Barely 1/5th into ‘1984’, I cant help discerning a fine individualistic touch of the author in the impact it succeeds in generating. Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell needs no introduction.
What makes a piece engaging is often the views presented behind the scenes (apart from the magic that authors like Wodehouse can create by mere wordplay) and for that, it is very important that the author says something definitive rather than filling pages with superficial frill. That is feasible only if the author holds a clear-cut view on the topic. Orwell exactly does that in Animal Farm and 1984, and drawing upon his personal experiences, spins out categorical tales woven around his ideology of politics and society.
Wikipedia’s article on Orwell is an interesting read. I particularly liked the excerpt about his critique of Dickens that only a blessed writer can conjure–
He wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens, “When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”
George Woodcock suggested that the last two sentences characterized Orwell as much as his subject.
The lovers of his works and his style of writing will probably also enjoy these “rules” he outlined for writers -
In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell provides six rules for writers:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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