The urban imagery of George Orwell

beatriz

Vittore Collina, Eurozine
The urban imagery of George Orwell

George Orwell's descriptions of cities are an important part of his overall analysis of politics and class. The Barcelona of Homage to Catalonia is revolutionary, vital, and very different from the "deep, deep sleep" of England. But increasingly Orwell turned to a dystopic view of the city, where it became the place of poverty, inequality, and oppression. Vittore Collina follows the transition from the "city of men" to the "city of stone" in Orwell's urban imagery.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists and architects belonging to the futurist movement developed an idea of the city that united urban order with movement, speed, and machines. But the general feeling is different and European culture after the First World War accentuates an awareness of loss of the city as a unifying system: the modern metropolis seems increasingly represented by its tensions, its disharmony, and its destructive forces.

"From the panorama of the city we can only learn that incoherence is a collection of false appearances in which the gigantism of new technological buildings (steel bridges, gas tanks, smoke stacks) lay next to the antique habitat on a human scale."[1] Represented by moments of suffocating crowds or desolate emptiness, urban space has been the object of many narrations that underline this uneasiness and alienation, the loss of historical meaning and the insensibility and absurdity of clashing elements. To new groups of intellectuals and architects, reason and geometric forms seem to be a remedy for the illness plaguing the metropolis. New stable reference points are sought after. The surrealistic approach links roaming around the city to the surfacing of the subconscious. These visionary reconstructions are in conflict with rational programming. In short, "order and chaos have become the complementing and interactive forces of the big city scene".[2]

The urban imagery of George Orwell falls within this framework. Even if it isn't the main theme in his writings, it is present, shares the diffused critical spirit and is characterized by very particular slants. This presence is highlighted in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the dramatic representation of London obtains great symbolic weight.
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Continue reading: Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-20-collina-en.html