TAYAH LEE

Throughout history, there has been a longstanding belief, known as the ivory tower outlook, stating that the artist should refrain from involving politics in his or her works (Fotheringham 1). However, as linguist John Fotheringham states in “George Orwell and Ernst Toller: The Dilemma of the Politically Committed Writer,” the two cited writers strongly oppose this outlook, believing in the right and duty of the artist to engage in politics (Fotheringham 1-2). While Fotheringham describes Orwell’s distinction between political art and political propaganda, historian Dolores Martín Moruno presents the long-lasting effects of political propaganda and censorship, specifically of the Spanish Civil War, in the scholarly article “Revisiting Spanish Memory: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.” Although their approaches differ, scholars Fotheringham and Moruno both provide useful insight to the fact that propaganda greatly affects identity, whether it be that of an artist or a country.

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Fotheringham conveys the widely accepted idea of the time that politically committed writers were considered “lesser artists” (Fotheringham 7). Despite this perspective, however, Orwell believed that in the midst of political unrest, “the notion of art for art’s sake was hopelessly out of date. Literature …had to become political for anything else would have been intellectually dishonest” (Fotheringham 10). The scholar introduces Orwell’s stance that “every artist was a propagandist” (Fotheringham 10) in the way that all artistic works are “colored” by the beliefs and the prejudices of the creator (Fotheringham 11). In this sense, Orwell believed that all art is either implicitly or explicitly political (Fotheringham 15). The identity of the artist affects the created “propaganda.”

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On the other hand, Orwell also recognizes the danger of crossing the line into “becoming a party political propagandist” (Fotheringham 11). He considered propaganda to lack “basic honesty and objectivity” (Fotheringham 12), and that to concede to political ideologies meant to not only violate artistic integrity but to “destroy [oneself] as a writer” (Fotheringham 11). In this sense, the use of propaganda damages the identity of the artist. The scholar gives examples from Homage to Catalonia of Orwell’s firsthand experience of propaganda consequences, in which journalists’ “lies or …discrete silence” hid the reality of the war from the rest of the world and directed the blame towards the group in which he served (Fotheringham 14).

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Fotheringham touches briefly on the effects on propaganda and manipulated media, specifically in reference to Orwell’s life. Scholar Moruno, on the other hand, expands on the long-term effects that censorship can have on a country. A large part of a country’s identity stems from its history. However, countries that go through periods under authoritarian rule often experience trauma in social memory from unresolved repression and censorship (Moruno 36). The political unrest and violence of the Spanish Civil War was so great, Moruno expresses that the only way to move past it was for the country to experience “collective amnesia” and “erase the memories of the war” (Moruno 36). This draws attention to the fact that the country continued to use propaganda and collective thinking as a type of “political reconstruction” (Moruno 39) to overcome the damage inflicted by the war and the censorship regime (Moruno 37).

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Spain was the only democratic regime of the 20th Century to not call for accountability of the repression suffered under authoritarian rule (Moruno 36). Moruno claims “the Spanish Social Revolution [was] an episode that Spanish society has apparently removed from its memory” (Moruno 39), drawing attention to the effects of propaganda on the memory, national past, and identity of a country (Moruno 37). However, to combat the collective amnesia, she draws upon Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia as a primary source of the war. Its firsthand perspective gives “a testimony close to reality, beyond the image of the war popularized by the part propaganda of that time” (Moruno 38). She attributes Orwell’s literary contribution as one that provides insight beyond the “perception that the Spanish Civil War was merely a fight of democracy against fascism,” characterizing the unrest as a social revolution instead (Moruno 39).

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Propaganda played a pivotal role in the Spanish Civil War. While Dolores Martín Moruno explains how the censorship regime of the authoritarian rule of the Spanish Civil War carried on fundamentally to cultivate the collective amnesia of the war, leaving a hole in the national past and identity of Spain, John Fotheringham presents George Orwell’s balance between political art and political propaganda and the consequences on the artist. Although their approaches differ, both scholars demonstrate the crucial effects of propaganda on identity.

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Works Cited

• Fotheringham, John. “George Orwell and Ernst Toller: The Dilemma of the Politically Committed Writer.” Neophilologus, vol. 84, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1-18.

• Moruno, Dolores M. “Revisiting Spanish memory: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.” Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 34-56.