The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Orwell · a personal record of the Spanish war in fourteen chapters · Secker and Warburg, London, 25 April 1938 · scored as the book Orwell published in 1938, its fourteen chapters in his order, on his English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Personal record and political reportage; a war memoir of the front set beside an argument about the press and the party, told in the first person by a witness who says what he could and could not see
Mythos
The stranger met once and made the emblem of a brotherhood; the city of the revolution and the same city fallen; the honest witness hunted by his own side; the fall from comradeship into suspicion; England asleep
Phase
From Orwell’s arrival in Barcelona in late December 1936, through the front, the May fighting and the wound, to his escape over the French frontier in late June 1937 and the train home through southern England
Presentation
Prose in literary form; fourteen chapters in the first person, the fifth and the eleventh given to the parties of the Republican side and to the press accounts of the May fighting, the fifth opened with a warning that the reader may skip it
Register
The plain style at a high pitch: concrete, unrhetorical, exact about the body and the material, carrying fear, comedy and anger without a change of register, and turning to journalism in the two chapters of analysis
Scale
One man’s six months in one corner of a war; the coalition, the party, the police and the press as one witness met them
Governing Proposition
An Englishman arrives in Barcelona in the winter of the revolution, joins the militia of a party of the left, serves on the Aragon front, comes back on leave to find the city turned, is wounded, and escapes over the French frontier while his party is suppressed and its people hunted. The wager of the book is that one man’s limited sight, told exactly and told against the interest of his own side, is proof enough to set against the press of a continent; and that the truth of a war fought by a coalition includes the war the coalition fought against itself, and the lie it told about that war afterwards.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens in the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, at the officers’ table, where an Italian militiaman stands, and Orwell says he will not forget the man’s face. The stranger is the book’s emblem before the book has begun its story: a brotherhood felt across a language, in a war that will not keep it. Orwell returned to the Italian in later prose, which is the evidence that the figure held for him as it holds for the reader.
Orwell arrived in Barcelona in late December 1936, and the city he describes is the city of the revolution, in which, in the words the book is known by, “the working class was in the saddle”. The prose is flat and the exaltation is real, and the second is earned by the first. It is a city in which class seemed abolished. The burnt churches are noted in passing and not entered; the book’s attention is on the people and the militia, and on what a city looks like when it has changed hands.
He serves in the militia of the POUM, one of the parties of the Republican side; the others the book will set out later are the PSUC and the Communists, and the anarchists of the CNT and the FAI. The comedy of the incompetent war runs through the chapters that follow, dry and well timed, and its ironies are never pressed. Secker and Warburg published the book in London on 25 April 1938, in fourteen chapters, less than a year after the events it ends with. It is scored here as Orwell published it, the fourteen chapters in his order.
Movement II
The militia go up to the Aragon front, first at Alcubierre and later before Huesca, and the front is not a battle but a condition. In trench warfare, the third chapter says, five things matter, and the enemy comes last of them, after firewood, food, tobacco and candles. The front is made from things: the candles, the lice, the rifle that will not fire, the rats, the cold. Nothing much happens, and the book says so at length. A reader may find the tedium long; it is the finding, and the subtractive test mostly fails to bite on it, though the accounts of the front repeat themselves in places.
At the head of the fifth chapter the narrative stops. Orwell tells the reader who is not interested in “the horrors of party politics” to skip what follows, and then sets out the parties of the Republican side: the PSUC and the Communists, the anarchists of the CNT and the FAI, and the POUM. The chapter is journalism, and reads as it, with lists of parties and their programmes. Later editions set it, with the eleventh, as an appendix, and the book loses nothing of its sense by the move. That the chapter can be moved without ruin shows it to be the container of the argument rather than its instrument.
The warning itself is a turn. A record that tells its reader where he may stop reading, and elsewhere warns him of the writer’s “partisanship” and his “mistakes of fact”, has made its own limit part of its method. The form is otherwise inherited, the chronological first person of the war memoirs of Graves, Sassoon and Blunden, and of the committed reportage of the 1930s, Orwell’s own The Road to Wigan Pier among it. Its innovations are of candour rather than of structure. What the book will claim to know is what one man saw, and it says so before it makes the claim.
