I

Having sent the completed typescript of his book The Structure of Complex Words to the publisher in London in September 1948, William Empson continued to have further thoughts that he wished to add, and so his long-suffering editor at Chatto and Windus had to find ways to insert the extra material even after the main text had been set in type. The last of these additions, sent from Peking over two years later in November 1950, occurs on page 83 of the published book, at the end of the notoriously dense and uninviting chapter entitled “Statements in Words.”Footnote ¹ The passage, set in smaller type than the rest of the chapter in order not to disturb the subsequent pagination, begins, “The most striking recent work on the kind of linguistics I am trying to consider here has been …” I break off his sentence there in order to call attention to the kind of claim the passage may seem to be making. After two long chapters, brimming with technicalities and even symbols, we now get an added paragraph which is considered so important that it is inserted after the last minute, even at the risk of disrupting the printing schedule. This indicates that the “recent work” Empson is referring to must be important indeed, and so we are naturally inclined to assume that some new scholarly treatise on linguistics or the philosophy of language must have recently reached him in China and he is hastening to take stock of its claims.

But when the sentence goes on to reveal the identity of this significant contribution to linguistics, our expectations are utterly confounded: the “recent work” in question is, he announces, “a very untechnical one: it is the dreadful book 1984 which George Orwell wrote while dying.”Footnote ² (By “dreadful” he clearly means, here and elsewhere, that it paints such an awful picture, not that it is such a poor book.) We can't help wondering whether the somewhat gratuitous information that Orwell wrote the book “while dying” isn't intended to turn away some of the criticism that might otherwise be directed at it. Empson did think the book represented a falling away from the author's best work, and here and elsewhere he showed a certain protectiveness towards Orwell's reputation.

Encountering Nineteen Eighty-Four in this setting, we may try to tell ourselves that it is not altogether outlandish to regard the novel as a contribution to “a kind of linguistics,” given the part played in the book by “Newspeak,” the invented official language of Oceania. Still, Empson's phrase may seem to come unnervingly close to, say, citing Animal Farm as a manual on agricultural practice. Why did Empson—Empson the preternaturally gifted reader of poetry, Empson the formidable analyst of the complexities of ordinary usage, Empson the idiosyncratic historian of cultural attitudes as embedded in shifts in the English language between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—why did this most subtle of thinkers, who had been working for over fifteen years on the ideas systematized in The Structure of Complex Words, believe, at or just after the last minute, that Orwell's dystopian novel was such an important contribution to his subject?

The question is made the more intriguing when one notices the unsteady, indecisive tone of the added paragraph, a tone uncharacteristic of an author who has never been accused of shying away from downrightness. This suggests that something about Orwell's book has unnerved him. But it is not, as we might at first expect, the appallingness of the society depicted or the bleakness of the novelist's vision that unsteadied the normally so-steady Empson. Rather, he seems to be unnerved because he suddenly fears that something about Orwell's treatment of the language of totalitarian politics may blow a large conceptual hole in the elaborate schema he has developed in his long and closely argued book. The added paragraph focuses on the “doublethink” involved in assenting to obviously self-contradictory or meaningless statements of the type “white is black,” which Empson characterizes as “a process of intentional but genuine self-deception.” He acknowledges that “this kind of process does occur, and is based on emotional grounds,” and then goes on, “I am left uneasy whether my treatment here has a pure-minded intellectualism which ignores the facts in view.” At first, he affects to wonder whether the extreme uses of language that Orwell devises are simply so exceptional that they do not affect his own general analysis of the operation of meaning, but he quickly swings over to affirming that his analysis can, in fact, encompass even what he calls “the ghastly paradoxes of the Orwell world such as ‘War Is Peace’.” Empson points out that his chapter already contains a paragraph on “the paradoxes of the great religions,” and now he wants to emphasize that his analysis “would apply to the very worst religions too.” (I'll come back to the interesting equation between totalitarianism as Orwell represented it and the “great religions.”)

Then, in a Burkean “return upon himself,” Empson swings round once more to suggest that “taking this way out of the theoretical dilemma does seem only another way to make my position a null one.” Buried in the smaller type of the squeezed-in paragraph, this is a remarkable admission two chapters into such an intricate and weighty book. In the course of that book, Empson demonstrated that the heavy theoretical machinery he had devised for analyzing how single words could be carrying “covert doctrines” applied even to the terms used in such apparent “identity assertions” as “Work is Prayer” or “Might is Right.”Footnote ³ These, he argued, are not just meaningless slogans; rather, they depend for their effectiveness on being analyzable into meaningful propositions of some kind, where, for example, an implicitly idealized version of the word in the grammatical position of the subject is allowed to benefit from a much more general sense of the word in the predicate. Yet here, faced only by Orwell's far-fetched and clearly parodic instances of totalitarian political slogans, Empson seems about to throw in the towel—to admit that his attempt to encompass such cases only shows that his position is “a null one.”

However, there is one final sentence in the paragraph, which reads, “It is rather hard to see beforehand what a line of argument is letting you in for; but I suppose I really meant to argue all along that the human mind, that is, the public human mind as expressed in a language, is not irredeemably lunatic and cannot be made so.” Here, in the dialectic of Empson's debate with himself, he returns to a more positive position. He is taking his stand on a claim—a claim that is repeated in various forms in many of his later writings—that the use of language is governed by an intelligible logic, one that, given sufficient patience and ingenuity, can be teased out, even from initially unpromising or apparently meaningless statements. The Structure of Complex Words constituted Empson's dogged and sometimes stuttering but ultimately magnificent vindication of this commitment to rational exegesis. So, we may ask again, why did he seem to be temporarily knocked off his balance by Orwell's novel?

There are different levels at which to attempt a response to that question. One would be to explore Empson's friendship with Orwell and the high regard he had for him: he treated his views as deserving of very serious consideration, whether on the interpretation of King Lear or on the meaning of political slogans.Footnote ⁴ Another would be his desire that The Structure of Complex Words should seem, as he explained to his editor, “up-to-date”: Nineteen Eighty-Four had enjoyed great acclaim following its publication in June 1949, and Empson knew that the tendentious equations of Newspeak would be in many people's minds when reflecting on the kinds of “identity assertions” he was discussing in Complex Words.Footnote ⁵ But, above all, there was the fact that any treatment of statements as “mere noise,” “pure emotion,” or simply “meaningless” constituted an intellectual challenge to the whole enterprise of his book. Professional linguists might not have thought of Orwell's novel as any kind of contribution to their discipline, but Empson had several reasons for taking it more seriously. I want to suggest that contemporary intellectual historians also have good cause to take Empson's engagement with Orwell's writing seriously, not least for the light it sheds on two ways of addressing the language of propaganda, both in the 1940s and, perhaps, in the present.

II

There may be various reasons for wishing one could have been present in the pubs around Broadcasting House between August 1941 and November 1943. Several leading figures in British literary and intellectual life worked for the BBC during this time, and large numbers of similar people gave talks or contributed to other kinds of radio programs. Contemporary reports and subsequent retrospects suggest that the local pubs functioned as a mixture of green room, office canteen, rehearsal space and impromptu seminar setting. Some of the exchanges that took place on these occasions may have had a bearing on the more public disagreements that were to follow.

In the course of the 1930s, Empson had published two short and commercially unsuccessful books of criticism together with a slender corpus of poetry, all the while consuming far from slender quantities of alcohol. He had had temporary teaching posts in Japan and China, interspersed with periods of freelance writing in London, and he had returned from China in 1940 because he believed in the overriding importance of contributing to the defeat of Hitler.Footnote ⁶ In the same decade, Orwell had published some commercially never very successful novels and some better-received works of nonfiction, while (especially from 1940 onwards, following the publication of Inside the Whale) starting to become known as the author of substantial essays and forceful journalism. During the war years he attracted further attention for his pungent contributions to these two genres—there can be no question but that his was a better-known name than Empson's when they met—but it was only with the publication of Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 that his reputation began to soar to the extraordinary heights that it has occupied ever since.Footnote ⁷

The two men met in August 1941 when they (and, as it happened, Empson's future wife, Hetta Crouse) were enrolled in the BBC's training program for talks producers—what Empson, with characteristic impishness, was later to call “the Liar's School.”Footnote ⁸ They then went on to occupy parallel roles, Orwell as the producer of talks for the Indian section of the Eastern Service, Empson for the Chinese section.Footnote ⁹ In the partially partitioned spaces that served as offices in the nearby building requisitioned by the BBC, they occupied adjoining cubicles, becoming friends as well as close colleagues. After a day's work, they and others would adjourn to the aptly named “George” or another local pub, when the intellectually more stimulating part of the proceedings would begin.Footnote ¹⁰

This may suggest that, like so much of British intellectual history from, roughly, the 1860s to the 1960s, it all seems to come down to what an Old Etonian said to an Old Wykehamist. But I am not so much interested here in some versions of past orality, as in a common setting that encouraged both men to think about the ways propaganda achieved its effects. The work that they and other producers in the section were doing was, on the surface, a mix of cultural broadcasting and political analysis. They commissioned talks on various literary and intellectual subjects and they wrote commentaries on current events, with more than half an eye to presenting Britain in a good light and countering German and Japanese propaganda. By 1943, Empson clearly felt that this latter purpose predominated: “I haven't any cultural side to speak of,” he wrote to I. A. Richards, “being now definitely an all-time propaganda hack.”Footnote ¹¹ Should their programs threaten to stray too far from the approved official line, the Ministry of Information was always ready to step in, overtly or covertly, and Orwell, in particular, had several brushes with the censors. It was difficult to say what effect such broadcasting had: the programs were most probably heard only by the relatively tiny numbers of educated Indians or Chinese who might have radio sets and could listen to the BBC.Footnote ¹²

Certainly, Orwell came to feel that he was largely wasting his time. He resigned from his post in November 1943, partly as a result of such frustration, partly in order to have more time for writing and journalism, becoming the literary editor of the left-Labour weekly Tribune.Footnote ¹³ Empson continued in his post until January 1947. The two had become good friends and saw quite a lot of each other socially during these years.Footnote ¹⁴ In the period between Empson's return to China in early 1947 and Orwell's death in January 1950 they did not meet again, but there is evidence that they were keen to have news of each other.Footnote ¹⁵ It is a minor oddity of the story that the two books I am mainly discussing were written at almost exactly the same time. Orwell had been planning Nineteen Eighty-Four for some years, but the first full draft was composed between April and November 1947 and then revised between July and November 1948, the final typescript being sent off to the publisher in December 1948. Empson had published several chapters of what became The Structure of Complex Words as essays before the war, but all the arrangement, revision and new writing, of which there was a lot, was done in Peking between the spring of 1947 and the summer of 1948; the (putatively “final”) typescript was sent to the publishers at the beginning of September 1948, though, as we've seen, Empson continued to send in revisions over the next two years. We don't know exactly when he read Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he had evidently done so by the end of September 1950 when he was explaining his reservations about the book to a friend.Footnote ¹⁶ The added paragraph from The Structure of Complex Words with which I opened was Empson's public response to reading the novel.

