Orwell and Language
Olivia Yankey, Helene Vincent, Luke
Howley, and Alexandra Elkin
“Politics and the English Language”
Historical/Political Context:
Published in 1946:
–WWII had just ended
–Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster
College
–William Joyce executed for anti-British broadcast propaganda
–First meeting of the UN
Literary Context/Orwell's Life
•His wife, Eileen, dies in 1945, just a year after the couple
adopted a baby boy
•While waiting for publishers to pick up Animal Farm, Orwell
works as a war correspondent in Paris for The Observer
•Animal Farm is finally published in 1945, garnering fame for
Orwell
•In 1946, Orwell begins work on 1984
•His own health begins to decline at this time
Orwell's Argument
•Orwell writes about the bad literary habits and “debased
language” of the time, what he saw as a decline in the
precision and care with which people wrote.
•He suggested that this decline brings with it a negative
impact on the overall consciousness of a society.
•Cites political and economic causes for this collapse of
modern language
“But an effect can become a cause…”
•Highlighted the dialectical nature of the relationship between
language and politics:
–“It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for
us to have foolish thoughts.” (p. 270)
•Suggested that cleaning up the English language is the first
step towards political reorganization
– Explains that concern over the state of the language is
not a foolish or superficial endeavor
The Essay Itself
•Selected five passages to illustrate common problems he finds
with English as it was then written
•All contain a lack of precision and trite imagery
•His “catalogue of swindles and perversions”:
1. Dying metaphors
2. Operators/verbal false limbs
3. Pretentious diction
4. Meaningless words
His Prescription
He offers guidelines to avoid this kind of debased writing (285):
•Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used
to seeing in print.
•Never use a long word where a short one will do.
•If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
•Never use the passive where you can use the active.
•Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
•Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Do as I say, not as I do.
•Orwell mentions that he, too, is guilty of writing this way,
having probably committed some of these infractions within this
very essay.
•How does one reconcile his emphatic list of literary “don’ts”
with the fact that he knowingly commits them himself?
Writing Degree Zero
( Le degré zero de l’écriture)
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
• Written in 1953, translated in
1967
• Barthes first full-length book
• Work of literary criticism
Language, Style, and Writing
Language: the ordered, collective, historical horizon of social
experience
Style: the residue of a given author's biology (body) and biography
(past)
Writing (ecriture): the writer's form, the unique and creative act
Between language and style, the two predetermined necessities that
impose themselves and that the writer may transform but not refuse,
writing emerges as the synthesizer
The Mode of Writing
"A language and a style are blind forces; a mode of writing is an act
of historical solidarity. A language and a style are objects; a mode of
writing is a function: it is the relationship between creation and
society, the literary language transformed by its social finality, form
considered as a human intention and thus linked to the great crises of
history" (14)
In more understandable terms...modes of writing are inextricably
linked to socio-historical factors (history shapes mentality and
consciousness) and he describes these modes as being chosen by the
writer
The Author and the Scriptor
The Author
• The writer as a craftsman "who shuts himself away in some
legendary place, like a workman operating at home [...] devoting
to his work regular hours of solitary effort"
• The lone genius with a kind of power of original imagination
• This figure is obsolete
The Scriptor
• The writer is no longer the focus of creative influence
• A figure of the modern world
• Has no past, but is born with the text
• Lets language speak
Realism
"No mode of writing was more artificial than that which set out to
give the most accurate description of nature" (67)
The combination of formal signs of literature (preterite, indirect
speech, rythm, etc.) and signs of realism (popular speech, strong
language, etc.) does not work well
Roger Garaudy
Realism is to be found in a neutral form of writing that can "achieve
innocence" (Albert Camus- L'etranger)
A Zero Degree
The concept was actually suggested earlier by Jean-Paul Sartre's expression
“L’écriture blanche”
A colorless writing: a "style of absence" which transforms itself into a "neutral term
or zero element"
Deliberately forgoes any elegance or ornamentation
"[Entrust] one's fate to a sort of basic speech" (77)
The goal is to be able to write without style and convey the realities of society
“Writing is then reduced to a sort of negative mood in which the social or mythical
characters of a language are abolished in favour of a neutral and inert state of
form; thus thought remains wholly responsible, without being overlaid by a
secondary commitment of form to a history not its own”(77)
A Zero Degree
Two excerpts from Albert Camus' L'etranger:
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a
telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow.
Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was
yesterday" (Part 1, Chapter 1)
"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had
only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my
execution and that they greet me with cries of hate" (Part 2, Chapter
5)
The Trouble of a Zero Degree
“Unfortunately nothing is more fickle than a colourless writing:
Mechanical habits are developed in the very place where
freedom existed, a network of set forms hem in more and more
the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing appears
afresh in lieu of an indefinite language. The writer, taking his
place as a ‘classic’, becomes the slavish imitator of his original
creation, society demotes his writing to a mere manner, and
returns him a prisoner to his own formal myths” (78)
Orwell & A Zero Degree
Orwell certainly wants to convey the realities of society, but is it the
colorless writing Barthes delineates?
Are Orwell's novels "artificial" as were the novels of the realist
writers like Maupassant and Zola?
Stuart Chase and George Orwell
Orwell’s Views of Chase:
“Stuart Chase and others
have come near to claiming
that all abstract words are
meaningless, and have used
this as a pretext for
advocating a kind of
political quietism. Since you
don’t know what Fascism is
how can you struggle
against Fascism?” (285)
Orwell’s Response to Chase:
“One need not swallow such
absurdities as this, but one
ought to recognize that the
persistent political chaos is
connected with the decay of
language, and that one can
probably bring about some
improvement by starting at
the verbal end.” (285)
Stuart Chase
• 1888-1985
• American economist
• 1917: Federal Trade
Commission
o
Investigation of the meatpacking industry
• “Consumer Literacy”
• 1937: FDR and the New
Deal
• Post-WWII, Cold War:
“Today the citizen can
only save his home, and
his country, by helping to
save mankind.”
“[H]e perhaps more than any other
one person has made economics
interesting and understandable to
everyday people like you and me.”
-1942 magazine article
The Tyranny of Words
• Published in 1938, met with great popular success
• Semantics
o
o
“Abstract words and phrases without discoverable referents
would register a semantic blank, noises without meaning”
(Chase 21)
Orwell’s meaningless words: “The word fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not
desirable’” (Orwell 276)
• Seeks to repair the vagueness and inconsistency of
meaning that result in “bad language”
o
How can we arrive at a given destination by following a grossly
inaccurate map, especially when each adventurer has a map
with different inaccuracies? Better language can clear away
many nonexistent locations which clutter the maps we now
carry”
• Praises scientific language as well-developed and in
Orwell and The Tyranny of Words
• Agreements between Chase and Orwell:
o
Focus on the relationship between new political
developments and linguistic development
 Orwell: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must
suffer” (282)
 Chase: “From 1870 to 1914 in the United States this kind of thing
did not make so much difference. Men were busy overrunning a
continent, and words could not seriously deflect the course of
hustling and impetuous action. But those of us who have lived
through the Great War, the Great Boom, the Great Depression,
and now observe the rise of the dictators abroad are not so easy in
our minds as were our fathers…” (351)
o
“In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics”
 Review of Tyranny: “…The book is not on linguistics, but is a
politico-economic tract” (Kent)
o
Succinct style with effective, easily understandable imagery
 No “dying metaphors” or “pretentious diction”
o
Both admit to some lapses in their own works
Orwell and The Tyranny of Words
• Orwell’s problems with The
Tyranny of Words:
o
Advocates political quietism
 “Confusions persist because we
have no true picture of the world
outside, and so cannot talk to one
another about how to stop them…If
people do not in fact behave as our
ideas of ‘fascism’ expect them to
behave, we are rendered helpless in
dealing with the happenings which
go on under that label” (Chase 352)
o
Chase offers vague advice for
changing the system
 “The promise of the semantic
discipline lies in the broadening of
the base of agreement”
 Call to abandon contemporary
canons of thought and belief and to
Ogden and Orwell
Rubin's Outside the Whale