In 1944, a young British writer named Eric Blair was sending publishers his manuscript about the rise of Stalin, but it was mostly rejected for its inflammatory content. He finally found a publisher, and the book, „Animal Farm,” released under Blair‘s pseudonym, George Orwell, became a bestseller. The experience proved instructive. Next year, in the essay „Politics and the English Language,” he wrote that degraded language was both symptom and cause of the decline of contemporary culture and political thought. „One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end,” he wrote. In other words, it‘s important to call a pig a pig.
Hating imperialism Since its publication in 1945, „Animal Farm” has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and become a standard text for schoolchildren, along with Orwell‘s other vision of the future, „1984.” But it is the writer‘s essays on the importance of clear language and independent thought that make him relevant. Consider this, from „Politics and the English Language”: „The word Fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‚something not desirable.‘ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.”
Eric Blair was born into what he described as „the lower-uppermiddle class” in 1903 in Southwold, England, and spent most of his adult life trying to undo the comforts and privileges his station afforded him. Instead of going to university, he joined the Imperial Police, requesting the remote post of Burma. It was in Burma where Orwell would learn to hate all forms of imperialism. Ffive years later he returned to England, where he slept in homeless shelters and asked for work in restaurant kitchens to experience how the poor lived, then went to the economically depressed north of England to document the condition of the miners. A self-described democratic socialist and anticommunist, he volunteered to fight with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he stood up in the trenches to light a cigarette and promptly was shot through the throat.
All this time he was writing, or trying to, and began publishing regularly during World War II. In addition to his war reporting, he wrote reviews, essays, memoirs, novels and a regular newspaper column. He also was a faithful diarist. Since August his entries have been published as a blog (orwell diaries.wordpress.com) on the same date they were written 70 years ago.
Lucidity of writing Though many of Orwell‘s essays describe single incidents, his concerns are political, in the largest sense: the way human dignity is corrupted by false phrases. He was less interested in what motivates people to act without integrity than in the words they use to camouflage and perpetuate their dishonesty: for Orwell, bad language and bad politics were one and the same. Yet for all his penury and despair, his faith in the power of clear, strong language can only be read as optimistic.
Today, the writer‘s name is invoked to describe anything involving surveillance, paranoia or even books about animals. Orwell‘s ideas have been simplified over time, so that „Big Brother,” the totalitarian, state-run citizen-control mechanism of „1984,” is now the name of a reality-TV show that bears little resemblance to the book. Rather than describing surveillance devices, or pig farms, a more accurate application of the adjective would mean something that aspires to the lucidity and integrity of Orwell‘s writing.
