What would George Orwell make of the series of conflicts entirely bloodless between American President Donald Trump and the sections of the American media and the so-called “Fake news”. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell expressed in one of his images, that of the whale and you could understand the society or the world being swallowed up like Jonah. According to Norman Mailer, a fellow Connoisseur with Orwell, of life’s olfactions, there are not three smells in the whole Hemingway oeuvre the three rich scene setting aromas in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith escaping the April cold through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, where the hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. On the seventh floor of his flat Winston pours himself a reviving swig of victory gin which gave off a sickly and oily smell as the Chinese rice-spirit.
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there”, George Orwell.
Orwell was plain talking and truth-telling author. The hero Winston Smith works for Oceania’s paper of record. “The Times”, it is called in the novel, Orwell wrote for David Ashton’s Observer as there was no love lost between the broadsheets. Winston’s paper is Hand-in-glove with the Ministry of Truth, and his day job was to falsify, to manufacture alternative facts.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in his last years which ends pessimistically with Winston killing time until it suits the state to kill him. Orwell an optimist fought in Spain alongside anti-Stalinist Marxists and anarchists, whom he thought as glorious losers.
Orwell’s socialism is a battleground, and his political thought is commonsensical and the Orwellian smell test would diagnose the malaise of socialism in 1936 nose-first.
Orwell who claimed he would have preferred to live 200 years ago with his fellow Tory-anarchist Swift as he loathed 20th-century mechanical smells.
Orwell’s nose can do even more, critically it knows what is right and what is wrong.
Orwell’s Nose by John Sutherland published by Reaktion £15