Assignment Paper 107

• Name: Divya Sheta
• Paper Name: 107.The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century
• Assignment Topic: Language and Ideology in George Orwell’s 1984
• Subject Code No:22400
• Roll No.:06
• Enrollment No :4069206420210033
• Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com
• Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-II
• Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University.

 

• Introduction: 

“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”-George Orwell, Why I Write.

Nineteen Eighteen Four-1984 considered one of the best dystopian novella, respectively written by English novelist George Orwell. Along with his contribution towards dystopian literature, he successfully wrote about political ideology, heavily presented by political ideology like, Totalitarianism. An adjectives he gave like ‘Orwellian’. 

• About George Orwell:

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in 1903 into a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family. Orwell’s father had served the British Empire, and Orwell’s own first job was as a policeman in Burma. Orwell wrote in “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) that his time in the police force had shown him the “dirty work of Empire at close quarters”; the experience made him a lifelong foe of imperialism.

By the time of his death in 1950, he was world-renowned as a journalist and author: for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain) and poverty (tramping in London, washing dishes in Paris or visiting pits and the poor in Wigan); for his political and cultural commentary, where he stood up to power and said the unsayable (‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’); and for his fiction, including two of the most popular novels ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Orwell Foundation maintains a wealth of Orwell resources, free to access online, from Orwell’s essays and diaries, to a library of work about Orwell and his writing. Read on for an extended biography written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His Biography of Orwell, Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award.

As part of our wider commitment to promote knowledge and understanding of Orwell’s life and work, the Foundation also regularly releases new short educational films. These are free to access on YouTube and include contributions from Orwell’s son Richard Blair, D. J. Taylor, and previous winners of the Orwell Prizes:

1. The Night Orwell Died

2. George Orwell and the Battle for Animal Farm

3. ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’: 75th anniversary film

• About the Novel: 

Nineteen Eighteen Four novella follows the life of Winston Smith, a low ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler Big Brother.

‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; created ‘Thoughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as a looming punishment. Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, totalitarianism and how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, begins a subtle rebellion against the party by keeping a diary of his secret thoughts, which is a deadly thoughtcrime. With his lover Julia, he begins a foreordained fight for freedom and justice, in a world where no one else appears to see, or dislike, the oppression the protagonist opposes.

Perhaps the most powerful, effective and frightening notion of 1984 is that the complete control of an entire nation under a totalitarian state is perfectly possible. If the world fell under the control of one or even multiple dictators, the future could easily become a twisted, cruel world where every movement, word and breath is scrutinized by an omnipotent, omnipresent power that no one can stop, or even oppose without the fear of death.

• Linguistic Ideology: 

In Nineteen Eighteen Four the Party’s linguistic ideology is paradoxically anti-linguistic: there are several reasons that why it become anti-linguistic:

1.It uses language to mask a hatred of language

2.It rewrites history to destroy man’s history and heritage 

3.It prepares new dictionaries so man cannot express himself through language.

The Party's attempt to control man through language, to control time and history, is subverted, however, by the oldspeak narrator who asserts the linguistic "past" (embodied in a series of allusions) against the Party's anti-historical "present."

In a novel about the destruction of the linguistic past, the oldspeak narrator grounds the text in a series of allusions which assert the linguistic "past" and hence qualify the Party's anti-linguistic present. Allusions call up events from the past, and the narrator's use of allusion thematically subverts the Party's effort to destroy the textual past. Indeed, the novel's major symbols are about books, and Orwell emphasizes their relation to the oldspeak past. For instance, Smith keeps a "secret" diary to record his free and intimate thoughts with an old pen ("an archaic instrument") on "smooth creamy paper.. that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past."! Goldstein's "secret" book is written in the quasi-style of Trotsky and read by Winston and Julia in a "secret" room that is "paradise" (124). For a brief time this room suggests a return to Eden, a return to a prelapsarian linguistic world where unfallen lovers can read and talk in blissful safety. The fact that Goldstein's book has probably been fabricated by O'Brien makes the latter a tempter and the fatal book a "forbidden book" (164), as the allusions to forbidden knowledge and O'Brien's forbidden "apple" suggest Winston and Julia's "fall." There are also the ephemeral newspeak dictionaries continually being superseded by "definitive" editions, one of which Julia throws at the televised image of Goldstein, incongruously conjuring up. I suggest, Thackeray's Becky Sharp impetuously flinging Dr. Johnson's dictionary into Miss Pinkerton's garden (see Chapter I, Vanity Fair). The tacit contrast between Becky and Julia is also a contrast between the relative innocence of Becky's nineteenth century world and the world of 1984.

Orwell specifically associates the 1984 world with a perverted Puritanism, obliquely expressed in the incongruous statue of Oliver Cromwell (95) and the reference to a civil war (135). Moreover, Julia is mutatis mutandis Hester Prynne while Winston is Dimmesdale. In Julia's case the allusions are not subtle. She wears a "scarlet sash" which is an "emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League" (12) an inversion of Hester's sexual emblem. To Winston the sash is an "odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity" (17), and he passionately hates Julia because she seems to represent the Party's sexual sterility. Later, when Winston and Julia escape into the "golden country," the celebrated forest scene in The Scarlet Letter is evoked when they make love.

In addition, the allusions to the past crystallize the narrator's linguistic self-consciousness. One of the novel's fictions is that the narrator writes in oldspeak English in order to explain and describe the new, radical linguistic revolution embodied in newspeak. In this context, both the narrator and the reader are "prelapsarian" users of oldspeak: we are conscious of language before the "fall" into newspeak. This fiction allows the oldspeak reader to assess the perversion of language into its newspeak form. The allusions to Eden and the Fall also suggest a fall of language. As the reader's language is oldspeak, he is aware of the special irony in words like minitrue, minipax, miniluv, and miniplenty-an irony which escapes even Winston who only sees the words as simple abbreviations. Although oldspeak is still the lingua franca of the 1984 world. Winston and others are ignorant of the historical meaning of words, as the Party's assault on oldspeak slowly removes the accumulated historical meanings of the pre-newspeak words. In contrast, the reader sees the prefixal "mini" as a thematic abbreviation of the Party's linguistically compressed world, and he also sees the irony by which the Party unwittingly tells the truth about "mini" or "little" truth. peace, love and plenty. Winston misses the significance of mini because it no longer exists in its earlier oldspeak sense. What Orwell documents is a thematic fall of language, not a second Babel with a proliferation of tongues and words, but a new fall of language in which language is narrowed and reduced to the Party's circumscribed meaning. 

• Conclusion:

To sum up the point, Orwell also believed that the health and sanity of a society could be preserved through the health and sanity of it’s language. In context, perhaps Orwell’s enduring gift was to make us self-conscious that in a world where people are still assaulated and murdered in the name of high-sounding words our real labor is still to preserve the dialect of the tribe. 

Work Citation

“About George Orwell.” The Orwell Foundation, 10 Nov. 2021, www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/about/about-george-orwell/. 

 

Blakemore, Steven. “Language and Ideology in Orwell’s 1984.” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 10, no. 3, 1984, pp. 349–56, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23556571. Accessed 8 May 2022.

“1984 By George Orwell – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/may/29/1984-george-orwell-review.