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Art1, Politics and Language in George Orwell :( with special reference
to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Neerav Dwivedi
Presently teaching at Ram Lal Anand College
Department of English
Delhi University
Delhi
The paper attempts to look at Orwell’s take on the issues of “art” and “politics” and how the two
often intertwine. In doing so, the paper plans to look at the dialectical relationship there is between
“life” and “art”, “form” and “content”, while keeping in mind how the scale, generally, tends to tip
either way. There is an attempt, here, to look at how this dialectic works in Orwell, the way
Eagleton looks at it, and also glance at Ranciere, whose conception of the “politics of literature”
appears to be quite different from that of the other two. The project entails analyzing the connection
Orwell makes between the “decay of language” and political chaos, and looking at how language is
deployed for certain political ends, while studying Animal Farm and Ninety Eighty-Four.
Fundamental issues in art and philosophy, as also perhaps elsewhere, appear to defy a definitive
resolution. The nature and the final cause of art, for example, remain as thorny as they were in
Greek antiquity. At the root of the problem is art’s paradoxical relationship with life: art isn’t life
and yet life it is. This relationship of correspondence with, and deviation from, life/nature/reality is
variously reflected in mimetic and expressive theories of art.2 ‘Copyism’, with its claims to exact
representation of life, and ‘aesthetic autonomy’, with its heterocosmic pretensions aren’t a whit
1
Art, here, refers to verbal art/literature as well as all art as distinct from ‘nature’/’life’/’reality’.
Art as pure “correspondence”, even if possible, would be mere “duplication”, hence meaningless; there’s
no sense in going to art for what’s already available in life. But art lacking all “correspondence” would be
equally “meaningless” – something like mathematics – in that it would escape the category of art
altogether. Pater’s “All art aspires to the condition of music” can then be seen as not so much an advocacy
of pure form as an appeal against excessive mimeticism. The significant word here is “aspires”.
“Correspondence” can range from realism to naturalism to symbolism but can be neither total nor nonexistent. All “correspondence” is more or less expressive in that there’s a human agency behind it.
Similarly, no expression can be exclusively personal; for it necessarily reflects life/extra-personal reality.
“Expression”, in a broad sense, can range all the way from realism/naturalism to Romantic personalism to
symbolism. For a dialectical theory of literature, see Graham Hough, An Essay in Criticism, Duckworth,
1973.
2
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immune from the ‘dual’ relationship; they’re merely overdone modes of emphasis, hence blatantly
partial.
All art is more or less ‘impure’ in that it is forced to have some truck with the ‘world’ or ideas.
The art of literature is, however, “splendidly impure” in that it is based on “the ineluctable fact of
being in words.”3 Since words are “primarily conceptual” and carry “connotations of feeling”4,
social and rational meaning comes trailing behind. Literature “thus often tends to aspire, not to the
condition of music (Pater’s ideally pure art) but to that of non-artistic discourse.”5 This doesn’t,
however, apply to poetry because it may have much more ‘image’ than prose may, and if any verbal
art may at all shed ‘discourse’ and aspire to music, it has to be poetry. All this doesn’t look terribly
difficult in theory, but in practice it’s hard to find two critics who’d agree on the exact proportion of
image and discourse, form and content in a work.
George Orwell, a “ferociously political writer”6, is also torn between the claims of life and art.
Orwell was primarily concerned with exposing social and political inequities, and can be seen as
breaking away from the previous generation of writers – those who identified with the aesthetic
movement, with its belief in “art for art’s sake”, and those who identified with the naturalist
movement “which was interested in the various forces that drove people to behave in the ways that
they do”.7 Both these “movements” did little to help Orwell’s interest in “making things better”. For
the former is engrossed in its own “world”, -“independent, complete, autonomous”8 – while the
latter is resigned to determinism.
For all this theoretic muddle, Orwell is at one with his generation of writers – Pearl S. Buck, John
Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, and Aldous Huxley – in their feeling an “obligation” to “use their words
to try to better the world”.9 These writers had seen the destruction wrought by World War I and
were watching Hitler consolidate power in Europe before triggering World War II and were well
aware that “politics had very real, and often tragic consequences.” Believing that art could play an
influential role in society, they sought to enact fundamental changes through their writings. Such is
Orwell’s oeuvre that William E. Cain is led to comment that “in fact, the aesthetes would have
3
Lawrence Lerner, The Truest Poetry: An Essay on the Question What is literature? Hamish Hamilton Ltd,
1960. 221.
