“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” – George Orwell, 1984.
George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), a novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic was born in Bengal Presidency, British India. He describes his family as ‘lower-upper-middle’ class. He learned seven languages and studied French from Aldous Huxley. His best known and most popular novels are dystopian fiction: 1984 and the bitterest critique on Stalinism: Animal Farm. He is also one of the great essayists in the world. Among the hundreds of essays, articles and letters he wrote, here are five essays that every writer and book lover should read:
“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
Orwell was a political writer. Politics has never escaped his works of art. He wrote with a purpose and had a tight grip on language. He even involved himself in the Spanish Civil war and produced ‘Homage to Catalonia.’ The impact of this was so powerful and profound that it became the most quoted and the most famous essay of Orwell. It talks about the impact of politics on the English language and its decline. Orwell is severely critical of his contemporaries and modern writers who have deteriorated and dehumanized the language with the use of abstract words instead of bringing concreteness to the text. According to him, the political language is full euphemisms and is written with sheer cloudy vagueness. He gives six rules for its remedy:
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The kind of advice that Orwell gave more than 50 years ago still applies accurately in the present scenario of writing. It only points to the genius of Orwell who always wrote strongly and with an unwavering will of exposing the deceit and manipulation of the authorities.
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there 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 windowpane. 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 lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
He describes his journey as a writer and says that writing is his true nature. Much of his life was spent in poverty and he became well acquainted with the troubles of the working class which shows in his works. He talks about the four great motives for writing: sheer egoism (his novel ‘Animal Farm’ brought him international fame and recognition due to its being a satirical allegory on Soviet Russia the subject of which was important from a political standpoint), aesthetic enthusiasm (his essays ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ describe his personal experiences and emotions and flaunt his command on the most delicate matters of human nature; its flaws and unexplainable tendencies in stressful situations), historical impulse ( ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ and ‘Homage to Catalonia’ document his experiences while dealing with real world situations and thus provide an account of history) and political purpose (Orwell always had a sense of being a rebel against injustices and he achieved it with ‘1984’, a nightmarish futuristic reality where there is no sense of individualism and everything is controlled by a single Party).
3. Bookshop Memories –
“But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro.”
Anyone who loves books or is an avid reader knows that it is a dream come true to be around books all the time but can the people who work at a bookshop say the same even the ones who always loved to read books? Orwell shares his experiences of working in a second-hand bookshop in London. Constantly being around books and dealing with all sorts of people who come into the library and leave the shopkeepers exasperated has made him hate the sight of books. His experiences in this essay are inspired by the bookshop “Booklover’s Corner” in Hampstead, London in which he worked years before he became an established writer. Its working experiences provided Orwell a first hand knowledge of the bookshop business and the kind of people that come into them.
4. Confessions of a Book Reviewer –
“He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.”
In this short essay, he gives a detailed account into the life of a book reviewer or any writer in general. Orwell describes the pangs of reviewing books that are utter nonsense and not worth reviewing. It is safe to say that it is not a very glorious job regardless of how it may appear on the outside. Most books that are to be reviewed do not provide much to write about them and only good books deserve long reviews. But a book reviewer always has to deal with whatever he or she is given. Still, the job of a book reviewer can be exciting as they get advanced copies of the new books that are newly published and they get to share their opinions and thoughts with people who truly care about those books.
5. A Hanging –
“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working –bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming–all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”
Orwell described this essay as a story. Set in Burma (now Myanmar), Orwell narrates the grim and depressed state of a prison. They are preparing for the execution of a prisoner by hanging. The genius of Orwell’s narrative is shown by such images like that of an ominous barking of a dog, the to be hanged prisoner avoiding a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet, his chanting of ‘Ram!’ repeatedly to keep his mind occupied in that dreadful moment and the unsure laughter of the men in authority. Orwell was in the Imperial Police in Burma and although he has said that it is a work of fiction, it is highly possible that he saw such a hanging in his time there. The process of an execution is dehumanizing and brutal and it makes Orwell question about the barbarity of the colonizers and the lack of ethics and proper justice to the natives.
Orwell had waged a war against totalitarian governments and oppressive regimes through his written word and considered language as a powerful weapon. His own experiences with colonialism and wars gave him a sympathetic understanding of the sufferings of the marginalized. His essays offered intense insights, social commentary and an understanding of his personal thoughts and feelings. His writing style and his attention to details has always been commendable to his every reader and will continue to amaze his future readers as well.
Comment below any other essays of George Orwell that you read and liked-
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