Shooting an Elephant

Update. Free to read online

The">http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/everythingsanargument4e/content/cat_020/Orwell_Shooting.pdf.

The end of the Empire came when those who had previously given up their arms and all their wealth to he-who-wears-a-pit-helmet and burns-in-the-sun realised that Jack was not only as good as his master, but his master was a total dickhead anyway and it was time he went home to colder climes and the fat queen who wore a golden crown studded with jewels stolen from their lands.

This book is about one of the sunburned crew realising that yeah, he is a dickhead and reflecting on the lengths he went to just to stop other people realising that. But they knew, they just didn't know they could do anything about it, deprived of arms and government as they were. All they could do was force him to behave in ways that would benefit themselves. In this case, he had to kill a mad elephant that he didn't want to or even seen the need to, but that was his role and elephant was their favourite food. The satisfaction of forcing the white man and his gun to perform his self-defined role was one thing, but defining their own roles another. Eventually though, revolution and independence became possible and then inevitable.

Well, actually not. The British government has been trying to get its remaining outposts of empire to become independent since the mid-80s. The whiter the populace (ie Falklands) the less hard they try and vice versa. (The Labour government actually gave all the rights of passport and settlement that these pale islands enjoyed to the darker ones, which was something).

The problem is that the non-independent islands are now in the position of power. They are all self-governing and the UK is responsible for defence, helps out with major island maintenance via its roving ships, sends old books to the libraries and provides a good place of tertiary education for those that wish it. The only irksome thing for the locals is having to have a meet-and-greet governor who generally lords it over everyone having gathered a coterie of cocktail-party going expats and rich, sycophantic locals around him.

But the main benefit is that our often thoroughly-corrupt politicians cannot change the political system and elect themselves dictator president-for-life. So no one except the thoroughly-corrupt politicos actually wants independence. Empire died. Britain's cold and grey and poor, and we are sunny and warm and not too badly off. We can come to the mother country and work, you can't come here without a work permit. Karma.

Great story. Very short. As well-written as everything else by Orwell. ( )

In this disturbing short story the "yellow faces" of the Burmese "coolies" lie just in the background of Orwell's acknowledgement that he is not where he wants or ought to be. He is as angry as pathetic in his inability to finish a botched job (the shooting of the elephant) that he clumsily got into.

In a different way, it reminds me of when the crowd on the bus pushes Bube (in [b:Bebo's Girl|6829483|Bebo's Girl|Carlo Cassola|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348682178s/6829483.jpg|2319703] - not sure why the English translation has Bebo instead of the original Bube) into flattening the priest accused to be a Fascist collaborator. What is common to both stories (and many others) is how easy the unwilling descent into violence and prevarication just to save face. Compared to the cold dutiful determination of a [a:Rudolf Höss|160621|Rudolf Höss|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1340538634p2/160621.jpg], this is equally terrifying, as Orwell shows much easier it is to slide into it than to try and resist it. ( )

הספור הזה היה החרדה הגדולה של כל תלמידי כתה י' כמל​כודת לבגרות באנגלית. לא בשבילי, אבל גם לא התלהבתי ​ ( )

A few months ago I was quite impressed by George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London, in which he recounts his experiences on the fringes of society with a healthy measure of social commentary and sparkling wit. I was keen to read some more of Orwell's non-fiction, and this collection of essays seemed to fit the bill quite nicely.

The essays span a period from the early thirties to the late forties, shortly before Orwell's premature death in January 1950. They cover a number of topics, some personal and some political, ranging from his experiences as a policeman in Burma, lofty dissections of the works of Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift, all the way down to simple observations about the coming of spring.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as Down And Out, because a lot of the political essays were largely theoretical - I preferred those in which Orwell discusses his own experiences, such as Shooting An Elephant, How The Poor Die, and Such, Such Were The Joys. Unfortunately these were a minority in the book, and it was somtimes hard going reading about politics sixty-five years out of date, or a 60-page analysis on Dickens when I've never read a lick of the man's writing.