4
Yvor Winters, In Defence of Reason, Univ. of Denver Press, 1947. 11.
5
R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism, Methuen Company Ltd, 1969. 17.
6
Kim E. Becknel, Bloom’s How to Write About George Orwell, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2010. 51.
7
Ibid. 51-53.
8
A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1965. 5.
9
Becknel, Bloom’s How to Write About George Orwell, Bloom’s Literary Criticism. 51
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claimed that Orwell’s writing was “not art at all. From their perspective, what he wrote was
journalism at best, propaganda at worst.”10
Orwell may not have much of a flair for theory but he does manage a deft analysis of how a
writer is ‘determined’ by the age and yet remains “free”. He may have been “forced” into
pamphleteering but he retains his freedom to complain against writers like Auden, Spender, and
MacNeice who were “didactic political writers, aesthetically conscious of course, but more
interested in subject matter than technique.”11 And he retains his freedom to be critical of the
absence of “literary qualities in the literary sense” in the Marxist criticism of the time by people
such as Christopher Caudwell and Edward Upward which looked at every book “virtually as a
political pamphlet”, primarily interested in digging out its social and political implications.12
However, Orwell is absolutely clear about the “political purpose” of his writing. And he explains
himself at some length, “…using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push
the world in a certain direction to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should
strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should
have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”13 This forthright view is nuanced as
well, in that it uses “political” in the widest possible sense and takes care to emphasize that the
“four great motives of writing” are, often, at war with one another and how “they must fluctuate
form person to person and from time to time.” Orwell knows himself enough to say that “I am a
person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth.”14 The fourth motive would,
however, be outweighed only if, as Orwell clarifies, he were living in a “peaceful age”. But if the
writer were living in “tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own”, the political motive, the
implication is unmistakable, would probably outweigh the rest of the motives.15
10
William E. Cain, “Orwell’s Essays as a Literary Experience”. John Rodden (ed). The Cambridge
Companion to George Orwell, Cambridge University Press, 2007. 64.
11
Orwell, “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda”, 1941, www.google.com. Web.
12
This period, itself, is to be seen as being in sharp contrast to the period immediately before it, when one
can see the typical writers of the 1920s – Eliot, Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce (“the best of them all”)
putting the main emphasis on technical innovations. Thus, the prevailing outlook was that form was more
important than subject matter, though there were exceptions like George Bernard Shaw. The later change in
the attitude to literature should be seen as triggered by the changing social and political conditions which
put a stop to any kind of intellectual dilettantism that might have been possible in a “peaceful age”. (Ibid. )
13
Orwell, “Why I Write”, 1946, www.google.com. Web.
14
The four motives are – Sheer egoism, Aesthetic enthusiasm, Historical impulse, and Political purpose.
‘Aesthetic’, as used here, doesn’t carry the weight of its technical entailments such as ‘disinterestedness’,
‘intransitivity’ and the like. It refers here to the “fascination with words and phrases which appeal to him
for non-utilitarian reasons”; and with a certain kind of “typography, width of margins, etc.” (Ibid.)
15
Ibid.
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One doesn’t, then, have to take a simplistic view of Orwell’s belief in the “inevitability” of his
political orientation; it’s clearly not a case of plain determinism. As he wrote in “The Frontiers of
Art and Propaganda” (1941) – “You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are
dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat…(Thus)
literature had to become political,
because anything else would have entailed intellectual
dishonesty”16 (emphasis added). This is the common man’s view of the inevitability and utility of
politics, governed as it is by a certain set of circumstances. It might take it for granted that a whole
chunk of literature – arguably the largest – may be untouched with politics. This “view” is naive
enough to suspect, unlike Eagleton, no political trickery in an apparently innocuous phrase like
“creative imagination” or a common word like “poetry”. And it certainly doesn’t see literature as an
“alternative ideology”.17
Eagleton’s formulation of literature as intrinsically political is relatively accessible, however
Ranciere’s formulation of the “politics of aesthetics” is quite different. As a matter of fact, it
appears to put paid to politics as Orwell, and even Eagleton, understand it. However, Ranciere goes
along with Eagleton quite some way – in his view of politics as the “practice of power”, literature’s
involvement with history, or in his rejection of attempts to locate ‘literariness’ in an “intransitive
language” as opposed to political commitment or “political action”. In his comments in “The
Politics of Literature”, Ranciere begins by explaining that his “politics” does not deal with the
politics of the writers, their personal commitment to the social and political issues and struggles, the
struggles of their times, nor does it deal with “the modes of representation of political events or the
social struggles in their books”, issues which surely would be of great interest to both Orwell and
Eagleton. For Ranciere, literature is similar to politics in that both are “a partition of the sensible, of
the visible, and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear.” The
politics of art is then to be seen as “a certain (and constant) recasting of the distribution of the
sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms”.18 It is in this context that Ranciere talks
16
Orwell uses another metaphor in “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) – “When you are on a sinking ship,
your thoughts will be about sinking ships.”
