JOLLY DAYS

Orwell's Compass

Orwell noted a sea-change in popular crime fiction. His article at first seems just a standard review, but his canny mix of robust moral compass and prescient insight turns this article into a brilliant expose of the inner life of a society.

The article notes that the older model of Sherlock Holmes was replaced, almost without remark, by a far darker default. The fact that the paradigm shift was not discussed is typical for pop culture. Things just appear and seem to be absorbed on a subconscious, subtextual level. The meme mind.

See if these words, published in 1944, don't remind you of the current CSI and Law and Order franchises, the Sopranos and Criminal Minds, the Homicide and Dexter variants, in their obsessions with the sadomasochistic, necrophiliac mind.

…it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of Miss Blandish, has ‘wet slobbering lips’: this is disgusting, and it is meant to be disgusting. But the scenes describing cruelty to women are comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by men upon other men…the hero, who is intended to be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character, is described as stamping on somebody's face, and then, having crushed the man's mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in it…Their whole theme is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak.

Orwell goes on to say,

The thing that the ordinary reader ought to have objected to — almost certainly would have objected to, a few decades earlier — was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is implied…that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the sense that it does not pay…the distinction between crime and crime-prevention practically disappears…the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is success, is very much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the ‘log cabin to White House’ brigade.

And the vulgarity is not merely a triviality, the cork bobbing on the sea of the popular mind, it can have deeper consequences,

Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini…nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes….This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact.