George Orwell fought in and wrote about the Spanish Civil War right at the beginning of his commitment to democratic socialism and the beginning of his commitment to writing about democratic socialism. I’m interested in the way Orwell’s perception of art’s relationship with politics influenced his writing style.
I will begin by discussing the role of language as a tool both for and against oppression in the context of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and his Politics and the English Language. When you talk about Orwell and political language, though they are both written well after Spain, it is impossible to ignore Newspeak or this seminal essay.
Following that, I will compare a few moments in Orwell’s book on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, to a few slides of Republican propaganda posters used during that same war. This will provide an illustration of how Orwell's ideas about communication and propaganda play out in his work, in the context of the political discourse of that time. He finds himself graffiti-ing walls in Spain in honor of his party, and vacillating between frustration with war's boring, grimy side and long-remembered boyhood visions of valiant soldiers and the glory of battle. The men he fights alongside have little in common with the men on the propaganda posters. Why--and how--does he write, given this incongruence between the ideal and the real?