17
“The word ‘poetry’, then, no longer refers simply to a technical mode of writing: it has deep social,
political, and philosophical implications, and at the sound of it the ruling class might quite literally reach
for its gun. Literature has become a whole alternative ideology, and the ‘imagination’ itself, as with Blake
and Shelley, becomes a political force.” (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell
Publishers, 1993. 19-20.)
18
This issue is also addressed by Ranciere in the “Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics”,
where he talks of the “aesthetic regime of art”, as against the “ethical” and “representative” regime. The
aesthetic regime, initiated by German Romanticism, provokes a transformation in the distribution of the
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of the “power” of the “mute letter” which in upsetting the hierarchies of the representational
system” and “any principle of adequation between a way of being and doing” helps give expression
to “the nonsense of life in general”19. Things become clearer when one reads, “This is not a matter
of political engagement. It is a politics carried by literature itself.” Ranciere’s “new “politics” of
literature” – what he terms “a kind of side-politics or meta-politics- would then be odd for both
Orwell and Eagleton. For this super-subtle ‘politics’ “takes social situations and characters away
from their everyday, earth-bound reality and displays what they truly are, a phantasmagoric fabric
of poetic signs20 which are historical as well.” (emphasis added) This “politics” of literature, quite
expectedly, “emerges as the dismissal of politics of orators and militants who conceive of politics as
a struggle of wills and interests.”21
Orwell couldn’t have the foggiest notion of how social situations and characters could be, truly,
a “phantasmagoric fabric of poetic signs”, and “historical”, one suspects, only incidentally. At any
rate, their being historical “as well” (emphasis added) indicates the secondary status of their
historicity. Politics, for Orwell, on the other hand, is very much a site of “struggle of wills and
interests”, and it’s intimately related to “orators” and “militants”.22
Deeply aware of his artistic gifts23, Orwell decided to put these to political use: to expose some
lie or to draw attention to some fact – his “initial concern”: being “to get a hearing”.24 But he has to
sensible and thus rejects the representative regime’s poetics of mimesis. Writing, which “aimlessly wanders
away without knowing who to speak to and who not to speak to”, is thus linked to a “certain regime of
politics”. It is in this light that Ranciere can talk of the “democratic equality” of Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, which does away with all hierarchies of representation and even establishes a community of
readers that is bound together by the “random circulation of the written word”. Jacques Ranciere, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum,
2004. 1-20.
19
This “new politics of literature” is seen, by Ranciere, as being at the core of the realist novel, which
displays “the so-called world of prosaic activities as a huge poem”. Thus, literature, is then seen as a
“powerful machine of self-interpretation and self-poeticization of life, converting any scrap of everyday life
into a sign of history”, and the interpretations being “political” in that they constitute a “reconfiguration of
the visibility of the common world.” Jacques Ranciere, “The Politics of Literature”. SubStance. 33.1
(2004): 10-24. Project MUSE. Web.
20
Ranciere mentions that their nature as “poetic signs” is the same as “their nature as historical results and
political symptoms.” (Ibid. 19)
21
Ibid. 20.
22
Eagleton, too, prizes “extra-poetic reality” and criticizes deconstruction for seeing “social reality less as
oppressively determinate than as yet more shimmering webs of undecidability stretching to the horizon.”
(Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983. 146.)
23
Orwell claims this awareness came to him when he was hardly five or six. At fourteen, he wrote a
rhyming play in imitation of Aristophanes. At sixteen, he discovered the “joy of mere words”, and two
lines from Paradise Lost “sent shivers” down his backbone. (Orwell, “Why I Write”, 1946.
www.google.com. Web.)
24
Ibid.
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face a contrary pressure, as he cannot do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine
article, “if it were not also an aesthetic experience.” He goes on to say that even when it is “a
downright propaganda it contains much that a full time politician would consider irrelevant” and
that he would always cherish the surface of the earth, take pleasure in “solid objects and scraps of
useless information.” Reference to “aesthetic experience” doesn’t, however, have to send one to
Clive Bell, just as “fusion” of two “purposes” doesn’t have to recall the idea of “organic form”. All
that’s meant here is Orwell’s emphasis on “adequacy” of expression to content. When he says
“acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity”, the last
phrase almost certainly equates with “adequacy”.
