In his political dystopia, 1984, George Orwell writes that Newspeak, the official language of the totalitarian Party in charge of Oceania, is intended “to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent from consciousness” (253). Newspeak provides a Party member “an almost foolproof instrument” (253) to “spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets” (253), which is to say that Newspeak eliminates the individual from the process of speaking, replacing the voice of the individual with the voice of the Party, and in effect, replacing the mind of the individual with the mind of the Party. That is the goal of Newspeak, its intention, to remove consciousness from the process of information conveyance.
Information conveyance is a strange…word…concept…image. It lacks warm colors. It is cool, like breeze through a porcelain tube. It lacks the human element of, say, communication, which gives off images such as friends gathering in warm cafes, phone calls home on a Sunday afternoon, a conductor directing a lost passenger to the right train. Communication conveys a connection between forces, but the connection isn't as important as the forces on the ends of that connection: the friends being more important than their gossip, the voices being more important than the wires, the help being more important than the train; for without the friends, what is the gossip?, without the voices, why the phone?, without the help, where the train? Information conveyance, on the other hand, turns the attention off of the forces deeply connected and onto the form of that connection, and deeper still, onto the information itself, flowing through the connection: it is more important that the gossip spreads than it is who does the spreading; more important that the network is built than it is the daughter calls home; more important that the train is on time than it is there are people on board.
Newspeak is intended to prevent communication, and when it accomplishes this, it leaves no record of its overt ill will. Its grammar and its vocabulary are constructed to prevent the possibility of heresy against the Party or its mandates. It erases its efforts, and in effect, erases any evidence of its will. In the wake of Newspeak, lies only the world as it must be.
Though there are fewer words, there is no ambiguity in Newspeak, and any sense of it is repressed by the person who imagines it: “An extraordinary medley of feelings…but it was not a medley exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost…struggled inside him. The spasm passed” (238-239). Newspeak eliminates the physical struggle that arises when faced with ambiguity. Because it has fewer words, ambiguous sensations have no names within Newspeak, and because they can't be named, they can't become fully conscious; and finally, because they cannot become conscious, they never are awarded the privilege of becoming real.
Orwell intended the world he created in 1984 (including Newspeak) to serve as a warning to the West about the dangers not only of totalitarian politics, but also of the negative uses of language theory (which, in the contemporary world, is the actual topic for much of what calls itself philosophy). But there is a positive lesson for fiction writers hidden in the consciousness-purging nature of Newspeak. The fiction writer's goal is to erase the real author from the reader's mind. It is to prevent the reader from ever suspecting that there is a will behind the fictional world. It is to get the reader to accept the truth of the fiction.
The difference between the Newspeaker and the fiction writer is that the Newspeaker refuses to struggle with ambiguity while the fiction writer must defeat it. Where the Newspeaker accepts the loss of distinction between finer details and allows a crowd of concepts to gather under the umbrella of a single word, the fiction writer must be strong in her determination to verify only that which is absolutely necessary, to push through the crowd and discover the name of that single, essential pole that alone supports the word. This is not to say that the fiction writer shuns ambiguity, but it is to say that she shuns ambiguity about something.
Orwell is right: “Greater precision [is] dangerous” (251); which is why, to those who would control the world, fiction writing is a dangerous profession, and it marks those of us who would practice it as precisely as Orwell did as…well…heretics.
And free.