Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent
the scenery of his own mind: he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves.
If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as genuinely nonpolitical literature, and least of all in an age like our
own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness.
Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly
to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possible find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt
or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable.
They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand they are always liable to be altered at a moment's notice.
Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or 'fellow-traveller'
has had to adopt towards the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September 1939 he was expected to be in a continuous stew about 'the horrors of Nazism' and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word 'Nazi', at least so far as
print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning
of 22 June 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now,
it is easy for a politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In
either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him but the very words he uses will seem to
stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language
one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an
'age of faith', when the prevailing orthodoxy has been long established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there
was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing: and the intellectual leaders
of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barely altered during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or
intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts, or the emotional sincerity, that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops. This was well illustrated
by the Spanish Civil War. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about
which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable
lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than for a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other 'practical'
men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying - that is, what his poem 'means' if translated into prose - is relatively unimportant even to himself. The thought contained in a
poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of a picture.
A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brush-marks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily an individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or,
on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed, but at any rate they
are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions
of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably
accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse - and perhaps
good verse of its kind, though it would not be the highest kind - might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime.
Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished, there would still be need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery: and these are the kinds of poem that can
be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since
the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian
societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to
all fo
Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the
Revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to
take seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary
intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive, in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence and death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer,
the historian, the novelist, the critic and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems
much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance actually comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but
apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend
on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or
perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces
human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with
the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machinelike is the production of short stories, serials and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct your plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters
and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary.
Imagination - even consciousness, so far as possible - would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish;
but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the State. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile totalitarianism has not fully triumphed everywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to
whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour
of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to
acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one
sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their
cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the USSR. They appear to
think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected.
The USSR is a large, rapidly developing country which has acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them
generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to
the writer as such - his freedom of expression - is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: 'Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer.' They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated, and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler.
At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of
the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality
cannot be altogether ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blue-print of
an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later,
when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his
job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not regard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting, and architecture, it is - as I have tried to show - certa
no way out of this. No tirades against 'individualism' and 'the ivory tower', no pious platitudes to the effect that 'true
individuality is only attained through identification with the community', can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified.
At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it now is, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will
not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact - and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial - is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
1946
Books v. Cigarettes
A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was fire-watching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was: 'You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book.' These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool.
This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person is so widespread that it deserves some detailed examination. Exactly what reading costs, reckoned in terms of pence per hour, is difficult to estimate, but I have made a start by inventorying my own books and adding up their total price. After allowing for various other expenses, I can make a fairly good guess at my expenditure over the last fifteen years.