George Orwell: The Cultural Icon of Today

Richard Lance Keeble examines the extraordinary continuing presence of George Orwell and “Orwellian” in Fleet Street today

George Orwell is nothing less than a cultural icon. Indeed, the persistence of George Orwell and “Orwellian” as reference points in contemporary mass media is remarkable.

I typed a number of names into the LexisLibrary database of “broadsheet” newspapers covering the previous three months’ issues of the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Independent on Sunday. These were the results:

William Shakespeare 1,342
J. K. Rowling 502
George Orwell 358
Virginia Woolf 204
Will Self 171
Hilary Mantel 163
Charles Dickens 161
Salman Rushdie 112
Margaret Atwood 93
Nick Davies 91
Leo Tolstoy 88
George Eliot 67
Ian Fleming 57
Margaret Drabble 49
John Updike 44
Gore Vidal 33
Erich Maria Remarque 23
John Berger 22
Noam Chomsky 20
Doris Lessing 15
Simone de Beauvoir 15
E. L. James 8
P. D. James 7
Jack London 7
Arundhati Roy 2

While the LexisLibrary results have to be seen as not 100 per cent reliable, these figures are still fascinating. Orwell’s position is high – and his presence in the media is enhanced still further in other ways. For instance, the word “Orwellian” is everywhere: it is used as a pejorative adjective to evoke totalitarian terror, the falsification of history by state organised lying; the use of euphemistic language to camouflage morally outrageous ideas and actions. Occasionally “Orwellian” is used as a complimentary adjective to mean “displaying outspoken intellectual honesty, like Orwell”. I typed “Orwellian” into LexisLibrary for the same period and it came up 77 times.

In The Times, of 2 August 2014, Janice Turner wrote about seeking seats in a train “where Orwellian screens won’t blast me with entertainment packages”. In the Daily Telegraph of 16 August, a report by Jeremy Warner was headlined “Amazon facing Orwellian nightmare”. On 1 August an obituary of the novelist Dan Jacobson, in The Times, spoke of his “Orwellian aversion to jargon and frivolous writing”. While on 9 July, the Guardian columnist Owen Jones wrote: “Twenty seven Palestinians are reported to have died in Gaza and mercifully no Israelis have been killed by Hamas rockets – and yet the BBC opts for the Orwellian ‘Israel under renewed Hamas attack’.”

In his recent, highly publicised spat with Orwell in his BBC Points of View contribution on 31 August, the award-winning novelist Will Self took issue with Orwell when he wrote (in the essay, “Politics and the English Language”, of 1946): “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilisation is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.” Self rightly highlighted the way in which the English language, far from declining and being in a “bad way”, is being constantly invigorated with the addition of new words and neologisms.

Yet paradoxically Orwell himself gave to the English language a whole host of new words, phrases and striking aphorisms. He was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War”. Other phrases and words he invented which have slipped effortlessly into everyday English include “Big Brother”, “newspeak” (and variants such as “nukespeak” and “massacrespeak”); “doublethink” (and variants such as “groupthink”); even “Room 101” – all from his famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (of 1949). Moreover, many of his aphorisms are regularly referred to in the media.

For instance, there’s “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” and “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper”. Others include: “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac”; “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” and “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly and hatred.” Finally, there’s “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

While Orwell acquired international fame for his great novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he is perhaps best seen first and foremost as a journalist. Indeed, all those aphorisms combine some of the best elements of journalism: conciseness, originality and a sense of moral and political urgency.

• Richard Lance Keeble is chair of the Orwell Society and editor of Orwell Today (Abramis, Bury St Edmunds, 2012)