding (rather, beginning to understand--staging might be a better word) something of the conditions that obtain in the states right now, it seems fair game to talk about the text from which that metaphor is derived. if you cannot do that, then the metaphor is worthless as an analytic device, the activity of mapping from one genre to another a waste of time.
what i meant when i equated orwell to a dickens novel is that it is told in more or less classic realist fashion, with you are a reader put in the position of transcendent spectator made privy to orwell's staging of oceania and his reason for doing so at once. so you are outside the main action, having it interpreted for you as you move through the text. your relation to that text as a reader and your relation to the political evironment in which you find yourself is therefore fundamentally different...at which point my argument would converge with cthulu's immediately above.
in a better, more democratic space, it would be obvious that politics is a variant of fundamental philosophy--it can and should involve consideration of yourself, your relation to the world and the modes of posing questions to and about any and all of the relations implied by these terms. trying to limit the kinds of questions that can be posed and the type of materials used to pose those questions is symptomatic of the impoverished state of discourse in the states--which itself is an index of and device for legitimating (by making critique difficult to impossible for many) of precisely the domination that we are talking about.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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