My first essay on Orwell began with a contrast between Orwell and Henry Miller. I then defined Orwell as a man of letters and man of war, and showed his kinship to the themes of guilt, sense of responsibility and need for commitment of his French contemporaries in the 1930s, Malraux and Sartre.
Passing through Paris on his way to fight in Spain in 1936, Orwell stopped to meet Henry Miller, whose books he had reviewed and admired. Miller cared nothing for the Spanish War, and forcibly told Orwell, who was going to combat Fascism and defend democracy “from a sense of obligation,” that he was an idiot.1 This striking confrontation reveals the polarity of political attitudes among modern writers. If Miller, as Orwell later wrote, is undoubtedly “inside the whale”—performing “the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting”—then Orwell himself is clearly “outside the whale,” responsible, active, rejecting the horrors of the modern world and committing himself to change them.2 He is part of the collective tragedy and shares in the collective guilt, and he would agree with Dostoyevsky that “every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”3 Spain was the magnet that attracted such crusaders as Orwell, Hemingway and Malraux—intellectual men of letters who are also courageous men of war, the very incarnation of the heroes they create in their books.
Orwell is a literary nonconformist whose works defy genres, a writer who is hard to place. His satiric style has been likened to that of Swift, Butler and Shaw. He has affinities with the school of the great plain writers Defoe, Crabbe and Gissing—the writers of working-class realism, of human beings in conflict with the class structure. He has some similarities to the Auden-Spender school of the Thirties, though he was unsympathetic to them.4
But more important than any of these influences and traditions, I think, is Orwell's close kinship—in his intense feeling of guilt, responsibility and commitment—to the French novelists, particularly Malraux and Sartre, who began to write during the interwar years, the “age of guilt.” They have been perceptively analyzed by Victor Brombert, who states that those French writers “who reached the age of reason around 1930, have suffered from a near-pathological guilt complex, and are haunted by what Paul Nizan has called the ‘social original sin.’ … The further removed from the scene of human anguish, the greater the self-reproach, the more persistent the feeling of responsibility…. Their message is permanent accusation. Silence in the face of social injustice or political tyranny is for them a shameful act, a manner of collaborating with evil. To give society a ‘bad conscience’ is, according to Sartre, the writer's first duty.”5
It is not difficult to relate Orwell's ideas and ideals to those of the French writers. The evolution of his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), is an illustrative example, though many of his works attacking Fascism, Communism or capitalism would serve equally well.6 Orwell spent five years as a policeman in Burma, and he was responsible for the kicking, flogging, torturing and hanging of men. He saw the dirty work of Empire at close quarters and “the horribly ugly, degrading scenes which offend one's eyes all the time in the starved countries of the East” where an Indian coolie's leg is often thinner than an Englishman's arm.7
By the end of the five years, writes Orwell, “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear … it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny…. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.”8 Orwell managed to relieve this intense guilt in two ways. He resigned his position and to expiate his country's political sin submerged himself among the oppressed poor of Paris and London and took their side against tyrants by becoming one of the common people. For obvious reasons of caste and race this kind of masochistic submergence was impossible in Asia, but for Orwell the European working classes “were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma.”9 Orwell also relieved his guilt through creative exorcism, for he writes that “the landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of a nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them.”10 This accounts for the novel's passionate and didactic quality.
The central political principle in Burmese Days derives from Montesquieu who wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, “If a democratic republic subdues a nation in order to govern them as subjects, it exposes its own liberty.”11 The truth of this principle is illustrated by the Burmese judge U Po Kyin, who is clearly modeled on the physical characteristics of the Malay chief Doramin in Conrad's Lord Jim, for both Orientals are lavishly dressed, enormously fat, need assistance to rise from their chairs and habitually confer with their wives.12 U Po is the primum mobile of all events in the novel, an underling who has the most actual power in the English outpost of progress and through devious machinations controls even his rulers. He slanders the Deputy Commissioner Macgregor, ruins the Indian Dr. Veraswami, incites a rebellion in which two men are eventually killed and six imprisoned, and drives the hero, Flory, to suicide. A fair sample of a Burmese magistrate, U Po has advanced himself by thievery, bribery, blackmail and betrayal, and his corrupt career is a serious criticism of both the British rule that permits his success and his British superiors who so disastrously misjudge his character.
