Reformations of Prose: Some Considerations on George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ Part II
Alice Brewer
Part II
One of the more pernicious aspects of Orwell’s essay, the one common in clarity advocates today, is its egalitarian, democratic gesture. It lays out reforms that are, supposedly, to widen the franchise of comprehension to emancipate potentially-useful ideas from the jargon and divagating syntax where they lie sequestered, justified into prose. The problem with such stylistic reforms is that they take the supervening feature — dense, jargon heavy prose habits — as their point of departure, rather than seeking to eliminate the material reasons as to why some people don’t understand certain kinds of non-fiction: lack of education, lack of time, lack of resources. A genuinely representative constituency of readers, where no one is excluded from comprehension or judgment, requires radical material progressive changes, not stylistic regressive ones.
But Orwell does not ostensibly care about the creation of such a constituency. In his essay, there are no readers—only ‘your reader’ or, more commonly, ‘the reader’.¹ Readers, a diffuse dispersed group of individuals, with varying demands, varying critical and aesthetic sympathies, do not interest him. Instead, dispersed judgemental affinities of readers coagulate into a singular noun or definite article: an archetypal, monolithic figure. This construction is as fictional as it is populist: other than some völkisch motioning towards common sense and anti-pretentiousness, there is little to suggest that ‘the reader’ is representative of much more than Orwell’s imagination.
But it is on this brittle fiction that his argument, if it cannot be supported by its linguistic foundations, must depend. ‘The reader’ must consider impressionistic adjectives within art criticism as ignorable matters of opinion, or double negatives to be entirely unnecessary, for Orwell to write such constructions off as stupefying or deceitful, or otherwise unfit for purpose. But as Orwell would put it himself, there is no ‘discoverable object,’ no actual reader(s) suggest that this is truly representative of the experiences of reading. And if Orwell is to claim (and he does claim) he is opening up meaning to the public, he needs corroboration beyond his own narrow vision of readership: a mandate.
The political gestures of Orwell’s argument amount to an almost farcical, short-circuited prose- populism. He is uninterested in actually representing the populace whose assent his argument demands, even less in making this group wider, fully realised. Because there is, and was in Orwell’s time, too, a great deal of exclusion within reading. But these exclusions by and large have material bases. Even if people were to write like Orwell wants them to, a great deal of readers would still be left out. Those who cannot defer paid or unpaid work for long enough to have the time and energy to concentrate and read widely, those who cannot afford to buy dictionaries and companion readers and subscriptions to The New Yorker. Or those whose local public libraries are closed down or unable to stock those texts, those who do not have a bus service that is cheap and regular enough to make going to the libraries that do hold those texts feasible because they do not own a car. And so on.
The material exclusions from reading (from writing, too) are prolific and narrowing the democracy of ideas and judgement, until it is not a democracy at all. And when writing about the un-democracies of suffering and survival, Orwell realises this wholly and poignantly: in his essay ‘How the Poor Die’, for example.² But when concerned with writing, he misses the point entirely: the project of socialism — a project that Orwell largely agreed with — must be concerned with these intellectual exclusions, too. This, to my mind, should be the point of departure for anyone concerned with exclusion within criticism, rather than imposing their own ideas about what is suitably digestible for ‘the reader’ at large.
If criticism is to truly become accessible, if it is to not deceive or stupefy its recipients as Orwell says it does, it will be due to the resources of reading, like time and access to books, being emancipated, no longer the preserve of the rich. There are some initiatives that try to remedy this, to bring about small emancipations of culture: for example, The World Transformed, a radical festival and resource hub concerned with bringing about a grassroots socialist education, Jacobin Magazine’s Casualties of History, which goes through, chapter by chapter, EP Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class. Many more reading groups happen at a local level, and bootlegged versions of various texts and readers exist online. But until these initiatives are mainstream, not reliant on the whims of contemporary copyright laws — which living academics rarely profit from — and the availability of volunteers and their own often-fragile livelihoods, culture remains, to a greater extent, exclusionary.
Through changes to the system under which people read and suffer, an un-exclusionary critical practice can emerge. The means of judgement and comprehension would become un-sequestered. With these resources, the complexities of writing — all the style and the history — would not be exclusionary and rebuffing. And from this (perhaps) a way out of such complexities, too.
You can read Part I here.
¹ George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, from Inside the Whale, and other Essays (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 151, 148.
² George Orwell, ‘How the Poor Die’, from Books v. Cigarettes (London: Penguin, 2008) pp. 50-64.