Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In 1942 Orwell wrote that “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.” But in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell also invented many vivid phrases: “Big Brother Is Watching You,” “Two Minutes Hate,” “Thought Police,” “Thoughtcrime,” “Facecrime.” “Doublethink,” “Memory Hole,” “Vaporized” and “Unperson.” These words, which uncannily expressed the ideas and emotions of people living under totalitarian oppression, read like advertising catchwords. They became political shorthand during the Cold War, and remain so today.

  In “New Words” Orwell ventures into the realm of dreams and psychology, argues for the expansion of language and boldly but impractically suggests that “it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary, perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practically unamenable to language.” Just as the French Academy was created in the seventeenth century to preserve the purity of language, so, Orwell argues, “several thousands of people with the necessary time, talents and money” could, by dedicating themselves to this noble task, create new words “for the now unnamed things [intuitions, fantasies, dreams] that exist in the mind.” Through this unrealistic project Orwell hoped to increase understanding through language and reduce “the star-like isolation in which human beings live.”

  “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” considers the influence of history on literature and explains why English writers have shifted from an interest in form over content in the 1920s to the reverse in the 1930s. Minimizing the military, political and social effects of the Great War, which shattered a century of relative peace in Europe and killed ten million men, Orwell argues that it was the Depression and the Second World War that forced writers into “a world in which not only one's life but one's whole scheme of values is constantly menaced.” Detachment is no longer possible and “literature had to become political because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty.” Propaganda has crept into art and aesthetic judgments are now influenced by the author's prejudices and beliefs.

  Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm describes the genesis of his most humorous and wickedly satiric book. As in “Why I Write,” he describes his background—including his five years with the police in Burma, association with the criminal class in Paris and warfare in Spain—to explain his political beliefs. His experience in Spain taught him about the great dangers to clear style and free thought: “how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries” and “the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.” His duty, he felt, was to expose the illusions created by such propaganda, make people “see the Soviet régime for what it really was” and destroy the Soviet myth in order to revive the real Socialist movement. Inspired by seeing a little boy whip a huge farm horse, Orwell imagined a revolution of oppressed beasts and analyzed “Marx's theory from the animals’ point of view.”

  Orwell's lucid, witty and ironic style is perfectly suited to his political allegory of the Russian Revolution. In Animal Farm the actual writing of political slogans takes place after the revolution. The pigs, Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), become literate, reduce the principles of Animalism to seven commandments, and use writing to manipulate the animals and consolidate their political power. As the revolution is gradually betrayed and the pigs replace the oppressive farmer they have overthrown, each of these sacred rules is broken. Finally, the horse Clover realizes that the last and most important commandment—“All animals are equal”—has also been changed to “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.” The most famous phrase in his fable, rewritten by the shrewd, self-serving pigs, combines Thomas Jefferson's fundamental concept in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” with Eve's command to the serpent in Milton's Paradise Lost: “render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior.” The defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish War taught him that “history is written by the winners.” His own minimal achievement, while working as a talks producer at the wartime BBC, was to keep “our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.”

  Several of Orwell's essays explore the conditions that allow or prevent the freedom of expression (and freedom from self-censorship) that's essential for good writing to exist. The polemical “Prevention of Literature” considers the more insidious factors, apart from totalitarianism, that mitigate against the creation of great, or even honest literature. It also anticipates Orwell's portrayal of Winston Smith's job in Nineteen Eighty-Four: rewriting and perverting history in order to adhere to the ever-changing party line. In England, he argues, “the immediate enemies of truthfulness and hence freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all.” All literature is political in an age like his own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties affect everyone's beliefs. In one of his most striking sentences, he insists that a writer must have freedom of thought and oppose the prevailing doctrines in order to create serious work: “to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox…. Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.” The assumption that the act of writing is in itself a political act runs through all Orwell's work.

  In a 1946 review of a book by the novelist Georges Bernanos, Orwell, always ready to expose poor style, noted: “a tendency towards rhetoric—that is, a tendency to say everything at enormous length and at once forcibly and vaguely—seems to be a common failing with present-day French writers.” His classic essay “Politics and the English Language” opposes this trend and forcefully advocates clear language. Orwell's ideas were foreshadowed by Leviathan (1651), the major work of the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who had also attacked the abuse of words, argued that a sane, stable society must have a clear, stable language and believed that pure style was not only good in itself but also a civil duty. Writing during the English civil war, in an elegant and balanced style, Hobbes insisted that clear words benefited society while confused and confusing style could lead to seditious disruption:

  The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definition first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui [delusions]; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their ends, contention and sedition, or contempt.

