GEORGE ORWELL, a short biography
He was born in 1903 in India and died at the age of 46 in London as a result of tuberculosis.
His most famous books are Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia.
When he was one year old, his mother took him and his sisters to England. As a child, he attended a Catholic school, and later he studied at Eton, the famous boarding school for the elite. There, Aldous Huxley taught him French.
As he wasn’t a particularly good student, his parents decided he should apply to the Indian Imperial Police. He went to a training police school in India, and then he worked as a policeman there.
After contracting dengue fever, he went back to England, having spent five years in India. He decided to leave the police force and to become a writer. He started with a memoir of his days in India with a book called Burmese Days, which he managed to publish several years after: at the time his manuscript was refused by all the publishers.
In 1927 (he was 24), he went to live on Portobello Road, where you can find a plate bearing his name.
The following year he went to Paris, where he wrote some articles for Le Monde, whose editor was Henri Barbusse. After six months, he went back to England, this time to Suffolk, where his parents were living. He went on trying to publish articles and sending his writings to various editors, but they were rejected.
At 29, he started working as a teacher at a boy’s secondary school in London. While working there, he was able to publish A Scullion’s Diary, a report on his visits to the London slums; then he also got published Down and Out in Paris and London, a book about his experiences in both cities. He got ill again and stopped teaching forever.
His new job was in a second-hand bookshop; there he began his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, inspired in his days as a teacher. In the bookshop he contacted with Esperantists and with the Independent Labour Party. He also wrote literary reviews for some magazines. His book The Road to Wingan Pier was an investigation into the living conditions of the working class in the Northern England.
At the age of 33, he got married, but the same year he came to Spain to fight against the fascists, and he joined the POUM, a Trotskyist party; he fought in the Aragon Front, where he was wounded. He was taken to a hospital in Barcelona, where he witnessed the violent clashes between the Communist Party and the rest of leftist groups in May 1937. He was arrested, but he managed to escape and flee from Spain and the Stalinist agents. He told his experiences in the Spanish Civil War in his Homage to Catalonia.
Due to his serious health problems, his friends sent him to the French Morocco for recovery, but he came back before the start of the WWII.
During the war, he worked for the BBC, wrote articles for newspapers and finished Animal Farm. In 1945, he was appointed editor of the Tribune, but the following year he moved to an isolated farm to try to recover from his deteriorating health and to finish his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949, some months before his death.
THE
PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
The text we’re going to discuss is a kind of summary
of the new language invented by George Orwell for the dystopian society depicted
in the novel 1984.
But first, let’s talk a little bit about the novel. A dystopia
is an imaginary place or time where people live in subhuman conditions. It’s a
kind of opposite to utopia, where people live happily as in a paradise.
In the 1984 novel, the world is divided in three superstates
in perpetual war with each other, but it’s a war of low intensity and the battles
usually take place on the borders, and the alliances shift frequently, but none
of the belligerents can achieve a definite victory, so the war never ends.
Our protagonist lives in a group of regions forming
the state of Oceania under a totalitarian regime. The only political party with
his leader, Big Brother, controls everything and everybody, and its ultimate
objective is the absolute control of the human mind.
All the time, the regime tells its subjects that they
live in the best of the worlds, but you know all are lies that everybody
believes without question.
Our hero, Winston Smith, is a kind of civil servant
who becomes aware of the big falsehood of the system and the tyrannical nature
of the government, and wants to rebel against the establishment. He has a
lover, and together they try to get in contact with the opposition, a Brotherhood
whose leader is Goldstein. But the Thought Police is always watching.
The Thought Police is the most efficient police of the
world, and its goal is to uncover any form of heterodoxy and suppress it. The only
way to remain all the time orthodox is through Doublethink, that is, being able
to think at the same time two opposite and excluding statements, i.e., “two and
two is four, but sometimes two and two is five”, and genuinely believing that
both are true. It isn’t hypocrisy, that is, thinking one thing and saying another,
but really believing there isn’t a contradiction between both declarations.
The Party is working to maintain orthodoxy, and the
way to reach this goal is the Newspeak, a new language designed to keep all the
thought between the limits of goodthink. This new language will reduce all
possible ambiguities eliminating unnecessary words such as synonyms or opposites, and simplifying grammar and spelling. So, the new Dictionary will contain fewer and
fewer words each new edition. At the end it would be impossible to commit crimethink because the worlds to express such thoughts will no longer exist.
QUESTIONS
-How do you see the future of Humanity? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it? Why do you think so?
-What is solipsism? Do you think reality exist out of our minds, or it's only an invention of our minds?
-In your view, are we spied and controlled all the time? According to you, is it good or bad for people?
-Our languages, are becoming poorer and poorer?
VOCABULARY
lice, root, arising, utter, telescoped, devised, rook, severed
