Continuous Relevance to ‘Unspeakable Wrongness’ in Orwell’s A Hanging: A Transitivity Analysis

Md Alam

doi:10.14738/assrj.71.7708

Abstract

ABSTRACT:  This paper is an interdisciplinary study of Orwell’s queer-literary genre piece i.e. “A Hanging” with an insight into the “unspeakable wrongness” across that 1931short story / essay by the application of Halliday’s linguistic tool of “Transitivity”. The functional linguistic theory of transitivity is very instrumental in exploring “ideational meaning” about the “on-goings” of characters’ material and mental world as expressed and documented in literature. Albeit comparatively less noticed, Orwell’s “A Hanging” is a superb experiential documentation of his intolerance and disapproval of all unspeakable wrongness in all forms found in “colonialism”, “imperialism”, and “capital punishment”, discovery of all of which through the story has an extended significance and current century relevance. The study comes up with a convincing “cosmopolitan call” for the abolishment of capital punishment. Orwell goes as a narrator mentally aloof from his imperialist fellows and stands as one “odd out” with a deciphered “anti-imperialistic” impulse inside him which marks out colonialism as the very wrong “metamorphosing” power that is in itself demoralizing and makes it a huge impossibility of “equity” among universal humanity. Orwell ended up with a “Geliliolic discovery” of imperialism paving the way of only “oppression and deprivation” of the colonized and injecting a “generic moral decay” inside them; so Orwell cuts his professional “cohortship” with this giant, wrong, inhuman system that practices far-fetched, unconvincing “power imbalance” on earth by taking away the powerless races’ “freedom of speech”, and that bursts into a large scale of “moral decay” and “hollowness” of human hearts.

Highlights

Orwell study has long been a focal interest for the scholars who consider exploring deep into “colonialism” and “post colonialism”
How Orwell’s choice of these processes altogether represents his antiimperialistic view and argument against the wrongness in the capital punishment system runs as below: Material processes: The majority “processes” of ‘A Hanging’ are material processes which is (+/- 115) 189.08% of the total. It suggests that Orwell’s portrayal of a hanging as a wrong deed is mainly based on the physical actions of the different actors in the transitivity framework
Halliday’s (1985) Transitivity framework is a part of his systemic –functional grammar

Summary

Introduction

Orwell study has long been a focal interest for the scholars who consider exploring deep into “colonialism” and “post colonialism”. Orwell came up with his individual, painful observation of the English super power’s colonizing others’ lands, imposing ruthless rules, alien manners and customs, and religious beliefs on the indigenous races and groups who have their own long living identities and values, and cultural patterns. He was accumulating a strong zeal and enthusiasm to fight “fascism” and to defend democracy from “a sense of obligation” (ibid) as his political stance. His passive-active “reluctance” to accept the “wrong- headed” actions and policies of the imperialists obviously come up in his writings

Objectives

Results

Conclusion