Orwell’s Perspective

1. What is Orwell’s argument?

The English language is continually being corrupted due to unconscious writers that use it inappropriately. We should be conscious of what we are writing and have a concrete idea of what we are going to write about before jotting down the words that we believe may work. Political and economical distress are causes of the changes the English language confronts and suffers.

2. Identify two cases of irony.

•After exploring the possibility that our intent in changing the language is impossible and that the language’s decline follows our decline Orwell states that “it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” After stating this he will employ the examples of five specific writers to support his ideas, somewhat ironical to what he had previously stated.
•As Orwell introduces the five examples of bad writing he states that the “five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer.” He realizes that if the five passages are not bad he will not be able to extract anything from them so he explains that they “are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples.” Orwell will later criticize these examples completely but he seems aware that the writers from whom he is citing must not be depicted as bad writers. But the reader understands that Orwell really wants to say that their writing is wrong, something that is highlighted by the ironical, a little below average, but fairly representative.

3. Define dying metaphors, pretentious diction, meaningless words.

Dying metaphors: Metaphors that have lost their original meaning. Authors who use them are not conscious of what they are talking about.

Pretentious Diction: Foreign words that are used in English instead of employing the appropriate English words. Foreign words are overused and loose their original meaning.

Meaningless Words: Words that have lost their meaning through overuse, are excessively vague and unnecessary.

4. Create ten steps to good writing according to Orwell.

•Understand what you are going to say before you say it.
•Say it in the simplest way possible.
•Revise what you wrote and if it reflects what you wanted to say.
•Use appropriate English words in your writing. This eliminates the use of pretentious diction.
•Avoid the passive, look for active alternatives for your writing.
•Your writing should reflect original thoughts, no clichés involved.
•Eliminate all words and sentences that don’t mean anything to your writing. Avoid fluff.
•Look for words that work well with what you want to say.
•Avoid jargon, scientific and foreign words and phrases by employing everyday English alternatives.
•“Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

Teaching The Lived

As I continued reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I noticed how enthusiastic he is about the idea that we are all one, and the intricate relationship between poet and reader. After narrating an immense quantity of situations and jobs of the common people he has run into, he states that “the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time; / The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; / And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them; / And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am” (317-321). I read this passage a couple of times until I deciphered several messages he has inscribed in those words. He is telling us how there are some people that are dead and are more alive than those that are alive, this is because their thoughts still exist and their names are still named. Sleep here appears as the state of dormancy which the individual experiences when he has lost his path, the path that leads to understanding the situation of others and not only thinking of oneself. In the end of this poem he shows how he is one of us, he is not an alien to mistakes and that young and old we keep doing the same mistakes in our lives. Another important aspect of these lines is how he uses a common everyday reality and routine, sleeping, to show how time passes but the essentials unite us and how important it is to value the mundane routine when contemplating our individual souls connection to all.

Another piece that impacted me was when Whitman stated that he is “A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest; / A novice beginning, yet experient of myriads of seasons” (336-337). Whitman once again levels himself with the reader, a technique I believe he uses to support the good nature of his messages. Whitman repeats this over and over again, always with different approaches, but always with the same essence. He wants us to understand that he makes mistakes as we could previously see, and he wants us to know that his word isn’t the final word, he can still be taught even though he has lived a long life. This made me think of how the elderly become more and more clutching and stubborn about their ideas about life. They become more conservative about what they have built for themselves and they don’t want to change anything. They hope to maintain the status quo which has seemed to work for them in their lives. It becomes scary and uncomfortable to try to change anything in their lives because they don’t want to change, maybe this is because it is the only way they can maintain control before the visit of inevitable death, the annihilator of all power to change.

Present Is For The Conscious

As I dived into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass I noticed how his poems directly focus on how to approach the reader, using repetition and explanations completely reflecting his consistent style. Whitman begins his poetry collection by embracing the reader as an equal to the poet. Whitman begins by stating: “I CELEBRATE myself; / And what I assume you shall assume; / For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.” (1-3) By leveling himself with the reader, Whitman shows how his topic will be all of us, because we are made of the same valuable material. Pure lines of empowerment continue as Whitman characterizes human nature as being pure and innocent, open to whatever inner yearnings will emanate from it. By exposing his humbleness in a simple yet powerful way, we are guided to follow his teachings in the first three lines of the poem. Whitman’s writing is vibrant, youthful, fresh and original, so different from any stale cliché that tries to unite humanity.

