Orwell, World War I modernism and the Spanish Civil War

Anti-fascist writers in Britain during the Spanish Civil War had to reconcile their representations of this conflict with the collective memory of the Great War. This article explores George Orwell's analysis of this challenge in his memoir of fighting in Spain, Homage to Catalonia (1938), and other essays. Orwell sensed an excess of idealism amongst progressive Britons supportive of the Republic: a failure to acknowledge that this war, no less than its predecessor, involved the degradation, deception and betrayal of common soldiers. His concern lies especially with the way the POUM (Partido obrero de unificacion marxista, 'Marxist unification workers' party') militia, and the revolutionary ideals for which many volunteers were fighting, were being betrayed by the Soviet Union. To make this point, he invokes in his memoir the conventions of the popular anti-war 'war books' of the Great War. In his allusive memoir, the Aragon front recalls the discomforts of the trenches in France; the Communist leadership and its supporters on the home front resemble the Great War's indifferent, incompetent generals and jingoistic 'Old Men'. Orwell also borrows some significant formal strategies from the war books and from the tradition of literary modernism, especially the device of a limited, prejudiced and confused narrator. The function of this device is twofold: to foreground, by example, cultural differences that may weaken the popular front and also to challenge Communist propaganda about a calculated POUMist plot against the Republic. Lastly, the article discusses the ways Orwell's memoir departs from its inter-texts, especially in largely avoiding the mention of 'the pity of war'. I argue that this is because Orwell does not want to fall prey to the syndrome, increasingly common on the Republican side, of stirring up hatred for fascism through atrocity propaganda. In their appeals to emotion rather than reason, he believes, anti-fascists are coming to resemble their totalitarian enemies.