Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nathan Waddell, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham
Like many of us, George Orwell saw January as a month to be endured rather than enjoyed. You can picture him steeling himself against its cold, gloom, rain, frost and wind.
And not only because of his ailing, vulnerable body, which was ravaged for so many years by respiratory malfunction. But also because grimacing defiance is the posture January tends to bring out in people. Orwell wasn’t an exception. His attitude to January is soothingly familiar yet peculiarly his own.
At one point in Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), the protagonist Gordon Comstock meets his girlfriend Rosemary under some railway arches on “a horrible January night”. There’s “a vile wind” that screeches round corners and flings dust and torn paper into their faces.
In Animal Farm (1945), January’s “bitterly hard weather” makes the earth “like iron” and stops the creatures from working in the fields.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) transposes these imagined Januaries to other points on the calendar. It begins on a “bright cold day in April”.
As in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a “vile wind” whirls dust and scraps of paper into the air. The sameness between the books isn’t mere repetition. On the contrary, I think that it subtly evidences January’s tenacious impact on Orwell’s mind.
One of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s concluding episodes takes place on “a vile, biting day in March” when the grass seems dead and the earth is “like iron”, just as it is in Animal Farm. These are moments following long, hard winters, and it’s no accident that the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, suffers through a long period of torture in the Ministry of Love in the year’s coldest, bleakest months.
Writing about the weather for the Evening Standard newspaper in 1946, Orwell noted that January and February are particularly difficult to bear – at least for those in colder regions. This is when rooms get chilly and pipes tend to freeze and burst. Remove January and February from the calendar, he claimed, and where the weather is concerned the English “should have nothing to complain about”.
Nevertheless, Orwell knew that winter was an indispensable adversity, the rest of the year depending on its burdens. Tasty fruit and scrumptious vegetables need “rain-sodden soil” and the slow arrival of spring to develop their flavours, just as England’s ordinary flowers – primroses, wallflowers and daffodils – thrive after frost and cold.
Take away the contrast between the months and they become less special. There’s a time for chilblains and noses that run endlessly in chilly weather, Orwell insisted, and heat and sweat have their place, too. We need January to enjoy July (and, for some, vice versa).
The arrival of spring
In his brilliantly titled essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946), Orwell reflected on the ostensibly “miraculous” arrival of spring after the bitter winters of the preceding five years – a time during which the climatic afflictions of January, February and March were made harder still by the burdens of the second world war.
It had been difficult to believe that spring would come, and it had been near-impossible to think that the conflict would end. And yet: hostilities ceased, spring arrived.
Orwell thought that January could be “beastly”, as he put it in his novel Coming Up for Air (1939), but he also argued that winter is a necessary trial: a time of temporary retreat ahead of release and recuperation. The war could have gone either way.
Spring, however, is not so fickle. The broader miracle is not that spring delivers warm weather and hope, Orwell claimed, but that nature’s rhythms guarantee their advent. The predictability of January’s beastliness matters because it points to the cyclical logic of the seasons themselves.
The shift from January into February and then into March and April is a progression that in Orwell’s view reveals an absolute limit to authoritarian power. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories,” he wrote in Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, “the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the Earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it”.
It matters to feel the chill, in other words, because in feeling it we glimpse a structure in nature that remains away and apart from human influence. In an unexpected manner, the revolving seasons prove that those who’d like to bring the world to heel are themselves subject to natural laws they cannot change, and which make them forever inferior to a cosmos indifferent to their arrogant cravings.
Orwell never wanted to be sentimental about nature, or about the seasons. But he did think that seasonal cycles tell us important things about our dreams, complicating our myths of power and control.
Can January be wished away? No. And for Orwell it’s precisely because it can’t be wished away that it means something good. He never quite put it in these words, but he meant to say that January is our friend.
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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Nathan Waddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. What January taught George Orwell about control and resistance – https://theconversation.com/what-january-taught-george-orwell-about-control-and-resistance-272860
