Biographical Doublethink: A Portrait of George Orwell in Comic Form

George Orwell reviewed by Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Pierre Christin, Sébastien Verdier and a team of six other graphic artists combine to produce a lavish account of George Orwell’s life and works, alerting us to the possibilities and limits of the comic form for biography. Generic convention may result in the writer’s life becoming an adventure story, yet the polyphonic possibilities of the image-text allow for skilful interweaving of autobiographical sources, fictional dialogues and biographical narration. Above all, the portrait returns us, refreshed, to Orwell’s writings.

As George Orwell’s all-too-short lifespan recedes from us – he died in 1950 at the age of 46 – the question of his significance and legacy continues to be posed afresh. The view that »the texts of authors are more significant than any biography about them« (Weigel 2006, 47) is one we may argue with, but it remains the case that a biography, regardless of its form, serves among other purposes the task of returning us to those texts. How does this splendid graphic biography of Orwell, translated from Pierre Christin and Sébastien Verdier’s French original into German by Anja Kootz, return us to Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), refreshed for a re-reading of these now classic commentaries on the grand horrors of the twentieth century? How can Orwell’s worldview speak to us today through the medium of the comic, here in sumptuous hardback format and with visual contributions from André Juillard, Olivier Balez, Manu Larcenet, Blutch, Juanjo Guarnido and Enki Bilal?

Orwell’s great dystopia and allegory grow, biographically speaking, out of his disillusioned imperial experience as a police officer in what was then Burma, his ›urban plunge‹ experiments in investigative journalism in London and Paris, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and his dawning realisation of the human costs of the Soviet experiment. A biography of Orwell, or of any other significant cultural figure for that matter, will always face – and ultimately fudge – the Freudian challenge of how much of adult outlook and achievement can be attributed to childhood experience. The shared narrative burdens of word and image in the comic form allow an elegant side-stepping of any too linear causality on this front; the drawings evoke the cloistered, at times cruel worlds of boarding school, with the top hats at Eton, the fishing-rods and timber-frame cottages of the English countryside allowing a glimpse of the milieu from which Orwell hailed. The sparse word-count and reticent ›voiceover‹ text of the biographical narrator make it possible for readers to draw their own connections and conclusions. Orwell speaks ›directly‹ in typeface font, his own words clearly demarcated from the fictional dialogues of the speech bubbles in a smooth yet transparent interweaving of biographical source and invented speech. A conventional, text-only biographical novel would struggle to mark this difference so clearly; here, as with the occasional juxtaposition of drawings with archival photographs (as on 122), the comic form allows the fact-fiction tension of biographical narrative to unfold in rewarding ways. From use of perspective and relative size of figure, to sporadic deployment of colour in a generally black-and-white image-text, line-drawn versions of stills from films, and sudden departures from the mainly realist aesthetic in dream sequences or illustrated quotations from Animal Farm (135-6), the artists on this project have collaborated to produce a rich artefact that demonstrates the versatility of their chosen medium.

Given this range of medial possibility, what surprises is the relative conventionality of the biographical frame. Orwell is undoubtedly the protagonist, recognisable throughout by dint of a fairly static depiction that tends to remain unchanged and to centre him in the frame. Narratively, too, the biographer’s dilemma – what to include, what to leave out – is resolved here in ways that tend to endorse a somewhat sanitised conception of biography: Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy appears in the role of concerned helpmeet, his second wife Sonia Brownell as a glamorous late-life cameo. (Posthumous biographies tell a different story.) Of Orwell’s attested homophobia – a cultural norm of his generation, particularly among those who passed through the British public school system – there is no hint, nor is there mention of the fact of his having providing the British Foreign Office with a list of ›crypto-communists‹ and Stalinist ›fellow travellers‹ at the start of the Cold War. At the beginning of the book, a fascinating two-page reflection on the arbitrariness of both family history and generic convention seems to throw all the biographical cards in the air, but they then land in the familiar, more or less chronological, protagonistic pattern. The angle of post- and anti-colonial critique opened by these first two pages is carried forward in the colour précis of Orwell’s 1934 debut Burmese Days (34-37), but elsewhere the mode is that of celebrating a hero who, we read, is ›above all an Englishman‹ (103). Of course, this claim sounds more congenial if it’s made by a Frenchman; and reading this tricultural production – the German translation of a French portrait of an uncomfortable English hero – we are reminded of all that Brexit has cost us, and find ourselves wondering what Orwell himself would have made of Cameron and Johnson’s very British coup. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell’s caustic, granular commentary on what it feels like to inhabit, and be inhabited by, the British class system, resonates powerfully today in a post-Brexit Britain ravaged, even before the pandemic, by nearly two decades of Tory austerity. This graphic biography reminds us through word and image ›why Orwell matters‹ (Hitchens 2002), and offers an engaging, medially rich introduction to key biographical, political and literary aspects of the author’s life. If it reads in places like an adventure story, then all the better to return us to the great Orwellian adventure of confronting Big Brother, Newspeak, and Doublethink, the dystopian nightmares from which we struggle to awaken.

Bibliography

  • Hitchens, Christopher: Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
  • Weigel, Sigrid: ›Hinterlassenschaften, Archiv, Biographie: Am Beispiel von Susan Taubes.‹ In: Spiegel und Maske. Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger. Vienna: Zsolnay 2006, pp. 33-48.

 

George Orwell
Aus dem Französischen von Anja Kootz
Pierre Christin and Sébastien Verdier
München: Knesebeck Verlag, 2019
152 pp., 25,00 Euro
ISBN: 978-3-95728-154-8