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An Analysis of Newspeak

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Brian Wicker
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The recent publication of his Collected Essays has renewed interest in Orwell’s position as a writer, and especially in his attitude to the artist’s commitments in the world. The writer’s problem, in a time of conflict, according to Orwell, was that ‘one half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature’. For Raymond Williams (e.g. in The Observer, May 21 1961) this separation, while understandable, is not necessary: ‘it is part of the dissociation between the individual and society which is our deepest crisis’. Elsewhere he points out that any defence of liberty by an exile, as Orwell chose to be, standing apart from society, is bound to be ambiguous because ‘while the rights in question may be called individual, the condition of their guarantee is inevitably social... to belong to a community is to be part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define its disciplines’. While I agree with this view, I want to argue in this article that the source of Orwell’s dilemma, and indeed of the dissociation in general, has an important but hitherto undiscussed, philosophical aspect—to put it crudely, Cartesian dualism—which manifests itself in Orwell’s treatment of two related problems: the problem of language and the problem of orthodoxy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 43 , Issue 504 , June 1962 , pp. 272 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Writers and Leviathan (Collected Essays p. 434).

2 Culture and Society (Pelican Ed.) p. 281.

3 Politics and the English Language (Collected Essays, p. 350).

4 L. Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations 3 34.

5 Nineteen Eighty‐Four (Penguin Edition), p. 45.

6 For a criticism of this abstractionist theory see P. Geach's book Mental Acts.

7 cf. the following, from a report on a visit to China (The Guardian, May 25 1961): ‘We once began a conversation with: “Suppose a person wishes to change his job …” and got the answer: ‘“Which man? in what factory?” There is in fact no answer to anydung not now, here and expedient’.

8 cf. her article A House of Theory in the symposium Conviction edited by Norman Mackenzie, 1959.

9 T. D. Weldon: The Vocabulary Of Politics (Pelican Edition) p. 19.

10 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 246.

11 Quoted in John Atkins: George Orwell, p. 254.

12 Collected Essays, p. 197.

13 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 45.

14 From notes taken at Wittgenstein's lectures, quoted by Norman Malcolm in Ludwig Witgenstein: A Memoir, p. 48.

15 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 169.

16 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, pp. 66, 80, 119 and 126.

17 “Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 80.

18 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 119

19 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 68.

20 cf. Burmese Days pp. 135 ff., Animal Farm (Penguin Edition), p. 11, and Writers and Leviathan (Collected Essays, p. 428).

21 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, p. 127.

22 cf. St Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate Q. XIV Art. I; S.T. 2a 2ae, 1.4and Newman Grammar of hsent passim.

23 The Clergyman's Daughter, pp. 24 and 81.

24 Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 279.

25 In Philosophy Vol. XXXIII, Jan. 1958.

26 Politics versus Literature (Collected Essays, p. 3 89).

27 Writers and Leviathan (Collected Essays, p. 432).

28 Politicsand the English Language (Collected Essays, p. 343).