Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 3
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George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Is this where it all began? / Jacinta Maria Matos
Keywords: Culture Studies, Urban Studies
“Men, like poets, rush “into the middest”, in media res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.”
—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending
Beginnings
<1> Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is arguably the most influential political novel of the twentieth century, providing us with a set of concepts and a vocabulary to discuss the state’s totalitarian control of the individual. As such, Orwell can be seen as one of the founding fathers of literary representations of a threatening urban space which functions as the microcosm of a global, totalizing and dystopian reality. His seminal contribution to the discourse of (in)security and surveillance has been widely recognized. David Lyon is one among the many theorists who place Orwell at the top of the list of early studies of state control, both acknowledging that his “dystopian vision is valuable” and critically assessing it as “dated in some respects” (143). Although not the first and certainly not the most sophisticated of thinkers, Orwell played a major part in the dissemination and popularization of these issues. He may not rank with illustrious predecessors like Bentham, Marx or Durkheim in philosophical depth and theoretical innovation, but non-specialists will probably turn to him first and specialists cannot by-pass him in any discussion about the nature and mechanism of disciplinary power.
<2> Borrowing from a long tradition of fictional and nonfictional writing on the city as a site of utopian dreams or dystopian nightmares, Orwell himself has now become an integral part of that tradition. And because he speaks to us from a recent past, in many ways the beginning of the “middest” (Kermode 7) we now live in, his influence on contemporary writers (and novelists in particular) cannot be over-rated. After Nineteen Eighty-Four whoever takes up the task of adapting and updating his vision has to do so with this model or “ideal type” (Lyon 52) in mind. For better or for worse, Orwell cannot be read today without the benefit of hindsight; but neither can we consider current narratives on our ever-more-problematic urban spaces without resorting to him. Whether you find him relevant or dated, still topical or completely superseded, Orwell has undeniably become part of the literary and political culture we inhabit. Explicitly or implicitly, begrudgingly or approvingly, in Frank Kermode’s sense we have created him as one of the possible beginningsfor the “middest” we live in,a point of originwhich helps us give form and shape to all that followed. He has been re-written and re-appraised, his insights acknowledged and his limitations exposed, his supposed predictions confirmed or disconfirmed. But he has undoubtedly become part of the cultural palimpsest.
<3> The question in my title has therefore both a “yes” and “no” answer. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is and is not where it all began. Deceptively rhetorical and deliberately provocative, that question was meant to find a space for Orwell in a publication dealing with current representations of urban anxiety and insecurity, a place I believe he deserves if for no other reason (and there are many) than his ubiquity in all manner of discourses that compose our daily lives. My contribution is intended as a sort of opening note ideally reverberating throughout a volume where Orwell will still be heard in the background among other voices that have since added to the tune. We know so much more than he did, and much more is needed today if we are to cope with a postmodern reality he could have had no knowledge of. But the dilemmas which Orwell faced as a political writer in those crucial decades of the 1930s and 40s are still very much with us in an era where the intellectual’s engagement with the crises of history and his/her role in the public sphere has become increasingly problematic, but also, for that very reason, more urgent and in need of critical attention. In this light, I shall try to trace the contours of some of those earlier debates Orwell was deeply involved in and committed to which have a clear relevance to the condition of the writer, the intellectual and the citizen in our world today.
<4> My first concern is with Orwell’s choice of the novel as a medium for the literary representation of the principles and practices of the totalitarian state. Curiously enough, during the gestation years of Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell seems to have favoured the essay as a means to pursue an investigation into existing and newly-emerging systems of authoritarian control, and their implications for society in general and the creative artist in particular. “Literature and Totalitarianism” “Wells, Hitler and the World State” “Literature and the Left”, “You and the Atom Bomb” “The Prevention of Literature” “Politics and the English Language” and “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” are just a few of the titles in an impressive body of essay writing devoted to the theme. If we recall that Orwell himself believed that he was not by nature a novelist and if, like me, you happen to agree with this self-appraisal and value above all his achievement as an essayist and writer of documentaries, then the question “Why a novel?” seems worth pursuing. The answer, however provisional, may clarify not only the reasons for Orwell’s personal choice of the form, but serve as a reflection on what novels, as novels, can contribute to our understanding of the workings of power, surveillance and control. Despite the many premature announcements about the novel’s imminent demise, the last decade clearly attests to the continued appeal of fiction in the creation of threatening urban landscapes and their effects on the individual. Hopefully, Orwell can be used as a prototype for what writers and readers envision as the virtualities of the novel among a plethora of discourses vying for attention in his time and ours.
<5> The second question which will repay attention concerns the status of the artist and the intellectual in society and his/her responsibility in the public spheres of politics and history. Orwell spent most of his life and career debating with himself and with the wider public the conflicting interests—as well as the areas of overlap—between autonomous art and political engagement, trying to find a productive position from which to address the urgent issues of the moment while retaining his integrity as individual creator. Nineteen Eighty-Four problematizes in extreme form some of the issues all intellectuals face in their capacity as producers, disseminators and contesters of ideas. Orwell’s nightmare vision of a society where intellectuals are not so much marginalized as vaporized out of existence is clear proof of how highly he valued the intellectual’s social and cultural function. But it also testifies to his awareness of the seductive appeals of conformity, acceptance and succumbence to dogma for those who have lost a familiar constituency and a direct form of address. To determine how he negotiated different allegiances and conflicting loyalties without losing sight of essentials is an interesting exercise for all who face similar options in a world where the “outside” (if it ever existed) is becoming more difficult to discern, where old dichotomies no longer apply but new polarizations have come into being, and where the gap between the intellectual and the public at large is felt to be widening, if not actually becoming unbridgeable.
<6> Finally, some attention is due to Orwell’s preoccupation with language. After all, he coined some the words and expressions that both critics and the wider public now use as a form of short-hand for complex and abstract concepts about state control and surveillance. That Orwell has added to the language is, in itself, no mean achievement; but of no less lasting effect is, I believe, the particular centrality that language came to have in his vision of desirable and undesirable futures. Although he never formulated it in this way, Orwell strongly believed that we live in and through language, and that to maintain it in a vigorous, healthy, condition would go a long way towards keeping at bay the authoritarian tendencies and totalitarian corruptions embryonically present in all of its users—intellectuals not excepted—but above all, of course, in the powerful discourses of the modern state.
Why a novel?
<7> By the mid-1940s Orwell had behind him no more than a moderately successful career as a novelist. He was, however (depending on your political stance), either famous or infamous as a writer of polemic documentaries and controversial essays. But when against all expectations (including the author’s) the first edition of Animal Farm quickly sold out, Orwell’s reputation as a novelist became firmly established. In his view the book had for the first time successfully achieved his main goal as a writer: “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” (CW 18: 320) We may, of course, be of the opinion that Homage to Catalonia is just as good an example of that fusion, but the point here is that Orwell believed he had come into his own as a novelist when he managed to invest “art” (meaning the novel form) with a political content traditionally more appropriate to the nonfiction documentary or the essay.
<8> Although we no longer subscribe to the view that only fiction fulfils the aesthetic requirements of an art form, the fact remains that Nineteen Eighty-Four came in the wake of an experiment that seemed to have worked brilliantly both for the writer and the large audience he was quickly and surprisingly acquiring. In the aftermath of World War II, Orwell became particularly concerned with a new geopolitics of superpowers (who were dividing the world among themselves) and new forms of oligarchical rule (emerging out of the wreckage of recent dictatorships and old democracies). The atomic threat, he feared, would make popular resistance virtually impossible, and the world might be plunged into a perpetual conflict that nobody could win. The more abstract and conceptual implications of this occupied him in several essays devoted to the possible scenarios for a new international order, but clearly something was missing from the picture Orwell was forming about the future. In “You and the Atom Bomb” he gives a hint about what else was needed for an effective reflection on these matters:
"James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ’cold war’ with its neighbours.” (CW 17: 321)
<9> Orwell is pointing to the need for an imaginative reconstruction of what it would feel like to live under such a regime as well as of its ideological and social configuration. To look at this new kind of society from the inside, as experienced by individuals in a defining social context, is precisely what he complains hasn’t been done yet, needs to be done urgently, and therefore what he set out to do in his own novel. In other words, Orwell was availing himself of the novel’s capacity for inscribing private life into the realm of the public, for dealing with inter-subjective relations within a social frame and for exploring the complex ramifications between the individual and larger historical processes. He was using narrative as one of the most powerful cognitive instruments in our understanding of the world, an understanding that he felt would not be complete without recourse to what the novel can do best: to provide human significance to the amorphous, chaotic jumble of the real by focusing on the manifold connections between the inner and outer life of individuals.
