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an excerpt from an article by Edward "The Great Mac" MacIntyre George Orwell, author of such classic 20th Century novels as 1984 and Animal Farm, spent most of his life trying to rid the English language of pretense. Orwell fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; then, back in England, he wrote what many consider his finest documentary novel, Homage to Catalonia, which he described as an attempt to clear up the misreporting coming out of Spain. "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed," he wrote. |
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. . . he wrote what many consider to be his finest documentary novel, Homage to Catalonia . . . |
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The Spanish Civil War changed Orwell dramatically. He now felt he had a purpose–to
make political writing into an art. Later he would write that every line of serious work
he undertook after 1936 was written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. "When I sit down to write a book," he wrote in an essay, "I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a book of art,’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." Orwell had plenty to write about from 1939 to 1945. Convinced that the best weapon against Fascism was cleaning up the English language, he demonstrated again and again how words could be turned on their heads to subtly deceive the reader. The arguments he put forward in the essays he wrote during the war emerged in coarser terms in 1984: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." And, in more amusing terms in Animal Farm: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." |
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exposing the well of swindles and perversions into which he felt the English language had
fallen, Orwell offered numerous examples of how language could be manipulated in his
essay, "Politics and the English language." In one classic example, he took the
well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race
is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill: but time and chance
happeneth to them all." Then he translated that same passage into Modern English: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account." This is an example of the type of "Newspeak" Orwell wrote about in 1984, the totalitarianism of language. Orwell’s primary source for his book was Y.I. Zamyatin’s WE which appeared in 1924 and tells of human existence in "the Single State." This state, ruled by the benefactor, enforces total control over every aspect of mental and physical existence. Orwell, however, did not intend that 1984 should necessarily be a prophecy of the future. Orwell wrote: "My recent novel is not intended as an attack on Socialism. . . but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences." |
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