Horizon

I smiled at:

'...but he (Orwell) suffered from the empiricist illusion that what was real was what you could smell with your own nose and feel with your own fingers. Samuel Johnson held much the same view - and if Johnson is the kind of 'character' the English adore, it is not only because they take a stoutly individualist delight in the idiosyncratic, but because a 'character' represents the tangible truth of a person rather than the abstract truth of an idea.'

I had a vision of Che Eagleton on the back of a train in a snowy lanscape, with a scar on his face; like Strelnikov in Dr Zhivago...

Where did you find that quote?

In Terry Eagleton's review of the Orwell bios

http://www.arlindo-correia.com/041203.html
scroll to:

LRB | Vol. 25 No. 12 dated 19 June 2003 | Terry Eagleton

Reach-Me-Down Romantic
Terry Eagleton

In one sense, portraying the seamy side of things seems a radical gesture; yet it also paints a world so gross and solid that it is hard to imagine how it might be transformed, which is not a radical gesture at all.

I like this bit.

Orwell's impressive candour is among other things the reverse side of his dubious epistemology. You must stick as closely as you can to the facts and avoid fancy theories. Theory is middle-class, experience working-class. Working-class socialists must thus be discreetly edited out of The Road to Wigan Pier, since they threaten to dismantle this dichotomy. Orwell tells us that the sight of a man pilfering food on a ship 'taught me more than I could have learned from half-a-dozen socialist pamphlets'. It is a typical emotive, empty gesture, one which anticipates the approving marginal tick of the liberal reader. In fact, seeing a man pilfering food will tell you nothing about the causes of poverty, just as (so Brecht remarked) putting a factory on stage will tell you nothing about capitalism.

This gets to the bottom of Eagleton's anti-empiricism. I think he's wrong, but after all I guess he'd have to take this view considering his profession.

In one sense, portraying the seamy side of things seems a radical gesture; yet it also paints a world so gross and solid that it is hard to imagine how it might be transformed...

Maybe he had caught on to that by *1984*, suggesting as he does that the slums are more enduring than the Outer Party stratum.

'which is not a radical gesture at all.

I like this bit.'

The three impossible things before breakfast school of thought: yes, highly necessary for academic marxists.