It’s then a dialectical relationship that Orwell is after: a dialectic of politics/art, content/form,
determinism/autonomy, and group/individual. It’s thus that while group loyalties are “necessary”,
they are “poisonous to literature, so long as literature is the product of individuals.” But he is
equally certain that “no thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the
present one.” What he therefore suggests is that one should draw a “sharper” line of distinction
between one’s political and literary loyalties. 25
Perhaps no dialectical relationship maintains an exact equilibrium, it leans, however subtly.26 The
“leaning” can, of course, be more or less but if it’s beyond a certain point, the relationship ceases to
be dialectical. Here, one must not forget that it’s supremely difficult to pronounce judgment with
any amount of certainty on the presence or absence, and the strength and weakness of the
“dialectic” in a given case. One does feel, however, given the times Orwell was living in, that the
“dialectic” of politics and art in Orwell distinctly leans towards the former. For all his fascination
25
Hence, “when a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, but not as a writer.” However,
this is not supposed to mean that one should completely refrain from writing about politics, only one should
do so “as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerrilla on the flanks of a regular army.” It
is “reasonable” then to fight in a war because the war has to be won, but at the same time refuse to write
war propaganda. Orwell realizes that the suggestion that a creative writer, in time of conflict, must split his
life “into two compartments may seem frivolous or defeatist: yet in practice I do not see what else can one
do.” Yielding to group ideology destroys one as a writer, at the same time this is a “painful” dilemma since
one sees the need of engaging in politics while “also seeing what a dirty and degrading business it is.”
What is required of a writer then is that, his works will always be “the product of his saner self that stands
outside” and “records the things that are done”, admitting their necessity, but refusing to be deceived as to
their true nature. (Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”, 1948, www.google.com. Web.)
26
A most telling illustration of this practically inevitable “leaning” is available in the fate of Marxist
attempts at forging a dialectical relationship between form and content. Eagleton grants that the relationship
is “not easy to grasp”. For “Marxist criticism sees form and content as dialectically related, and yet wants
to assert in the end primacy of content in determining form.” (Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary
Criticism, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1997. 23.)
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with language, Orwell regards it as an “instrument”27 which can be moulded to our own ends.
Since, to him, “all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred, and schizophrenia”,28 he would have language expose these lies. Language, then, would be
ultimately judged by its competence in executing this exposure.
Orwell is upset about the “decline” of English but believes that the “process is reversible”. He
concedes that “political and economic causes” are “ultimately” responsible for the decline. He
grants, too, that it isn’t due “simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” He
believes in a dialectical relationship between the cause and effect of this decline so that indifference
to language produces bad English, which in turn leads to worse English and so on. He has a point
when he says that the language grows “ugly and inaccurate” thanks to foolish thoughts while the
slovenly language encourages sloppy thinking. Orwell is especially worried about written English
“full of bad habits which spread by imitation”. Rid of its bad habits, English can, he believes,
facilitate clear thinking which is a “necessary first step toward political regeneration”. Healthy
English, then, has a role in promoting a healthy political set-up.29
Since Orwell connects “the present political chaos” with the “decay of language”, he suggests
“starting at the verbal end” in the hope of “some improvement”. He makes some very important
suggestions for speaking and writing clear, fresh, and forceful English – what Alan Warner terms
“clean English” and Carl Freedman “plain style”30. His general advice is that if we simplify our
English, we would be freed from the “worst follies of orthodoxy”. There’s no other way, he
believes, to effect at least a partial cure of political language which is, as a rule, “designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
27
Orwell, “Politics and the English Laguage”, Standard MLA Application Critical Writing Piece. 2005-06.
Ibid
29
Contemporary political speech and writing is “largely the defence of the indefensible” and the ‘decline’
is assisted by the Latinate, inflated style which serves as a “kind of euphemism29”. Political language,
playing this role, “has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” A
resounding allocation of words like “transfer of population” or “rectification of frontiers”, for example, is
used to “beautify” the ugly reality of millions of peasants being “robbed of their farms and sent trudging
the roads with no more than they can carry.” It’s such dishonest use of language that forces Orwell to
conclude that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” But of course, sincerity by itself isn’t
enough; the point is that its absence nullifies a substantial part of the ingredients of clear, forceful prose.
(Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, Standard MLA Application Critical Writing Piece. 2005-06.)