There is an asymmetry in the available evidence about this friendship, partly attributable, no doubt, to Orwell's early death. We know that Empson admired Orwell and wrote appreciatively about him more than once across the three decades by which he survived him (presumably, no deliberate tribute was involved in the fact that Empson died in 1984).Footnote ¹⁷ We have hardly any published testimony from Orwell's side.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, there are some intriguing and potentially significant features to this relationship, not least in foregrounding two different approaches to the analysis of the language of propaganda.

Interest in propaganda may have been at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, for obvious reasons, while the newly fashionable topic of “totalitarianism” encouraged a concern with how human beings might be conditioned into believing the obviously unbelievable.Footnote ¹⁹ This presented itself as simultaneously a psychological and linguistic problem: did assent to self-contradictory or unintelligible propositions depend on the words being used in a special sense or was some other trick of the mind involved?Footnote ²⁰ Since his death, Orwell has acquired the reputation of being an unusually acute analyst of language, an indulgent judgment that has been extended to include the place of language in his last novel. As one representative treatment puts it, “Newspeak as a medium for doublethink is … solidly grounded in Orwell's professional experience as a writer and in his ideas about language as an instrument for attaining power.”Footnote ²¹ To say it is “solidly grounded” in his earlier work and thinking may be to beg several questions: the treatment of language in his last novel was continuous with his earlier work in certain ways, but it actually involved, I shall suggest, doubling down on some of its most doubtful premises.

Although Orwell is now regarded as an acute critic of the deformations and excesses of political language, it is noticeable that this theme acquires its salience in his writing only from about 1942 onwards. The increase in his attention to it thereafter may have been partly due to his work at the BBC, though it seems likely that his contact with Empson may also have encouraged it. Even so, Orwell's early comments on the subject scarcely rise above the commonplace. He wrote a couple of talks for the Indian section in early 1942 on the development of new terms such as “scorched earth” and “sabotage,” but these suggest no distinctive interest in the working of language.Footnote ²² His journalistic comments on language during the war years are similarly unexceptional, including some standard rants about the “debasement” of the language by Americanisms and the prevalence of stock phrases in totalitarian propaganda, which he parodied as “the Fascist octopus has sung its swan-song” and “hydra-headed jackboots riding rough-shod over bloodstained hyenas.”Footnote ²³ (He waged a one-man campaign in his Tribune column against the use of “jackboot.”) One new element during these years was his engagement with the project of Basic English, and here Empson's role was obviously crucial.

Basic English was a simplified version of the language, confined to 850 words, devised by the Cambridge polymath C. K. Ogden and energetically promoted by Empson's mentor I. A. Richards. Empson had been a qualified enthusiast for Basic since the early 1930s, collaborating with Richards, in trying to get it used in the Far East.Footnote ²⁴ Where Ogden's principal aim had been to create a medium for international exchange, for Empson one of Basic's chief advantages was pedagogic: he saw it as an extremely effective first stage in learning English, though he also appreciated its virtues where the avoidance of bluff and preciosity were concerned. There is no paradox in the fact that Empson, supreme analyst of shades of meaning and ambiguity in language, should be an advocate of this stripped-down toolkit, precisely because he always regarded it in such instrumental terms. He never believed that it could or should replace English; rather, he thought it an excellent way to begin to learn English. Additionally, in his chapter on dictionaries in Complex Words, he extolled the merits of the exercise of trying to compile an English-into-Basic dictionary as a way of revealing distinctions that existing dictionaries, with their extensive reliance on approximate synonyms, fail to clarify. “The great interest of such a plan is that it makes all the problems of dictionary-making far more clear-cut.”Footnote ²⁵ In the late 1940s, therefore, he was still insisting on the considerable supplementary value of Basic, finding its limited use entirely compatible with his maximally subtle analysis of the riches of normal English vocabulary.

The first record we have of Orwell's interest in the project of Basic English dates from August 1942, when he commissioned a short talk about it and expressed himself keen to have more.Footnote ²⁶ That broadcast led to an exchange of letters with Ogden in which they reflected on the resistance to the whole project of an “artificial” language.Footnote ²⁷ According to W. J. West, in his edition of Orwell's war broadcasts, “William Empson had been first to arouse interest in the language [i.e. Basic] within the BBC,” though there seems to be no direct evidence to support this plausible claim.Footnote ²⁸ The subject cropped up several times in Orwell's writing and correspondence of the next two or three years. For example, in an “As I Please” column from January 1944 he reflected on having read Ogden's Basic English versus the Artificial Languages, smiling at the vehemence with which the proponents of different invented languages assail each other.Footnote ²⁹ But he acknowledged that Basic had a better chance of meeting the need for an international language than the invented languages, announcing that “Tribune may before long print one or more articles on Basic English.”Footnote ³⁰ Three weeks later the paper carried an article by Empson in its literary pages (for which Orwell was responsible) entitled “Basic English and the Modern World.” In this piece, Empson was clearly concerned to counter the damaging effect of Winston Churchill's recent endorsement of Basic, which had set alarm bells ringing elsewhere in the world since it suggested that this version of the language would be simply a new weapon of British imperialism. Empson concentrated on Basic's value as an aid to the early stages of learning English, but he allowed that it might be convenient as “an international auxiliary language” and that it might be helpful to foreigners in making them “a bit less easily deceived by nonsense written in bloated English.”Footnote ³¹ Churchill's endorsement had forced the BBC to explore making greater use of Basic, and Empson was recognized as their in-house expert, but, once the political heat was off, the BBC lost interest, and by the end of 1945 Empson had to admit defeat.Footnote ³²

Orwell was evidently attracted by two of the virtues claimed for Basic by Empson and other proponents: first, that it would facilitate international understanding, and second, that its use worked against unclarity and deception:

The “Basic expert” in question was almost certainly Empson,Footnote ³⁴ and at this date Orwell seems well persuaded of the uses of the project, though the topic largely disappears from his writing after about the end of 1944.

