“All issues are political issues,” he declared with the same no-nonsense clarity that characterized nearly every paragraph, every sentence, indeed, every word he wrote. Long before efforts to destabilize language became a cottage industry and then a staple of academic politics, Orwell worried about the social implications of wretched speech. At a time when we are surrounded by the bromides of advertisements and editorials, when language has an increasingly difficult time competing with the power of visual images, and perhaps most of all, when the case for clear writing raises scholarly eyebrows, the 50th anniversary of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is a useful occasion to ruminate about the long-term prospects for mounting clear, unequivocal prose against our continual cultural ruin. Words, let us simply admit it, were always slippery and the problem is only exacerbated when shoddy speech becomes the norm. Think of Prufock, worrying himself into night sweats because his allusion to Lazarus might be misunderstood (“That is not what I meant at all, / That is not it at all.”) or of nearly any character in The Waste Land dangling uneasily between “memory and desire.” And it is surely among Eliot’s intentions that those more sophisticated than Sweeney Agonistes should also “wrestle” with one of the central questions of our age-namely, how making coherent sense becomes increasingly problematic.
For even a consciousness as coarse as Sweeney’s has intimations about how fragile words, in fact, are. Eliot’s protagonist nonetheless identifies a problem that has high-brow implications, and the 20th-century jitters, written all over it. “I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you,” Apeneck Sweeney tells his girlfriend Doris as he tries to explain how it is that “death is life and life is death.” Though he dwells near the bottom of the cultural food chain, T.S.
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