“I assume the mailbox is a Haldeman reference.”
How about just elaborating a bit?
Huh, I hadn’t even noticed the plusunlife of this thread.
Anyway, if 1984 can be interpreted as anti-Christian as well as anti-Communist, that just means Christianity and Communism have many elements in common. Hardly a newsflash.
Can you give us some evidence? The only mention of religion in the book is when Winston says he’s an atheist (hardly criticism of religion) and a few references about a church or something like that. Orwell himself saw the Anglican Church as a bastion against superstition.
Yeah, I can see interpreting it as being broadly anti-authoritarian, but “an indictment of Christianity disguised as an anti-communist dystopian screed” seems far fetched.
Well, actually, there was a specific on-point religious reference, Part 3, Chapter 2:
If anything, Orwell notes that religious power structures behaved in much that same way as 20th-century totalitarians - but the totalitarians approached the “problem” of heresy in a more scientific way. O’Brien goes on to describe their limitations, which have since been corrected by the novel’s “IngSoc” regime.
Overall, it’s not that the inquisition (i.e. “religion”) is better than communism, but that the inquisition didn’t have access to the same knowledge and technology.
Inquisitions are hardly equivalent to the spirit of true religion. Would Christ have approved of burning people at the stake? :dubious:
“True” religion? Excuse me while I snigger. Even believers of the same religion will draw distinctions among themselves over what is “true”.
Maybe not, but a lot of his self-described followers have been okay with it, over a span of numerous centuries. I figure “Christians” began executing people as soon as they had the power to do so. Find the earliest state or kingdom or fiefdom or tribe or any organized or quasi-organized government that is officially “Christian” and how long it took them to start stoning people, or burning people, or hanging people… I’m sure it’s not long at all.
We’d have to get well into the Enlightenment before a Christian society formally abolishes the death penalty, and then fits and starts through the industrial and information ages, as the religious influence waned.
I know, my point is that by Biblical, Christ-based Christianity there is no place for brutal massacres and forced conversions.
Well that was largely because Emperor Theodosius saw Christianity as a political tool to use to ruthlessly crush his opponents.
And that’s why Biblical, Christ-based Christianity never got anywhere.
And this is but one example among thousands of nominally “Christian” leaders who found that killing enemies (real and perceived) worked better than turning other cheeks and whatnot.
Since this never got answered in the thread, Farenheit 451 was subversive in the sense that it was published during the McCarthy era. I doubt it is even close to controversial these days.
As for Orwell’s politics, some people today might forget there was this little non-aggression pact between the Spanish Civil War and 1948. Darkness at Noon is another example of this type of book.
Two different teachers in middle school assigned us Shirley Jackson stories, “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. While they might not stand up as literary gems, I’d say they were more subversive than anything Bradbury or Salinger ever wrote.
Really? I think Shirley Jackson’s work is definitely considered literary.
Only if he considers it justice.
:dubious:
Actually fairly recently some people challenged the book due to some cussing in it.
I never took marxist literary criticism too seriously. Asserting that texts were taught so as to subvert those very same texts is yet another example of why I never took marxist literary critcism too seriously.
Indeed, nothing “Marxist” should be taken seriously.
I’m confused.
I went to high school in the 1960s – not the liberal, hippie, anti-war 60s, but the uptight, status quo, Midwestrern, leftover from Eisenhower '60s. I was assigned Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Animal Farm, Silas Marner and all the rest of those subversive texts in high school (or even before.)
Did I mention I went to Catholic school, where the teachers didn’t have unions or tenure and could be fired anytime for anything? Did my conservative Catholic school expose us to 1984 as an anti-Christian diatribe, or as an anti-totalitarian warning? Did they force me to read The Merchant of Venice because Shylock was a literary tool to justify anti-Semitism? Was Huck Finn a hero or a villain? Did they make us read Catcher in the Rye (with “fuck” and everything) because it was an archetype of 1950-1960 adolescence, or to mock Holden Caulfield’s lack of religious belief?
Were my English teachers from grades 6-12 trying to subtly undermine the Roman Catholic Chuirch or reinforce it? Jeez, it’s bad enough I had to read all that stuff, now I have to figure out why I had to read it?