On less technical linguistic matters, Orwell and Empson were also often at one. For example, when Orwell, in one of his “As I Please” columns, criticized the style of C. S. Lewis's radio talks on Christian apologetics, a reader wrote in to complain of the attack's unfairness in not making enough allowance for the demands of the medium, but in a published letter Empson weighed in on Orwell's side, emphasizing that it was not the move to broadcasting that damaged Lewis's style: “His style went wrong because his thoughts became silly,” an impeccably Orwellian sentiment, even if expressed in Empson's arch demotic.Footnote ³⁵ But as Orwell began to move on to more programmatic pronouncements about language, he revealed assumptions with which Empson could not have concurred. Throughout 1944 and into the early months of 1945 Orwell wrote a series of comments on the current “corruption” of language, in which, by attempting to arrest shifts in usage, he also laid himself open to being made to look foolish by the tides of linguistic history, as when he urges a campaign against “some obviously bad usage—for example, the disgusting verb ‘to contact’.”Footnote ³⁶ In the summer of 1944 he wrote a piece on “Propaganda and Demotic Speech,” arguing that the language used in most propaganda was too abstract and needed to be replaced by the vigour and directness of demotic speech.Footnote ³⁷ Increasingly in the mid-1940s, Orwell's remarks about language emphasize the corrupting effect of totalitarian politics.

III

Orwell's views on the nature and functioning of language were neither constant nor consistent, and we should be wary of attributing anything like a coherent theoretical position to him.Footnote ³⁸ But the assumption that underlies the majority of his ad hoc comments is that words have a “true meaning” and that that meaning is determined by what corresponds to the word in the outside world.Footnote ³⁹ We think of the “thing” and then choose the appropriate word to refer to it. His essay “Politics and the English Language,” first published in Horizon in April 1946, represented something of a summa of his current thinking about language. It is commonplace to say that Orwell's essay has achieved canonical status. In reality, it has gone beyond even this: it has come to be regarded as an authoritative guide to good writing in general, a brief how-to-do-it manual which is used in innumerable writing classes and programs.Footnote ⁴⁰ I do not share this high estimation of the essay, but I attend to it in some detail here for what it reveals about the tensions and confusions in Orwell's thinking about language by this date.

In the essay, Orwell is making both a political and a historical point. The political point, fairly obviously, is that orthodoxy stifles thought and that this sinister process is aided and abetted by the bad use of language, especially of abstractions. The historical point is that even if this is not an entirely new or unprecedented development, it has become much more acute with the rise of Fascism and Communism, and so in the last generation there has been, as he repeatedly insists, a “decline” in the language. In practice, substantial elements in the essay do not in fact support either of these claims: they consist of a homely taxonomy of bad writing habits—habits which are neither specifically tied to political writing nor demonstrably on the increase. These elements tend to be what most readers remember of the essay, partly because the illustrations hover between being amusing and excruciating, but also because of the crisp countervailing recommendations for how to write better, such as:

• Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.

• Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

• Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

• Prefer the short word to the long.

• Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

One could be forgiven for thinking that these are among the best-known sentences Orwell ever wrote. Except that he did not write these particular sentences. Instead, I have taken them from the opening page of The King's English, written by the Fowler brothers and first published in 1906 (a revised edition appeared in 1919 and was frequently reprinted).Footnote ⁴¹ Variations on these injunctions have been the stock-in-trade of writing guides for a long time; there is nothing particularly original about Orwell's almost identical recommendations. But nor, as I hinted, do his recommendations really support his political or his historical case, and it is when we try to probe these cases a little further that the difficulties start to appear.

The fundamental problem already makes its presence felt in the essay's opening paragraphs: Orwell does not consistently distinguish between assertions about changes “in the language” and assertions about the prevalence of certain kinds of statement. In other words, he constantly slides between claims about the incidence of certain uses of the language to make untrue or misleading assertions, and claims about the “decay” of the language itself. For example, in his paragraph on “meaningless words” he gives as an illustration the sentence “Marshal Pétain was a true patriot.”Footnote ⁴² To someone of Orwell's political convictions, writing at the end of the war, this seemed to be a patently false and misleading claim, only made possible, he argued, by the fact that the word “patriot” had lost all meaning. But considered linguistically, there is no decay or loss of meaning here: both semantically and syntactically it is an impeccable English sentence whose intended meaning is clear. To someone who believed that Pétain's decisions in the summer of 1940 were in the best interests of France the sentence was not only intelligible but true. More generally, it should hardly need saying that a statement may be false without being meaningless: when made from indoors, the observation “It's not raining” has a perfectly clear meaning, even if, on going outside, we find that it's tipping down. And similarly, the range of application of individual words may be considerably stretched without those words entirely losing their semantic function. So, when Orwell writes, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’,”Footnote ⁴³ he may be right to recognize the increased elasticity in the use of the term, but wrong in his conclusion.

