Parodists lead tough lives. Reality keeps catching up with them. Consider George Orwell: A Reassessment, a new collection of essays from St. Martin’s Press in which are enshrined “the reactions of political scientists, literary critics, social historians and novelists to the Orwell oeuvre” Had this compendium been decently edited and marketed as a spoof, it would have been every bit as funny as The Pooh Perplex, Frederick Crews’s lethally precise send-up of scholarly literary fashions circa 1963.
The comedy begins with the cast of characters. The papers reprinted in George Orwell: A Reassessment were all delivered at a 1984 colloquium held in Vancouver, British Columbia, and with the sole exception of Bernard Crick, Orwell’s biographer, the contributors are all associated with various Canadian institutions of higher education, the least likely sounding of which is Royal Roads Military College, Victoria, B.C. Their credentials can be collectively summed up by this Pythonesque extract from “Notes on the Contributors”:
Samuel L. Macey is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. His books include an edition of Henry Carey’s Dramatic Works, a volume (with R. G. Lawrence) Studies in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, and he is the author of Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought. His Patriarchs of Time: Dualism in Saturn-Cronos, Father Time, the Watchmaker God, and Father Christmas is to be published by the University of Georgia Press.
Professor Macey’s contribution to George Orwell: A Reassessment
