INTRODUCTION
15 desembre 2010 by rorueso
“Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)
Basically what I am going to analyse in this paper is the way in which George Orwell manipulated language, but focused mainly in his last writing, Ninenteen-eighty- four. George Orwell devoted himself mainly to write about political issues and he reflected some of his concerns in this book. He feared tremendously that England could become a totalitarian society and it is because of this fact that he decided to write a dystopian novel where he reflected the worst imaginable society, just in order to make people aware that it could happen in a near future, and he wanted readers to realize what it meant.
This novel reflects clearly how language used in an apropìate way can be a very powerful weapon to control people minds, and keep the power, as it happens in every totalitarian society. Just a minority is beneficiated whereas the rest is working and suffering deprorable conditions. Orwell believed that totalitarianism and the corruption of language were connected.
He focused especially on political language where you distorted events and concepts by calling them something else. You say things in such a way that you avoid producing an inner picture of them. He said: “If thoughts corrup language, then language also can corrupt thoughts”.
In the novel George Orwell talks about concepts like Newspeak which is a new language created by the inner party, whose main purpose is to avoid any personal thought, by eliminating words which contain negative implications against the Party and also Doublethink which according to the author it was: ” To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself”.
At the same time it also talks about different ways of manipulation like control of information and history, physchological manipulation, physical control, technology, etc, and every single concept is explained much more in deep in the whole essay, so if you want to know more about this, then the complete essay!