Insincere language

‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.’
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

A world ruled by fiction

In his Introduction to the 1995 reissue of 1973 masterpiece Crash, J.G.Ballard writes:

‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.’

Tom McCarthy continues…

‘Reality isn’t there. It has to be brought forth or produced. This is the duty and stake of writing.’

LRB, 18 Dec 2014 – ‘Writing Machines’.