Big Brother is reading youI am reposting my graphic because it disappeared once. I get the feeling that the government or the government's representative here on earth is watching and will not allow non-conformity.
George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the memorable writers of the 20th century and may have contributed more vivid images into the language than Dickens did per square word written. Big Brother will never die although allusions to him in modern discussions about our blossoming surveillance society turn the issue towards frivolity. Orwell’s 1984 is often called ‘prophetic’ although it is little more than a good story about his view of a totalitarian society. Orwell was no prophet and he never pretended to be one. 1984 is just 1948 backwards. He had to name it something and he was writing it in 1948. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was far more insightful into the future than 1984. He wrote about a total state that controlled the population with sex and drugs, but he didn’t know about rock and roll. In his Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote in 1958 about the ‘prophetic’ nature of his 1932 novel Brave New World and made predictions about what will come using the future tense in a very specific manner. Huxley’s view of a developing world of distraction and eugenics was far closer to today’s ‘shut up and shop’ society than Orwell’s militaristic future.
Orwell’s brilliant contribution was his powerful images. He gave the mind something to hang onto. Who can forget the ‘five minute hate,’ ‘thought crime,’ ‘the Ministry of Truth,’ ‘Newspeak,’ ‘war is peace,’ or the horrific image of Winston Smith’s interrogation at the Ministry of Truth in 1984? Orwell put Smith’s head in a wire cage with a hungry rat visible behind two simple sliding doors as the interrogator opened the first door and the rat leaped to within a small inch of Smith’s nose as he studied the rat’s eyes and smelled its breath and his questioner described how the rat would plunge into his eyes and burrow into his cheek to eat his tongue with just the raising of one more small door! Who can forget it once they’ve read it? That imagery of in-your-face terror is more horrible than anything that Poe ever wrote. Nothing in Huxley approaches the power of just one of Orwell’s minor images.
Orwell’s facility for holding the mind was apparent in everything he wrote:
On the London blitz: ‘Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line—zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses. (Coming up for air)
On Londoners hiding in the underground during the blitz: ‘And the large families one sees here and there, father, mother, and several children all laid out in a row like rabbits on the slab. They all seem so peacefully asleep in the bright lamplight. The children lying on their backs, with their little pink cheeks like wax dolls, and all just asleep.’ (a journalistic story)
In Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ he expains his power. ‘A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image…’ ‘The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.’ ‘By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.’ He identifies two common defects: ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision.’ Throughout his essay, he displays the freshness of his thought: ‘outcrops of simplicity,’ ‘an accumulation of stale phrases chokes’ the writer ‘like tea leaves blocking a sink,’ ‘This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases…anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain,’ silly words and expressions have been ‘killed by the jeers of a few journalists,’ ‘flyblown metaphors,’ ‘sheer cloudy vagueness,’ trite phrases ‘are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow,’ and modern writing at its worst ‘consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.’
He was not afraid to quote ancient Hebrew as an example of great writing:
‘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 happened to them all.’
He rewrote it into what I would call the academic style and mocked it:
‘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.’
Orwell was not an academic. He was what might be called a ‘visualist.’ The academics who use obscure words to describe simple concepts and then make us read pages of anal retentive monologues of their contending with each other and referencing one another to try to figure out what they were talking about would make Orwell crazy. An academic’s use of simple normal everyday language in the first place would suffice to describe their grand theorems, but they want us to follow them like herded little yellow chicks in the barnyard trailing behind the mother hen looking for the grubs of their wisdom.
Orwell would scream at the avalanche of modern blog-style writing that buries creative prose. Like the snow sliding down the mountain collecting trees and rocks, it smashes the drama, cultural connection and the allusions of good writing leaving creativity in a darkened air pocket with ten minutes to live. First draft is the last draft; opinion is truth; nonsense is creativity; breaking rules is making rules; no meaning is deep meaning.
His essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ was probably whipped out to make a few bucks, but the brilliance of his analysis is inescapable. He definitely could go into greater depth regarding political writing, but that subject is always dangerous because there is hardly a greater hatred than from a politico mocked. Besides that, he could get a reputation of believing one way or the other.
A ‘mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially any kind of political writing,’ Orwell wrote. ‘As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like sections of a prefabricated henhouse.’
‘If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy….Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’
George Orwell used to ride around London on his motorbike with no coat in November. Such habits did not help his ‘weak lungs.’ He died only eight months after publishing 1984—way before most writers’ prime—and he never knew of his effect on the cultural imagery of English or on the readers and writers who loved him.