30
Orwell’s ideas about “plain” language were foreshadowed by Thomas Hobbes who attacked the abuse of
words and argued that “a sane stable society must have a clear, stable language and believed that plain
language was not only good in itself but also a civil duty.” Hobbes, like Orwell saw that misuse of words
was intended to deceive rather than enlighten readers. Swift, who was another major influence on Orwell,
also wrote three important essays regarding the need to “preserve clear style and eliminate corrupt (and
convoluted) language”. (Jeffrey Meyers, “George Orwell and the Art of Writing”, Web. 109)
28
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Orwell deplores the absence of “concreteness” in modern prose. However, he doesn’t quite “go in
fear of abstractions” as recommended by Pound,31 and followed to the letter by Stuart Chase and
others. He doesn’t believe that all abstract words are meaningless, and resents the fact that their
avoidance has been instrumental in “advocating a kind of political quietism”. He argues that if one
doesn’t know what Fascism, for example, is, one wouldn’t know how to struggle with it.
Though Orwell claims to be considering here merely language as an “instrument for expressing
and not for concealing or preventing thought” and not “the literary use of language”, his
suggestions32 would improve literary language too. For the gulf between literary and non-literary
use of language isn’t half as wide as Orwell appears to think. As for political language, the
improvement would be tremendous which would, further, be reflected in a cleaner or at least opener
politics. Orwell’s prescription of clean English is, however, exaggerated and self-contradictory.
Plain English has its obvious virtues and there’s no controversy about them. But Orwell goes too far
when he appears to think that plain English exhausts the full potential of the language. Fascination
with Latinate diction and foreign words and phrases no doubt merits censure but the belief that they
can be dumped without loss is unwarranted.33 Fetishization of the “concrete” or the “Anglo-Saxon”
is certainly less condemnable than that of the ‘abstract’ or the Latinized style but a fetish is after all
a fetish, and is as such, problematic.34
In looking, then, at rhetorical sleights of hand, Orwell’s perceptions of the connections between
“truth, freedom of expression, and use of language”, and at how language is deployed for achieving
specific political aims, it might be instructive to take a look at how these issues are elaborated in
31
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, Faber and Faber Ltd, 1969. 5
Orwell wants English to shed dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and what he calls “meaningless
words”, for example. He has a list of proscriptions, too: Never use a figure of speech which often appears
in print or never use the passive where you can use the active, for example. (Orwell, “Politics and the
English Laguage”, Standard MLA Application Critical Writing Piece. 2005-06.)
33
Carl Freedman, “Writing, Ideology, and Politics: Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and
English Composition, Web. 331.
34
Orwell’s “naively empiricist view of language” appears to Freedman “philosophically unacceptable”. He
notes, too, the self-contradiction involved in believing language to have “ultimately…political and
economic causes” and yet be “infinitely malleable”. This confusion between determinism and autonomy
runs all through. Orwell does try, as Freedman notes, to take a “more dialectical and systematic view” but it
remains at best, “partial and suggestive”. On the whole, however, Freedman freely acknowledges Orwell as
a practitioner of plain English. (Ibid. 359. 329. 334.)
Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, for all its philosophical imperfection, exaggeration,
and dogmatism, remains a classic. Its dogmatism is balanced by its undogmatic repudiation of its beloved
proscriptions. Often despotic in its formulations, it can yet be humble and fearless in the face of selfstultification. He concedes that he has often been guilty of the faults he censures, and demands that any of
his rules be broken if it leads to “anything outright barbarous”. Thus, as a prophylactic against “elephantine
writing” its importance can hardly be overstated.
32
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Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s “plain style”, Hugh Kenner, writes
“was a deliberate contrivance, formed in response to Newspeak” and notes that he was a leftist at
odds with the official left. While the official left’s rhetoric was “notoriously abstract” and
“incorrect”, Orwell’s was, by contrast, “deliberately concrete”.35
It is Animal Farm that Orwell himself saw as the “first book” in which he tried, with full
consciousness of what he was doing, “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one
whole.”36 Beginning with Animal Farm, designed obviously to parody the betrayal of the Socialist
ideals by the Soviet regime, Orwell attacks the “toadying” of the Left intelligentsia in Britain to the
Stalinist regime, one can clearly see the connections Orwell makes between language and
despotism, illustrated in the ideological manipulation of language by the power-hungry pigs
(Bolsheviks) – Napoleon (Stalin), Snowball (Trotsky). It is their ability to read and write that gives
them a certain edge over the other animals and aids in their easy manipulation. This can be seen in
the “changing” commandments, “Principles of Animalism” as they are called, which help the pigs
eventually consolidate power and have the animals’, almost voluntary obedience. Thus, while in the
beginning one sees commandments like – “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades” and
“four legs good, two legs bad”, we later have “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess” and “four
legs good, two legs better”. The crowning moment, however, comes when all the seven
35
Hugh Kenner, “On Language, Art and Politics”. Harold Bloom (ed). Bloom’s Guides: George Orwell’s
1984, 2004. 82.
