Mr. Charrington's junk shop: T.S. Eliot and modernist poetics in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' - character in book by author George Orwell

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1997 by Patricia Rae

In preserving the "sense of history," in particular, Eliot's work seemed to Orwell a valuable alternative to the denial of history endorsed by the leftist intelligentsia: both indirectly by their support for Stalin, whose regime sustained itself by radical rewritings of the past,(7) and directly by their frequent call throughout the 30s to abandon nostalgia for dreams of a utopian future. A feeling for the past, and particularly for national tradition, seemed to Orwell to be especially important in wartime, as a source of solidarity and strength (see Sherry 93).

Scholars of the Orwell/Eliot relationship generally find that Orwell's approval of the poet grew steadily after his disenchantment with Soviet communism during the Spanish Civil War.(8) His respect for Eliot is said to have deepened despite two events that might have disrupted it: the publication of the first three of the profoundly Christian Four Quartets in 1942 and Eliot's rejection of Animal Farm in 1944. For Alldritt, Sherry, and Zwerdling, this respect is reflected in Orwell's growing enthusiasm for modernist poetics, an enthusiasm ultimately, in their view, informing the style of Nineteen Eighty-Four.(9) But Mr. Charrington suggests that a very different picture emerges of how Orwell viewed Eliot - and modernist poetics - at the end of his life. The shopkeeper's brutal betrayal of Smith suggests that, by the time he wrote his last novel, Orwell deeply regretted his enchantment both with the poet and his poetry.

Charrington is to Winston Smith as Eliot is to Orwell: a prospective solution to a deficit of history. Smith is initially drawn to Charrington because of one especially intolerable policy in totalitarian Oceania: that of rewriting, or at worst annihilating, the past. In his post in the records department of the Ministry of Truth, Smith's chief responsibility is to destroy or alter archival material at odds with party dogma: No document is to retain any mention of any political alignment other than the present one, any pronouncement or prediction of Big Brother's at odds with current truth, or any references to political prisoners who have been "vaporized" (32). Above all, no evidence must survive to suggest that a higher standard of living was enjoyed in the past than is enjoyed now: The party ensures political stability by making historical comparisons impossible.(10) Smith deposits offending documents in slots in the office wall known as "memory holes," whence they are "whirled away on a current of warm air to ... enormous furnaces ... hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building" (29).

The problem with Smith, however, is that he hasn't yet mastered the mental discipline known as "double-think": He can't entirely forget what he has altered, or that he has altered it.(11) He is haunted by the memory of a photograph he once destroyed: a picture of three rebels - Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford - whose details definitively disproved the party's official account of their lives. Like the protagonist of The Waste Land, Winston faces the wasteland of Oceania burning with "memory and desire," both nostalgic for, and intensely curious about, the past: