You need language to be flexible in order for thought itself to be possible. It doesn’t follow that people with limited vocabularies have big important thoughts. He was interested in it in a political sense, but here he takes on literature. We know of Orwell’s main concern with language it is a topic he took up again and again. The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. How could that possibly be the case, in a book about dead-beats and whores? Orwell writes:īut get hold of Tropic of Cancer … and read especially the first hundred pages. It gave him hope that the English language was still growing and thriving. Orwell knew Miller slightly, and while some of his comments on Tropic of Cancer are pretty funny (he “refuses to be impressed” by all the profanity and sex), he was astonished by the book. “Inside the Whale” is a gigantic essay which is a review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (the book is its focal point), but also spans out to discuss English literature during the crucial decades of Orwell’s life: the 1920s to the 1940s. A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell
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