The Orwell Prize has recently unfurled their project to post George Orwell’s personal diaries online, in blog form, and in real time, seventy years after each entry was originally written.
Why they’ve elected the blog format and the seventy-year anniversary is left unsaid, but they’re questions that I think are not only interesting but important to consider for a project of this kind. There’s little discussion of the motivations behind the project and readers are asked only to “gather [their] own impression[s] of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries.”
But what happens when (a famous author’s) personal diaries get remediated in blog form?
In the case of Orwell’s diary, it walks and talks like a blog, but it isn’t quite a blog. The site uses a standard template from WordPress, with a double banner– one for the Orwell Prize and the other announcing the site as the “Orwell Diaries” in a sans serif font above an image of a few lines from the diaries. (Speaking of which, I’m curious as to the singularizing of what, in its original form, is plural– will each new diary be presented in a different format or be somehow marked? Or will the blog unify several diaries into one, continuous format?) To the right of the title banners is an image of the author at work at his desk. And running down the far right of the page are links to the about page, archives, categories, and a series of media pieces on the project. The first two posts announce the arrival of the blog, and it is not until the third post that Orwell’s writing begins.
In that post, the diary entry has been transposed almost exactly from Peter Davison’s edition of Orwell’s Complete Works, footnotes included. What’s different is the addition of tags (in this case, “animal” and “snake”) as well as a category (“domestic”), a link to Richard II in Sparknotes, and a place for reader comments. I think, from this and the following few posts currently online, it’s safe to say that the blog format is being used here to replicate the printed book, with a few bonus add-ons.
But because the publishers have decided to release the entries in real-time, I have to think that the intentions for the blog may have been more than just that. By publishing the entries in correlation with the days in which they were written, the blog brings the writer’s thoughts into our time. These aren’t a fossilized and completed set of prestigious memoirs, but rather quotidian reflections just like our own (an impression assisted by the sometimes-banality of Orwell’s entries).
My question is what can be done to enhance the present-ness of Orwell without altering the entries themselves? What font choice would you select? Different fonts to reflect different moods? Would you find a self-reflexive piece of his writing and stick that on the “about” page? What about the banner? Would you include links to the day’s weather forecast in Morocco? What about links to current or contemporary news articles for the more political entries to come? Despite 70 being a nice, round year, I’ve never ceased to be astonished by the prescience of Orwell’s political insights, and how much more relevant this project might be if we brought the author further into our time by associating his personal thoughts with current events–in this case, via links to those events.
Above all, if one is going to remediate Orwell’s work, why not translate it creatively instead of using the web as a book with heightened intelligence?
That said, I think it’s an interesting way to bring Orwell’s diaries to a larger audience, and I’m certainly glad to get a daily fill of his thoughts and observations.