{"id":1796,"date":"2009-06-01T22:24:52","date_gmt":"2009-06-02T05:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/2009\/06\/01\/george-orwells-quest-for-truthful-language\/"},"modified":"2009-12-05T12:09:03","modified_gmt":"2009-12-05T19:09:03","slug":"george-orwells-quest-for-truthful-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/06\/01\/george-orwells-quest-for-truthful-language\/","title":{"rendered":"George Orwell’s Quest for Truthful Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"New Statesman<\/em> has a very interesting article by Keith Gessen<\/em> about George Orwell’s<\/em> ‘plain spoken’ style<\/a> that manifested itself in a series of essays in the 1940s and found its full expression in his masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four. <\/em>It’s fascinating to read about how Orwell’s experiences with fighting in Spain during the civil war in the 1930s and journalistic coverage of the events of that war influenced his use of altered and entirely untrustworthy newspaper articles in Nineteen Eighty-Four.\u00a0 Orwell apparently believed in clear, sharp and truthful language.\u00a0 He did not want ready phrases or dead metaphors.\u00a0 He wanted keen observation and simple expression.<\/p>\n

I think he achieved this in Nineteen Eighty-Four to a great degree.\u00a0 Mr. Gessen says one thing in his article that I don’t necessarily agree with: “In truth, Orwell was wrong about all sorts of things, not least the inner logic of totalitarianism: he thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>. In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin\u2019s death.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t think that’s quite right.\u00a0 The totalitarian regime in Nineteen Eighty-Four is<\/em> overthrown.\u00a0 In the last section of the book the writing jumps out into the future and discusses a quite obviously defunct and long-gone totalitarian state that tried to reduce language to its own ends.\u00a0 I think the point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that complete control of a population can be largely achieved with various mind-control techniques and the constant application of fear, but that it requires only a modest intelligence to resist and eventually overthrow such control.\u00a0 The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is just an ordinary schlump.\u00a0 He’s not very bright.\u00a0 Pretty dim in fact.\u00a0 The idea with Winston Smith is if he can do it then anyone can.\u00a0 And yet he is capable of resisting until his will is ultimately beaten out of him.\u00a0 But the point is that the will to resist is a real pest.\u00a0 You can’t remove it from society.\u00a0 It always comes up and eventually overpowers all control structures.<\/p>\n

Purchase Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em><\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Statesman has a very interesting article by Keith Gessen about George Orwell’s ‘plain spoken’ style that manifested itself in a series of essays in the 1940s and found its full expression in his masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s fascinating to read about how Orwell’s experiences with fighting in Spain during the civil war in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[431,2496],"class_list":["post-1796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-orwell","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1796"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3009,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions\/3009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}