Another aspect of Whitman’s writing is his constant repetition, something I noticed in the third poem. He explains how the present is what really matters as “There was never any more inception than there is now, / Nor any more youth or age than there is now; / And will never be any more perfection than there is now, / Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” (32-35) Whitman gives us new supporting ideas to the Carpe Diem concept by saying that there isn’t something of a valuable nature that the past and future can give and the present can’t. Using the same line construction Whitman states that there are new beginnings, young and elderly, perfection, and good and evil right now and that there isn’t more in the past and future. Whitman’s charmingly light yet profound poetry shares the basic concepts of Buddhist thought in a timeless yet split second fashion, pure magic.

In the first ten poems of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, we are given unique input in matters of life by dissimulating straightforward messages through the use of repetition and metaphors. I look forward to continue reading this piece which seems very promising.

Simply Looking For Love

As I finished reading Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Soul over the weekend, I noticed how passionate and loving Flaubert’s protagonist, Felicite was towards everybody and everything. As Loulou becomes Felicite’s greatest love, Flaubert states that they “held conversations together, Loulou repeating the three phrases of his repertory over and over, Felicite replying by words that had no greater meaning, but in which she poured out her feelings.” (Ch. 4) In the first three chapters, I noticed how Flaubert uses complex sentences to both narrate his story in a free indirect style and build our perception of his characters. Here we see how Flaubert both continues his story about the parrot and Felicite, their complex relationship which isn’t more than another example of Felicite’s total, overwhelming love and shows us how Felicite was an open person who spoke through her feelings even when speaking to a wall. We are not told how she is but it becomes our task to stop and deduce her personality out of her actions. The book describes Felicite’s tragic life in a way that opens a more complex path for our minds to analyze (much akin to what we do in our own personal dilemmas) than using the lighter thought processes required to processing a straightforward story.

Flaubert’s descriptions of Felicite’s life are given to us in such a way for us to understand the process and for the author to connect independent ideas. He states that a “weakness came over her; the misery of her childhood, the disappointment of her first love, the departure of her nephew, the death of Virginia; all these things came back to her at once, and, rising like a swelling tide in her throat, almost choked her.” (Ch. 4) We are given the chance to reflect on what happens to Felicite independently when the event is being narrated, but in this sentence we are shown the condensed version, the overwhelming disastrous life Felicite has lived. This sentence makes us feel sorry for Felicite who is condemned by the commas to continue suffering. The list continues and so does Felicite’s sorrow.

When Loulou arrives from Fellacher’s shop we are given a description of his new appearance. Flaubert describes Loulou as “sitting bold upright on a branch which could be screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on one side, and in his beak a nut which the naturalist, from love of the sumptuous, had gilded. She put him in her room.” (Ch. 4) Flaubert has planned the new course his story will take. He includes the short sentence “She put him in her room” to now describe her room, the last setting of the story. The sentence is of a completely different length compared to the first, making the reader have a needed break from the complex plot and new insight that will later build the end of the book. This planning ahead that Flaubert single-handedly does immortalizes his sentences that simply sound right. His paragraph breaks are necessary to highlight the important but sometimes unnoticed sentences that are the soul to his writing. Doing so makes Felicite’s dramatic life be forever remembered and helps us, Flaubert’s entertained audience, become intensely impressed by his amazing writing about a person who was simply looking for love.

Simplicity, Punctuation And Characters

As I ventured into Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Soul, I noticed how the author is able to give us a complete description of his plot and characters in a free indirect style, with a unique use of punctuation that reflects the importance of details and close attention. While reading I found myself wandering frequently through Flaubert’s complex sentences, showing me how the reader must be completely immersed in Felicite’s life in order to understand the complexity of it. Flaubert makes monotony and a simple life interesting, through his complex sentences from which you can’t eliminate or modify a word without changing the meaning of the whole. Flaubert states that “every Monday morning, the dealer in second-hand goods, who lived under the alley-way, spread out his wares on the sidewalk.” (Ch. 2) The author chooses to highlight this event that becomes his path to further describe Felicite’s surroundings and the people she lives with. In this passage in Chapter 2, I noticed how Flaubert chooses to change paragraphs in order to give a description of how days went by (“Every Monday morning”, “Every Thursday”) and further describe his characters. This transforms a monotonous tale into a short story full of complexity and vital importance.

Flaubert subtly builds the perception the reader must have about his characters. After saving Madame Flaubert from the angry bull he states that “Felicite took no credit to herself, and probably never knew that she had been heroic” (Ch. 2). Flaubert continues talking about what life after the bull incident had become for Madame Aubain, making this sentence become completely miniscule to the reader, yet quietly building brick by detailed brick the reader’s perception of Felicite. By using this technique, Flaubert impacts an unconscious reader who dives into the next paragraph. By the end of the chapter we have a concrete perception of Felicite’s character, necessary for Flaubert’s ultimate objective of making his character immortal, an impression of what has been up to now a tragic life.

