Abstract
In Chapter 1 I referred to one of the major and most attractive features of Orwell’s writing, the individual, colloquial, forthright style, clearest in those essays in which he expounds his views on some subject that moves him. In this chapter I will try to show how this voice is achieved linguistically. My starting-point and main source of evidence in this chapter are the essays. But we must bear in mind that, if the idea of an ‘Orwellian’ personal style has any validity, it applies also to the third-person narratives, and to first-person writing in which the persona is not Orwell himself, such as the novel Coming Up for Air. The ‘window pane’ and ‘demotic speech’ requirements, if they mean anything, apply to any genre of his prose, and not just to the first-person essay, the closest form to speech. In later chapters, we will be looking at the Orwellian voice as it appears in the full-length books, interacting with other styles of writing and particularly in the context of the language of narration.
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Notes
B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980) p. 116
For an introduction to the multiplicity of meanings of the term’ style’, see K. Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman, 1989) pp. 435–7
G. Leech and M. Short, Style in Fiction (London: Longman, 1981) chs. 1 and 2.
M. A. K. Halliday, A. Mcintosh and P. Strevens, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching (London: Longman, 1964) p. 87.
M. Montgomery, An Introduction to Language and Society (London: Methuen, 1986). Ch. 6.
The germ of this idea is in Halliday’s earliest discussion of register: see M. A. K. Halliday, A. Mcintosh and P. Strevens, Linguistic Sciences, p. 87: ‘One sentence from any of these and many more such situation types would enable us to identify it correctly’. For development of the idea in terms of cue and model, see R. Fowler, ‘Oral models in the Press’, in M. Maclure, T. Phillips and A. Wilkinson (eds) Oracy Matters (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988) pp. 135–46.
Respectively, W. J. West (ed.) The War Broadcasts (London: Duckworth, 1985)
W. J. West (ed.) The War Commentaries (London: Duckworth, 1985).
‘Dialogism’, the orientation of a person’s utterance toward the utterance of another person, is one of a cluster of valuable ideas drawn from the work of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin; others are ‘heteroglossia’ which is the basis for my Chapter 6 and later discussion in the present book, and ‘polyphony’ which structures the argument of the last section of Chapter 6. Cf. note 8 below for the reference to ‘carnival’. Bakhtin’s most influential work, first published in 1929 but not known in the West until translated into French and English in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is Problems of Dostoevsky’ s Poetics, the definitive translation of which is by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Accounts of Bakhtin’s ideas include M. Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990)
T. Marshall, ‘Dialogism’ in R. E. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994) IV, pp. 908–14.
H. Ringbom, George Orwell as Essayist: A Stylistic Study (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973).
G. Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).
R. Williams, Orwell (Glasgow: Fontana, 1971).
On stereotyping through language, see R. Fowler, Language in the News (London: Routledge, 1991).
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© 1995 Roger Fowler
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Fowler, R. (1995). A Personal Voice. In: The Language of George Orwell. The Language of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24210-8_4
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