[lbo-talk] Orwell's Obscurity

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Dec 8 15:45:18 PST 2006


Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
>
> I am not sure the particular examples Carrol is referring to here. If he can remember them I hope he can please list them or explain specifically.

As a start:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

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"Bother ... at all ... would admit": I've read a lot of work by various people in the 1920s/30s/40s who bothered about language. To Purify the language of the trive one of them or several of them wrote. I don't remenber any of them "admitting" (see the Earle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason books on this vicious usage) any such thing. It was in fact, if anything, generally claimed (probably not accurately) by those who bothered that one _could_ do something about it. A couple centuries earlier Swift had gone down that route, but I doubt anyone takes very seriously his hullabaloo about how vulgar the words "bus" and "mob" were. And since what Orwell is describing here is utterly a mystery, it is hard to derive that "it follows that...."

Is "language" (The Language) an "instrument which we shape for our purposes." Language might be considered a storehouse of instruments from which a given individual on a given occasion might derive and shape certain possibilities. But the general statement here is sheer nonsense and would be marked "vague" in the margin of a freshman theme. Orwell has set up a srawman in the very first paragraph of his essay and it poisons everything that follows.

The pacification paragraph is indeed superb. Was it original with him. I believe many people who hadn't ever read Orwell recognized the dodge as soon as they began to look at what was going on in Vietnam, but perhaps Orwell was first. I don't know. Kipling justified such pacification in his "The White Man's Burden," which is vile but also a wonderful use of language. It just isn't true that corrupt practices can't be justified in honest language. That was one of Blake's errors. "You can get good results sometimes from killing people." That is fairly obvious to most except to a scattering of consistent pacifists in the world. And even most of them would admit that if a would-be murderer and rapist broke into one's house shooting him might not be a bad idea. And most would admit that when a u.s. plane flew over a village to drop napalm, if the villagers shot back and killed the crew it was probably a good idea. But no, Orwell has to hint somewhat dishonestly that only assistant professors defending Stalin's purges invent sneaky language to disguise their adherence to this obvious principle. The honest argument here is that Stalin's purges were not an occasion when good results were achieved without suggesting that this was always the case.

"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer."

About the time that Orwell was writing there was a flurry of popular books and essays arguing that the German language had been utterly corrupted by the Germans and that it couldn't be used for honest purposes any more. That was nonsense and so is this sentence of Orwell's. Language does not decline! No language has ever declined. All languages are essentially perfect (except from the viewpoint of those who take Genesis literally and believe there once existed and unfallen language.) A given language remains a reservoir of infinite variety. (Chomsky argues this!) Susanne Langer long ago laughed out of court the idea of "primitive" languages which were so incomplete that the speakers could not hold a counsel in the dark but needed to gesture to each other. She noted dryly that the English Parliament probably would not want to hold its sessions in the dark. (Where has Ian gone; he was the only poster on these links who shared with me knowledge of Susanne Langer.) The use of language for corrupt purposes simply does not effect the language itself. A statment like Orwell's here can mean anything because it has no concrete meaning.

There is only one criterion of style: Decorum. And Decorum involves the complex interplay of time, place, audience, subject matter, immediate purpose, author's persona, genre, occasion, ultimate purpose,etc etc. Hence there can be no intelligible rule about this or that kind of language being or not being "good." And no language has ever failed to answer to the purposes of those who used it.

"But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely."

True, banally true, and irrelevant to Orwell's immediate purpose since he hasn't yet established the existence of either an effect or its cause. But it gets worse.

"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 inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Nothing was happening to the English language, and the amount of nonsense being expressed in 1946 was no more and possibly less than was being expressed in 1916 or 1876 or 1746 or whenever. And if foolish thoughts were being expressed, it was beause a foolish writer was expressing them, and not because, even in the slightest degree, English had become less able to exclude foolish or express wise thoughts. What poppycock!

" Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble."

When I started this post I thought Orwell's essay had (like any essay) its faults but on the whole really deserved its reputation as a classic. But this is really terrible. "Modern English ... is full of bad habits": It's hard to imagine worse nonsense about language. This nonsense has been spouted generation after generation, of course, and like most nonsense has sometimes resulted in wonderful things, my favorites being the _Dunciad_ and _Tale of a Tub_. When Orwell asserts that these bad habits "can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble," he is making the same equation between bad writing and bad morals that I have objected to in posts on this list. Pope and Swift make that (false) assumption, and produce great literature, but that's no justification for it as a working hypothesis. Any language in which there exists a largee amount of published prose will exhibit a large amount of bad prose. Big deal.

Among the worst faults of style as far as I'm concerned is tautology, and poster after poster in this cluster of threads has expressed his/her stylistic preferences in a series of banal tautologies, as does Orwell. And since readers characteristically try to give some content to a tautology (it always "feels" profound), different readers are bound to ascribe different senses to it.

Though "unnecessary" stylistic complication has also produced great literature. One of the most wonderful things about Byron's Don Juan is how many words Byron can gloriously use in making a simple point. It is the only book I ever read which, when I finished it, I was sad. I wanted it to go on and on. Hence even the tautology, "Don't produce unnecessary complexity" is not only a rather banal tautology but, paradoxically perhaps, false.

Enough.

Carrol



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