L-Space- Confessions of an English Literature Reviewer

I have the day off work, so a lazy morning of watching awful morning television shows while lounging about on the sofa eventually turned into a short trawl through Wikipedia links. Wikipedia is my go-to place in times of boredom, and I've set the random article function as my homepage (which more often than not results in a short article about a village in Eastern Europe for some reason). Through reading an article on litotes (and trying to work out how to pronounce it) I was quickly led to an article about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (1946) (here, originally published in Horizon magazine), an essay I'd never read before. I found the full essay (here, possibly even legally) and it's fairly short and succinct; a well-written rant against the way that a few factors had been leading to the decline of the English Language.

Orwell's main cause of discontent was the manipulation of the language's various faculties in political writings in order to disguise the nature and/or hypocrisy of its actual meaning, and of the writer or political party behind it. As a natural-born cynic regarding the topic I can't really say much about the political aspect, only that almost seventy years later such techniques are undoubtedly ubiquitous in particular segments of modern society, the most obvious of which is advertising (and we all know advertising rules the world). Orwell wrote the comedy novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the subject of advertising, which one day might get re-read and reviewed here.

 

My most necessary rule.

Orwell goes further in his essay by addressing the application of political dialogue in literary criticism, which is, to be honest, what made me thoughtful enough to write this short post. His point is that a lot of literary criticism relies upon the reviewer creating a kind of false sense of immaculate articulation through tossing in to their reviews as many longer words as possible, regardless of their actual effect or even meaning. It's not difficult to recognise Orwell's point (and some of the examples quoted in the essay are ridiculous), and now I'm constantly set to worry that I regularly do the same thing in my reviews; sacrificing accurate reviewing for the sake of flowery prose, thus making the whole exercise a waste of time. Muddying the waters, so to speak.

I think everyone who's ever written a few articles on absolutely anything must be guilty of this to a small extent at least, and it's not something that a writer should overly worry about if it doesn't occur to them that it's something that they're prominently doing already. Personally I am worried, so this short post is an attempt to follow Orwell's rules while talking about them (very meta, I think). I started this blog to hone my non-fiction writing skills precisely thanks to the quality of prose displayed by my favourite authors like Orwell, and almost two years on I think the project is progressing decently, but not perfectly. Ah well, onwards and upwards and all that. At present I'm currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (albeit slowly) so that will be on the review schedule, as will the next Discworld book and possibly, possibly the continuation of the Comics Snobbery series. But maybe not.