The object of U Po's intrigues and the Nirvana for which he pines is the English Club, the last fortress of white insularity. Orwell's ironic juxtaposition of “native” and English social scenes (which he observed in A Passage to India) reveals the sleazy Club just after U Po's fabulous wish. Besides Flory, the British colony consists of the bigoted and malicious Ellis, the drunken and lecherous Lackersteen, his scheming and snobbish wife, the bloodthirsty and stupid Westfield, the boring and pompous Macgregor, the innocuous and inoffensive Maxwell and, later on, the arrogant and cruel Verrall. Orwell's work is unlike Forster's novel; there are no redemptive characters in his essentially negative and pessimistic novel, only the “dull boozing witless porkers” who observe the five beatitudes of the pukka sahib and exploit the country. They strive to impose the “Pox Britannica” which, prophesies Flory, will eventually wreck “the whole Burmese national culture. We're not civilising them, we're only rubbing our dirt on to them” (37).13
These are the views that Flory presents in his everlasting argument with his friend Dr. Veraswami, a loyal British subject who always defends imperialism and who also aspires to Club membership as protective prestige against his enemies. Flory reveals his moral weakness by first refusing to support his friend's nomination and then allowing himself to be coerced into signing a statement against native members. Like Orwell, Flory hates to see the English humiliating the Asians, and is ashamed of the imperialist exploitation and class distinctions. But he recognizes that “even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism” (61).
This connection between political oppression and private guilt has been acutely described by Nietzsche, who wrote that “political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful. One must seek to make amends for political superiority. To be ashamed of one's power.”14 Flory, of course, is ashamed, but his failure to come to terms with the intolerable colonial situation is symbolized by his hideous birthmark (as much a sign of guilt, a mark of Cain, as an indication of his isolation and alienation), but also by his failure to mediate between the three worlds of Burma: the English, the “native” and the natural world of the jungle.
The second third of the novel begins with the arrival of the shallow and selfish Elizabeth Lackersteen, whom the desperate Flory sees as the only salvation from his Burmese misery. But they are unable to communicate in a meaningful way, and Flory's efforts to introduce Elizabeth to the Burmese world of dance plays and marketplaces, to make her appreciate and admire the country as he does, result only in insulting his Oriental friends and revolting Elizabeth, who prefers English society. Nevertheless, their parabolic courtship progresses in a series of physical adventures: they meet as Flory rescues Elizabeth from a water buffalo, decide to marry first after shooting a leopard and again after Flory's heroic swim to rescue the besieged Club members, when the rioting Burmese all want to “get into” the Club.
Their only communion occurs during the central hunting episode. Flory teaches Elizabeth to shoot and she kills the beautiful jade pigeons that he had previously observed while peacefully performing a Thoreau-like baptism in the lonely jungle. He had sought refuge and relief there from the anguish of penitential solitude and guilt. When the limp, warm and iridescent fowl is placed in Elizabeth's hand, her desire for Flory is awakened, and the connection between sexual passion and destructive violence (foreshadowing Flory's suicide) is subtly revealed. Soon afterwards Flory shoots a male leopard and his gift of the skin silently seals their troth. Later on, this ruined leopard skin, like Flory's disfigured skin, is both a cause and a symbol of Elizabeth's disaffection.
Flory's inability to meet responsibility under the pressure of an overwhelming guilt is revealed in his relationships with Dr. Veraswami, whom he proposes to the Club only when it is too late; with his Burmese mistress May Hla, whom he abandons and then bribes after a mutually destructive relationship, and who decays in a brothel after exposing him before Elizabeth; and finally with Elizabeth herself, whom he can neither enlighten nor engage. His suicide, an appropriate gesture of physical courage and moral weakness, is his terrible protest against these failures.
But Orwell himself continued to bear that guilt he acquired in Burma and to defy that “whale” which swallowed up so many other writers. His whole life was a struggle against barbarism and for what he called “comparative decency”: a sane, clean, friendly world, without fear and without injustice. He felt it was his duty to prepare the future; he opened himself to the suffering of others and changed the world in a small way. His one great motive for writing was a “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”15 Is this sort of intense commitment, so desperately needed, still possible today, or have our Orwells been overwhelmed and extinguished by the increasing horrors of modern life?