Orwell, Marcuse and the Language of Politics
| Date | 01 December 1975 |
| Published date | 01 December 1975 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1975.tb00083.x |
| Author | Ian Slater |
| Subject Matter | Article |
ORWELL, MARCUSE AND THE LANGUAGE
OF
POLITICS
IAN SLATER
University of British Columbia
THIS
paper
is
a
discussion of the contribution of George Orwell and Herbert
Marcuse to our understanding of how language can be corrupted and the dangers
inherent
in
such corruption. Implicit in the paper, however, is the assumption that
while both men shared a deep concern for language, in their own use
of
it two more
disparate writers could hardly be imagined. Indeed if Orwell were alive today
I
believe that an example of Marcuse’s writing would very probably have joined
those pieces of Laski and others who were strongly criticized by Orwell in his
essay
Politics and the English Language.
In short, what Orwell and Marcuse shared in spirit they did not share in practice.
In this essay
I
am mainly concerned with their shared spirit and how it manifested
itself in criticisms of our use of language. The paper is divided into three parts:
I-Orwell and Language; 11-Marcuse and Language; and 111-The Importance
of
‘Form’.
ORWELL
AND
LANGUAGE
Expressing concern over what he called ‘the huge dump of worn-out’ and ‘in-
compatible metaphors’ which we habitually use to describe and justify political
and other events, George Orwell, in his essay
Politics and the English Language,
notes how the phrase ‘the hammer and the anvil’ is ‘now always used with the
implication that the anvil gets the worst of it’ when ‘in real life it is always the anvil
that breaks the hammer.”
This remains
a
typically Orwellian kind of observation, one which reflects
the deep concern he had for the use of language and is one of the reasons why
Orwell, even in hisearlierworks which were not particularly well-received, somehow
stood above his contemporaries who, like himself, voiced their opposition against
what they believed were the injustices of their time. Another reason why Orwell
stood out was an early decision to settle, not without some nagging reservations,
that basic tension between subjective and so-called objective reporting which
aWicts most writers. The confiict was largely resolved in favour of a strongly
perceived social responsibility. Orwell’s growing disdain for writers who did not
share this broad, albeit ill-defined, sense of responsibility was expressed in the
New
English Weekly
in
1936
where he wrote:
On
the last occasion when Punch produced a genuinely funny joke, which was only
six
or seven years ago,
it
was a picture of an intolerable youth telling his aunt that when he
came down from the University he intended
to
‘write’. ‘And what are you going to write
about, dear?’ his aunt enquires. ‘My dear aunt,’ the youth replies crushingly, ‘one
doesn’t write
about
anything, one just writes.’
Whether or not he was entirely correct in his analysis, Orwell goes
on
to say,
G.
Orwell,
Inside the Whale and Other Essays
(Penguin
Books,
1957),
p.
146.
Political
Stndiea,
Vol.
XXIII,
No.
4
(459-474)
460
ORWELL, MARCUSE AND THE LANGUAGE
OF
POLITICS
This was a perfectly justified criticism
of
current literary cant.
At
that time, even more
now, art for
art’s
sake was going strong.
.
.
‘art has nothing to do with morality’ was
the favourite slogan
.
. .
To
admit that
you
liked
or
disliked a book because
of
its moral
or
religious tendency, even to admit noticing that it
hod
a tendency, was too vulgar for
words.’
In
Why
I
Write (1946)
Orwell asserted that ‘the opinion that art should have
nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” and that ‘looking back
through my work,
I
see that it is invariably where I lacked apolitical purpose that
I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without
meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generall~.’~
In
view of other novelists’
work, however, such as that of Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, the question remains:
why is Orwell still regarded as not only probably the most important political
writer (in terms of fiction) of his own time but as one of the ‘finest prose writers
of any English age’?4
The major reason for his success is that Orwell, largely through his vigorous
rejection of jargon, his outstanding honesty in criticizing his own political beliefs
as well as others’, and perhaps above all by his meticulous choice of fresh metaphor,
developed in his writing an extraordinary ability to reduce the big political prob-
lems of his day, and thus perhaps of most days, down to concrete events and to
interpret them in terms of personal (often intensely personal) everyday experience
and
so
could simplify complex issues without making them appear simplistic.
In these ways he has not only contributed significantly to the common currency
of
despair (e.g., ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak‘, ‘Doublethink‘) but has enabled
us
to
see politics as a man-to-man, rather than a conceptual, relationship
so
that we may
diagnose, through the help of more vivid imagery, some of the more general
problems of politics.
Furthermore, while unashamedly stating his bias yet being determined to retain
an unbiased eye, he began (by acting out his belief that ‘the more one is conscious
of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without
sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrit~’)~
to
make it acceptable, even
respectable perhaps,
to
approach the study of politics with moral conviction rather
than with amoral intellectuality. He said in effect that a man who studies politics
can, among other things, be angry yet truthful and even useful in writing and putting
things right
or
at least
in
making them better than they are.
In
short he generally
debunked the notion of value-free prose in political reporting.
Much
of
Orwell’s overall contribution to political writing (and here
I
include
the writings
of
political science as well as political reporting) and to the language
in
general stems from the care he showed in selecting imagery which would most
accurately reflect his conceptions of politics. In
Burmese
Days, for example, it is
the constancy of the naturalistic metaphor which is important to my mind and not
so
much whether the individual reader agrees or disagrees with Orwell’s interpreta-
tion of imperialism. And
it
is this constancy which, insofar as it reflects his refusal
to mix metaphors, offers an alternative to the haphazard
or
unwitting kind of
acceptance of current politically orientated metaphors which Martin Landau
I
G.
Omell,
The
Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters
of
George Orwell,
ed. by
S.
Orwell
and
I.
Angus
(Penguin
Books,
1968),
Vol.
I,
pp.
288-9.
Ibid.,
p.
26
Ibid.,
p.
30.
G.
Woodcock,
The Crystal Spirit
(Penguin
Books,
1967),
preface.
Orwell,
Collected Essays, Jorcmalism and Letters,
Vol.
I,
p.
28.
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