36
Orwell, “Why I Write”, Web.
In looking at Orwell’s writings and while keeping in mind the political reasons that “impelled” Orwell to
write, it is also useful to take cognizance of the control that was exercised on the freedom of the press. This
issue is addressed by Orwell in “The Prevention of literature” (1946) and also in the essays - “Writers and
Leviathan” (1948) and “Literature and Totalitarianism”(1941), where he speaks of the “fog of lies”
that surrounds such subjects such as the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland and so forth.
“Organized lying” and “deliberate falsification on important issues” is to be seen as integral to
totalitarianism. Also, one can see how, Orwell’s proposed preface to Animal Farm which wasn’t included
in the book is significant in that here Orwell tells us how this book was refused by four publishers,
including T.S. Eliot, who was an editorial adviser to Faber, the main problem being – the way the fable
clearly applied “only” to Russia and the “predominant caste” being pigs, which could be offensive to the
Russians. It is significant that Orwell sees the literary censorship in England as stemming not so much
from an intervention by official bodies, as from the voluntary exertions of the publishers and editors
themselves, ‘driven’ by intellectual cowardice and fear of public opinion. What, rather was demanded by
the prevailing orthodoxy was “an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia”- what he calls “Russomania” with any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, which was seen as nothing short of sacrosanct, hidden or
“next door to unprintable”, such as the modifications made in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World
by the British Communist Party which brought out a “garbled version which had done away with mentions
of Trotsky and also the introduction by Lenin.” Orwell, however, doesn’t see ‘mental dishonesty’ as being
“peculiar” to the Socialists and left-wingers; rather he asserts that “acceptance of any political discipline
seems to be incompatible with literary integrity”, a logic which he sees applying equally to movements like
Pacifism and Personalism “which claim to be outside the ordinary political struggle”.
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commandments are condensed into one –“All animals are equal; but some animals are more equal
than others.” Given this crafty manipulation of language and the pigs’ appropriation of absolute
power, it is hardly surprising that the animals, looking inside the Manor Farm (no longer Animal
Farm) at the end, should be left a thoroughly baffled lot. For, as they “looked from pig to man, and
from man to pig and from pig to man again…it was impossible to say which from which.”37 What is
mirrored here is, as Orwell says, “a movement of the proletariat that is promptly canalized and
betrayed by astute people at the top, and then the growth of a new governing class. The one thing
that never arrives is equality”.38
The relationship between power and language is also brought to the fore in Nineteen EightyFour, exemplified here in the notion of Newspeak39. Since language is the “living memory of man
37
Orwell, Animal Farm, 2009. 75.
The novel has been interpreted by many critics as expressing Orwell’s own disillusion with any form of
revolutionary political change or even that the novel unfolds a meaning without the author’s conscious
intention. However if one looks at Orwell’s own comments on the novel, it seems otherwise. Orwell
himself commented on Animal Farm, that “if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.” The text, as rightly
argued by V.C Letemendia (univ of Toronto) reveals “Orwell’s consistent belief not only in democratic
socialism, but in the possibility of a democratic socialist revolution”, an interpretation that can be
sufficiently corroborated by evidence outside Animal Farm. While several commentators find the novel
suffused with utter pessimism (either of the author or the tale), it is important to realize that Orwell’s
criticism of the pigs doesn’t necessarily indicate a failure of the proletarian revolution, rather it emphasizes
the need for greater awareness among the working class movement. Orwell’s reply to his friend Dwight
Macdonald is enlightening in this respect. Though, of course, Orwell meant it to be primarily a satire on the
Russian revolution, he “did mean it to have a wider application in so much that it meant that that kind of
revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power hungry people) could only lead to
a change of masters.” Thus, instead of heralding an end of all revolutionary hope, Animal Farm, can be
seen as calling for a new kind of personal responsibility on the part of the revolutionaries. The novel, as
Orwell himself said, ends on a note of “discord” and not harmony, and one may smell an impending
revolution. V. C. Letemendia, “Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell’s Neglected Commentary, Web. 127137.
