That voice—once you’ve heard it, how do youget it out of your head?” So writes Keith Gessenin his introduction to this new collection ofGeorge Orwells critical essays. Like manyadmirers before him, Gessen—himself a livelyand effective critic as well as a novelist—paystribute to Orwell’s writing as “clear,” “plain,”“sharp,” and “strong.” In doing so, he registersthe influence, on yet another generation, ofone of literature’s most famous prose stylists.

Orwell has been around a lot in the pastfew years, in part because of the recentpublication of Peter Davisons awe-inspiringcomplete edition, but also because he survivesas an embodiment of intellectual integrityand democratic vigilance, even after the endof the Cold War. Orwell is still, to use his owndescription of Dickens, a writer “well worthstealing.” Christopher Hitchens, for one,agrees, having tried to appropriate him for hiscampaigns against both “Islamofascism” andhis former comrades on the left.

All Art Is Propaganda was compiled byNew Yorker staff writer George Packer, who,as a powerful opponent of America’s occupationof Iraq, understandably looks to Orwellas a fellow “essayist with a cause.” (This phrasecomes from Packer’s foreword, which makes acase for the best kind of journalistic writing intimes of “partisanship and upheaval.”) Thevolume brings together pieces Orwell wrote onliterature and art in the 1940s, but what isstriking, if not surprising, is just how saturatedwith political commentary these cultural essaysare. Lurking within almost all of them isOrwell’s wartime and postwar obsession withencroaching totalitarianism, and the weaknesseshe thought would ensure its arrival.“We are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships,”he writes in his celebrated 1940essay about Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale.”Then adds ominously, “The autonomous individualis going to be stamped out of existence.”

There was, he believed, no “keeping outof politics,” whatever he was writing about.Several well-known essays in this collectiontake the form of Orwell scrutinizing somethinghe had grown up with—Dickens, boys’comics, Kiplingand working out thepolitical influence they are likely to have had,on him and in general. Dickens, he decides,is a classic 19th-century liberal; one whoprefers moral to political revolution (a “changeof heart” man). But the final sentence of hisanalysis strikes a strange note: Orwell laudsDickens as “a free intelligence,” which makeshim “a type hated with equal hatred by all thesmelly little orthodoxies which are now contendingfor our souls.” This is literary criticismplayed for high stakes.

In the same essay on Dickens he saysthat “every novelist has a ‘message,’ whetherhe admits to it or not, and the minutest detailsof his work are influenced by it. All art ispropaganda.” This isn’t as narrow as it sounds.Orwell mostly means that all art comes fromsomewhere and expresses a particular worldview;he is arguing against naive aesthetesand others who believe they are ideologicallyneutral. Yet he holds tight to the notion of “afree intelligence,” and constantly asks whata writer might do to keep literature alive in atotalitarian world.

Orwell was “intrigued” by Henry Miller’slack of interest in the Spanish civil war: it wasthe reverse of his own instinct, yet he preferredMiller’s rebellious quietism to the Communist-tingedliterature of the 1930s (Auden,Spender, Edward Upward), with its deferenceto the party line. As Gessen says, the messageof “Inside the Whale” is that “while all art ispropaganda, it needn’t necessarily propagandizesomething correct. The important thing isthat the writer himself believe it.”

Salvador Dalí represents another kindof escape, not into quietism, but into “wickedness.”Orwell detested the painter—in whosecharacter he felt that “the bedrock decencyof a human being does not exist”—not onlyfor his “immoral” work, but because heabandoned France in 1940 for the US. Theessay on Dalí also casts Orwell in an unflatteringlight, as too much of le bloke moyensensuel (to quote Stefan Collini), and assomeone who filters culture rather too easilythrough political biography.

But there is much else in this collectionto admire: the marvelous anthropologies ofboys’ comics and dirty postcards confirmOrwell’s position as a founder of culturalstudies. There are essays on Graham Greene(too Catholic) and Gandhi (too vegetarian).And always worth rereading is the classic“Politics and the English Language.” Set asidethe essay’s original context of a dawning one-partystate: political language in the McCain-Obama age is as full as ever of “euphemism,question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Gessen rightly points to the humor inthese invigorating essays, and justly praisesOrwell’s “funny, brutal, dry, destructive”words. We know his faults (so macho, somuch “decency”), and almost every one ofhis arguments begs opposition. Yet the voiceremains inside one’s head, bracing as wellas seductive. As Gessen says, it feels like thetruth, even when it isn’t.

"All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.