ABSTRACT
We do not think of George Orwell as a psychological novelist, and on the whole we are correct in that judgment. Orwell does not take us deeply into the inner life of his characters, nor does he deal with exotic psychological types, nor does he spend much time linking personal history to later behavior. At times he could be dismissive toward those who were in his view inappropriately "psychological." In his discussion of Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure he comes down hard on the novel's major idea, "that revolutionary activity is the result of personal maladjustment." That may be so, Orwell says, indeed it probably is so, but so what? "Actions have results irrespective of their motives." To be sure, he would sometimes use similar explanations when it suited his purposes, but most of the time he kept psychology firmly in its place. In his essay on P. G. Wodehouse, writing on what it is that led Wodehouse to broadcast for the Germans during the war, he seems to eschew any speculation on Wodehouse's personal motives, speaking instead of his "mentality," by which he means the author's limited and antiquated understanding of reality. It is a cognitive view of Wodehouse rather than a psychodynamic one. And in his many, many acerbic and disgusted observations of the perfidy of intellectuals, their appetite for the totalitarian state. I cannot recall a single comment having to do with their inner motivations, individually or collectively. Perhaps there are some we can find in that vast body of work, but it is fair to say that these are occasional. If Mr. Jones, who was once a Mosley Fascist, and later a member of the Communist party, and later still a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, now announces that he has given up politics and religion to become a vegetarian, Orwell may make note of that history, but only for what it reveals about the man's habits of mind—that is, his way of thinking—rather than for what it may say about his inner conflicts or his mental health. That reticence is refreshing, living as we do in a time and place simply besotted with psychology and psychologizing—much of it gratuitous, superficial, and vulgar.
