Orwell's Roses

Solnit discusses rhizomatic networks and how they function: In nature, certain plants send out roots and shoots, creating networks of interconnected organic matter; in writing, certain ideas sprout many-webbed connections to other ideas. She implicitly suggests that Orwell’s Roses is a kind of rhizomatic book, wherein certain, specific ideas lead to many other related, yet unique ideas: “Thinking about Orwell’s roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions” (125). She notes that the term “was adopted by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a decentralized or nonhierarchical model of knowledge” (125). This appeals to Solnit because it supports the ways in which she reconsiders Orwell’s work; it’s anti-establishment and nonhierarchical in how it questions authority and rejects conventional wisdom. The metaphor appeals to her too—the idea of rhizomatic networks—because it’s organic, derived from the natural world. This link to the natural world is what draws her to Orwell.

She notes that since the term’s appropriation from biology to philosophy, many new and intriguing discoveries have been made. The idea that plants and trees communicate with each other over distances and in very specific ways is now widely accepted: “[T]he underground mycorrhizal networks sometimes called the wood wide web [...] connect trees to one another in forests, circulating nutrients and information that make some forests a communicating community of not-so-individual trees” (126). Thus, in terms of authorial legacy, a writer in the 21st century can reach out, metaphorically speaking, to a writer who passed away in the mid-20th century; the network of ideas is there, almost as organic as that of the flowers that inspire these writers. Just as “[a] flower is a node on a network of botanical systems of interconnection and regeneration” (189), so too is Solnit’s book another node on a different network that connects to Orwell’s work and attempts to regenerate its ethical tenor.

In part, the history of the English countryside—the country Orwell so clearly admired—is one of exclusion and oppression. While this countryside was already shrinking from the Middle Ages forward, the enclosure acts that were passed over a hundred years, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, completed the process of closing off the public commons to most of the population. The available land wasn’t shrinking; rather, public access to land was curtailed. Solnit describes the effects of this political legislation: “These acts gave to powerful individuals land that had long been collectively farmed, grazed, and administered, erasing villages and villagers and their self-determination and prosperity” (151). This, in turn, led to widespread relocation of rural populations to urban centers to take up often-brutal labors that the Industrial Revolution required. Thus, farmers and villagers who once enjoyed autonomy in the countryside became impoverished and disenfranchised workers—Orwell’s “proles,” from proletariat—whose exploitation supported the aristocracy’s wealth.

Thus, Orwell’s longing for this land—the “Golden Country” of Winston Smith’s youth in 1984—is part of a long history of dispossession, wherein nostalgia becomes the only point of access. The enclosure acts had the additional effect of reinforcing certain moral precepts:

Defining the social order as natural and the aristocracy as rooted in the natural world justified the British aristocracy as they expanded their power and wealth even as the French decapitated and drove out their aristocracy after the 1789 revolution (152).

If nature is the repository of “all that is true and good” (153), then the aristocracy must possess of those moral virtues. At the same time, the aristocracy is exploiting enslaved labor overseas to grow their wealth and support their country homes and lifestyles. The notion that aristocratic claims to land are “natural” and devoid of sociopolitical context survived into Orwell’s day. Further, Solnit suggests that contemporary society is perpetuating the same processes, as evident in the comparable dislocation of the workers in the South American flower industry: “A process analogous to the British enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had made many of them [the factory employees] landless workers in industrialized agriculture” (198). Thus, access to nature and acts of enclosure are always points of political tension and struggle.