Essay: George Orwell’s Writing: a Criticism of Language

A few years ago I took an Athabasca University course in Intermediate Composition. I thought that it would interesting to convert a few of the assignments into blogs. 

This assignment was a research essay and I wrote a general comment on the writing of George Orwell:

The English author George Orwell campaigned for every person’s right to free speech and press freedom, yet he did not see everybody’s writing as having equal beauty, clarity and truth. As he might have written, but apparently did not, all writing is equal but some is more equal than others. His essay Politics and the English Language provides suggestions to improve not only political writing, but all kinds of written English. He provides examples which are pulled apart so the entrails can be examined to determine possible improvements. Upon examining a few of his other published works we see that while his logic could be gullible and fuzzy, his writing, especially his political writing, was normally plain, clear and full of meaning.

In Orwell’s essay (Orwell, Politics) he deplores writing created carelessly without expressing clear thought. In particular, he singles out “Operators or verbal false limbs” which are defined as phrases such as “render inoperative” or “militate against” that a lazy author might choose instead of a simple single word such as “break” or “stop” (120). He preaches against “Pretentious diction” including “banal statements… given an appearance of profundity” (120). Another short section titled “Meaningless words” (121) warns that in certain kinds of writing “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning”. He points out the debased language used by political speech writers who defend the indefensible through mechanical repetition of familiar phrases (125). Finally, he provides six rules for writing to prevent “bad English”. (See Appendix 1) While the emphasis is on political writing – and he specifically states that he had “not here been considering the literary use of language” (128) – his rules and precepts can be applied anywhere that language is meant to express meaning.

It is easy to find published criticisms of Orwell’s work that provide bibliographical detail, ponder the hidden meaning of his plots, discuss his political thinking and then compare his satire with that of Swift. It is more difficult to find criticism that discusses his choice of phrasing and words. A welcome exception is Anthony Daniels’ critical article on Homage to Catalonia which was Orwell’s personal memoir about the Spanish Civil War. Daniels praises Orwell’s writing as being “almost always lucid, never pretentious or wilfully obscure, and gives the impression that what the author is trying to communicate is more important to him than the mere fact that it is he who is communicating it.” (Daniels) Daniels then points out that “he often lacked the imagination to see the consequences of what he said, he accepted political clichés uncritically, not-withstanding his brilliant essay on that very subject”. (Daniels) He points out places in Catalonia where Orwell accepts children fighting as soldiers, accepts leftist political dogma on faith without reason and accuses Orwell of producing “just as much dialectical claptrap as his opponents”.(Daniels)  I noticed some of these trends myself.

Down and Out in London and Paris was his first published book. It is a first person narration based on Orwell’s observations of the working-classes of Europe during a period of brutal economic conditions. It starts with stories gleaned from the weeks he spent labouring in the dungeon-like bowels of several Parisian hotels and restaurants. It concludes with his adventures in London where he slept in quite horrid conditions as imposed by charities and local government councils before they would provide basic support to the indigent. Some of the chapters consist solely of some particularly interesting story that he overheard while drinking at a local bar. The prime example is Chapter II which has the motif of someone named Charlie relating his sexual attack “like a tiger” on a young woman in a Parisian brothel. Orwell relates this tale without criticism or comment “just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter” (Orwell, Down and Out 12). During the course of the book, the author shows the essential goodness of the people that he associates with, but then he casually relates tales of greedy immigrants; especially Jews. Reading from a modern perspective, I cringed when I wrote read a multi-cultural story which concludes with “After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian’” (75).

This book has plain and outspoken language that is quite unusual in a main-stream book published in 1934. He offers some clear references without condemnation to the activities of those he refers to as “nancy boys”(169); and even though most swear words are reproduced as '——' there is even a story based on a fight which started when one man miss-hears another say “Bolshevik” when he really said “Bullshit”. (206) 

It is interesting to compare the language as transcribed from the low-life characters he meets in Paris with that recorded in London. In Paris he translates the French words of his companions in standard plain English with only an occasional italicized Mon Dieu or Merde inserted for local colour. There is little attempt to distinguish class or origin by the manner of speaking. However, when relaying the speech of his English characters, he takes care to plug them into their class and social position by carefully reproducing their accent and choice of slang words.

Some of the most interesting chapters are short political essays. Near the end, in Chapter XXXVI, he discusses drudgery and lack of worth in most common labour.  He writes about the satisfaction of producing one’s own food on a farm versus government make-work schemes.  This concern over the value of a person’s labour is also a major theme in Animal Farm which was first published a dozen years after Down and Out. Many have seen Animal Farm as only as an allegory about the events of Soviet Russia. But it can also be read in a more general way as a treatise on the way that any dictatorship or oppressive regime controls and debases language.

In the Introduction to the Everyman’s Library Edition of Animal Farm, Julian Symons writes that “the telling of unpalatable truths was to Orwell a kind of duty… it was at times also a pleasure”(Intro, Animal Farm xii). Symons says that “his gift could best be employed in narratives where the people were symbols rather than realistically drawn characters”. (xix)

Some of the best writing in Animal Farm is political speech writing. Early in the book is a centrepiece political speech by the old boar named Major.(Orwell, Animal Farm 3-6) Using short plain words and concepts he summarizes the life of animals: “Let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious and short”; and then asks rhetorically, “But is this simply part of the order of Nature?” He then proceeds to his main point “Man is the only real enemy we have”. Finally he drives it all home by providing direct examples relevant to individual cows, chickens and horses as to how much better their lives would be if men were not stealing their milk, eggs and foals. The words are plain and the precepts are simple: “Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers”. During the course of the book, this superb multi-page speech is reduced to a flock of sheep bleating “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad”.

In conclusion, we see that Orwell was capable of accepting common political dogma as truth without logical reason to do so. In Down and Out he relates stories from the lower classes without the criticism they often deserve.  In Animal Farm, by the end of the book there is a sense that everything the pigs do must be bad; just as Major earlier presented everything human as essentially bad. The plot allows little room for compromise or pure logic. But when George Orwell wrote his political essays—even when they are found in the chapters of a novel—the language is plain and clear with sentences that are stirring and memorable.

Appendix 1

The rules provided in George Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language are:

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.

ix: 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.

 
Bibliography

Daniels, Anthony. “Orwell's ‘Catalonia’ revisited.” New Criterion (25.6) Feb. 2007: 11-20.

Meyers, Jeffrey.A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. London, England: Thames and Hudson, 1975

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. London, England: Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1945.
(Introduction by Julian Symons in Everyman’s Library Ed copyright 1993)

—. Down and Out in Paris and London. London, England: Victor Gollancz, 1933

—. “Politics and the English Language.” The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose. Ed Roberts, Tammy, et al. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. 117-129.
(Also available online at http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html)