Silliman's Papers

The Fight for Language
George Orwell’s fusion of art and politics
By Daniel Silliman
For Tracy Simmons
December 3, 2003

George Orwell is the champion of clear words and the enemy of obfuscation. To him, this meant that he was for Democratic Socialism and against all forms of totalitarianism. For Orwell, the waters of art and politics flowed together. “All issues are political issues,” Orwell wrote, “and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”
The revelation of Orwell is that politics shows itself in language. In his totalitarian future of 1984, people speak Newspeak, think Doublethink and proclaim the slogan that War is Peace. Totalitarianism is a crime and a terror, and the first place the horrific beast emerges is in the abuse of language. Thus the bond between art and politics is inseparable and must either be honest or insidious.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism,” he wrote. This is true of his great novels, Animal Farm and 1984, the two novels he wrote before that, Homage to Catalonia and Coming Up for Air, and in his essays. As he gives advice on writing, he’s speaking about the standard that saves us from totalitarian devilry.

Reading Orwell’s advice on writing, one sees there is no dividing art and politics. For him, he “tried, with full consciousness…, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” That one whole was clarity and honesty.

He famous essay on writing identifies itself as a thing of politics in the very title: “The Politics of the English Language.” For Orwell, totalitarianism is heinous for creating ugly and inaccurate language, ugly and inaccurate language heinous for creating totalitarianism. As he writes in “The Politics of the English Language”,

"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

The failure of Winston Smith in 1984 and of Boxer in Animal Farm is, ultimately, personal. Big Brother isn’t finally about politics in the sweeping sense of economic production and foreign wars, but about politics in the most private and personal sense possible. “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’,” Orwell wrote, because politics isn’t out there, it isn’t another law or a new plan of production or an army on the front, it’s about us in the most human ways possible. The fight against totalitarianism is a fight for language.
Winston Smith, at the height of 1984, tries in consternation to recall the words of an old nursery rhyme. A nursery rhyme – an innocent and childish collection ditty that is, really, the point of conflict between a propagandistic world-tyranny and honesty. The old man he meets in a bar can’t stop talking about how he misses pints. These are just the mutterings of the feeble-minded young and old, Big Brother says, but the real battle is over these measures of the world: the size of a drink and the rhyme of a child and the way we use our language.

“If you want a picture of the future,” he wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” Which is to say, imagine a world where dictionaries are propaganda and aphorisms are lies and your language has been corrupted in your mouth. This isn’t something one can pass over, something one can wait out and ignore. This battle is a battle every time you set your pen to paper, every time you speak.

Orwell was pessimistic about writing and about politics. But that’s too easy. It’s not that he didn’t have hope and it’s not that he didn’t believe that greatness could happen. He was pessimistic like an editor who never receives the great manuscript, like a revolutionary who never found a cause. He was pessimistic exactly because he believed.

Hemmingway, a man who also went through the Spanish Civil War and who made similar political moves, once said that his writing was an attempt to find true sentences and to write them down. This was the policy of Orwell, and it bleeds from every page he wrote.

Orwell fought the corruption the propaganda that eats men’s souls, destroying their world and devastating their language. One never comes across true sentences written down any more than when reading Orwell. He writes that “The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,” and he resists totalitarianism with a simple sentence, with clear English words that don’t bend to ugly or slink to blurring. They show instead of hid, because they are honest words and an honest politics, because Orwell was an honest man and an honest artist guided by the north star of clarity of language.