<10> “Human” is, of course, the key word here. It is no accident that in the inhuman world of Nineteen Eighty-Four novels are written by machines, mass-produced and mass-consumed by the anonymous mass of the proles. For Orwell, novels are and should be the work of an individual consciousness in the exercise of one of his/hers more fundamental rights, the right to express a personal, inimitable opinion on the world:
“We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist—or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous. … The whole of modern European literature … is built on the concept of intellectual honesty, or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare’s maxim, ’To thine own self be true’. … Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing.” (CW 12: 502-503)
<11> I suggested above that novel writing became an epistemological imperative for Orwell, in his attempt to fully comprehend all the implications of a totalitarian reality. This imperative, as the quoted passage implies, carries with it an ethical programme of honesty and truth-seeking on the part of the writer. Orwell was no naïve believer in Truth with a capital T nor in the autonomous individual as a free-floating entity devoid of all ties. Rather, he was all too aware of the dangerous pitfalls and “illusions” of a metaphysics of the subject which had led to liberal capitalism’s exploitation of the very same individual it was supposedly celebrating. And he often claimed that instead of truth, honesty of vision was all he could offer the reader. But he did hold a view of literature as a humanistic enterprise against the homogenizing forces of totalitarianism. Curiously enough, his view of the novel as “the most anarchical of all forms of literature” (CW 12: 105) and the one, therefore, that had most to lose in an atmosphere of dogmatic impositions, stresses precisely what we now call (after Bahktin) the heteroglossic, polyphonic and carnivalesque nature of the form. Against the monologic discourse of authority, the novel’s representation of multiple “others” interacting in various ways and producing diverse views of the world would counteract the single voice of the tyrant. And the genre’s bubbling energy and refusal to conform to one single mould seemed to him to mirror that healthy spirit of transgression and dissent that he often insisted was the best safeguard against conformity and surrender.
<12> Narrative form, then, complemented more conceptual instruments of knowledge in productive ways. Particularly adept at dealing with the inner life of the individual, fiction also necessarily engages in process, thereby connecting that individual with the wider locations of history. The “as if” of fiction gave him the freedom to create alternative scenarios and provide a fully-formed image of what the future could, but should not, be. It is redundant to point out how the power of his vision has provided us with a strong critique not only of what might have been, but of what actually came to pass. Utopian and dystopian writing, we now recognize, are essential modes in the production of space, symbolic configurations that interact with the real, since there is no agency unmediated by representation. In Orwell’s time, the novel still fulfilled a central role in this process by virtue of its privileged position in the culture as the dominant literary form. And although Orwell chose it as much for what the genre could do as for the audience that he could reach through it, he also conceived it as a counter narrative intended to shake the complacency and apathy of prevailing discourses. That choice, which, he argued, came out of a sense of public responsibility while remaining “the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels” could only be made by people who were not cowed into submission or frightened into compliance. Winston Smith, in the isolation of his private little corner, is reduced to self-expression and diary writing. Orwell wanted to ensure that more choices would remain open to the creative artist as much as to the responsible citizen.
<13> Ultimately novel writing was for him a political gesture which went beyond any political content a particular novel might carry. That he made his ideas more available for public scrutiny and discussion by the use of fiction, is undeniable. Whether as an essayist (brilliant as he is) he would have had the same cultural impact is a moot point. But that he himself conceived of his book as the best means to promote a democratic debate about the possible routes available at a particularly complex cross-road of history reveals how you can transmute the personal into the public and give some collective significance to that “emotional life of the individual” (CW 12: 503) that he so valued.
