Orwell vs Huxley
- Thread starter Orang Utan
- Start date
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kittyP
Pluviophile
Slightly off topic but I remember hearing Meera Syal being interviewed and she was saying that since Bhaji on the Beach had become a study piece for A Level, people kept approaching her and saying 'oh I loved how you used that to show this, the imagery is beautiful' and she said 'most of the time I didn't mean it to be imagery at all, it was suppose to be a funny anecdote from my life'.
Sorry, I'll go now.
Kaka Tim
Half Arsed and Slapdash till I Die
Superficially its Huxley - his vision of people being controlled by their deisires being sated on demand seems very close to our own media/celebrity/ gratification fueled consumer society.
But behind all that flim/flam is a chilling orwellian world of the opressive exercise of power through survilance, control of language and information and - when necessary - brute force. e.g Concepts like newspeak, doublethink, memory holes, hate week and a state of endless war find disturbing echoes in contemporary phenonmena like the 'war on terror'.
Huxleys world is based more on his own whimsy, eliteism and cynicism about humanity. The message of BNW is that we are the authours of own oppression - we are too weak willed, too enslaved to our own selfish deisre for pleasure and gratification to take control of our own lives and/or communtiy and society.
Orwells world is based on identifying the distingushing features of the totalitarin, closed society of Stalinist Russia and distilling them into totalitarian archetypes. The message of 1984 and Animal Farm is that power will always seek to dominate, to crush every imaginable threat and to ever seek to expand itself.
Huxleys analysis is true for some people some of the time. Orwells warning that Big Brother is always waiting in the wings - and how to recognise him - is fundementally truer.
But behind all that flim/flam is a chilling orwellian world of the opressive exercise of power through survilance, control of language and information and - when necessary - brute force. e.g Concepts like newspeak, doublethink, memory holes, hate week and a state of endless war find disturbing echoes in contemporary phenonmena like the 'war on terror'.
Huxleys world is based more on his own whimsy, eliteism and cynicism about humanity. The message of BNW is that we are the authours of own oppression - we are too weak willed, too enslaved to our own selfish deisre for pleasure and gratification to take control of our own lives and/or communtiy and society.
Orwells world is based on identifying the distingushing features of the totalitarin, closed society of Stalinist Russia and distilling them into totalitarian archetypes. The message of 1984 and Animal Farm is that power will always seek to dominate, to crush every imaginable threat and to ever seek to expand itself.
Huxleys analysis is true for some people some of the time. Orwells warning that Big Brother is always waiting in the wings - and how to recognise him - is fundementally truer.
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