ducksanddrakes

Yesterday, I described George Orwell’s “Politics and Language” using two versions of his hypothesis. In the first version, Orwell writes that chaotic politics is a result of chaotic language. In the second version, Orwell’s idea is that thought corrupts language while language corrupt thought. These two versions are not identical, but they interact with one another in important ways. For instance, they interlock into a chain:

thought-corrupts-language-corrupts-politics-corrupts-language-corrupts-thought

And we spiral downward. This is another way of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Let’s change the verb to something usefully banal:

thought-affects-language-affects-politics-affects-language-affects-thought

In this chain, language seems to be the only way in which we have any meaningful power. Thought is precocious; politics is vast. Only through language can we manage the encounter between our interior lives and the social structures that rule us.

This is a pretty strong notion of what language is all about. It is also fairly obvious – thought precedes writing and writing precedes politics, which informs thought. I think that people accept this idea as common sense. But common sense is never just common sense. Here I discuss how authors might make use of Orwell’s insight for different audiences. For illustration, I take two examples from recent articles in The Guardian, neither of which is conversant with Orwell. The first is an interview with the Australian writer Alexis Wright., who won the Miles Franklin literary award for her novel Carpentaria. The second is an opinion piece that laments the lost hopes of the 1968 generation by the prominent American author Erica Jong.

In her interview, Wright discusses aboriginal issues in the wake of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s historic apology for the scandal of the “stolen generation.” Wright advocates expanding Aboriginal self-rule in Australia, and has ideas about how her writing fits in to this project:

These questions of self-determination underpin Carpentaria, but, as Wright stresses, it is a work of the imagination, not political theory. It demands not a bill of rights, but a space to think and breathe. “When you have a secure space, you are able to ask yourself questions about what might make it better. At the moment we haven’t got the space to dream a future for ourselves, or to imagine how we might want to be. A lot of our people are working so hard at the level of survival that we’re not dreaming, not imagining, to the point of feeling that it’s not even worthwhile to dream because we can’t make our dreams come true. My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams.”

For Wright, thought (dreaming) and language (writing; a space to think) must be pulled together in order to be able affect politics (making our dreams come true). It’s a chain like this:

Thought/language affects politics affects thought/language.

This is not quite the same as Orwell’s chain, but a number of readerships will find this version compelling. There is a constituency that responds to the idea that literature is a “space” that brings focus to thought prior to any politics – indeed, I’d wager that a lot of readers of epics use these books as a means to bring focus to their own thoughts.

Before pursuing this subject further, let’s contrast Wright’s idea with Jong’s. Jong’s article on the hopes of her generation of feminists begins thus:

In 1968, there was a great feeling of hope that things might change, that women might escape from beatings and rape and malnutrition in the developing world, and that, in our supposedly civilised world, they might find law degrees, medical degrees, political advancement and economic parity with their brothers and fathers. Not to mention their husbands.

This paragraph offers a number of metrics by which “change” are to be measured: lowering rates of violence and increasing rates of higher education and income. We expect that a failure to meet these goals will form the content of the disillusionment that Jong feels. Yet this is not quite what comes next:

But it has not come to pass. Yes, women have law and medical degrees in great number, write books by the carload and are good at it (why should we be surprised, when our first great poet of love, Sappho, was a woman?), but the world is still not a level playing field. Women are still not safe on the streets or in their own homes. And they comprise, with children, most of the world’s poor.

Paragraph One did not mention anything about the books required to bring about the change . The idea of writing has crept into this discourse without much heraldry. The new theme expands in the next paragraph, in which the level playing field has less to do with safety, education or advancement, but everything to do with language:

We have spilled oceans of ink, cut down forests of trees, blazed through the internet in light, and the world is still dominated by the sex-bearing appendages rather than clefts. Why? That is the subject for a future book. But I can say that the hope I felt in 1968 has evaporated. Last week, a woman commentator on a supposedly progressive network called Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro “whores”. She was suspended, but she’ll be back. Women columnists still make their fortunes by attacking other women, as in the age of Clare Boothe Luce. It is, in fact, a time-honoured way to get a book contract or a political appointment. Trashing one’s own gender remains a path to advancement.

It would be false to say that the paper troubles itself only with language. In fact, in the ensuing paragraphs, Jong concentrates more fully on women’s rights and choices in the post-1968 era. But she also continues to thread into this discussion a number of critiques of what people write and say about women. Among the evidence for the diminished presence of feminist goals include: Time magazine’s cover “Is Feminism Dead?” from the mid 1970’s; the fact that feminism was something “scarcely enunciated” before it became renamed as “the F-Word;” and the fact that Oprah Winfrey often uses the term “vajayjay.”

Here I’m not interested in the merits of Jong’s point of view. My point is that in this article, Jong has almost subconsciously substituted political battles for language battles. So In the context of this discussion, a different string applies:

thought-affects-language/politics-affects-thought.

Notice the contrast with Wright. What accounts for this discrepancy? Actually, there is no mystery here: there is a very well-defined constituency out there of people who believe that language and politics are always tightly coupled, and that thought can only but affect both at once. Indeed, this is the orthodox view among humanist scholars of the last quarter century, ever since the linguistic turn.

So who’s right? Both. In the context of her literary career, Wright made a decision that her readers believe in a deep connection between thought and language. Jong’s readership has led her to make a different decision, but based on similar criteria, and equally as accurately.

The results differ because these authors have different emphases because they are conversant with different readers. As a result they draw upon the common sense embodied in Orwell’s system in radically different ways. Actually, Wright and Jong have similar politics and points of view. But at the end of the day, what matters in both texts is the reader - precisely the entity missing from Orwell’s formula.