Shooting an Elephant to save face

Getting at the truth, as Orwell put it, is one motivation for writing. This permeates Orwell's writing, his novels, his journalism, and his essays. One essay that most of us remember reading in school is his essay entitled "Shooting an Elephant". It is about the time that Orwell spent in colonial Burma working as a colonial policeman. He points out in this essay the "futility of the white man's dominion in the East." It was a hollow dominion for in order to keep the respect of those over whom Britain held dominion the British had to do what the population expected. In the case of this essay it was that Orwell had to shoot an elephant that he personally did not want to kill. However, as Orwell put it: "He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it." The crowd behind Orwell the policeman expected him to shoot the elephant, but he preferred not to, even though he was legally entitled to shoot it because it had killed a man. The truth that emerges and that Orwell has the courage to share is that he in fact did it because he was a coward; a coward to face the crowd, a coward of being - not hurt by them, but of being laughed at. This is what Orwell writes at the end of the essay:

"The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."

Homage to George Orwell

Big Frank with this post begins a series of posts in honor of and in reference to the great twentieth century writer, George Orwell. Most people are at least familiar with his two best known novels, Animal Farm and 1984. He wrote lots else: essays, literary criticism, poetry, and journalism. However, what most impresses Big Frank is the unbelievably clarity of his prose. This man could put sentences together with such finesse that just reading them is a kind of mental therapy. That is exactly what Big Frank is going to do with these next few posts on Orwell; he is going to display the brillance not only of what Orwell said, but the beauty in how he said it.

Let's begin with why it is that Orwell wrote. He put the reasons down in an essay entitle "Why I Write". I gives four main reasons - listed below in an excerpt from the essay: to be noticed, to percieve beauty, to get to the truth of the matter, and to put the world right in some way.

Big Frank's favorite line below is this: "The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class."

An essay could be written on this line alone: what does it really mean to "live their own lives to the end"?

OK - here's Orwell's four great motives for writing:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

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For the complete essay go here.
George Orwell: ‘Why I Write’
First published: Gangrel. — GB, London. — summer 1946.