Orwell and the Language: Speaking the Truth in Homage to Catalonia

Abstract

Reviewing Inside The Whale in Scrutiny in September 1940, Q. D. Leavis referred to Homage to Catalonia as ‘valuable’ and ‘impressive’. She described Orwell’s role in the Spanish War as that of a ‘critic-participator’, but what impressed her most about Orwell was this: ‘the great thing is, he has a special kind of honesty, he corrects any astigmatic tendency in himself because in literature as in politics he has taken up a stand which gives him freedom’.¹ Whether or not Orwell read this review, he was thinking through similar matters several months later in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’ which appeared in The Listener on 19 June 1941. There he wrote:

The whole of modern European literature — I am speaking of the literature of the past four hundred years — is built on the concept of intellectual honesty, or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare’s maxim, ‘To thine own self be true’. The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he shall not tell lies, that he shall say what he really thinks, what he really feels. The worst thing we can say about a work of art is that it is insincere…. Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing….

Any use of language is the chance to say something of our own — which is the same as the chance to achieve sincerity…. By using language we simultaneously express our individuality and our connection with humanity: we imitate and use the language of others because that allows us to be ourselves.

Ian Robinson, ‘D. H. Lawrence and English Prose’.

To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

George Orwell, ‘The Prevention of Literature’.