Blood Meridian

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Blood and death and violence. The peak of human evil, perhaps. Blood Meridian is, for most people, the most violent and horrific book they have ever read. There is nothing here of love or affection. Tenderness is a thing that little survives an axe to the brain. Babies are murdered and hung on trees like Christmas decorations. Men, women, and children are slaughtered for less than a sideways glance. Yet worse than this is the knowledge that most of this book is a true thing, that John Joel Glanton’s gang was not a fiction but a living pandemonium that truly walked upon the earth in the middle of the 19th century. Cormac McCarthy retraced its marauding steps time after time in writing this book.

Blood Meridian is sustained by its own brutality. Each chapter is a litany of bloodshed through which we stumble, confused and in awe, lost in the power of an almighty language being wielded only to describe that which in our conscious moments we have no wish to see described.

What it is, is a novel about man’s descent (for there are no women, except as bodies to be broken) into barbarism. We may think we know the type. Heart of Darkness and its ilk have prepared us, we think. But Heart of Darkness is less about Kurtz’s descent as it is about Marlow’s coming to terms with it. Marlow has his ideas of right and wrong, just as Kurtz has his own – soon distorted – ideas of the same. It is a moral book, however much it seems to rise from the jungle’s murk.

Blood Meridian is neither a moral book, nor an immoral book. What makes it so frightening is that it is merely an amoral book. “Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.” It is the story of a gang who begins by killing violent Indians in exchange for bounty and loot, then move on to killing peaceful ones, then they kill the Mexicans who hired them to protect themselves from the Indians, and eventually, they kill Americans. That is the simple story which we witness when we read the book.

Some Theory: John Williams on What A Western Should Be

John Williams, author of Augustus and Stoner and most relevantly the Western Butcher’s Crossing, also wrote a programmatic piece, “The “Western”: Definition of the Myth”, which might help us to appreciate Blood Meridian. Williams was writing at a time before McCarthy had switched his stories’ backdrops from the Appalachians to the southwest United States, before the Western genre was made serious with such books as Warlock, and films in our own day like The Power of the Dog. His main complaint of the genre was that its practitioners misunderstood it, and adopted literary modes that were not appropriate.

Williams argues that the traditional Western is purely a thing of “an element conflict between the personified forces of Good and Evil”, which is not inherent in the material but rather a transference of “the New England Calvinist habit of mind” that sees the world, at times without being fully aware of it, as broken up into the damned and the saved. This moral rigidity, whatever complexities might be added to the stock characters of the western, such as the cowboy and sheriff, mean that “beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.” It is about arranging a world where the right judgement can be acted out.

For Williams, the west is not tragic, nor comic, nor epic, but mythic in nature, and this is what he thinks previous writers have failed to recognise. Tragedy is primarily about powerful figures, often historical, suffering, that we might see as “the cost of disorder in an ordered universe.” Epic, meanwhile, is about cultural unification – it is about telling a story that collects together ideas for the building of a nation. It requires this element of nation-building or nationalism, because “the heroism, the bloodletting, the superhuman bravery, the terrible mutilations – these are given point and intensity only by the nationalistic impulse that lies behind them. Without that impulse, the adventure (handled epically) is empty, is bombast, is violence without rage.” This is an idea we will come back to, because under this definition Blood Meridian is easily readable as an anti-epic, as nation-destruction rather than building.

Myth, however, and not anything else is what Williams sees as appropriate for Westerns. He defines it as an approach where “the mythic subject rises from the enveloping action of history, but the events that detail that subject are invented.” The myth is thus a combination of history and fiction, but it is not historical fiction, even though we are aware of as many historical forces – economic, social, cultural, and religious – as the author may wish to include. “The events and characters… are intensely symbolic and they compel belief on a level different from that of historical reality.” The mythic work is symbolic, its characters are often archetypes, stretching beyond themselves in their significance.

The heart of the mythic is the inner quest. This is what distinguishes it from tragedy, where quests and conflicts are generally public and on the level of the state, and from comedy, where conflicts are generally domestic and lie between characters. The mythic, for Williams, is about the acquisition of inner knowledge that can only be bittersweet – “the exaction of the human spirit by the terror of truth.” “The outcome of myth is always mixed; its quest is for an order of the self that is gained at the expense of knowing, at last, the essential chaos of the universe.” If tragedy is about breaking order, myth is about creating a pocket of order whose diminutive size makes us only more aware of the world’s general disorder.

For a mythic tale to work well, history must play a role. In the case of the Western myth, the history is one of exploitation – of people but, primarily for Williams, of land. The period of the frontiersman is one of the lone being attempting to survive in a new land, rather than of the state trying to grow itself through the organised murder of prior inhabitants. People entering that world, coming from the East, brought with them their simplified ideas of good and evil, which crashed and were broken against the reality of a cruel and indifferent sun. This is the central theme of Butcher’s Crossing. Here, a “voyage not the wilderness was most meaningfully a voyage into the self, experimental, private and sometimes obscure.”

To summarise, for Williams, the Western is most appropriately a mythic tale. It is deeply lodged in its own time, like Moby Dick, but it is peopled with symbolic characters who reach beyond themselves in their meanings, and whose essential journeys are internal and with results which are not entirely welcome.

Blood Meridian is both an epic and mythic work, according to the ideas Williams describes, but in both cases, the novel is something quite different to the “straight” interpretation of either approach. Let’s begin with the case of the epic. Western novels, as he acknowledges, have often relied upon epic themes and motifs, but with the exception of the Indian Wars, nationalism and nation-building have been less important than the individual’s struggle for survival and success in a new land. In Blood Meridian we have part of the American wars of conquest, with our character, “the kid”, at first joining a group of soldiers under Captain White to go and murder Mexicans in spite of the recently signed peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

This figure, White, is an unpleasant one, but his views are somewhat unique in the novel. “A race of degenerates… There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.” White, practically alone among the misfits of Blood Meridian, sees the matter in terms of governance and the growth of the United States. If his views are unpleasant and Hobbesian, then they are also the only views in the novel which are concerned with administration. It is he, whom we might say, belongs in an epic work – though not one we may necessarily be proud of.

Still, they are fallen upon by Indians and White and most of the “army” are slaughtered. The scene is epic, and here McCarthy’s language reaches a pitch that anywhere else would be ridiculous, yet here is Biblical, Homeric:

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Here the language is distinctly non-specific, with the enemies of the Americans containing so many hints of other identities that they become clearly mythic and symbolic in character. White’s group, building a nation, fight against the forces of disorder, and those forces annihilate him.

“The kid” survives. And here the novel begins its anti-epic shift. If White was trying to pacify and crush people for the good of some absurd American nation, Glanton’s gang fight Indians, Mexicans and finally Americans only ever ostensibly for such goals, and time after time we are reminded that their goals are instead more simple, crude, and barbaric. They go to towns to debauch themselves, eating so much food that the townsfolk starve afterwards, they amass great riches and commit crimes so terrible that murder must have seemed a solace to those gifted it, and there is no nation to be built.

It is in this regard that people, including those on my copy’s blurb, have called the novel an anti-Western. It is an unheroic novel, a barbaric novel, where the Indians are not made victims but rather where every specimen of humanity seems determined to drag itself down into the depths of human cruelty. And all of this is related in prose that is entirely unjudging, that never questions or looks into people’s heads except when they have been splattered across a saloon’s wall, so that we feel silly for wanting there to be a point to it all.

If we want to find meaning, we must look at the novel as a mythic work. Such an interpretation is natural when our characters have names like “the kid”, “the judge”, “the expriest”, which eclipse any real names, Holden and Tobin for the latter two, that characters actually have, and when we journey through volcanoes and larger-than-life landscapes and see tarot cards and meet fools in cages. But here, too, there is something unusual that sets the novel outside of the mythic categorisation Williams gives – the sheer lack of interiority.

“The kid” is the character we follow, more or less, throughout the work. But he rarely speaks, and rarely does he act. He is more than anything else a witness to the novel. He is, in other words, like us. And so, it is most fitting to say that the journey to some kind of personal order within a disordered universe is primarily not in him, but in us, the readers, who are forced to confront this most awful tale in the hopes of extracting meaning. The narrator, who merely describes, has no epiphany. So that just leaves us.

But what order, what myth, lies within the bloodshed? The truth is that the novel is about power. It is a mythic representation of power, especially in Western history, and “the judge”, who is one of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered in fiction, anywhere, is power itself.