What role for the intellectual?
<14> Political gestures, if they are going to be more than indulgent self-expression, need not only a wide audience, but a recognized role for the addresser vis-a-vis the addressee. Orwell was fully aware of the declining status of the intellectual in a capitalist economy where art and literature had become commodities and the writer an alienated intellectual worker at the mercy of the laws of the market. He was also both sympathetic to and critical of his modernist predecessors’ disengagement with history and society, a model for the writer which he understood and to an extent admired, but one that he could not and would not follow. But the committed political writer of the 1930s fares even worse in his assessment of how the artist should position himself/herself in the public arena. He felt that, as a writer, he had no role to play in organized politics except that of the gramophone churning out slogans or the subservient publicist “dictated to by political bosses.” (CW 19: 292) The Left, as he found it, was no intellectual home that he could unequivocally occupy and comfortably inhabit.
<15> So, from very early on, he set about creating his own version of the intellectual and his own space of intervention not only as a citizen, but above all as writer and creative artist. Orwell’s struggle may well have been a quest for the unattainable condition of an unproblematic sense of community and belonging, but it foregrounds issues of estrangement, loss and up-rootedness which have become even more acute in our own time. However brief, a reflection on the obstacles he encountered and the way he negotiated difficulties can serve as a useful case study for an on-going discussion about the problem.
<16> Orwell’s first protagonists were all, by chance or by design, misfits, marginals or rebels. They stood or were made to stand outside a society they could not relate to and in which they had no place. Just like their author, they encountered oppressive systems with feelings of personal exclusion, exile and powerlessness. Rebels they might be, but rebellion was more of a private issue to be endured than a public stance to be affirmed. Up until 1936, most of Orwell’s fiction and nonfiction suggests that the “outsider’s” is the only morally and ethically correct position from which to mount a protest against the evils of the world. In time Orwell came to realize that this naïve, sentimental and immature perspective (although not without its epistemological merits) would not get him, either politically or ideologically, very far. The Road to Wigan Pier marks the beginning of the search for centres, both cultural and social, where he could firmly ground a radical project of a “democratic Socialism” which would be neither eccentric nor ex-centric.
<17> The condition of the working-class, the world view of the “common man” and the outlook encapsulated in popular culture became fundamental preoccupations for him in the late 1930s and into the 1940s. He was looking for a centre that could hold together under the pressures of modernity and of a threatening national and international situation, a core that would lend itself to radical change but still have a recognizable, familiar and traditional shape. “The Lion and the Unicorn” is the fullest expression of this project (later re-worked in a twin essay, “The English People” ), where the question of the intellectual’s role and place in English society is woven into the argument for an “English revolution” . Orwell laments the isolation imposed on intellectuals by a public which has a “downright contempt for ’cleverness’” (CW 16: 227) and a “widespread unawareness that aesthetic considerations can possibly have any importance.” (ibid.: 226) This, he believes, has meant that “the people whose vision is acutest” (idem) have been severed from the common culture of the country. Intellectuals, so his argument runs, have turned away from their own culture, transferring their allegiance to some mythical Utopia (often located in the Soviet Union) or embracing the shallow cosmopolitanism of those who “take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.” (CW 12: 406) Deracinated and disconnected from a national identity, they have become “negative creatures” (idem; italics in the original), defining themselves primarily as anti-everything, thus prevented from and incapable of making any meaningful contribution to public life.
