AJELLS: Vol. 5 No. 1, 2014
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Language and Style in Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Christopher Ufuoma Akaruese
“The style is the man”
- Comte Buffon
Abstract
This study was carried out to examine the style adopted by
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) in putting his message(s)
across to his audience (the common man) in a novel entitled
Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the world of creative writing, studies
have revealed that actual usage of language varies from
group to group, and speaker to speaker in terms of the choice
of words and the meaning of those words. In order to have
adequate insight into the theme of this study, attempt was
made to highlight the life and works of Orwell and the concept
of style which the analysis was premised on. At the end of the
study it was revealed that Orwell makes use of images,
symbols, contrast, dialogue, exaggeration and a few others in
order to portray the high degree of totalitarianism in the novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four which is a satire against the defunct
Soviet Union and all forms of power hunger and rational
hierarchy.
Introduction
Language is the universal medium for conveying the common
facts and feelings of everyday life by using symbols, words,
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pictures, figures, graphs or illustration. No language is fixed,
uniform, or unvarying; all languages show internal variation.
Actual usage varies from group to group, and speaker to
speaker in terms of the pronunciation of a language, the
choice of words and the meaning of those words.
Furthermore, in the words of Leech and Short, “the distinction
between what a writer has to say, and how it is presented to
the reader, underlies one of the earliest and most persistent
concepts of style as the “dress of thought” (13).
These notions make a good starting point for a more technical
discussion of the use of style in language which makes
references to a distinctive manner of expression, through
whatever medium this expression is given physical shape
because a writer responds with total personality to a social
environment which changes all the time.
In addition, the writer registers with varying degrees of
accuracy and success, the conflicts and tensions in his
changing society. Thus, the same writer may produce different
types of work, sometimes contradictory in mood, sentiment,
degree of optimism and even world-view for the writer
himself lives in, and is shaped by history which impliedly
means that writing is not an isolated activity but an expression
of the general political consciousness. We can see this in
Orwells novel entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four that was first
published by Seeker and Warburq Limited in the year 1949.
In the aforementioned novel, the author tries to make political
writing into an art for Nineteen Eighty-Four could be termed
as a surgical work on the political direction of mankind
especially in the Twentieth Century. It vividly depicts the
recklessness of despotism and the fate of man in the hands of
man. This goes to show how a few individuals arrogate to
themselves the power of life and death while the majority of
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the people knuckle under to the excesses of these power
wielders.
Premised on the foregoing, this paper attempts to investigate
the style adopted by George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) in
putting his message(s) across to his audience which he
describes as the “common man” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Life and Works of George Orwell
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was born in Bengal in
1903, his father being an official in the Indian Customs and
Excise. He went to a South Coast preparatory school and then
to Eton, his style cramped by genteel poverty. He served in
the Indian Imperial Police from 1922 – 1927. Dissatisfied with
a role which increasingly offended his conscience, he left
Burma and spent the next two years in Paris doing a variety of
odd jobs and living in very sordid condition.
From 1929 he took a series of poorly paid jobs which
nevertheless provided him with much material for his writing.
About this time he became a professed socialist, and the rest
of his life was largely spent in defending and propagating in
one way or another what he considered to be true democratic
socialism against its perversions.
George Orwell, before his death, as earlier stated, was a leftist
and the principal features of his career as a writer, broadcaster
and critic is his persistent criticism of those who present,
analyze and advocate ideas. Orwell's development as a writer
coincided with his growing knowledge and hatred of
totalitarianism and of the mentality that supported and
practiced it. His rejection and hatred of left and right wing
totalitarianism was the outcome of a detailed knowledge
gained from reading and personal experience. Many of his
hopes and fears about the shape of the future were responses
to what he read throughout his adult life.
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Orwell had prolonged interest in social development and
political structures. After reading all authors that wrote on
totalitarianism and the future, he came to see two things
possible, the possibility that most men will be made slaves
and that socialism might take an oligarchical instead of
democratic form. The themes of the books he was reading
about dictatorship and totalitarianism for example began to
foretell with astonishing accuracy the things that were
happening thirty years later. Enslavement of one kind or
another is a recurrent theme in Orwell's fiction and his
stemmed from a fear that the 'labourer's' lot might become
universal except for the few controlling the system.
Orwell saw little to choose, with various systems (ISMS), to
him they all have the same disastrous consequences for
ordinary people. Only the leaders had any freedom, the rest
were permitted at best as followers, at worst they were forced
into slavery or killed. Thus Orwell in his time came to believe
that the intellectuals have betrayed their trust and repudiated
their obligation to think; they have been corrupt by the desire
to get their hands on power that they have accepted without
analysis or protest the totalitarianism outlook. Orwell also
became disappointed by the result of the First World War. It
was this attitude, derived from this background, which
determines his feelings about socialism. He thought that
socialism was elementary common-sense because in the midst
of abundance there was no good reason why everyone should
not have a fair share. He rejected doctrinaire socialism and
Marxism but advocated the common means of production and
classless society. However, the fact that Orwell's life was a
struggle to see and help humanity out of impasse cannot be
over-emphasized. In this light, one has no choice but to accept
V.S. Pritchett's characterization of Orwell as:
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“the Wintry Conscience
of his generation.:
Orwell as a writer wrote the following novels:
Burmese Days (1934), Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra
Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to
Catalonia (1938), Coming Up For Air (1939), Animal Farm
(1945) and Nineteen Eight-Four (1949). The aforestated
works were borne out of Orwell's experience in life, his
knowledge and hatred of totalitarianism and the mentality that
supported and practiced it coupled with the ideas he got from
the works of other authors like Samuel Buttler, Arthur
Koestler, Zamiatin, Daniel Defoe and a few others.