We meet him, seven foot tall, without a hair on his body, “serene and strangely childlike”, as a reverend is preaching to a gathered room. He steps forward unexpectedly, and declares that the reverend is a fraud. After a short speech he declares, “in truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” A man in the audience immediately shoots the reverend and chaos breaks out. Back at the bar, the judge gets himself a drink. Someone asks him how he knew the reverend was a fraud. “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.”

The incident is the perfect introduction to the world of Blood Meridian and how little human life is worth there. It is also the perfect introduction to Judge Holden. Gigantic, multilingual, an amateur botanist, geologist and artist, the judge seems to embody knowledge itself. With his ability to speak eloquently, he has the ability to kill without moving a muscle, because none of the men in the West and in Mexico have the knowledge he does, and so they listen and defer to him, trusting whatever he says. There are several signs suggesting he is probably the devil.

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” In those words is his philosophy entire. He learns about the world to gain mastery over it. Unlike White, who at least in name acts for the United States, Holden acts for himself and the growth of his own suzerainty over the world. At one point he says he would have every bird in the world contained within a zoo, that not one of them might have freedom. Blood Meridian was published in 1985. By that point, we had the apotheosis of human power, the atomic bomb. We had also put men and women into camps and slaughtered them on a scale that the murderers of Blood Meridian could only dream of. Human history is many things, but one of them is the increased power of technology over nature, and the use of that power to cause harm to other people.

The judge is that power. He sits and takes notes on plants and flowers, drawing them in his notebook. He saves the gang from certain doom by creating new ammunition for them using gathered guano and sulphur at a volcano. Through force of will and force of knowledge, he gains strength over others, the environment, and himself: “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

The ultimate place where power is tested is in war. It is here, as some of the quotes above have indicated, that might determine right, and all other considerations, moral and spiritual and jurisprudential, fall away. In the judge’s reckoning, war is “the ultimate trade” because every other aspect of human existence feeds into one’s success or failure within it: “all other trades are contained in that of war.”

Depending on how cynical we are being, we may agree with the judge. War’s horrible wonder lies partly in the way that it is a complete and total experience, that takes all of our existence and demands everything from our bodies and souls for victory’s attainment. It takes everything from our minds, as we use knowledge to create new weapons and strategies. And from our souls as we destroy ourselves as decent human beings to destroy more capably the enemy standing or sitting opposite us. As the judge remarks, “war is god.” It is also evil.

The judge is evil by other measurements too. But that Calvinistic good-and-evil approach that Williams criticises bears little fruit here. The judge is a mythic creature. His physical attributes are superhuman. He tells us that he shall never die. He spends much of the story naked or wrapped in robes, wandering at night. Glanton’s gang fears him and sits in awe of him, turn by turn. He does no good, but the truth that he carries within himself is not strictly speaking evil. It is an acknowledgement of the state of things: “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.” The disorder that Blood Meridian reveals is that there is no order here, except what we have placed here, and it is inadequate to the task of mastering creation. “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.”

The story as a whole is one of a gang who, themselves disordered and led by an agent of chaos, become forces for the destruction of order within others. They are symbolic of untethered natures and the consequences of a world without any unifying principles. In such a world, only power can unify. And the judge has the most power because instead of simply gaining pistols and rifles he has determined to populate his mind with knowledge that can be used for violence too.

What do we, readers, get from this myth? Because knowledge comes to us. We understand the disorder, and because we understand it without experiencing it first-hand, we may yet be able to build a better order – personally, or on a larger scale. Blood Meridian is a mirror of human cruelty and brutality, an artefact of evils passed. It is a lesson and an unignorable initiation for those who might be tempted to ignore this side of human nature. If we want power, we must have knowledge. And knowledge without moral feeling is just chaos and destruction. With epic scale and epic scope, mythic prose and Judge Holden one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered in any media, Blood Meridian is a book to read and read again.

Cormac McCarthy died last month, June 2023. He has written some of the most brilliant, awe-inspiring fiction I have ever read. Until such time as I can write about him in a way that does him justice, you can read scattered thoughts on The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses here.

The Guiltless Gliding of Amis’s Time’s Arrow

The success of a gimmick lies in whether it makes any messages in the story more effective, or whether it distracts and annoys us more than anything else. With a subject like the Holocaust, we certainly do not want the latter result. And yet the Holocaust has been the topic of many novels that have used non-standard forms and structures to deliver their messages. From this we might conclude that with such a serious topic the standard narrative approaches simply will not do.

Among others, we have that reconstructional striving we encounter in the works of W.G. Sebald, where characters seem determined to walk and read and effortfully remake the past, scrap by informational scrap. We have the cyclicity of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse, where the story can never end because the protagonist can never quite admit their guilt. We even have the time-skips of the thoroughly mediocre The Reader.

Time’s Arrow shares with these works an unusual approach. Martin Amis’s novel is told backwards, from a man’s death to his birth. I can only think of Delillo’s Underworld as having done something similar, and I cannot recall it adding anything there. But here, given the subject matter is a doctor at Auschwitz who successfully flees to the United States before dying of natural causes, we might assume the guilt component to be more prominent. The way, that is, that an earlier mistake might shape the life that follows, and then also how earlier decisions must have made that most mistaken of careers possible as well. This thread of interest must be enough for us, because all tension is removed when every beginning is really an end.

We follow the life of Odilo Unverdorben, who is first an old man alone in the US with the ridiculous name Tod Friendly (though Unverdorben is also dire – it means “untainted” in German), then a doctor both in New York and further afield, before heading to Europe shortly after the Second World War. We spend time in Auschwitz, then watch as he trains to become an SS Officer and courts his wife. Then he becomes a boy and re-enters his mother. We do not have access to Odilo’s thoughts, only to his emotions. We are trapped inside his body with another, unnamed person, the narrator, who may be Odilo’s soul. “Passenger or parasite,” that is our role.

This character – the narrator – is quite odd. He seems deliberately restricted in his access to information in a way that I found unsatisfactory. He knows all about Jews, for example, but nothing about the Holocaust or history. He’s essentially given a random assortment of knowledge, such that he can appreciate the world, while still being utterly bewildered by it. At no point, for example, does he realise that things are going backward. He just comments on how bizarre it is that things are the way they are.

For unlike Delillo’s novel, which is a series of vignettes in reverse chronological order, in Time’s Arrow the narrative is actually reversed. We read dialogue in ordered English, but the end of the conversation comes first. The same is true of actions. Doctors, in this world, cause damage and throw people, bloodied and broken, back onto the streets. Relationships begin with tearful and angry departures. We regurgitate our food and retrieve things from the rubbish. The narrator cannot believe this, it is all so desperately odd to him.

So now the question is, what does all this add? Is it worth it? On a basic level, this approach is excellent for making us pay attention. We need to read each conversation twice to really get the meaning. Various transactions are involved here – whether for sex, for health, or anything else – and by shifting the transfers into reverse we pay more attention to what is actually going on, and whether it makes sense. It is also used for humour, although not in a particularly exciting way. The narrator complains that Odilo checks out women by beginning with their hair and face, and only then going to their body. We, however, are winkingly aware that Odilo is far less chaste than such a sequence assumes. There is also the way that he seems to gain all of his strength for the day by absorbing excrement each morning from the toilet.

But its primary purpose is to confuse our moral compass. Doctors hurting their patients seems bizarre, especially when they are paid for it. People regret things, and then do them anyway. Relationships begin badly, but end with the sweetest of romances. This just doesn’t make sense, as our narrator never tires of telling us. It doesn’t make sense until Auschwitz. There, the doctor is at last healing people. Thousands of thousands of people are created in gas chambers and furnaces, or brought back to life on electric fences, or given miraculous life-giving injections. As the narrator remarks innocently, this is the only thing he has yet seen where things actually make sense.

This could have been extremely tasteless, and it’s a testament to Time’s Arrow’s quality that it is not. The absence of anything but positive judgement on the part of the narrator coupled with our own absolutely certain knowledge of what is truly taking place successfully amplifies a horror that is already almost unbearable to the imagination:

“There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats out like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens – awaiting human form and union… the sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.”

The scenes in Auschwitz are the highlight of the book, if we can call it that. Everything is so repugnant, but also so impactful thereby. The breakdown (or build-up) of Odilo’s relationship to his wife and his childhood are all that remains. Here there is not much excitement. Odilo suffers from impotency relating to his systematic murder of undesirable people, and chronologically before that also develops strange sexual proclivities. This affection for sadism and domination in the bedroom is something Odilo shares with Hanna in The Reader. As we go back, Odilo simply becomes less and less interesting as a character, as Amis seemingly decided he needed to tick off the serial-killer-psycho trait list just in case readers did not believe Odilo could actually have done the things he does.

