The only merit of Orwell's work is its political relevance.

>>8874179
This isnt false

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I
decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the
dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay,
of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping
round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs
and mean grievances. The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is
the way they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling
that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the
same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker’s self-pitying talk–always the
same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine
of ’It does seem ’ard, don’t it now?’–revolted me even more than her habit of
wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people
like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For
they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic
by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the
civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism
has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered
into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo,
the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their
pockets; and this is where it all led –to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens
with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It
is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell
them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to
stay there too long.

Mostly agreed, but read some of his essays, they're not bad. Killing An Elephant and A Hanging.

>>8874179
His essays are good. His novels are an... interesting foray.

I liked A Clergyman's Daughter, I think maybe.

>>8874179
Where did this shitty meme come from?

His writing isn't atrocious. He can write; just read his essays. But he wasn't a great novelist. Huxley, same deal.

He was a good but not a great writer. An intelligent and perceptive non-genius. He was very high-minded, but ultimately a literalist thinker. You can see this in his essay responding to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare. I haven't read Tolstoy's pamphlet (I'm sure it's as awful as Orwell says it is), but one cannot help but remember that Tolstoy is a truly great poetic writer, and Orwell is not, though in this particular instance he is the defender of poetry. He appreciate Shakespeare the way that an engineer or civil servant can appreciate Shakespeare, which does not count for nothing, but it is not the poet's appreciation. I am sure that both Orwell and Tolstoy would detest my somewhat aristocratic view, but Tolstoy would feel that detest more deeply, because he was a figurativist thinker. Orwell may not deserve his cult, but he is a solid writer and a sincere man; his problem is he does not have the sort of mind that can transcend sincerity.

>>8875129
Harry Bloom.

>>8875192

Well then here, as in many places, Bloom was wrong. He is not the one true critic, you know. Bloom doesn't like him because he's a literalist, I suspect. But literalist writers can still teach us many things.

I agree.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

>>8875184
Orwell is one of my favourite writers for the very reason that he embraces what you call 'sincerity', as opposed to desperately trying to transcend it in the name of genius

He was a remarkably empathetic man, and always wrote without pretence or posterity. He understood that reading itself is meant to forge a relationship between the reader and the author

>>8874179
why so bad in trolling?

>>8876173
Why is your prose style within the confines of English language so atrocious?

>>8875424
i agree with this completely

>>8874179
His writing is riddled with banal cliches. He's a good essay writer but he lacks the creative vigour to make his fiction sparkle