Another aspect of Flaubert’s style is the use of punctuation. As Madame Aubain tries to escape the angry bull Flaubert narrates that “Madame Aubain finally slid into the ditch, after shoving first Virginia and then Paul into it, and though she stumbled several times she managed, by dint of courage, to climb the other side of it.” (Ch. 2) If you try to take out one comma of this sentence (which appears as a whole paragraph in the chapter) it completely changes the meaning of the sentence, and the process Flaubert is showing by forcing the reader to pause in the commas. It makes the sentence a process where the reader must slowly but hastily descend and come out of the ditch Madame Aubain is going into. Flaubert plays with the reader’s need to read what happened to Madame Aubain, makes us pause, thus helping us imagine it instead of swiftly noticing it.

Communication and Exposition

As I read Gary Lutz’s lecture, The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, I connected his ideas about sentences and their composition to what I have been reading and experiencing with writing lately. The first example of this intricate relationship between words in sentences is metafiction. In metafiction every single word counts and must count, for it to be good metafiction. Lutz states that good sentence writers are those who “seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential.” Slutz’s writing reminded me of Dawkins’ style in The Selfish Gene, were he clearly identifies the units for evolution to be genes. In this lecture, Slutz defines the unit that expresses the essence of writing as words forming sentences, something completely different from words forming paragraphs, essays, or novels. The unit of writing according to Lutz is the sentence which has to be created by the words that “belong together” for that specific sentence. It seems to be the obligation of the writer to expose seemingly obligatory relationships between words to communicate ideas rather than having messages to be expressed by words that fit the message. This may well be the line that cuts off mathematical writing, the place where there is an obligation to write a word that fits the message from expository, beautiful, majestic writing, the place where words are needed to fit a feeling, where words become an obligation of the writer.

As Slutz describes some examples of the relationships between words, specifically the locations and changes between the places where individual letters are located we see the mathematical part of expository writing. There are a wide range of possibilities; however, you can decide to use alliteration, divide a sentence to create portions of repeated letters, play around with two repeated letters, give more or less emphasis to a part of the sentence, etc. Slutz describes writing “rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off.” The subject becomes a spectator for the sentence variety, word use and writing styles. The subject of a sentence isn’t more important that what a survival machine is for a gene, it is simply a way to continue being immortal. If the subject can’t be exploited by the relationship of the words that conform it, the subject isn’t appropriate, it isn’t a good survival machine. This perception of the art of writing is different from what I have studied, but only by a short glimpse into Slut’s perception I see a complete different art from what writing for me once was. Now I understand and feel more comfortable with appreciating writing as an exposition of a writer’s creativity and genius rather than just a simple channel of communication.

Building An Unfinished Mystery

As Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, comes to an end we are shown the nature of the title and the last bits of information that Pynchon wanted to include in his satirical, strange novel. I must say that I was disappointed when I read the last sentence of Pynchon’s novel: “Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49” (152). With this Pynchon leaves an open-ended novel which surely works with the difficulties in communication both between Oedipa with the world and the reader with the book. Pynchon gives the reader the opportunity to build the rest of the story in his own mind, to simply find the answer to the mystery as we weren’t allowed to know. We were Pynchon’s puppets in the book, the characters that have feelings but can’t create on what is being built in front of their eyes. They can see how Pynchon gives Oedipa the motives to be lost in the mystery, as she discovers that Pierce owned everything in town, all the businesses that were necessary to build his master joke.

In the Crying of Lot 49 Wiki webpage I found a video which shows the main problematic that the book deals with. It shows recurrent themes of the book like drug use, misunderstanding, and cultural aspects of 1960’s California to give us a representation of what the literal part of the book shows. The main adventures that Oedipa lives in the novel are portrayed in a way that my own mind was imagining them. The sudden changes in shots give the viewer a unique perspective of the events, there seems to always be more than the symbols employed to represent Oedipa’s adventures. The final shot shows the hammer of the auction, an accurate representation of Pynchon’s ending, the abrupt open-ended final.

Genghis tells Oedipa that they “say an auctioneer ‘cries’ a sale” (151). This gives the readers the last clue into the mystery, the crying of the auctioneer resembles that of the misunderstandings we have seen through the book. The problems that have been created due to the lack of information given to both Oedipa and the reader become a cry for information, for that feeling that Pynchon creates when leaving an open-ended novel for us. We are thus given the opportunity to observe and make fun of the adventures of a human being that has become fond in our hearts, while attacking this feeling of misunderstanding. Is life like a big misunderstanding of a simple event? Are we like miniscule Oedipas in our own, unique adventures? Is there a Pierce in our lives?