Not that Odilo was ever very interesting. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everyone else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.” Basically, he’s one of those brutes Adorno complains of in “The Meaning of Working through the Past” and elsewhere.

Yet that’s not entirely true. We still have the entire first part of Time’s Arrow, set in America. This can’t all be for nothing. Armed with a lot of gold, taken from the dead Jews, Odilo uses contacts in the priesthood to get himself into New York and set himself up there as a real doctor, the type which heals. In these conversations we get a brief view of Odilo’s heart, which is otherwise well-hidden from us: “I have sinned, Father… I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good…” So now we have a motive which sits fairly uneasily with the sheer scale of the horrors that Odilo is guilty of. He has had a change of heart. One which comes about only after his camp is set upon by the Soviets, and his family has abandoned him.

In another passage, earlier in the book, when Odilo has to leave New York, he says to his helper “all I ever wanted to do was help people.” This is quite frankly a load of bollocks. It may be true of his time in the States, but it would require extreme mental contortions to consider the administration of lethal poisons in concentration camps “helping”. And because we so rarely hear Odilo speak, and certainly never get into his mind, this approach – where we explore Odilo’s delusions – simply cannot work. As it stands, such statements just make him look a bit silly.

I am a big fan of redemption narratives, of course – it is the religious side of me. But Time’s Arrow cannot be this because we meet Odilo at his end first, and it is impossible to say whether he actually expiated his guilt or not. He donates money to the church, helps prostitutes, and has healed thousands of Americans. Whether we consider that adequate to washing away the sins of Auschwitz is a personal question. As for whether Odilo himself feels that he has worked through it all, without access to his head, it’s impossible to say for certain. All we get are occasional visions of a man who feels shame, who seeks crowds to “shed[…] the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity.”

All of this is to say that the decision to go through this narrative backwards both works and doesn’t. It makes us stop and slow down, and it certainly enhances the horror of that central topic – the systematised slaughter of Jews, those with disabilities, and all-too-many others – by portraying it in a way that makes it seem so morally positive. On the other hand, it takes the weight out of nearly everything else. Odilo’s relationships all end badly, so we cannot really enjoy them while they last – there can be no hope, after all, that this time he’ll crack it. As for his guilt, once we know his secret, we cannot really assess whether he feels like he’s successfully redeemed himself or not. Learning that he was hit as a child or mistreated Jews while at school adds nothing except reasons to dislike the person we are stuck with.

The narrator says, in the novel’s final words, “I… came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late”. Earlier, he had remarked about his situation, how he had “(effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it.” We might think about how all of this relates to the question of guilt. We, too, are in the narrator’s position. As readers, we can only perceive guilt, but never rectify it or prevent the actions that led to its coming. Especially in this story, where everything is so deterministic. Why, then, do we continue to read about these things? Perhaps because, in questions of guilt and responsibility, which are among the most important ones we may face in our own lives, the more approaches to these problems we have, the more likely it is that we may be able to do whatever it is we must to save our own souls.

Simone Weil vs George Orwell on political language

Around the time of the Second World War, both Simone Weil and George Orwell were lamenting the misuse of language. At first glance, this is not altogether remarkable, for criticisms about language’s mistreatment seem constant throughout history. However, both Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” and Weil in “The Power of Words” are writing with a certain heightened seriousness that we can argue is lacking in previous laments over language’s decline. Surrounded by war in a century where possibilities for slaughter were fast proving limitless, understanding how language could contribute to bloodshed was of paramount importance. As a result, the writers go beyond that standard argument we may already be familiar with – that sloppiness in language indicates and produces sloppiness of thought.  

No, their goal was loftier than that. As Weil put it, “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis – to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving lives.”

Orwell

Of the two, it is Orwell whose essay is more practical. Many of us read “Politics and the English Language” today as a kind of guide to decent prose style. That was what prompted me first to glance at it a few years ago. Orwell begins his piece with a series of examples of bad, careless prose. From these he identifies a few common elements – “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” chief among them. He goes into detail, noting problems like pretentious, often Latinate diction; the use of meaningless words in art criticism; needlessly complicated language (generally when we use compounds when a single verb will do); and finally, the dying metaphor – the metaphor which by its familiarity has all the impact of a fish’s flailing upon the whaler’s deck. Orwell then follows up his criticisms by ending with a list of advice that you feel you ought to pin onto your fridge door:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Politics and the English Language” was published just after the end of the Second World War. It lacks some of the urgency of Weil’s essay, which was written when she returned from the Spanish Civil War, where she had been volunteering with the anarchists. For Weil, that war was obviously a prelude of the horrors to come – horrors she might prevent, if only she reached the right people with her voice. Orwell, meanwhile, has the resignation of an older man – he was already in his forties, while Weil was my age (twenty-five) when she wrote her essay. Though Orwell’s criticism of bad writing listed above is important, there is an attack on political writing in particular that I consider far more crucial than the sloppiness of aged professors and arts critics.