The political critique at the heart of the essay repeatedly leads Orwell into confused assertions about language. He holds that supporters of totalitarian regimes, Soviet Communism above all, are forced to assent to statements that, at some level, they must know are not true, and that these statements are so blatantly untrue that the sentences in which they are asserted are, or are close to being, “meaningless.” As an example, he instances the claim that “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” Orwell believes that the evidence that renders the claim untrue is so stark and unavoidable that to continue to make the assertion must involve some misuse of language, though, once again, from a purely linguistic point of view there is nothing at all wrong with the specimen sentence, and one could easily specify the political beliefs within which it could be held to be true. And, in a similar way, he exaggerates his perfectly sensible strictures on various forms of bad writing into unpersuasive claims about how such writing illustrates change in the character of the language. His larger, and somewhat more persuasive, if still exaggerated, point is that “[i]n our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But even then he cannot resist asserting, as entailed by this, a claim about language: “Where the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian, and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Leaving aside the evaluative claim about “deterioration,” it is important to ask in what sense we can say that language changes as a result of such circumstances. As any dictionary on historical lines (such as the OED) shows, and as Empson explored much more penetratingly, words are constantly losing and acquiring different senses, and political circumstances are indisputably one cause of such semantic change. An adequate analysis of any piece of writing involves being alert to this historical process and the nuances of meaning it deposits, rather than dismissing later senses of words as evidence of the “deterioration” of language into meaninglessness. One could take as a minor but germane example the history of the word “propaganda” itself. Derived from Latin phrases dealing with the “propagation of the faith,” the noun form of the word, which started to become commonly used in English in the early nineteenth century, carried a neutral force: “any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice,” as the first edition of the OED has it. But it would seem that in the course of perhaps the 1910s, and certainly the 1920s and 1930s, first in the USA and then in Europe, “propaganda” began to acquire a more pejorative sense, defined in later editions of the dictionary as: “The systematic propagation of information or ideas by an interested party, esp in a tendentious way in order to encourage or instil a particular attitude or response.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It is the “tendentiousness” on the part of “an interested party” that marks out the subsequent use of the term, and it is scarcely fanciful to assume that the developments of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the rise of advertising and the newly systematic efforts to mould public opinion on the part of authoritarian regimes, may have helped to reinforce this linguistic shift. What we should not conclude, here or more generally, is that the relationship between the entities of Orwell's title—“politics” and “the English language”—simply consists of the first doing damage to the second.

Orwell's case is also a curiously voluntarist one. He sees the failings he itemizes as “bad habits” and so argues that they can be eliminated if we make an effort to change our habits. He acknowledges that some people will think that language is a large social fact that cannot be shaped in this way by the efforts of a few individuals, but he explicitly denies this claim: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Really? I suspect that if we wished to show that, far from being “killed” off, these phrases have continued to enjoy rude good health in the anglophone world, we would not have to go as far as exploring every avenue, let alone leaving no stone unturned. Again, Orwell seems to be allowing a local cultural fact—in this case the anyway doubtful contention that in certain political and journalistic milieux in mid-1940s London the use of these phrases became temporarily unfashionable—to stand in for large-scale linguistic change.

We could say that Newspeak represents the logical outcome of what could happen if the warnings given in the essay are disregarded. Words will slip their anchorage to reality, and become available for cooption by the dominant power. In this respect, Newspeak can be seen as representing the result of a thought experiment. What if the following two conditions were fulfilled: (a) people became used to believing meaningless propositions, and (b) a totalitarian government acquired the power to specify the words that could be used and to eliminate all the others?

As other scholars have remarked, the Appendix in Nineteen Eighty-Four on the principles of Newspeak draws upon the conception of Basic as originally outlined by Ogden.Footnote ⁴⁸ For example, it sets out several rules which simply reproduce those governing Basic, such as the formation of negatives by use of the prefix “un-,” the formation of compounds by sticking two words together, and so on. The distinctiveness of Orwell's version lies not in the mechanics of the language, but in the very tight connection he posits between language and thought. His central contention is that the adoption of Newspeak actually prevents certain kinds of thought. Orwell thus turns a plausible case about the influence of available forms of expression on perception and understanding into an implausible case about the way the elimination of certain terms and constructions entails the elimination of politically unacceptable ideas. As the Appendix explains, “the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” The point, it reiterates, is “to diminish the range of thought.” In Newspeak, “the expression of unorthodox opinions … was well-nigh impossible.”Footnote ⁴⁹

It would have to be said that, as a set of premises about the relation between language and thought, these are surely doubleplusungood. I realize it may seem unsympathetic or pedantic to probe the logic of Newspeak too closely; Orwell, we may say, is just having his fun by taking a number of contemporary tendencies to such plainly ridiculous lengths. But although the account of Newspeak, both in the Appendix and in the novel itself, is not wholly consistent, it is nonetheless central to Orwell's depiction of extreme totalitarian control. Since Orwell's target is totalitarianism, he writes as though the replacement of Oldspeak by Newspeak is a centralized, controlled process, quite unlike the actual development of language.

There are both continuities and contrasts here with the treatment of language in the famous essay.Footnote ⁵⁰ In one respect, they embody two different models of agency. In the essay, individuals are the sovereign agents: Orwell is inciting them to pay attention and to change their habits. “If you simplify your English …” begins its most famous sentence: the very grammatical structure makes the individual the active subject. But in the Appendix on Newspeak, the constructions are largely in the passive voice because all agency has already been exercised, unseen, by the ruling power. How were old meanings purged? “This was done by stripping such words”—there is no subject of the verb, no action by an agent. “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish …”: again, the passive construction leaves the individual speaker no role.