39
A good contrast with Nineteen Eighty-Four, in so far as it is a dystopian novel which has an interesting
‘experiment’ with language, is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) where Burgess, who was
also a linguist, introduced the language which is called nadsat – “a transliteration of the Russian suffix for
‘teen’”. Thus here, Devotchka means woman, cancers – cigarettes, pretty polly – money and the like.
Burgess’s use of nadsat, among several other things, lends his narrator a unique voice, which also
reinforces his indifference to his society's norms.
The invention of Newspeak can be seen as a satire on “Cablese” and Basic English. “Cablese” is a sort of
verbal shorthand used by journalists, which “operates on the principle of systematic truncation and
condensation of words.” “Basic English” on the other hand is an international language experiment,
imagined by C.K. Odgen. It belongs to the category of “minimal languages”, one that is a syntactically
simplified English of 850 words. Its invention, as rightly pointed out by Jean-Jacques Courtine, is not
without hegemonic designs: “it was to turn English into the international language of business and
politics.” The two languages, considered here, signal the “triumph of surveillance over language” and owes
much to Bentham’s “Panopticon” in that they bring all language completely into the domain of visibility,
such that the entire vocabulary may be seen at a “single glance”. Considering that Ogden was the most
authoritative interpreters of the linguistic developments in Bentham’s thought, it is not surprising then that
in 1929 he had “already conceived of a language even more abbreviated than Basic because it contained no
more than 500 words” and not unsurprisingly, again, it was called “panoptic English”. (Jean Jacques
38
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and offers him a space for inner resistance, it is essential for power to establish control over it.
Language in constituting “a screen between the totalitarian gaze and the human body” and hence
being the “zone of obscurity where the gaze is lost”, threatens the totalitarian enterprise. Hence the
need to eliminate old and obscure words, areas that escape definitions, and also the need to wipe out
zones of indetermination-ambiguity and polysemy.40 In Nineteen Eighty-Four totalitarians keep
control by Newspeak, a language developed to meet the ideological needs of English Socialism
which helps make truth less accessible to the people and aids in systematically denying them a
sense of reality.41 As A.M. Tibbetts points out, in addition the grammar was highly regular in its
forms - steal-stealed, think-thinked, good, gooder, goodest, etc., such that the “grammatical
irregularities that help to give English its colour, force and distinction were ironed flat.” This
ironing out of distinctions is also done in Newspeak by, what Tibbet appropriately calls,
“verbicide”.42 As Syme, the philologist tells Winston “we’re destroying words - scores of them,
hundreds of them everyday”.43 This verbicide serves the interest of the party since given the
absence of words for certain ideas, one has trouble thinking of them. Thus in Newspeak, heresy
(thought-crime) is “literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words”.44 Also
the citizens of Oceania fail to discuss the idea of civil rights given the absence of any word to
Courtine, “A Brave New Language: Orwell’s Invention of “Newspeak” in 1984”, Web. 69-74.) Though, for
a way out of this panopticon grid, one can look at Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life where
he looks at the numerous “modes of operation” whereby “users”/ “consumers”/”unrecognized
producers”(mistakenly thought of as passive) by resorting to “tactics” and “silent technologies” seek to
“short circuit institutional stage directions”. Here, one can see the various ways the “weak” continually
subvert the control thrust on them. This is done not by rejecting or altering the imposed rules, but rather by
the “use” they choose to make of them. Thus speakers by their “appropriation or reappropriation of
language”, or actualizing or not actualizing the given possibilities, and in their movement from ‘langue’ to
‘parole’ find a way out of the ‘fixed’ system of language that aims to constrain them. .
40
Jean Jacques Courtine, “A Brave New Language: Orwell’s Invention of “Newspeak” in 1984”, Web. 6974.
41
Thus, everything fades away into a “shadow world in which, finally, even the date of the year had
become uncertain”, and in Oceania “two and two are not necessarily four…sometimes they are five,
sometimes they are three, sometimes they are all of them at once.” This victory over one, even over the
memory, is called “reality control”, in Newspeak “doublethink”. As Orwell expatiates in the appendix,
grammatically speaking Newspeak maintained “an almost complete interchangeability between different
parts of speech. Any word in the language could be used as verb, noun, adjective or adverb.” Orwell,
(George. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2009. 278.)
42
Tibbetts, A. M. “What Did George Orwell Think about the English Language. College Composition and
Communication. Web. 162-166.
43
As indicated by Syme the citizen of Oceania will now need only one word to express any notion
connected with good and bad, good – with its various forms of ungood, plusgood, doubleplusgood, etc.
