skygiants: Grantaire from the film of Les Mis (you'll see)
[personal profile] skygiants
After eight years or so, I have now read Orwell in Spain so that I could finally return it to [personal profile] gramarye1971 during my very brief stint in DC last week. I don't regret the long wait -- as always, Orwell is timely and never moreso than when he's talking about situations that are messy, complicated, unwinnable and un-abandonable.

Orwell in Spain includes the full text of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War, as well as various contextualizing letters and articles he wrote while there and on returning.

I first read Homage to Catalonia back in 2011, and, unlike most of the things I wrote in 2011, my review of it from that time still pretty much encapsulates the things I would say about it now. What sticks with me more, this time, is how Orwell talks about the ragtag Marxist-anarchist battalion he accidentally ends up in as the only time in his life that he's ever had the chance to see the ideal of absolute equality, abolition of hierarchy, collective action, in practice, and how it convinced him it could be put into practice, that it was a realizable dream and one worth fighting for -- about how he was miserable and hungry and cold all the time and achieved absolutely nothing and still.

But of course context is important. And though Orwell is very determined to try and be fair-minded, and to encourage his readers to treat him as biased and to come to their own conclusions, the most interesting thing about the contextualization provided in Orwell in Spain is how it shows how much he was driven by his concern for his friends who were in prison, and his goal of raising some kind of outcry among international Socialists for their release. He writes reviews and articles, many of which are not published because they do not accord with the party line of What We Should Feel About Spain; he argues endlessly and demands receipts from everyone who publishes an account of what happened during the street fighting in Barcelona that doesn't accord with his lived experience; he returns consistently and desperately to the topic of his superior officer, who is probably still in jail, Situation Unknown.

And then the superior officer gets out of jail, and the next bit of writing included in the compilation is from several years later. This may be fiat on the part of the editor of Orwell in Spain, but it very much serves to emphasize that the personal is political. It's not that I don't think Orwell cared about the truth generally, because I do think he did, but also it's got to feel much more important to scream when you know it's going to immediately and directly impact the people you care about.
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