An Assay on an Essay

It's going to be a while before I post again, what with me heading off to Irvine for the entire President's Day weekend (a paradox?), then my GRE Prep course starting and traffic school, so I might as well take the opportunity to post something about Orwell now. Be fore-warned, this is in not very organized (as if anything I've published thus far is organized), and it may be boring, trivial, and redundant. I suppose those are the risks one takes when reading my blog. But, I said it was coming, so here it is.

I just finished reading Shooting an Elephant-- probably one of Orwell's more interesting essays. I find it interesting because, out of all the essays I have read so far in "George Orwell: A Collection of Essays" (A Harvest Book, 1981), it is the only essay that is written most like a short story. Of course there is Such, Such Were the Joys, but, while that is written in narrative fashion, it is not about a single incident, like Shooting an Elephant is. This is probably why Shooting An Elephant appeals to me, because I desperately want to be able to write good short fiction.

On another level, and probably a more significant one, Shooting an Elephant is about empire--empire from the "oppressor's" standpoint. (I place oppressor under quotes because Orwell mentions in the essay that, "[t]heoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British." So Orwell, being British, is at once an oppressor and is against the oppressors. This brings up another point that I will discuss a bit later.) Empire and imperialism are relevant for our situation, for (if you are unaware) there is a situation in the East where the West must struggle to maintain control. And, being a part of the "West" entails that we, like Orwell, are the oppressors. So it is beneficial in a way to get the opinion of a man struggling with being a part of the empire, and hating the empire at the same time.

The only way to elaborate on this is to describe--albeit quickly--what happens in Orwell's essay. The young Orwell gets a call from across town reporting that an Elephant has ravaged a bazaar. By the time Orwell gets to that part of town, the elephant is gone and no one can really tell him what happened. Orwell then finds a dead coolie in the mud, orders a rifle from an ordlerly, and heads off to where some Burmese had told him the elephant went. As he heads towards the elephant, a crowd of Burmese follow him; the crowd gets bigger and bigger as he approaches the spot where the elephant is. When Orwell sees the elephant, he does not want to shoot it, but ends up shooting the elephant because the crowd that had followed him expected to see a shooting. The only problem is, the elephant does not die after five shots, and Orwell ends up leaving the scene because he could not take it (he hears later that it took the elephant a half an hour to die). Orwell admits that he killed the elephant only because he wanted to "avoid looking a fool."

If one takes this essay as a parable for empire, one can see the struggle that the oppressor must undergo. Orwell had to shoot the elephant-- he even admits it in the essay: "And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly." Shooting the elephant has been expected of Orwell, and being in power, he had to cave to the will of the Burmese. One can transfer this to the situation in Iraq. Once the US has established some sort of presence, and is seen as protector and enforcer, it must respond to the will of the oppressed. It has to, simply to "avoid looking a fool." Once we realize this, it is easy to draw a similar conclusion to Orwell's: "I perceived that in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys." Thus, in "liberating" the Iraqis, we are giving up our own freedom.

It is also interesting to note that Orwell does not succeed in killing the elephant, despite repeated attempts. He shoots the elephant a total of five times, and it still does not die. Orwell does not even see the elephant die: he has to walk off, and only hears later that it died. In effect, this fact makes the oppressor ineffectual, even at solving a relatively simple problem. An easy thing (like an election) can become extremely difficult and unresolvable to those in charge.

The last point I wanted to make in regards to Shooting an Elephant, is the inherent contradictions that are common in Orwellian essays. Anyone familiar with 1984 knows the concept of "doublethink," where a person holds two contradictory views at the same time. This is obviously a major theme in Orwell's essays, for, in nearly every essay I have read from him so far, Orwell has some contradictory element that he discusses. In Orwell's essay on Rudyard Kipling, Orwell calls Kipling " a good bad poet." In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell's attitude towards Bingo is somewhat contradictory: he at once hates her and wants to impress her. This hating-yet-trying-to-impress contradiction is also in Shooting an Elephant. As I have quoted earlier, Orwell is for the Burmese and against the British, which means he is essentially against himself. He, however, is also against the Burmese, sort of: "All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible." Orwell continues, "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 into a Buddhist priest's guts." This contradiction is probably the most captivating thing about Orwell. How could it be that Orwell was against the British and against the Burmese? Orwell fortunately provides the answer: "Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty." So imperialism is more detrimental than it seems: it causes man to hold contradictory beliefs, as well as takes away his own freedom.

So there it was. There's much more that can be said of Shooting an Elephant, as well as the other essays from Orwell, but I do not have time. Plus, I think I wrote enough as it is. It is also kind of Derridian of me to write an essay on an essay. It's like trying to justify the unjustifiable. Anyway, have a nice weekend all.