Interestingly, Orwell wrote an essay “New Words”, first published in 1940, where, keeping in mind the
inadequacy of language, he argues for a need to ‘reform’ language which would entail inventing a
vocabulary of new words to “deal with parts of our experience now practically unmeanable to language.”
44
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 276.
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discuss it with. Thus here one has elimination of undesirable words and “stripping” of such words
of all unorthodox meanings and “so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatsoever.”45 Given
the continuous reduction of vocabulary, and the simultaneous and inevitable reduction of thought
that it brought about, it was hoped, ultimately, “to make articulate speech issue from the larynx
without involving the higher brain centres at all.” This aim was admirably reflected in the
Newspeak word ‘Duckspeak’ (“to quack like a duck”) where the opinions “quacked out” were
nothing but orthodox.46 Thus, since Newspeak seems to reverse the honesty of everything - War is
Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, two plus two equals five, Orwell chose a linguistic ground to combat it:
plain talk versus dishonest.
At a linguistic level, however, one should note that fiction is not really different from “fact”,
since both have identical “grammar, syntax and semantics”. So, Orwell can be seen as passing to
and fro between his two modes – reportage and fiction, which both employ the plain style. The
difference is that the “the fictionality of fiction offers itself for detection”, in that, if fiction speaks
political truths it does so by allegory.47 This, as Kenner rightly notes, is “tricky” since it transfers
the responsibility of what is being said from the writer to the reader. Orwell was warned by his
wartime BBC acquaintance, William Empson, in 1945 that Animal Farm was liable to
misinterpretation and years later himself proved this by denying that it was “about some future
communism”. Rather Empson insisted that the book was, obviously, against the Roman Catholic
Church.48 While we have critics like Raymond Williams seeing in Nineteen Eighty-Four a criticism
of democratic socialism, this seems to ignore what Orwell said, regarding Nineteen Eighty-Four in
one of his essays, about his not having intended it as an attack on socialism or on the British Labour
Party, “but a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have
already have been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.”49
45
In the Appendix Orwell mentions, that though it would have been possible to utter heresies of a very
crude kind, for instance, say that “Big Brother is ungood”, yet it could not have been sustained by reasoned
argument, because the necessary words were not available. (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 286.)
46
Given the relative power of the written word that Orwell here talks about, Winston’s keeping a diary can
be seen as the first step towards rebellion against the Big Brother.
47
Hugh Kenner, “On Language, Art and Politics”. Harold Bloom (ed). Bloom’s Guides: George Orwell’s
1984, 2004. 84.
48
Kenner speculates that one of the things that would have driven Empson to such a length was his “need
to leave the left unbesmirched by Orwell, also Orwell untainted by any imputation that he’d besmirched the
left.” (Ibid. 85.)
49
Ibid. 83.
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Here then we have arrived at an “odd place” through the plain style where “there can be a radical
disagreement about what is being said.”50 Yet, while Orwell never subdued, completely, the “inner
contradictions of speaking plainly”, this is not to be seen as detracting in any way from the
seriousness of his intent or the import of his works. He was committed to objective truth, underlined
the significance of “courage” that writing requires, saw that “Good novels are written by people
who are not frightened”, and asserted that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.”51
One can see literature, then, with Italo Calvino, as “one of society’s instruments of selfawareness – certainly not the only one, but nonetheless an essential instrument, because its origins
are connected with the origins of various types of knowledge, various codes, various forms of
critical thought”52. Thus literature is “necessary” to politics in that it gives a voice to whatever is
without a voice, and especially that which has been excluded by the language of politics, and aids in
the “creation of a model of values that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan
of action, especially in political life.” Further, what is striking about literature is its self-reflexivity
and self-awareness, an awareness that Calvino believes would also be useful for politics, enabling it
“to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth and literary topos”, so that it
can “know itself and distrust itself”.53 It is not surprising then to see the Chilean writer Adolf
Dorfman, commenting, in a programme aired on Al Jazeera (“The Political Power of Literature”),
on how all art, given the turbulent times of repression, transition, and revolution, in Egypt, Libya
and Chile is transgressive, even when it happens to be a love poem, since it tells the truth, against
the lies and deception the regimes there thrive on.
50
Ibid. 85.
Wiiliam E. Cain, “Orwell’s essays as an aesthetic experience”. John Rodden (ed). The Cambridge
Companion to George Orwell, 2007. 84-85.
52
Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine: Essays. 97-98.
51
53
Ibid. 97-99.
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