Movement III
At the front the war comes nearer. There is a night attack on the Fascist parapet, in bombs and mud, which rises out of the level of the front chapters without leaving their register; the fear is told as exactly as the cold was. Then leave, and Barcelona again, and the city is turned. The red flags are gone and the well dressed are back. The fall is shown before it is explained: the reader meets the changed streets as Orwell met them, and lives the turn from comradeship to suspicion before he is told its cause.
In May the fighting in Barcelona breaks out among the parties of the Republican side, and Orwell sees it from a roof. He tells what he saw and what he could not see, and he does not claim more. The book’s charge rests on that limited sight. In the eleventh chapter he sets beside it the accounts of the May fighting in the press of the international left, in which the POUM, whose militia had held the line in Aragon, was denounced as a Trotskyist fifth column in Franco’s pay. The gap between the event he saw and the reports of it he read is the book’s subject.
The disclosure is stated as an argument and it holds: inside a war fought by a coalition against fascism, the coalition fought itself, and the stronger party, with Soviet weapons behind it, suppressed the revolution it claimed to defend and lied about it. In such a war truth itself becomes a party matter, and a witness on the left must say so. The eleventh chapter, like the fifth, is written as journalism and stands partly outside the narrative’s law, and historians have since disputed parts of its political judgement. The mechanism it describes, the falsified record, is the part the century confirmed.
Movement IV
Then comes the wound. The wound passage is the summit of the book, of a cold kind, and a model of control: “Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion.” He takes himself to be dying, and the prose records it with calm: he thinks of his wife, and of his anger at leaving the world. He does not die. The book follows him to the hospital, exact about the body as it was exact about the trench.
Then the POUM is suppressed. Barcelona becomes a city of spies and arrests, of the police and the prisons, and the party whose militia had held the line in Aragon is hunted in the city it had defended. The witness himself is now hunted, in the Barcelona where he was welcomed in December. Eileen, his wife, is in Barcelona, and the marriage enters the book slightly, in the city and in the escape.
In late June 1937 Orwell escapes over the French frontier. The order of the book has done its work by now: the front, then the city, then the flight, so that the reader has lived through the turn before the analysis names it, and the analysis has only to confirm what the narrative showed. The comedy of the early chapters and the dread of the last ones are held by one law: the witness tells what he saw and what he knows, and tells it against the interest of his side when the truth requires.
Movement V
The last pages leave Spain. Orwell returns to England, and the train runs through southern England into “the deep, deep sleep of England”: the book ends on the country it was written for, and on a quiet dread. The image is the nearest thing in the book to a built myth, and its dread still carries. It also changes the book’s object in a few paragraphs, from Spain to England, at the last page.
The book was barely read on publication and through the war that followed. From the 1950s, after the fame of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the first American edition from Harcourt, Brace in 1952, with Lionel Trilling’s introduction reading it as a book about a man’s virtue, it has been continuously in print, taught, translated widely, and read as the book in English on the Spanish war. Historians have contested it and defended it; later readers have set its account of the May fighting against the archives. Its reach came late, and much of it came through its author’s later fame.
