1984 (1,5) Newspeak

[monk222]

Winston has gotten Syme to talk about Newspeak, steering him away mercifully from talking about the delight of torturing traitors to death, and Syme relates that the art of Newspeak is to destroy words rather than what other societies do, which is to grow as a culture and create words accordingly. Syme is rapturous that they are “cutting the language down to the bone.” He goes on dreamily:

”It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well - better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless word like ‘excellent and splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B. B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought.

Syme relates that the point is to eventually make it impossible even to have unorthodox thoughts, since people will not have the words to form heretical ideas:

Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

This is a fascinating philosophical experiment into language that Orwell conducts in his novel, but although I cannot be taken as an expert on the philosophy of language, one has to think that such a narrowing of language is impossible, that our creatively fertile play with words is impossible to limit like this, as we find that word leads to word and leads to more words and, before you know it, it is raining ideas. Which is why real governments that want to limit the range of their subjects’ thought are left with the primitive practices of burning books and imprisoning thinkers. Alas, dictators have to accept that they cannot actually stop ideas from happening.

I suspect Orwell knew this, but once he started playing with this concept of Newspeak, he found that it added such a wonderfully dark texture to his dystopian Oceania, and he kept it as the fanciful realization of the ultimate totalitarian society, bringing out what a totalitarian regime would like to achieve if it could be done, with that willingness to sacrifice everything in the interest of consolidating and maintaining its power.

Before I close this post, I want to include a poignant observation that Orwell has Syme make about Winston:

”You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.

Sometimes the world has to move on without us.