<18> Orwell’s view of a better future clearly involves a different set of connections between the intellectual and the mass of the people. Or, to put it another way, between what at the time would be described as “high” and “popular” culture. He himself is a good example of the inoperative nature of the distinction. Recently acknowledged as a pioneering cultural critic, his interest in adventure stories, detective fiction and comic postcards stems from his faith in the reinvigorating properties of popular and mass culture as a necessary corrective to the rarefied, inward-looking world of intellectual cliques. Chastised for their posturing internationalism and their disdain for all things English, their marginal condition, Orwell admits, is not entirely of their own making. And the popular culture he places so much faith in also comes under attack for its contempt of intellectual labour, its xenophobia and indifference to art and aesthetics. As is his habit, Orwell distributes criticism and praise in equal measure between friend and foe. But this is precisely his point: without a good dose of self-examination and self-criticism on the part of all cultural agents the rift would grow bigger and fruitful connections between them would be impossible to establish. A common culture where the saucy postcard, the political pamphlet, the “good bad book” the experimental novel and the nonsense rhyme would all have a space is ultimately what he was arguing for. He was envisaging a society where the intellectual would be accorded respect, but without subservience or servility. And by the same token a society where the intellectual would not go into the world with the missionary zeal of the zealot or the condescension and paternalism of those who talk de haut en bas to their audience.
<19> How does this programme for a cultural revival fit in with the role of the intellectual in political transformation? Orwell’s proposed revolution is an integrative vision in which culture and politics work together towards a common goal, and where the intellectual could and should have as much a cultural as a political function in public life. But here Orwell came up against an apparently insoluble conundrum: how to articulate the integrity, autonomy and independence of the creative artist with the demands of collective political action, party discipline and group solidarity? How can the intellectual be both firmly rooted in the culture of the country and critically assess and evaluate its rights and wrongs? How can intellectuals be at the same time part of the national narrative and producers of effective counter-narratives or alternative discourses? How can intellectuals work with and from a recognized centre and retain the distance and clear-sightedness of those who stand outside?
<20> These questions haunted Orwell all his life. His initial attempt to embrace the condition of the marginal was later rejected as a futile gesture which would produce the exact isolation and dissociation the risks of which he was all too much aware of. During the 1940s, his investigation into matters of national identity became a search for the idea of an “Englishness” he could belong to. And gradually, finding none that instantly suited him, he started to engage in a double-sided project: on one hand, essays like “The Lion and the Unicorn” and “The English People” were meant to re-enforce the sense of Englishness of the country; on the other, he was working to undermine some of its more powerful and pervasive myths. He both tactically placed himself inside the mainstream and promoted the upturn of some of the long-existing structures of society. He resisted inherited filiations of class and education, preferring instead conscious affiliations which involve a deliberate exercise in freedom of choice and are not tied down to what is, but can accommodate a vision of what things might become.
<21> It would be naïve to suggest that Orwell came up with a perfect and permanent solution for the complex problematics of the intellectual’s position in society. “An unwelcome guerrilla in the flank of a regular army” (CW 19: 292) is his preferred metaphor for what he came to believe was the best negotiation between conflicting interests and multiple allegiances. It signals the role Orwell devised for himself, and for writers and intellectuals, in society, or, should we say, inside and outside it: part of the regular army, fighting the same battle, but always on the verge of defecting and starting his own, more unconventional, struggle; marching along with others, but remaining a subversive, uncomfortable force that the regular army would rather have not to deal with. A difficult, often uncomfortable compromise between commitment and rebellion, which can easily leave you on the wrong side of either or suspended in the gap between the two. But eschewing party-politics in the narrow sense never stopped him from literally fighting alongside others (like the militias in Spain) for a cause he considered just, or from speaking up in their defence when they were wrongly accused. And although he was persona non grata in both Right- and Left-wing circles for most of his life and turned patron saint of congregations he would have strongly disapproved of after his death, Orwell’s model has been taken up, interrogated or adapted by other intellectuals, writers and artists, in their efforts to find the ideal equipoise between personal integrity and public intervention in the equally, if not more adverse, circumstances of our present.
Language, whose language?
<22> In an interview given to The Paris Review, Don DeLillo states: “Before history and politics, there’s language.” (15) I’m not sure Orwell would agree with DeLillo’s assumption about the ontological pre-existence of language and its primacy over everything else. In linguistic and philosophical terms, Orwell can hardly be called a nominalist, strongly believing that there is tangible world of objects out there which language, if properly used, can make us see in all clarity and transparency. Part of the established tradition of “plain style” and certainly one of its strongest contributors in the last century, Orwell retained a common-sense notion of the linguistic process; his underlying views on language (as expressed in essays like “Politics and the English Language” and in his famous dictum that “Good prose is like a window-pane” ) are, in the light of recent critical developments, dismissable, if not outright wrong.