One might also see the striking inconsistency between the position adumbrated in his most famous essay and the account of Newspeak given in the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four as reflecting the difference between the negative and positive cases about Basic. In the essay he insists that it is the cloudiness of abstractions and stale metaphors that allows people to hide from themselves the untruthfulness or absurdity of what they are required to believe by political orthodoxies. But in the Appendix, as I have remarked, the emphasis is on how the progressive reduction of language to the simplest elements of Newspeak eliminates the possibility of heterodox thoughts. When speech and writing are reduced to the bare elements of Newspeak, it becomes impossible to depart from orthodoxy. In both the essay and the novel, therefore, Orwell is interested in forms of self-deception, but whereas, in the essay, simplicity of language is held to promote honesty of thought and thus freedom from all orthodoxies, in the novel the sparseness of the vocabulary is seen as a way of eliminating every form of unorthodoxy.Footnote ⁵¹

The most fundamental continuity lies in Orwell's consistent failure to distinguish between meaning and truth-claims. As I've suggested, he writes as though the meaning of a word is ultimately determined by its correspondence to something in the world.Footnote ⁵² By tying this knot too tightly, he also makes it possible to tug the assumption in either direction: words lose their meaning when what they refer to does not exist, but things can be made to not exist by eliminating the words that refer to them. These assumptions about language thereby make it more available for exploitation by totalitarian governments, not less.

Commentators have in one way been distracted by emphasizing the obvious resemblance between Newspeak and Basic English. The conception of a dramatically pared-down vocabulary and the rules for the formation of tenses, adjectives and so on are, as I indicated, modelled on Basic. But the function of the two languages is quite different because the worlds in which they are to operate are quite different. Basic, at least as Empson conceived and defended it, is to serve as an introduction to the nearly limitless meanings of the full range of the English language; Newspeak, by contrast, is to eliminate all other words and all other meanings. Newspeak only possesses even a comic plausibility on the premise that the future power of a totalitarian government would be more total than anything previously imagined. It would include the power to stipulate the meanings of words and to prevent other meanings ever occurring. As with the project of the book as a whole, this may be best seen as a warning of where present tendencies could lead if unchecked. Orwell believed that there were already political pressures driving us to use words in ways that depart from their “true” senses. Propaganda can seem so terrifyingly effective in his late writings because he believes that, if we cease to call things by their proper names, then words become “meaningless” and people can be brainwashed into believing anything. If people can be led to give their assent to propositions such as “The Soviet press is the freest in the world,” then they can eventually be led to give their assent to propositions such as “War is peace.” They can be conditioned to believe not just what is untrue but what is meaningless. Perhaps it is little wonder that Empson found Orwell's last book so disturbing.

IV

As a result of his six years at the BBC, Empson acquired plenty of firsthand experience of the distortions involved in propaganda in its modern sense, and he came to recognize that, in its extremer forms, it posed something of a challenge to his analysis of how meaning operates in language. As part of his extended wrangling with I. A. Richards's ideas about language throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Empson was concerned to show that those uses of language that Richards and others would classify as “purely emotive” were in fact not so: the emotional effects of any such statements also depended upon some form of meaning being present, especially some slide (or, in Empson's terms, “equation”) between two senses of a key word. Taking issue with an account by Richards that would deny any sense to certain “emotive” uses of terms, Empson stood firm on this point:

For my purposes it is particularly revealing that, in The Structure of Complex Words, Empson chose to develop this point by talking about political propaganda:

Elaborating on his experience of Nazi propaganda, he went on to argue that, even in this form of deliberately exaggerated and misleading statement, words were not used meaninglessly or for purely emotional effect: propaganda only has any point if at some, possibly subliminal, level what it asserts has a meaning which could be true. He takes a (postwar) example of the Russians accusing the Americans of being “treacherous” in later publishing some documents from 1939 about the German–Soviet pact:

This last sentence has, as so often with Empson, an offhand compactness that needs a little unpacking. I take his point to be that, while the American action does not strictly constitute “treachery” in the ordinary sense, the Russian claim functions as a metaphor about what the Americans are like in general, suggesting that one expression (or “effect”) of this general treacherous character is likely to be “treachery.” In other words, in the passage in question the use of “treacherous” is not just an animal outlet of feeling, as in swearing, but nor is it an indecipherable distortion of language. It works, in so far as it does work, by building into the single adjective both a claim about the action in question and a claim about the habitual character of those performing it, where the compound gives some subliminal plausibility to the specific accusation in this case.

Empson goes on to concede that propaganda claims repeated over a long enough period of time may appear to lose even this small kernel of meaning:

In Empson's symbols, “A” stands, roughly speaking, for the sense of the term in question and “A!” for the emotion it expresses. His point here, therefore, is that if a term such as “treacherous” were evacuated of all meaning by repeated incantation, it would be unlikely to continue to carry the same emotional charge.

It will be evident from this example that Empson is attempting to analyze how our everyday use of language is in fact full of covert attempts at persuasion, where the use of a word that carries an equation between two senses is the chief agent of persuasive force. Paradoxes often depend upon just such “compacted doctrines”: against the tendency to simply “accept” such contradictory or nonsensical assertions as being unanalyzable, Empson maintained “of course, I think one should always try to interpret paradoxes.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Propaganda provides some of the most extreme examples of such language use, so extreme as to seem at first beyond analysis in these terms, simply a kind of noise. But in that case, as Empson insists, it would “not deceive anyone.” His larger framework for analyzing how the relations between the senses of a single word function in ordinary cases enables him to illuminate how the deception works in such extreme cases.

