In Search of "the Whole of England" : Utopian Impulse in Orwell's Coming Up for Air(Kanto Review of English Literature)

抄録

Published in 1939 when war was imminent, George Orwell's novel Coming Up for Air has been regarded as a text which represents the mood of despair at the end of the decade of radical politics. But when closely examined, the novel is aware of the limitations of the nostalgic sentiment that it seemingly embraces, and struggles to present a utopian vision of the wholeness of England towards which it aspires. This essay firstly considers the novel's complex relationship with modernity. The novel expresses its anti-modernism by the trope of "stream-line," which subsumes heterogeneous elements of ban modernization such as Fascism, capitalism and Communism. Despite its ostensible anti-modernism, however, the novel is not completely averse to modernity; rather, it appropriates modernity to reimagine England. The journey by a car leads the protagonist to a perception of "the whole of England," which is based not on the memory of the golden past but on the vision of people living in the present. This vision of England presented n the novel can be understood in relation to Orwell's political ideal of "democratic socialism." But the protagonist finally rejects his vision of England as an illusion. This essay interprets this act of negation not as despair in the face of the crises but as the novel's faithfulness to the modern alienating condition which has made social totality unrepresentable. The novel is motivated by the utopian impulse to reimagine the vision of democratic England which is unreachabel under the present condition.