What it gave that later work is plain in Orwell’s own writing. The falsified record of 1937 is the seed of the falsified history of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” grows from the same ground. After 1945 the book shaped the anti-Stalinist left’s account of the war. It set a pattern that has not been displaced: the honest witness against his own side, who says what he saw, says what he could not see, and warns his reader that he may be wrong. The book’s authority is that warning.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites twice. First, and most plainly, on the political chapters: at the head of the fifth Orwell tells the reader who is not interested in “the horrors of party politics” to skip it, and a book that licenses its reader to skip a chapter has conceded that the narrative does not require it, whatever the record does. Later editions set both analytic chapters as appendices, which confirms that they are separable. Second, the front is long on tedium: firewood, lice, cold, the absence of fighting. Here the test mostly fails to bite, because the tedium is the finding. The spine is required: the revolutionary city, the front, the city turned, the wound, the hunt, the flight, England. Held below 8.0 for the conceded and separable analysis, and for some repetition in the accounts of the front.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure is articulated and it holds. Inside a war fought by a coalition against fascism, the coalition fought itself; the stronger party, with Soviet weapons behind it, suppressed the revolution it claimed to defend, and lied about it. The POUM, whose militia had held the line in Aragon, was denounced in the press of the international left as a Trotskyist fifth column in Franco’s pay. Orwell shows the mechanism at both ends, the event he saw from a roof in May and the reports of it he read later, and the gap between them is the book’s subject. The larger disclosure, which the century confirmed, is that in such a war truth itself becomes a party matter, and that a witness on the left must say so. It earns its height by candour about its own limit, warning the reader of the writer’s “partisanship” and “mistakes of fact”. Held below 9.0 because historians have disputed parts of its political judgement, and because the record is one corner of a war.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The register is plain by design and elevation is rare, but it comes. The opening, the Italian militiaman at the officers’ table in the Lenin Barracks, whose face Orwell says he will not forget, carries a pure, grave feeling for a stranger. The arrival in revolutionary Barcelona has an exaltation the prose earns by its flatness. The night attack on the Fascist parapet, in bombs and mud, rises. The wound is the summit, of a cold kind: “Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion”, and then the calm with which he takes himself to be dying. The close, the train through southern England into “the deep, deep sleep of England”, reaches a quiet dread that still carries. Between these the long stretches by intention do not rise, and the political chapters do not. Several real heights in a mostly level work.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth evoked more than built, as reportage allows, and this is the axis held lowest of the twelve. Some patterns are present and some bear weight. The Italian militiaman becomes an emblem of the brotherhood of the war, and Orwell returned to him in later prose, which shows that the figure held. The arc from the revolutionary city to the city of spies and arrests has the shape of a fall: Barcelona in December, then Barcelona in June, the same streets with the red flags gone and the well dressed back, and the witness hunted where he was welcomed. The witness himself, the man who will not lie for his side, is a figure the book makes and Orwell’s later work turns into myth. What holds the axis here is that the book does not build these into a load-bearing structure: they lie in the order of events, and the reporter keeps them particular. The sleeping England of the close is the nearest thing to a built image.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the war memoir of the Great War, Graves, Sassoon and Blunden, and the political reportage of the 1930s, the committed reportage of the left among it, Orwell’s own The Road to Wigan Pier included. The turn is in the side he turned against: a man of the left, who had fought for the Republic, writing a book whose main charge is against the Communist party and the left press of his own country, in 1938, while the war was still being fought. The stake was real and was paid: the book was barely read on publication and through the war that followed. The form is less a departure: a chronological first person whose innovations are of candour rather than of structure. The warning of partisanship inside the text, and the chapters of analysis set off with a notice that they may be skipped, are a real, if modest, formal turn for the genre. Held below the bar on the form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The form is the first person of a witness who saw one corner, and the book knows that its form is its argument. What Orwell can claim to know is what he saw from the parapet and from the roof, and the whole charge against the press rests on the authority of that limited sight. Change it to a history and the book loses its proof, for a history could only weigh reports against reports. The order, the front, then the city, then the flight, makes the reader live the turn from comradeship to suspicion before it is explained. The cost is the political chapters, which interrupt the witness form with analysis and can be placed elsewhere, as later editions placed them. That they can be moved without ruin shows that this part of the book is container, not instrument. Held at 8.0.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The evidence is long and real. The book has been read for eighty-eight years in at least three ways: as a record of the Spanish war, contested and defended by historians; as the origin of Orwell’s later work, the place where the falsified record and the party lie first appear in his writing; and as a text of the ethics of political witness, returned to in every generation’s argument on the left about loyalty and truth. Each return finds something: Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the American edition of 1952 read it as a book about a man’s virtue; later readers have set its account of the May fighting against the archives. The semantic depth is narrower than a novel’s: the questions the book opens are mostly questions about the events, not about the book, and its surface changes little on rereading. Held at 8.2.