  Hobbes also observed that the misuse of words and creation of meaningless speech—also the subject of Orwell's essay—were intended to deceive rather than enlighten readers:

  There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the sorts of madness; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before … by the name of absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others from intention to deceive by obscurity.

  E. M. Forster, himself a notable stylist and, in A Passage to India, a major influence on Burmese Days (1934), wrote that in “Politics and the English Language” Orwell “was passionate over the purity of prose, and … tears to bits some passages of contemporary writing. It is a dangerous game … but it ought to be played, for if prose decays, thought decays and all the finer roads of communication are broken. Liberty, he argues, is connected with prose.”

  Orwell begins his practical advice to writers by giving five examples of bad contemporary prose, characterized by stale imagery and lack of precise meaning. He then lists (with convincing examples) four common faults, “a catalogue of swindles an
d perversions” that conceal and prevent rather than express clear thought: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs (including the use of passive rather than active voice and awkward noun constructions rather than gerunds), pretentious diction and meaningless words. He insists that a careful, thoughtful writer will always ask six essential questions about everything he writes:

  —What am I trying to say?

  —What words will express it?

  —What image or idiom will make it clearer?

  —Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

  —Could I put it more shortly?

  —Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?

  It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that he enlivens his essay on the evils of bad writing with a number of striking satirical similes. He compares dead language to tea-leaves blocking a sink, to soft snow blurring sharp outlines, to cuttlefish spurting out ink and to cavalry horses mechanically answering the call of a bugle.

  Orwell's six stylistic rules (he seems fond of the number six) are worth repeating and should be carved in stone above every writer's desk:

  i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

  ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

  iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

  iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

  v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

  As we all know from the speeches we hear every day, it is possible to obey all these rules and write persuasively, with all the appearance of clarity and strength, yet still be an outrageous liar. In his rules for writing Orwell assumes that the author wants to tell the truth. He believed that the consistent and courageous attempt to find the simplest and most direct way of communicating an idea would keep a person honest. In an observation that equally describes government propaganda today, he concludes that in his time “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Perhaps the most appealing quality of this essay is Orwell's daring to suggest that politics doesn't have to be dirty, and that the language we use can be a powerful force for order and understanding, for choosing the right thing to do.

  In his “Imaginary Interview” with Jonathan Swift, published in the Listener in November 1942, Orwell said that “Gulliver's Travels has meant more to me than any other book ever written. I can't remember when I first read it, I must have been eight years old at the most, and it's lived with me ever since so that I suppose a year has never passed without my re-reading at least part of it.” Swift, a major influence on Orwell's ideas about writing, also wrote three important essays about the need to preserve clear style and eliminate corrupt language. In “On Corruptions of Style” (1710)—essential reading for anyone who wants to write good prose—Swift, like Hobbes, followed the tradition of English plain style. He attacked senseless, convoluted “wit” and condemned “words and phrases that are offensive to good sense.”

  Swift's “Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue” (1712) unrealistically hoped to arrest the decline of language and preserve (his editor wrote) “a sanctioned standard language, in order to give permanent life to all written records.” Anticipating Orwell's plan in “New Words” to create an informal academy to study language, Swift proposed a strict English Academy (modeled on the well-established Academy in France) dedicated to eliminating useless words. They “will observe many gross Improprieties, which however authorized by Practice, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded. They will find many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of Our language; many more to be corrected.”

  In his “Letter to a Young Gentleman, lately entered into Holy Orders” (1721), Swift, an old gentleman, long in holy orders, expressed his clearest ideas about style, which he classically defined as “Proper Words in Proper Places.” (In “New Words” Orwell, echoing Swift, defines good style as “taking the right words and putting them in place.”) Swift emphasized clarity, particularly disliked the “use of obscure terms” and urged the young clergyman to address his congregation “in a manner to be understood by the meanest among them.”