Orwell and Empson's contrasting approaches to language can be further illustrated by considering the three slogans of the Party which are displayed in huge capitals on the Ministry of Truth:

• WAR IS PEACE

• FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

• IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHFootnote ⁵⁶

These are clearly intended to parody the unquestioning doublethink required by regime orthodoxy: the slogans are meant to be seen by the reader as nonsensical and self-contradictory, as exaggerated representations of the logic of the political definition of truth, and the reader is to believe that the inhabitants of Oceania have become so conditioned that they unquestioningly accept the slogans, even though it is hard to see any meaning in them. But for Empson, such constructions were a challenge to his analysis: how did “identity assertions” of the kind “A is B” actually work in so far as they did “work”?

The chapter in The Structure of Complex Words entitled “A is B” argues, among other things, that even the most gnomic “assertions of false identity” are susceptible of being analyzed in terms of Empson's larger scheme. “Work is prayer,” for example, only functions effectively because each of the terms is itself already a kind of “intra-verbal equation.” “Work,” Empson points out, is used here in some typifying sense to mean “labour of a serious or useful kind,” and “prayer” in an enlarged sense to mean “ways of acknowledging God that have some of the holiness of praying to Him.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As Empson shows, the order of such gnomic statements therefore tends to be that the subject is used in a narrowing, ideal-type of itself, whereas the “predicate-equivalent” (to the extent that the verb “to be” can have a “predicate”) tends to be used in an expansive quasi-metaphorical sense. So not all “work” counts: the labour of the burglar is not a form of prayer. But the work involved doesn't have to have all the properties of “prayer” in the narrow sense: it doesn't have to be done on one's knees using certain formulaic phrases. The “subject” is being used more narrowly, the “predicate” more broadly. But, says Empson, there are some ostensibly similar grammatical forms that cannot be made to function like this: the statement “red is blue” cannot be given a meaning in general because there is no way to equate a purer sense of “red” with an expanded sense of “blue,” and anyway no difference would be made by reversing the order of the terms in the initial identity assertion, whereas in the statements whose meaning he teased out the order is crucial.

The most intriguing of Empson's examples for my purposes in the assertion “Might is Right”. Clearly, the order here is vital: inverting the order pretty much inverts the sense. With “Might is Right,” as Empson shows, the point of the assertion (and of its reverse) depends upon the implicit acknowledgment by speaker and listener that “there is some kind of moral problem involved,” which might be summarized as “the might–right complex.” Then, against that background, the first form of the claim asserts, “The typical or ideal kind of might entails a general kind of right, and deserves the feelings attached to right in the strict sense of the term.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As with the “work is prayer” example, we can only capture the successful act of communication performed by this apparently paradoxical phrase if we understand how words carry various broader and narrower senses within them. The pithiness of the formulation (along with the internal rhyme) is what gives it its force: the cumbrous paraphrase seems both more doubtful and less interesting. But that pithiness is trading on the “equations” encoded in the terms themselves, which allow a competent speaker of the language to select the implications that make a kind of sense.

Returning to Empson's additional paragraph with which I began, one can now see more clearly why “the ghastly paradoxes of the Orwell world such as ‘War is Peace’” may have seemed to pose a threat to the scheme of his book. Nineteen Eighty-Four wants to insist that these slogans are internalized and believed by the inhabitants of Oceania, even though they may look to share the nonsensical meaninglessness of “red is blue.” In that paragraph Empson did, on balance, still feel that his scheme of analysis could encompass such assertions, and it is now not too difficult to imagine the form which such an analysis would take. In the case of “War is Peace,” for example, analysis could lead to some such unpacking as “the use of force, when exercised with proper ends in view, brings the state of settled satisfaction we associate with peacefulness.” Clearly, this is a little more strained than in the case of “Might is Right,” which is no doubt one reason why Orwell's formula remains less familiar. Actually, if we took one of the other slogans blazoned on the side of the Ministry of Truth—“Ignorance is strength”—we could quickly offer a convincing Empsonian analysis, as in “Freedom from excessive information and over-subtle reasoning enables us to harness our energies most effectively.” But the main point is that, in so far as such slogans have any persuasive purchase at all, they do depend upon capacities for meaning that are packed into words in the way Empson demonstrates. The examples given in Nineteen Eighty-Four are so strained that we may find it hard to see them having any genuinely persuasive force: they strike us as such extreme parodies of political language that they end up being more like “red is blue” than like “work is prayer.” But in so far as they could be conceived of as operating as successful propaganda at all, then it would be due to the mechanics of meaning as Empson analyzes them.

And this takes us back to the pubs around Broadcasting House almost a decade earlier. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the larger difference between Orwell and Empson on the intelligibility of propaganda was suggestively prefigured in a BBC broadcast of 11 August 1942. Edited by Orwell, it was a discussion of poetry, with various figures reading and commenting on some recent poems, and there is a transcript of the broadcast. This shows that Empson read Dylan Thomas's “After the Funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones),” after which Orwell led off the discussion by saying, “I suppose the obvious criticism is that it doesn't mean anything. But I also doubt whether it's meant to.” Empson's response was dauntingly brisk:

Faced with this barrage, Orwell grudgingly retreated a little, but still insisted that the poem had to be appreciated as “sound” and that “the last two lines in particular defy interpretation.” Empson was unyielding: “It may be obscure, but it is obviously not meaningless.”Footnote ⁵⁹ That apodictic judgment expressed the conviction that Empson reaffirmed, albeit nervously, eight years later when discussing the most extreme examples of propaganda.