Style
In trying to put his thought and message across to his
audience or readers, Orwell embarks on a style which is
peculiar to him. Before going any further, it is pertinent to
explain what is meant by the term style.
According to J.A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory (1993), style is the characteristic manner of
expression in prose or verse; that is, how a particular writer
says things. The analysis and assessment of style involves
examination of writers choice of words, his figures of speech,
the devices (rhetorical and otherwise), the shape of his
paragraph. Indeed, of every conceivable aspect of his
language and the way in which he uses it… The style as
Buffon puts it is 'the man'.
Analysis of Orwell's Style
George Orwell makes use of the third person singular and
plural form such as 'he' and 'they' in his narrative technique.
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He extensively uses hyphens instead of semi-colons such as in
the following expression:
…real. Not Saccharine, sugar. And
here's loaf of bread-proper white bread,
not our bloody stuff-and a little pot of
jam. And here's a tin of milk-but look!
This is the one I'm really proud of. I had
to wrap a bit of sacking round it,
because _. (108)
These hyphens functionally help Orwell to co-ordinate
sentences and ideas very well. Furthermore, with the effective
use of the hyphens, we are able to see the anxiety of the
characters such as mirrored by Winston and Julia in the above
statement. Another style of his is the use of suspense which in
most cases is also made possible by the use of hyphens. This
in essence means that Orwell through hyphenated sentences
puts his audience on by breaking off stories in the middle only
to continue afterward. The effect of this style is that the reader
who is already immersed in the story is often eager to know
the outcome or the end of such stories. A good example of this
is seen when Winston Smith is writing in his diary, his
experience with a freewoman in a narrow side street near the
big railway station.
…there was nobody else in the street
and no telescreen. She said two dollars.
I- …went with her through the doorway
and across a backyard into a basement
kitchen. There was a bed against the
wall and a lamp on the table, turned
down very low. She- … threw herself
down on the bed, and at once, without
any kind of preliminary, in the most
coarse, horrible way you can imagine,
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pulled up her skirt I- …turned up the
lamp. When I saw her in the light-….
(49 – 53)
One cannot rule out the fact that this type of suspense helps to
sustain the readers' interest.
This same reason could go for the use of alternating technique
as displayed in the 'physical jerk' scene and Winston's thought.
This method enables us to get a simultaneous message in
relation to the exercise and feeling as at that point in time.
With the aforementioned alternating technique, one sees
Orwell using flashback technique through dreams to bring the
past into the present thereby giving the present a concrete
bearing and understanding such as the case of Winston's
dream in relation to his mother and sister coupled with the
Golden country.
The use of 'dialogue' is not left out either. Such dialogues are
expressed in colloquial language as against the Standard
English he uses in narrating the story. The effect of this style
is that it makes the novel less formal thereby alleviating the
problem of boredom.
Orwell uses images and symbols along side with adjectives in
order to enhance a kind of 'vivid imagination' which is
cinematic in nature. Examples of such images are as follows:
'… some sort beetle-like man', '… suddenly he became aware
of Julia's face a few centimeters from his own, deathly white
as chalk…', '…nothing else, accepting the party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but
simply evading it as a rabbit dodges a dog…', '…it was like
two halves of a counter sing…', '… the war is like the battles
between certain ruminant animals whose horns are at such an
angle that are incapable of hurting one another…', 'Winston
became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new
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sound…', '…a tiny crinkle of pink like sugar rosebud from a
cake rolled across the mat…', 'He had set up a wordless
howling, like an animal', and '…one of the men had smashed
his fist into Julia's solar-plus doubling her up like a pocket
ruler' – and a few others.
However, one cannot undermine the fact that Orwell makes
use, of symbolic references in the novel entitled Nineteen
Eighty-Four. For instance, Smith's opening of the diary, Julia's
act of tearing her clothes off and flinging it on to a bough
symbolically mean rebellion against the party. On the other
hand, Mr. Charrington's half remembered rhymes, wine, the
old fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face, battered tin
oilstove and the glass paper weight symbolize the vanished
romantic past. In addition, the bird (thrush) symbolizes the
down trodden proles who are allowed to do everything that
they are unconscious of, while the 'boot' symbolizes
oppression, brutality and intimidation. The 'Golden Country'
more over represents the ideal society of Winston where
respect for humanity can prevail. In trying to project an ideal
society (Utopia), Orwell uses 'contrast' to depict the social,
political and economic ills of the society. The chess given to
Winston to play at the chestnut café invariably symbolizes the
eternal and unvarying triumph of good over evil.
Orwell also makes use of exaggeration in order to portray the
high degree of totalitarianism in the novel. Not left out are
irony, paradox and allusion as in 'we shall meet again-if we do
meet again …In the place where there's no darkness' (137).
Conclusion
In 1946, in an essay, “Why I Write” Orwell wrote: “What I
have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to
make political writing into an art” (3). In trying to achieve
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this, Orwell developed his famous clear, plain, simple,
colloquial and forceful style precisely in order to reach his
audience which he called “the common man”. Although
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire against the Soviet Union and
other forms of power hunger and rational hierarchy, Orwell
adopts-third person singular and plural narrative technique,
hyphens instead of semi-colons, alternating technique as
displayed in the “physical jerk” scene and Winton's though,
dialogue, images, symbols, adjectives and a few others in
order to achieve his goal/objective in the novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
Christopher Ufuoma Akaruese
Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Arts,
Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka
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