[lbo-talk] Orwell's Obscurity

[Carrol Cox]

It has occurred to me as I was rereading these recent threads that
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is a powerful example of
the obscurity of plain prose. There is nothing in the essay, its syntax
or vocabulary, to warn one that there can be radically different
interpretations of what Orwell is saying. And yet the history of the
essay, of response to it, show that it can be used, by intelligent and
well-meaning men and women -- to mean quite opposite things. I'm not
sure whether this is a stylistic defect, a deliberate but unacknowledge
intention, a symptom of basic confusion in Orwell's thought, or just an
instance of the impossibility of absolute clarity as soon as one gets
beyond Dick and Jane, but there is no doubt that there are fundamental
problems of interpretation raised by the essay, problems which will
never be satisfactorily resolved.

Carrol