It is this part of Orwell’s piece that we can read fruitfully next to Weil’s. Orwell’s main problem with political writing is that it uses meaningless words, or at the very least words that have been emptied as much of their meaning as possible. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Even “democracy” has no meaning, Orwell notes, except as a thing that is desirable, and hence a thing you use to describe what you personally want.

This meaningless has the result that “words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different”. By saying he acts for democracy, a general launching a coup can gather the support of an unthinking population at large, while his real goal is the consolidation of his own power. I say unthinking, because such actions rely on a reflex – the reflexive view that democracy is good, and hence those who claim to act in its name must deserve our support.

Meaningless words allow for reflexive action, while another tool we often use, consciously or not, is abstract language. By replacing specifics with euphemisms or vague terminology, we numb our listeners to the real content hidden behind the words. For “Purges”, read the systematic arbitrary imprisonment and murder of our enemies without fair trial; for “liquidation,” read “murder”; and to give a more modern example, for “special military operation” read “war”. Orwell notes that the key element of such language is that it lets us to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” In Orwell’s time, most political writing gladly abused this kind of language – and it wasn’t all fascists and communists’ doing. After all, we were still “pacifying” and “bringing civilization” to the colonies at this time in the Allied world, a great hypocrisy Weil is very critical of as well.

For Orwell, “Political writing is bad writing” because political writing demands this kind of numbing language. “Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” The point of most pamphlets is not to persuade, but to set light emotions that have already been charged by a tensed time, while keeping the mind itself dormant. Writers do this by repeating language that identifies the enemy and identifies our own group. Hence “democracy”, or “communism”, or “fascism”, or “dogs”, or “rats” in Orwell’s time. In our own day we might read “woke” or “leftists” or “alt-right” in the same, utterly meaningless way. Such language, emptied of meaning, and packed with group-associations, dehumanises people and also makes concepts unreal. By never defining “woke” or “fascist” seriously, there is no way to understand any associated political programmes in a way that might leave a space open for compromise and finding common ground.

To conclude, we can say that Orwell’s essay argues our goal must be clear language, because clear language is sincere and comprehensible. And because it lacks the evasiveness built into the abstract and the meaningless, it forces us to stay within acceptable moral boundaries in our politics. “We must murder our political opponents to ensure we maintain power” is only rarely a phrase that we can actually say without opposition. If we all actually aimed at sincerity of prose and voice, we would never end up in those rare situations in which such language can go unopposed at all.

Weil

Orwell’s arguments are straightforward and sensible. Clear language is honest language, and honest language keeps our politics in good bounds. Bad language allows for dangerous suggestions, whether we mean for this or not. Weil, however, goes more directly into why meaningless language in particular (words like “fascist” and “communist” and “woke” in their regular usage) is outright dangerous. She is explicit where Orwell only hints at the benefits of clear language, when she says that clear language can potentially save lives.

This is because Weil’s topic, in “The Power of Words”, is language and war. Specifically, it is about the language we use to justify wars. Here we come back to the problem of meaningless language that Orwell spoke of. Weil notes that our modern wars “are conflicts with no definable objective”, a type of conflict that is inevitably most bitter. I imagine many of us would disagree with Weil instinctively. The most obvious example of a war that has a definable objective is Allies’ participation in the Second World War. But now, think of any other war, and the matter becomes much more difficult. We all know that in the case of the Great War the sides “sleepwalked” into the conflict. You can possibly think of some other examples to confirm or deny this, but what is interesting are the arguments Weil makes about the consequences of meaningless war goals.

In any war where the goals are defined, it is possible to “weight the value of the stake against the probable cost of the struggle and decide how great an effort it justifies.” This serves a preventative purpose, as when we define goals in this way, we find that war rarely if ever proves a worthwhile activity. But more important than preventing war, clear goals allow for ending it by making a compromise between the sides’ goals possible. Alternatively, in a meaningless war, “there is no longer any common measure or proportion”, and thus a compromise is impossible – including with ourselves, about the worthiness of fighting at all.

