A day all about George

When­ever an his­tor­i­cal fig­ure is as­so­ci­ated with a place, things can get out of hand. Fa­mous fig­ures at­tract at­ten­tion and it is only nor­mal that an in­flux of vis­i­tors keen on see­ing birth­places, arte­facts and re­mains will lead to at­tempts at ex­ploit­ing the sit­u­a­tion for fi­nan­cial gain.

I haven't been in years, but the last time I was in Strat­ford-upon-Avon there was a cer­tain Dis­ney-like at­mos­phere to the ubiq­ui­tous ref­er­ences to Shake­speare, and it would not sur­prise me if you were to find a ‘Ham­let sand­wich' in a local pub called the ‘Bard's Head', which may look like it was opened in the 17th cen­tury but which in fact was a local green­gro­cers only a few years ago.

Cash­ing in is only human. How­ever, too much of it and you run the risk of triv­i­al­is­ing such his­tor­i­cal links. So, it is good to see that so far in Barcelona we have been spared the ‘Ye Or­well Arms' au­then­tic Eng­lish pub or tours of the Corte Inglés to show us where Or­well used to buy his Playsta­tion games. Clearly, Or­well is not a fig­ure of the stature of Shake­speare or George Wash­ing­ton, for ex­am­ple, but he was the au­thor of Nine­teen Eighty-Four, An­i­mal Farm, and cru­cially for us, Homage to Cat­alo­nia. What's more, for your av­er­age per­son, Or­well al­most sin­gle-hand­edly rep­re­sents the phe­nom­e­non of ide­al­is­tic for­eign fight­ers mak­ing the trip to Spain in the 1930s to de­fend free­dom and democ­racy in the face of Fas­cist ag­gres­sion in a bru­tal war that was a pre­cur­sor to the show­down with Hitler's Nazis.

In this sense, Or­well is very im­por­tant to Cat­alo­nia and it's good to see he has his own com­mem­o­ra­tion, Or­well Day, on June 8. As you can see from our ar­ti­cles on pages 42 and 43, Or­well Day in­volves the CCCB and Pen Català, and in­cludes an his­tor­i­cal walk­ing tour as well as a guest talk from New Yorker jour­nal­ist and writer, George Packer.

Not too much and not too lit­tle, with se­ri­ous yet en­joy­able com­mem­o­ra­tive ac­tiv­i­ties ac­ces­si­ble to any­one with a gen­uine in­ter­est in the au­thor and his re­la­tion­ship to the city. On the one hand, the walk­ing tour re­traces Or­well's steps in the city he de­scribes in Homage to Cat­alo­nia, a place di­vided by po­lit­i­cal strife, where rival groups snipe at each other from recog­nis­able land­marks. As a writer and a thinker, it is also apt that Or­well Day be cel­e­brated with a pre­sen­ta­tion on his jour­nal­ism from a recog­nised staff writer of a pres­ti­gious in­ter­na­tional pub­li­ca­tion like the New Yorker. Or­well Day is proof that not every­thing has to be done wear­ing a foam fin­ger.