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is English prose of the 1930s, the literature of the Spanish war in all its languages, and political reportage after it. The force: the book set the pattern of the honest witness against his own side, and showed that reportage could carry a moral argument about truth itself at the level of literature. It is discounted for delay, since its reach came after 1950, and for breadth, since within the art of the Spanish war For Whom the Bell Tolls and Guernica are larger cultural facts; it is held below the bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the hinge of Orwell’s own later work, the falsified history of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” growing from it; and it shaped the anti-Stalinist left’s account of the Spanish war after 1945.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Eighty-eight years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form takes no charge: the text survives whole as Orwell published it, and the later setting of two chapters as appendices changes the order in most copies now read but loses nothing. Presence was charged at the start and has been strong since. The book was barely read on publication and through the war; from the 1950s, after the fame of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the American edition, it has been continuously in print, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, and it is the book most read in English on the Spanish war. Its surface is fixed to a party quarrel of 1937, a real charge, but the quarrel has outlived its conditions because the book made it exemplary. The early neglect, and the debt of its presence to its author’s later fame, set it at the foot of its band.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. This is the plain style at a high pitch: concrete, unrhetorical, exact about the body and the material, able to carry fear, comedy and anger without a change of register. The front is made from things: the candles, the lice, the rifle that will not fire, the rats, the cold. The wound passage is a model of control. The comedy of the incompetent war is dry and well timed, and its ironies are never pressed. Charged: the political chapters are written as journalism and read as it, with lists of parties and quotations from the press; the narrative of the front repeats itself in places; and some transitions are those of a book written fast. Not the summit of English prose; a high command of one plain style, slightly uneven across the whole.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic squalor of the trench at Alcubierre, with its broken rifles and its lice, and the cold analysis of the PSUC’s campaign in the press in chapter 11. One law governs both: the witness tells what he saw and what he knows, and tells it against the interest of his side when the truth requires. The trench is told as it was, not as the posters had it; the press is weighed against what he saw from the roof. The range is real, from comedy to dread to argument, and it holds. Charged: the shift into analysis is announced and stands partly outside the narrative’s law; and the closing return to England, though earned, changes the book’s object at the last page, from Spain to England, in a few paragraphs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Many orders, held through one man’s six months. War and the body: the front, the wound, the hospital. The state and the party: the coalition, the police, the prisons, the press. Class: the revolutionary city in which class seemed abolished, and its return. Comradeship and the stranger, in the militia and in the Italian. History, as a war in progress and as a record falsified. Marriage, slightly, in Eileen in Barcelona and in the escape. England at the close. They are integrated through the witness. Absent or thin: the sacred, for the burnt churches are noted and not entered; the family; the inner life beyond the narrator’s honesty; and the Spanish themselves as more than a ground. A record of one corner holds what one corner holds.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Made at 8.5. A text that survives whole and has been in print and read for seventy years after an early neglect, the book most read in English on the Spanish war; a disclosure that holds, of a coalition at war with itself and the falsification of the record of that war, shown at both ends, the event and the report; and a plain English at a high pitch, exact about the body and the material, carrying fear, comedy and anger in one register.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: the stranger, the fallen city and the honest witness are evoked in the order of events and kept particular, not built into a structure that bears weight. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 7.8: two chapters of analysis that the book itself says may be skipped and that later editions moved to the back; and a record of one corner that holds what one corner holds, without the sacred, the family or the Spanish as more than a ground. The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 also close the summit: a turn of candour more than of form, and a reach real but late and owed in part to the later novels.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate, 8.2, holds the work in Tier IV of itself; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, published by Secker and Warburg in London on 25 April 1938, in fourteen chapters. The unit scored is the book as Orwell published it, the fourteen chapters in his order. Later editions set the two chapters of political analysis, the fifth and the eleventh, as appendices; that arrangement is named as context and weighed only where it bears on form and survival. The book is prose in literary form, scored as literature. The first American edition followed from Harcourt, Brace in 1952, with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, which is part of the book’s reception and is not scored. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: “the horrors of party politics”, “the working class was in the saddle”, “partisanship” and “mistakes of fact”, the sentence on the explosion, and “the deep, deep sleep of England”. The five things that matter in trench warfare are given in paraphrase. Graves, Sassoon, Blunden and the reportage of the 1930s are named as the book’s inheritance; Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, Trilling’s introduction and the work of historians are the record of its reception, and none is part of the work. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the word count, the time Orwell took to write the book, the publishing history before Secker and Warburg, the size of the first printing and its sales, the editorial history of the later arrangement, the name of the building from whose roof Orwell watched the May fighting, and the particular points on which historians have disputed the book. Citations are by chapter, numbered 1 to 14.