No war can be entirely meaningless but the meaning that fills a meaningless war is an extremely dangerous one. The only possible meaning for a meaningless war is the cost of it, in other words the sacrifices and pains it has demanded. This is unavoidable, except by having a real goal, and it results in wars that are self-perpetuating, and last until both nations are utterly ruined. In such a war, the argument “the dead do not wish it”, cannot be fought against, because there are no real objectives to measure the necessary future sacrifices with. And so, we fight, we die, and we water the grass with our blood.

The Trojan War, over Helen, is an example of a meaningless conflict. Helen was just a symbol, and like a chalice filling with blood she gained her meaning as men died for her. But in Weil’s world, “the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters.” Words like fascist or communist have limited meanings except to identify, as noted above, an in-group and an out-group. This prevents the limited practical differences between the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Hitler’s Germany, for example, from being an obstacle to them declaring each other mortal enemies. The capitalisation of such words takes away any practical meaning to them and thus the concreteness that, again, might allow compromise. 

These meaningless words which serve only to create the conditions for bloodshed are not limited to those hefty ideological words, though. “National interest” and “national security” are other examples of words whose meaning appears neutral, but which under Weil’s gaze reveal themselves to be primarily about securing the resources to succeed in war. Because success in any potential war is based on ensuring that others do not succeed, national interest inevitably leads to national conflict, and compromises are impossible where there can be only success and failure.

A binary choice, victory or defeat, success, or failure, are the rails which these abstract, capitalised words force us to travel along. For Weil, this is insanity. Everything, for her, lies upon a spectrum. This is the way of thinking which she wants us to adopt in our own lives. When there are no absolutes, distinctions can always be drawn, and ground shifted between positions to allow for a compromise.

By contrast, once we think only in isms and absolutes, murder appears permissible. When we cannot kill capitalism, for it is too abstract to wound with blade or bomb, we decide to kill capitalists instead. Everything soon becomes justifiable when the goal is an ill-defined victory. What shocks Weil is the way that human beings seemingly will choose death and violence over actually interrogating the meaning of the words that they are using to justify the most barbarous acts: “apparently it is easier to kill, and even to die, than to ask ourselves a few quite simple questions.” It is disappointing that this really does seem to be the case.

Similarities and Differences

Both Orwell and Weil in these essays take language as their topic, and they follow a well-travelled path in deploring contemporary language’s lack of clarity. Orwell focuses on how abstract and vague language numbs us to potentially horrific facts, ultimately allowing us to tolerate the intolerable – colonialism, totalitarianism, and so on. Weil is less interested in giving writing advice. The words that are her enemies in “The Power of Words” are not just words on the page, or even words in speeches, but words in the mind. Given capital letters and made abstractions, they carry us into conflicts that we cannot end because they brook no compromise by denying common ground or any sense of measurement and limit.

Orwell’s call in “Politics and the English Language” is primarily to write better, so that we might think better and avoid bad positions; Weil demands instead that we interrogate what we believe and set ourselves up to think according to “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends”. Both writers’ messages are important, but Weil’s one is the more urgent and more lofty.

It will not have escaped readers’ notice that there is a hot war going on at the time of writing, and plenty of internal conflict closer to home for those who live outside the combatants’ lands. These two essays provide guidance about the ways that language plays into creating and sustain such violent divisions, whether they are physical or still as yet merely verbal. That clarity is a virtue is undeniable. And Orwell’s essay is such a joy to read that everyone should study it as a model for effective prose.

But Weil’s essay, to my mind, is the more important at the present time. The ongoing war is for one side utterly meaningless, and for the other in danger of becoming abstracted in the way Weil warns against. It is easy, when suffering greatly, to make sacrifice one’s argument for continuing battle. But this makes compromise impossible and thus anything except a peace reached through exhaustion. That is not to deny that the one side’s stated goals are reasonable and generally moral. But there must be a limit to the cost we are willing to put in for that victory, no matter how moral or even just that victory may be. By losing sight of Weil’s ideas of boundaries and proportion, we can fall into a situation where inertia and the blood already clogging the trenches are preventing the thing that is almost certainly most worthwhile of all: peace.