Eagleton on Jeorge Orwell/ 伊格尔顿评乔治·奥威尔

Terry Eagleton/ Reach-Me-Down Romantic

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker · Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor · Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas · Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

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Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have castigated Britain's class-ridden education system, but he put his adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of Taylor's beginning 'Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses' turns out to concern Orwell's letters home rather than his person.) One friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as 'that evil despotism'; but he also admired empire-builders for their practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-wing Adelphi magazine for target practice.

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George Orwell, "Politics and English Language," 1946

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Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

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冠冕堂皇的空洞文体往往和闪烁其词的骗术相辅相成。这在英文里是这样，在中文里也是一定的。幸运的是，不登大雅之堂的“恶搞”如果运用得当，正好可以致冠冕堂皇的骗术于死地。鲁迅、王小波等文体家便是擅长“恶搞”的好手。他们帮助并启发读者去识别空洞的语言，并告诉我们：如果说空洞的语言还有什么用处的话，那就是欺骗。只有像他们这样正直而敏锐地去使用汉语，才能够发掘并整理出一整套“现代汉语骗术大全”来。

© by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。