<23> Nonetheless, language came to acquire a particular centrality in his work as a key element of his political vision and as a cornerstone of social transformation and historical change. Whether language comes before or after politics and history is in a sense irrelevant for him: neither can do what they are supposed to do if the former is not kept in good working order. His pragmatism, with all its limitations, does highlight fundamental questions about language and power, language and thought, language and truth, language and class, and language and the historical record, which are the object of scrutiny in a number of disciplines still battling with these crucial but elusive issues. For an amateur, Orwell tackled the problem of language with flair and perceptiveness, assuming, as we all do, that individuals construct and define themselves through language, that all social intercourse passes through it and that no future can be envisaged without proper consideration of its past and present uses and abuses.
<24> In the short space available here, Orwell’s initial thoughts on language will have to give way to the fully-formed vision of his later production, as expressed primarily in “Politics and the English Language” and Nineteen Eighty-Four, two of the key texts which explicitly deal with the issue. One scene from the novel is particularly illuminating in the present context. Syme, a philologist in charge of compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, is extolling the “beauty” of the project he is engaged in: the destruction of words and the reduction of the English lexicon, which will shortly render “Old English” incomprehensible to everybody in the future (NEF 61). Winston Smith’s interjection (“Except...” ) stops mid-way through the sentence. He is about to say the unsayable, that only the proles will keep the old language alive. In a totalitarian world where aesthetics have been turned upside down and the scholar is a willing lackey of the powers that be, silence speaks volumes. The individual no longer owns the language he uses, having had his powers of expression usurped by the forces of oppressive authority. Newspeak signals a new order which will leave the past unrecognizable and make the future unimaginable, because there will be no words to express them in. A perpetual present must be endured within the dominant discourse, and withdrawal from language is the only, ineffective, relief to this condition.
<25> This seems to me to encapsulate Orwell’s concern with the way language operates both at a private and at a public level. Once again, the two dimensions cannot be dissociated, since power relations construct both victim and victimizer by denying the first the right of intervention in the formation of public discourses. Newspeak is a language imposed top down rather than created bottom up. This is precisely what Orwell feared was already embryonically present in his lifetime. What he witnessed in the distortions and euphemisms of political discourse, the growing monopolies of media corporations and the hermetic obscurities of professional jargon was the tendency towards the silencing of dissent, the elimination of discord and the exclusion of an underclass from the audible speech of the culture. Fully aware of language as an emancipatory tool, in Nineteen Eighty-Four he turned it into one of the essential instruments of repression. But language’s double-edged nature is what, in his view, allows for a democratic control of its development. If followed to the letter, his recipe for good writing in “Politics and the English Language” would produce, it has to be admitted, a lifeless and uninspiring prose. The prescriptive tone of the essay does however imply that restoring English to health is a job for all and sundry and the moulding of language cannot be left in the hands of the few.
<26> The English are “branded on the tongue” as well he knew, having tried—and failed—to disguise his public school accent during his tramping days. Language as a marker of class was, paradoxically, he believed, being intensified in the age of the radio. The mass media did not reproduce the speech of the masses, but an idealized version of the language of the elites, thus perpetuating class divisions and structures of power. His fascination with Cockney, the dialect of tramps, and other varieties of slang and vernacular is not so much the concern of the antiquarian with the preservation of the linguistic past as an article of faith in the regenerating qualities of popular language. Just as the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four were the sole repository of a history told in nursery-rhymes and children’s verses, what he liked to call “the common man” was keeping the language alive by solidly anchoring it in the material world of objects. Tangible reality was thus a corrective to meaningless abstraction, and attention to the perpetually changeable surface of the world would prevent the dead metaphors and hackneyed phrases favoured by those protected from physical effort and removed from manual work. Even Winston Smith, rebelling against the predominantly urban world of the totalitarian state, cannot come up with a more evocative term for its anti-type, Nature, than the “Golden Country” of pastoral convention.
