How Did George Orwell Wrote That Good Prose Is Like A Windowpane?

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a British author whose literary works compiled of his essays, documentary journalism and novels. He is mainly recognised worldwide for his last two masterpieces Animal Farm (AF), his brilliant satire on the Russian Revolution, and 1984 (originally titled the Last Man in Europe) the disturbing dystopian view of the future. His popular and critical reputation has continued to grow since his death in 1950 with his novels, 1984 and AF, now a part of school curriculum and translated into more than 60 languages. His prose style was direct, clear and deceptively simple and in his essay Why I Write he wrote that “good prose is like a windowpane” – meaning that it should be transparent and should hide nothing.

The media is heavily censored in China, social media networks such as Facebook are blocked, the government uses monitoring systems and firewalls, shuttering publications or websites, and jailing nonconforming journalists, bloggers, and activists. The France-based watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked China 175 out of 180 countries in its 2014 worldwide index of press freedom (PDF). There are more than a dozen government bodies that review and enforce laws controlling the flow of information, into, within and out of China via the media. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker argues, “to the degree that China’s connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating.” Winston Smith, the protagonist in the novel, works at the Ministry of Truth, re-writing ‘false’ news reports and books, essentially re-writing history. Although China’s censorship is not as extreme as this, the Chinese government is still very much in control of exactly what information its citizens receive. Similarly, this information and media control is prevalent in North Korea. Radio and TV sets in North Korea are supplied pre-tuned to government channels and Internet access is restricted to a small section of the elite who have received state approval. This is a clear link with the hierarchy seen in 1984, with only members of the Inner Party having access to all media with the

The population of Oceania in the novel are under constant surveillance from Big Brother, with the Inner Party able to know all party member’s actions at all times. We in the UK are under constant surveillance, and while it perhaps “isn’t as personally invasive as Orwell’s, it is perhaps more pervasive” (Fred Johnson, The Double Negative). The British Security Industry Authority in 2013 estimated that there is one security camera for every eleven people in the UK. Satellite surveillance from Google has provided us with in-depth street views and interactive satellite photographs. The Internet can both police us and gather information about us that can be used by various parties, and “it’s got to the point now that your digital footprint is all but impossible to entirely remove,” (Johnson). We have hand held devices providing all our information, with technology such as Google and Apple, able to predict our behaviour, similar to O’Brien’s ability to predict Winston’s thoughts, words and actions, countering his arguments before they have even been made. The fundamental difference between the surveillance and enforcement in 1984 and the society we live in today is that Orwell’s population are forced to conform and live as observed lab-rats, yet we volunteer our information freely as “a culture who are keen to put as much information about ourselves into public spaces as