Nonetheless, Orwell was one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century (and easily its greatest journalist), and even when discussing unfamiliar subjects his prose is easy and enjoyable to read. He is exceptionally articulate, and his similes are quite imaginative:

[Dickens'] imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed.

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.

At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and thrown into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank full of pike.

He also expresses some thoughts I've had myself while travelling through Asia:

With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet through a Buddhist priest's guts.

While I didn't enjoy this as much as Down And Out, I still believe that all of Orwell's non-fiction is worth reading. Orwell was above all an honest writer, a man who could admit his errors and confront what he truly believed and write in plain English what he thought. That's a rare thing. He was not just one of the greatest writers of our age, but also one of the noblest.

He also totally shot an elephant in the face. What a man! ( )

As a police officer in Burma (a job where “you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters”), Orwell is forced by circumstances and the expectations of the natives to shoot an elephant he knows he shouldn’t (“It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery”) and the incident teaches him “the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. . . . when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”) In the same job he witnesses a hanging. A joyful dog interrupts the proceedings. When the prisoner, marching to his death, steps aside to avoid a puddle, Orwell suddenly sees “the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” Sometimes he will mix a metaphor like that in his attempt to get it all starkly down on paper.
Orwell describes his stay in a Paris hospital for the indigent in “How the Poor Die.” Looking at Tolstoy’s attack on Shakespeare, Orwell concludes that it cannot be answered: “there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is ‘good.’” He speculates instead on why Tolstoy made the attack and decides that in his youth Tolstoy might have thought others’ admiration for Shakespeare and his own lack of it merely a matter of taste, but when older he came to see Shakespeare’s literary reputation as somehow dangerous to his own.
Although he likes Gulliver’s Travels, Orwell doesn’t like the politics (“He is a Tory anarchist”) he thinks the book reveals about Swift, or that it is, in Orwell’s view, a Christian view of this life without the promise of the next. “Politics and the English Language,” probably Orwell’s most famous essay, takes aim at a number of bad habits Modern English is full of—using the “prefabricated” language of clichés and dead metaphors, using the passive where the active is needed, wordiness and unnecessarily big words, and so on.
Orwell reviews a partial autobiography of Gandhi and reveals his mixed feelings about him. On the one hand he admits his courage and integrity; on the other he abhors Gandhi’s pacifism in a world facing a threat like the Nazis. He thinks perhaps Gandhi did not understand totalitarianism, which prevents his sort of nonviolent struggle from being heard and thus defeats Gandhi’s aim of “arousing the world.”
“The Prevention of Literature” is a rant that shows Orwell’s particular paranoia in feeling himself surrounded by deluded fellow-travelers in the intelligentsia who did not understand what would happen to freedom of speech in the USSR; but the “Russian mythos” won’t hurt poetry as much, since “ what the poet is saying—that is, what his poem ‘means’ if translated into prose—is relatively unimportant even to himself.” He reviews James Burnham’s unsuccessful attempts to see into the political future in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians.
A selection of nine essays from the weekly column Orwell wrote for Tribune magazine concludes the book. He scorns the notion that sporting games create “goodwill between the nations,” regrets the “Decline of the English Murder,” seems to have to consider the political implications of watching toads react to the spring, and reminds us to plant trees, as did the Vicar of Bray, who in the song survived the reigns of Charles, James, William and Mary, Anne, and George with his living intact. Orwell thinks we should be reviewing only about ten percent of the books we do now, and reading, he argues against those who think it’s expensive, is cheaper than smoking. Orwell explores entertaining writers beyond the first rank in “Good Bad Books”—the phrase is Chesterton’s—and points out that Conan Doyle has worn better than Meredith and Trollope is easier to read than Carlyle. He reviews a collection of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, and says he prefers Lewis Carroll. And finally he describes how his first impressions of America were created by books like Little Women, Helen’s Babies, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod series, and the outdoor stories of Ernest Thompson Seton ( )