<27> The relation between words and their users is therefore a dynamic, dialogic process, where one is made by but is also the maker of the other. This carries important political overtones: Orwell’s notion that the boundaries of language determine the sum of what it is possible to think underlies his attack on all systems that curb discourse in an attempt to eliminate subversive ideas and heretical thoughts. In the fully-developed totalitarian world of Nineteen Eighty-Four the process is consummated in a reductum ad absurdum of what he could see happening in his own time. The “doublespeak” of political propaganda, the homogenizing English of the media, the anaemic, sterile productions of intellectual and professional elites, all appeared to him as serious threats to the democratic polyphony he advocated. Boundaries were closing in on language as much as on geopolitics.
<28> His insistence on the centrality of language in private and public affairs also stems from its crucial role in the preservation of the historical record. In a world where he felt words and meaning seemed to be parting company, the annihilation of shared truths and common values would endanger our relation with the past and therefore our construction of the future. The manipulation of the present to suit ideological tendencies or political programmes already evident in the totalitarianisms operating in his own time (and lamentably in supposedly democratic countries like his own) could quickly descend into a systematic erasure of history from which there would be no way back. Orwell was one of the first to realize that the new information technologies and the power of the mass media had the potential to accelerate this process. As a journalist himself, and Talks Producer in the BBC during the war, he could not but be aware of the impact of the media on our notions of truth and reality. As a writer of documentaries, novels and essays, he made it his task to record events as he saw and understood them, attempting to be true both to the way things were and to the way he felt about them—discontinuous as the two might be and often were for him.
<29> In an age of information wars and audiovisual surveillance, Orwell’s concern still strikes a chord, if for no other reason than because in matters of language he undoubtedly practiced what he preached. He extended our capacity for thinking through the complex issues of power and control by creating a new vocabulary that is instantly accessible not only to the specialist, but above all to the wider public. His deliberate efforts to forge a clear, straightforward form of address, universally (if somewhat innocently) praised for the vigour and lucidity of its prose, are part of his search for a language that would truthfully account for reality as he lived it. His powerful rhetoric, combined with a style which avoids sloppiness while remaining colloquial and although simple is never simplistic, produced far-reaching effects on our culture. Orwell never speaks to us condescendingly from a great height, nor does he falsely mimic the speech of the apathetic, the alienated or the impotent. His is the voice of an intelligent, concerned and committed individual who assumes you can be—and are—as interested as he is in denouncing the language of power and domination and in fostering discourses of freedom and empowerment.
Final Note
<30> Given the introductory nature of this paper, I have tried to be more suggestive than descriptive, more evocative than explicit, leaving the reader to trace the lines of descent between Orwell’s time and ours according to his or her own experience, interests and concerns. From my location as an Orwell scholar, seeing his shadow in the background of what follows is always an exercise filtered by the benefits—as well as the drawbacks—of hindsight and the occasional dramatic irony. But to revisit Orwell is always to realize how he opened up a space for the literary in the debate about power and control that we can step into and profitably appropriate up to this day. His dystopian vision remains with us today as a warning about the dangers of political apathy, social conformity and ideological subservience. His sense of responsibility, both as an intellectual and a citizen, reminds us that public intervention is not only possible, but effective—and available to each one of us. Hopefully, others will continue to use him, not as the prophet of doom or the sanctimonious consciousness of a generation, the idealized secular saint or the virulent scourge of the Left, but simply as a provisional point of departure, one of the possible (however fallible and tentative) beginnings of the “middest” we find ourselves in.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don (1993). “The Art of Fiction” in The Paris Review 135 (Fall 1993). Online. 29 March 2012.
Kermode, Frank (1979). The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press [1966].
Lyon, David (2010). Surveillance Studies. An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press [2007].
Orwell, George (1998). Complete Works. Vol. 12. A Kind of Compulsion. 1903-1936. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker & Warburg.
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