V

There can be no question but that Orwell has influenced popular views of language to a far greater extent than Empson has. Even academic discussions of propaganda and political language have made much more frequent reference to the novelist than to the critic.Footnote ⁶⁰ (The relative neglect of Complex Words in the 1950s and 1960s by linguists and philosophers of language, though not literary critics, is a topic that requires separate discussion.Footnote ⁶¹) Nonetheless, Empson was right to think that there was something important at stake in his disagreement with Orwell on language. For several years after Orwell's death (and after the publication of Complex Words), Empson recurred to his friend's last novel in ways that bring out just how high he thought the stakes were. One telling example occurred on the unlikely occasion of an address to the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961 on the subject of “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry.” Empson denounced the fetishization of “the image,” as something supposed to be a form of understanding that is beyond intellectual scrutiny: “During the last hundred years, the Image has been much mixed up with The Revolt against Reason, a game, I feel, which we can no longer afford to play … It is a misfortune that the whole literary tradition of Symbolism has grown up so completely divorced from the tradition of fair public debate.” As a literary fashion, this, he suggested, may now have exhausted itself, but “the residual legatee of all the anti-intellectual movements has been simple old fundamentalism, with a strong flavour of political conformity.” He might have concluded there, but he added a final paragraph—on Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Empson's reading, the time depicted in the book might be either “post-communist or post-Christian,” an equation he frequently insisted that Orwell recognized even if it is not explicit in the novel.Footnote ⁶² Either way, the outcome, judged by the historical evidence, is ghastly: “This,” Empson wrote, “puts me against all forms of the revolt against reason; I think our only remaining hope lies in getting the poor old mind to do its work just well enough.”Footnote ⁶³

And perhaps Empson, surprisingly, had history on his side in another sense, too. Studies of totalitarian societies suggest that, whatever lengths “indoctrination” and “brainwashing” and so on are taken to, it proves impossible to instal an ideologically pure language in place of the established vernacular with all its potentially unorthodox implications. Of course, in so far as Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a warning, he did not have to commit himself to making a firm prediction, only alerting readers to the potential already present in current trends. But, even so, Orwell's treatment of Newspeak differs from the actual functioning of language in totalitarian societies, as analyzed in subsequent studies, in at least three ways. First, such regimes (according to John Young in Totalitarian Language) “have found it either impossible or inexpedient to freeze the content of political terms,” unlike the supposedly definitive meanings fixed by Newspeak. Second, in practice totalitarian regimes have added to existing vocabulary more than they have reduced it, whereas the logicidal intent of Newspeak is to do the opposite. And third, and most important (to quote from Young again), “the wide gap between rhetoric and reality in all forms of totalitarian discourse … may completely fail to deceive people … As a result the words lose their power to persuade.”Footnote ⁶⁴

This is crucial, since the question that Orwell professed to be concerned with was the genuine self-deception involved in believing apparently contradictory or impossible claims. But, as historical studies suggest, the language of propaganda only succeeds where it retains some basic intelligibility, even if its plausibility rests largely on the subliminal associations of words. In the main, people cannot be led to accept the blank proposition that “black is white,” whereas they can, in the right circumstances, be led to accept that “might is right,” and this is where the superiority of Empson's handling of such language compared to Orwell's makes itself felt. Propaganda, if it is to be successful, cannot be altogether exempt from the constraints that govern more everyday uses of language, and so the language of propaganda is susceptible to a similar kind of rational analysis.

This argument has a continuing pertinence. One curious and minor by-product of Donald Trump's election as US president in 2016 was that Nineteen Eighty-Four briefly went to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.Footnote ⁶⁵ It's possible that some readers (or at least buyers) were reaching for a kind of literary comfort blanket, wanting to see the novel as a vindication of liberal decency or as the triumph of the resolute individual over adverse circumstances, even though the structure of Orwell's narrative does not in fact support either of those familiar misreadings. But there is also the perennial comfort to be derived from satire—the comfort of discovering that there are others who also perceive the risibility or fatuousness of some feature of the world. Newspeak parodies the extreme disregard for truth in certain kinds of political propaganda, and so it can, by means of the familiar feedback loop of satire, strengthen one's sense that there is still a valid and sensible perspective from which these excesses can be seen for what they are. But Orwell gives us the wrong steer when, in his essays as well as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he repeatedly insists that the language has declined, and his lead is followed by all those who pronounce that, in the age of extreme populism represented by Trump's tweets, language has been debased and rendered unusable. Apart from the intellectual confusions at work here—one individual's statements do not change language, they use language—these claims should be resisted because, for all the avowed liberalism of their proponents, their too-sweeping dismissal nourishes a form of declinism and ultimately despair.

Empson, in my view, points us in a better direction with his insistence that language is a constantly evolving system of meanings, one that is susceptible to rational analysis even when the sentiments expressed are at their most unpalatable.Footnote ⁶⁶ Attending to the relations between senses within individual words is a crucial aspect of such analysis. The assertion by some powerful figures of untruths that are so extreme that they border on nonsense should be treated not as an occasion for wailing and lamentation about the decay of language or the disappearance of rationality itself, but rather as a stimulus to showing how disciplined enquiry can account for the workings, such as they are, of even such tendentious gobbledegook—or, in other words, to repeat one of his phrases with which I began, showing that “the human mind, that is, the public human mind as expressed in a language, is not irredeemably lunatic and cannot be made so.” There are times when, especially perhaps in our present circumstances, it seems worth remembering that.