Politics, language and truth

George Orwell's The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters, spread over four volumes, can be divided between the documentary and the factual, and the fictional and the imaginative. A basic theme, says RAVI VYAS, is the relation between experience and expression in a writer and in the language and forms he shares with society.

"Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism ...

"What I have most wanted to do ... is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

"(But) it is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness ... The problem of language is subtle (r) and would take too long to discuss. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose into one whole.

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lack a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

George Orwell, "Why I Write" (1946) from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, (CEJL), Volume I

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GEORGE ORWELL's CEJL is spread over four volumes: Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940; Volume 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943; Volume 3: As I Please, 1943-1945; and Volume 4: In Front Of Your Nose, 1945-1950. There is an infinite variety of writing in these volumes but, sadly, except for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four (these were thrust on us in school leaving examinations some years ago) and a few stray forays into some essays on Gandhi, Shooting An Elephant (on his Burmese Days), Why I Write, that were anthologised in undergraduate texts, the rest passed us by. (At a pinch you add Politics And The English Language; Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool; and perhaps Books v. Cigarettes but this is just about it, give or take a little).

The question is why, because that would provide the raison d'etre for revisiting Orwell again. Largely, the neglect is because of two factors. First, a misreading of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four that were taken as anti-Left pamphlets by the Left intelligentsia after the years of depression and fascism. But both novels were nothing more than warnings to the Left from the Left; what absolute power would do to language as it would to the lives of the people through increasing bureaucratisation of the State machinery. Both evils were intrinsically intertwined: bad politics would debase politics and debased language would empower bad politics. The Left was inclined to think otherwise, because to them "good literature" was proletarian literature where the worker(s) finally triumphs over the capitalist-roader. But, more importantly, the absence of Orwell shows how badly literature is taught in our universities - as if the examination syllabus mattered more than the adventure of private discovery of passionate digression. The close reading of the text which is the substance of English literature training and response makes it more difficult to identify with the real world, to take the world of actual experience of "heart". (George Steiner put it well when he said that to many English Literature "gentlemen", the cry in the poem sounds louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside). This is precisely what Orwell despised. To him, experience was more important than imagination, "to suffer", (to paraphrase Kierkegaard) more important than "to become a professor of the fact that another suffers".

If CEJL is an embarrassment of riches, where and how does one start? One of the basic themes that runs through the four volumes is the relation between experience and expression in an individual writer and "in the language and forms he shares with his society". Language is the agent rather than the source of experience. Or, to put it another way, content had to take precedence over language and the writer had "to choose whether to reveal content directly or to work directly with words for their own sake". Of course a rigid distinction between content and language could not be made because if the latter is inadequate, content would have no impact on the potential reader. (Orwell was later to describe himself as a "pamphleteer".) Language matters but "mere description, more words are not enough".

Orwell's theoretical questions were never pushed far enough to become genuine theory (in the sense that Wittgenstein and others after him did with the Big Questions on the philosophy of language) largely because he was more concerned with questions of social justice which was to lead to his classic study of poverty in The Road To Wigan Pier (The Road To Wigan Pier Diary is contained in Volume 1). Orwell said he wanted to live "outside" society and "to write" as he recalled "the swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauches, and plain idlers," and its ideology: "in cultured circles, art-for-art's- saking extended practically to a worship for the meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words".

For instance, Orwell points out that Dickens, though a deeply compassionate man (recent biographies show him up as a bit of a monster) and a radical by the standards of his age, presented his "good" lower-class characters as cheerfully content with their station: the poor may bewail their starvation but not poverty, the servant may resent his maltreatment but not his servitude. Who told Dickens this? His experience or just his imagination? If every novelist has a "message", then, for Orwell, as for many of us, this "message" is contrived and cannot be sold. (Much of the same could be said of Victorian novels which are riddled with hypocrisy and bloated with words that become substitutes for thought and experience. Even George Eliot wrote too much about too little).

Though the themes of the relation between "writing" and reality" runs through the four volumes of CEJL, there are two core essays that expound them: Politics And The English Language and Writers And Leviathian (both contained in Volume 4). And the key paragraphs of these two essays are:

1. "... the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes; it is not due to the bad influence of this or that writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing an 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 foolish and because our thoughts are foolish, but the sloveliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts ...."

2. "The invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen. It must have happened, even if the special problem of totalitarianism had never arisen, because we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible. No one could devote himself to literature as single- mindedly as Joyce or Henry James."

So, it was not merely the corruption of language but the invasion of literature by politics that caused the hiatus between "writing" and "reality".

Orwell's CEJL can be divided between the documentary and factual work on the one hand, and the fictional and imaginative work on the other. The distinction is clear enough: on the one hand his comments on Down And Out In Paris And London. The Road To Wigan Pier, Homage To Catalonia, and his sketches as "The Spike". "A Hanging", "Shooting An Elephant", on the other, notes on the making of four novels. Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air. But this division is not really of much importance; what is the relation between "fact" and "fiction" and his insistence that "fiction" should bear some resemblance to reality or what he quoted to the point of annihilation that "good prose is like a window pane", rather like a mirror that is, like a looking glass, not a window pane. Anybody looking into it, and failing to find some reflected portion of our times would be myopic.

Does Orwell come through as a socialist in CEJL? It is not important in the context of this essay but an interesting one all the same. He certainly anticipated some of the sickening disillusionments that have led socialists to dilute or abandon their faith. But he hated inequality, exploitation, racism, the bullying of small nations - his essay on Gandhi clearly shows that. Yet he is too full of contradictions in every sense of the term; he hated the class system but had an equal abhorrence of the actual texture of "dictorial collectivism", he gave precedence to "truth" (or facts) over "imagination" (fiction) that is reflected in the concluding sentence of The Prevention Of Literature.

"At present we only know that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity".

Yet he knew that imagination was necessary because otherwise how could he, having never lived in Russia, have so keen a perception into its life under Stalinism? He could see the desecration of literature in Russia - one of its ancestral homes - and that it could lead to "doublethink", "double talk". He also knew that a totalitarian society could not produce any imaginative work; but it can cause it. Orwell detested the machine gun but he was not an enthusiast for "willing cooperation" either. All this comes through in these anthologies but the essence of all his writings is a sustained criticism of servility. It is not what you think but how you think that matters. That is all a creative mind can teach you; the rest depends upon luck and matters less.

George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volumes 1,2,3,4, Penguin Books, Volumes 1-3: œ7.99 each, Volume 4: œ5.99.

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