Turning authors into adjectives

That’s Orwellian. No, it’s Kafkaesque. It sounds Machiavellian.

What happens when writers are turned into adjectives? For a start, there’s lazy simplification, if not outright distortion. The recent brouhaha in America over the allegedly Orwellian actions of social media and publishing houses is a case in point.

The accepted use of the word is to describe conditions under a totalitarian state of the type portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems to have become shorthand to condemn any policy that one dislikes.

Christopher Hitchens, described in some quarters as Orwell’s heir, once wrote that the word is commonly used in one of two ways: “To describe a state of affairs as Orwellian implies crushing tyranny, fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as Orwellian is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable.”

Nevertheless, Orwell also wrote about many other issues: the condition of the working poor, colonialism, the English language, and British identity, for example. You’d hardly call a well-written essay Orwellian, even though it could be apt to do so.

Kafkaesque is another word employed in this idle manner. Loosely defined as something that is nightmarish and oppressive, the word specifically refers to the actions of an opaque bureaucracy as depicted in The Trial or The Castle.

This again is reductive. Consider his best-known short story, The Metamorphosis, in which a character is transformed into a large beetle. The elements of absurdity, not to mention being at an angle to reality, in this and other works are almost always ignored in turning Kafka into an adjective.

At other times, Kafkaesque, like Orwellian, is simply used to describe any frustrating situation. As biographer Frederick Karl once grumbled: “What I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not.”

In contrast, the use of the word Machiavellian is more focused. This is largely to do with the infamous reputation of the Renaissance diplomat himself. However, historians have long debated the nature of the nefarious practices that he described in The Prince. Was it simply an effort to ingratiate himself with Lorenzo de' Medici, was it also a warning to citizens, or was it a treatise on how to unite a nascent nation-state?

Since the man isn’t around to clear up misconceptions, we continue to use it to refer to the underhand tactics used by politicians and others in power. Given the current environment, it’s going to be around for quite a while.

There’s more of a divide with the word Dickensian. When applied to Christmas, as professor Mark Connelly has noted, it conjures up images of a nostalgic Victorian festival “full of turkey, mistletoe and goodwill”. A Dickensian childhood, on the other hand, implies deprivation and working in suffocating conditions. And a recent New York Times piece on the job market in the United States spoke of “the Dickensian elements of the Covid-19 economy — unemployed workers facing a cut-off in benefits.”

It’s worth reflecting that such coinage is largely to do with male authors. You do come across the word Austenesque, but almost always in reference to books, TV or film. Some fashionistas chatter about “Austenesque weddings”, by which they mean Empire-style gowns.

One would think that Emily Dickinson’s characteristically gnomic verse would lend itself to an adjective, but this hasn’t quite caught on yet. Perhaps it’s because Dickinsonian – or even Dickinsonesque – doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Brontëesque suffers from the same problem, though Kate Atkinson, in her A God in Ruins, refers to a character wistfully musing on a lack of “doomed and Brontëesque” passion in her life.

In decades to come, maybe contemporary authors will be turned into adjectives, too. Sethian could mean anything redolent of 1950s India; Rooneyesque could refer to millennial angst; and Ferrantean could describe the nature of long-lasting female friendships.

Of course, it’s not just writers who are subject to such over-simplification. In the case of the biologist associated with the survival of the fittest, the results can be dangerous: social Darwinism has been used to justify all sorts of inequities over the decades. And the word Freudian commonly refers to the Viennese psychoanalyst’s views on sexuality, with only the lesser-used “Freudian slip” pointing to his theory of the unconscious.

One way or another it looks like such words are here to stay, if only because people are keen to sound as though they’re experts with an incisive understanding of problems. Add the urge to twist language to prevent others from thinking for themselves, and you have a situation that’s positively Orwellian.