The linguistic criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four has focused primarily on Newspeak as a language (Flammia 1987: 28-33, Harris 1987: 113-119) and on Orwell's ideas about the relationship between language and thought (Kress and Hodge 1979: 144-150). It has largely ignored, however, the literary language Orwell used in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, the few critical remarks about Orwell's use of language have generally been negative - sometimes attributing the dull, monotonous, dry writing style to Orwell's career as a journalist (Ringbom 1973: 11-12, Petro 1982: 95, Bloom 1987: 1-2) or to the phlegmatic topic of his novel. Irving Howe (1982: 321), for example, writes that
             the style of 1984, which many readers take to be drab or uninspired or sweaty, would have been appreciated by someone like Defoe, since Defoe would have immediately understood how the pressures of Orwell's subject, like the pressures of his own, demand a gritty and hammering factuality. The style of 1984 is the style of a man whose commitment to a dreadful vision is at war with the nausea to which that vision reduces him. So acute is this conflict that delicacies of phrasing or displays of rhetoric come to seem frivolous - he has no time, he must get it all down. Those who fail to see this, I am convinced, have succumbed to the pleasant tyrannies of estheticism; they have allowed their fondness for a cultivated style to blind them to the urgencies of prophetic expression. The last thing Orwell cared about when he wrote 1984, the last thing he should have cared about, was literature.
             Those critical responses to Orwell - including Howe's defense of his style - are wrong. Orwell asserted that one of his primary motives for writing was Aesthetic enthusiasm.
             Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm o...