  Orwell's “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels” considers “the inter-connection between Swift's political loyalties and his ultimate despair” and “the relationship between agreement with a writer's opinions, and enjoyment of his work.” He discusses the changes in Gulliver's character in the four parts of this rancorous, reactionary and pessimistic book, as well as Swift's hatred of the human body, his paradoxical denunciation of oppression but dislike of democracy, his reverence for the past, lack of belief in religion or progress and his scorn for humanity. For Orwell the most significant aspect of Gulliver's Travels and “Swift's greatest contribution to political thought” is his attack on totalitarianism: “he has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State,’ with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.”

  Swift had a profound impact on Orwell's political fiction. Taking a hint from Swift's rational horses, he idealized the horses in Animal Farm, and transformed Swift's Floating Island of Laputa into the Floating Fortress in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He mentions that books were written by machinery in Gulliver's Travels and in “The Prevention of Literature” says it would “not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” Orwell, like Swift, was a “Tory anarchist,” a revolutionary in love with the past, but he was not a complete pessimist. In “Why I Write” Orwell states: “as long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects.” In “Politics vs. Literature,” by contrast, he emphasizes Swift's inability “to believe that life—ordinary life on the solid earth…—could be made worth living.”

  Orwell owned hundreds of political pamphlets, and in his essay on pamphlet literature, published in 1943, he exclaimed: “the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.” His introduction to a co-edited anthology British Pamphleteers (1948) advocates (like “Good Bad Books”) another minor but valuable kind of writing. Closely connected—in comparative method and argument—to “Politics and the English Language,” it forcefully laments the current decay of English and the corresponding decline of the pamphlet. After defining the topical and polemical pamphlet, rarely concerned with evidence or truth and essentially a protest expressed through exuberant argument and scurrilous attacks, he sums up the horrors of capitalism in a single, rhetorically effective sentence. “Wherever one looks,” he exclaims, “one sees fiercer struggles than the Crusades, worse tyrannies than the Inquisition, and bigger lies than the Popish Plot.” His age (like ours) cries out for political pamphlets but the form, to Orwell's deep regret, has virtually died out.

  Orwell's political point of view informed all his criticism and fiction. “Why I Write,” his retrospective artistic credo, begins with a brief account of his early life, including a description of his first novel, Burmese Days, in order to explain his four great motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. In a letter of 1938 he added, in amusingly cynical American diction, “pulling in the dough.” He might also have mentioned, as he did in a review of John Galsworthy, “some minor trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness,” that gave him the urge to write. He called the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought on the Loyalist side and was shot through the throat, the great turning point in his life. After that, he said, every line of his serious work—and in his view no work could be serious without a political purpose—was written “against totalitarianism and
for democratic Socialism.” His conscious aim was to transform “political writing into an art.”

  Most of Orwell's essays on writing—particularly “New Words,” “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” and “Politics and the English Language”—prefigure the ideas that he dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Fond of making political prophecies and honestly willing to admit his mistakes, Orwell urged readers to keep a diary—as Winston Smith does in the novel—not only to recover and preserve the past, but also to maintain an accurate perspective on the truth: “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.”

  Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Winston Smith is absorbed into the hateful system he'd once opposed, and expresses his anxiety in two kinds of composition. He professionally destroys the work of others while secretly writing his own work. In his job Winston alters the records of the past to fit Party policy. In private, he writes on the creamy paper of an old diary with an old-fashioned pen and ink. The first kind of writing (like Orwell's at the BBC) is mechanical and exhausting, the second (like Orwell's own creative writing) is psychologically liberating, but also sets off disturbing memories and dreams. The first is systematic lying in Newspeak, the second a passionate search for truth in Oldspeak. Orwell contrasts the mindless, bureaucratic attitude Winston needs to do this work with his panic at the blank sheet of paper, his poor handwriting, his mental and emotional confusion when he starts writing for himself. Winston's work forces him to practice “Doublethink,” the ability to hold simultaneously two contradictory opinions which cancel each other out. Winston has to believe that he's rectifying errors, yet also knows that he's falsifying information. Each kind of writing forces him to find a plausible formula to disguise the truth. Winston is manipulated by the system and, in his role of Outer Party intellectual, is also part of the system that manipulates others.