Reformations of Prose: Some Considerations on George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ Part I
Alice Brewer
“While you are polishing your prose, imagine what Adorno or Lacan might have said if they had been graced with the gifts of direct and easy expression.”
“Students without the cultural know-how can become overwhelmed and unable to analyse these books – containing ideas they are perfectly capable of engaging with – due to overly flouncy, poor writing.”
“Many scholarly authors in the humanities feel that there is no avoiding academic jargon and endless dense sentences if they are to be taken seriously in their field. This is a shame because once you start writing in that way it’s extremely difficult to change.”
Part I
Such are the cases made for greater clarity in criticism. The arguments are all the same: concerns about elitism, hostility towards compound predicates and under-translated words from the continent, the belief that a sentence should say and do one thing.
These rehearsals find one of their most influential and compelling articulations in George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, which first appeared in 1946.¹ Meandering or digressive or overly polysyllabic non-fiction writing, Orwell contends, ends up saying nothing true, or nothing at all. Modish but contentless, the effect of all this style is apparently stupefying and deceiving, and leads to corrupted or otherwise impoverished thought. The essay goes on to issue some correctives: no commonplace metaphors; no long, foreign, or scientific words where shorter or un-tariffed equivalents are available; no passive voice if the active is possible; no words that are not absolutely necessary. None of the above, lest you end up writing something ‘outright barbarous’.²
This formation of this position, like many of its contemporary iterations, uses a half-baked linguistic idealism, seemingly ignorant of the natural obliqueness of language and comment, its trenchantly material basis. And it produces a strangely narrow set of possibilities for writing and reading.
Orwell assumes that language is not merely a reflection of our thoughts and material realities, but something that somewhat determines them: as much as thought can corrupt language, “language can also corrupt thought”.³ Much of his fiction depends on this special determining quality of language: no less in Homage to Catalonia than in 1984. Such a view enjoyed relative acceptance in the first half of the 20th century, better known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. (There is little contemporary research to support it.)
Orwell’s version of this relativism or determinism doesn’t seek to naturalise these hypothesised differences in language and thought. He is, if nothing else can be agreed about him, a trenchant believer in standards. Language has fallen short of the communicative standard to which he believes it should cohere: it should be rectified into a precise, unimpressionistic plainstyle.
This relies upon what Richard Seymour, in his own essay on the politics of style, calls a ‘windowpane metaphysic’ of language: that writing involves — or could involve — an easy and absolute transference of concepts and images from the page to a reading eye, unimpeded.⁴ The belief in such a possibility ignores how the English language actually works. Graphic marks on the page correspond to certain sounds, rather than semantic values. The graphic marks pile up to activate mental representations, which are associated with certain concepts or gestures, which then go on to form sentences: propositional content. These mental impressions are not infused with meaning in themselves, but gain an arbitrary fullness through usage, our continual negotiation of their difference and relation to the other mental abstractions that surround them.
Orwell imagines his style free from such circumstantiality: that it is not just another slanting and partial negotiation of the meaning of words and their order. His approved style is implicitly set off from what he calls ‘dialects’ — by which he means the more extravagant (thus morally suspect) kinds of prose found in academic monographs, political pamphlets, and Poetry Quarterly. The ‘dialect’ label regionalises such writing, particularises it, brackets it off as a pretentious curiosity. Orwell’s ideal style, a laudable Anglo-Saxon terseness, is implied to suffer nothing as critically-effacing as historical particularity or affect: as if there were, through power of discourse alone, a way out of circumstantiality. As if he is not, like the writers he eschews, proposing and exemplifying just another negotiation with the changing uses and semantic affinities of words and their order. These negotiations are not some second-order product of writing, something confined only to trenchantly literary forms (forms that Orwell claims he is not commenting on), but underpin all writing.
Even if there was some sort of prose that was entirely conceptual, wholly content-laden, is communication the only function upon which criticism can be justified; that criticism cannot (should not) be funny as it is didactic, as beautiful as it is propositional? Even the most disinterested stylistic repose represents an intervention, an incompletion. Why must this precarity, from which beauty and humour arises, be ignored, routinely underdeveloped? The possibilities of criticism are, and should be, far greater than the pure economy of communication that Orwell lauds.
But certain parts of his essay imply that these more undisciplined and subjective claims to value should be relegated from commentary on more stable aesthetic productions too, like art and poetry. In such writing, apparently,
“...it is normal to come across long passages which hare almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic values, human, dead, sentimental, natural vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.”
Impressionistic adjectival categories are relegated: writing’s claim to meaning (and by Orwell’s logic, its claim to be a justifiable practice) depends here on the presence of a ‘discoverable object.’ This equation suggests the influence of another waning linguistic philosophy upon Orwell: logical positivism, particularly as laid out by AJ Ayer in Language Truth and Logic. Ayer insists that language is only meaningful insofar as it makes propositions that are empirically verifiable, or else tautologous. Those that do not do so, “simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion.”⁵ Another windowpane metaphysic: assuming, wrongly, that our circumstances and biases do not play a part in the production and prioritisation of ‘discoverable objects.’ Far from passively transmitting the world, the mind exercises itself upon it. The mind is grasping, confirming and producing: sense-data gets left out or more pronounced according to the situations of its receiver. The values that Orwell seeks to shear from criticism are actually mental descriptions, material facts. And potential disparities matter very much.
Invested in it or not, non-fiction writing is partial, shaped (but not ruined) by the situation of its production and reproduction. Orwell believes otherwise: that a certain syntactic and lexical sparsity within non-fiction will remove these (supposedly unwanted) dispersed and precarious affinities, which give rise to obfuscation and deceit. If there is to be a deliverance from these things, it will not happen via reformations of prose.
Part II will be published next week.
¹ George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, from Inside the Whale, and other Essays (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 143-157.
² Ibid. p.156.
³ Ibid p. 153.
⁴ Richard Seymour, Caedmon’s Dream: On the Politics of Style, Salvage, 5 July 2019.
⁵ AJ Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Penguin, 1936), p. 2.