[Newspoetry] orwell essay

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear DFM:

Some of what Orwell says is so accurate that we might as well accept it as
true rather than pointlessly argue over details too small to investigate
profitably.  However, it would also be necessary to ask other questions than
the ones that Orwell does about the relationship between politics and the
language(s) (styles) that prevail therein.

For instance, one has to assume there is some point ("end" in the sense of
purpose) to all speech, whether or not it sounds some meanings or merely
sounds some saws.  One is moved to speak, but the deployed skills of speech
(the "what" of what is said) may not evidently match the intent of the
speaker as well as some other practices of that speech might have done.

So, I would look first to the purposes of some speech, before I ever assumed
as Orwell did (does) that one style -- which may be named by its features of
clarity and directness -- the standard communicative model -- might be the
only style suitable for discourse.

I fail, too, to see the merits of your suggestion that Orwell was any sort
of an advocate of some particular connection between the language of poetry
and the language of news.  I'd say, rather, that he had very little interest
in metaphor or any other figures of speech, though some of my view is based
upon his rather hackneyed rejection of hackneys.  Who doesn't reject
hackney?  Well, I for one, think that this is a rather characteristic bias
of the elite world in which Orwell made his life.

One of the earliest discoveries that we make about language and its usages
concerns the love that people have for language.  That is, it concerns their
ability to recall strings of words, emotively significant to them.  This
enjoyment of language starts from the earliest cooings of infants (maa and
daa) and carries on through the ever more narrow channels of nursery rhymes,
poems and songs.  In the adult phase, though, only the song remains as a
remnant vehicle of self-expression of this love for language that finds its
own enjoyment in the endless unthinking repetitions -- of the boring, the
trite, and the hackneys.

Now, if I am right in my thesis, that language is acquired because it is a
pleasant thing to make sounds and that one enjoys one's own language as an
end that is sufficient unto itself -- with no communicative intent at all
(an heretical doctrine in today's world that believes that everything has a
social purpose -- or, rather, as with Orwell, that it ought to have one in
order to be meaningful), then something is quite wrong with the critics such
as Orwell.

What would be wrong is that his diagnosis is, as I hinted, hackneyed.  It is
the same criticism of the masses (or the many, as I would say) -- and their
language(s) that has ever been obsession of the elite(s) -- for the thing
that marks out the barbarians is always first their foreign tongues.

I could go on in this vein, of talking about the kind of class biases that
Orwell exhibits so well.

However, as I first noted, I did agree with him on the fact that there are
most definitely observations that might be made on the connections between
speech and politics.  However, my agreement with Orwell that a topic is
important is not nearly enough for me to accept much of the rest that he
says as relevant political analysis, or even as good political advice.  And,
what I say of politics goes equally well for what I would say of poetry, for
I know of no poems that he intended.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick