Shooting an Elephant

Shooting an Elephant
Author: George Orwell 1945-50 200 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 8 2008, Finished August 11 2008.

This book of essays is for the aficionado. The essays cover a diverse range of topics, not all of which are remotely relevant to the modern reader: a couple of reminiscences from his Burmese days, including the essential Shooting an Elephant, a denunciation of Tolstoy’s denunciation of Shakespeare, thoughts about writing and reviewing, a critique of the writings of the otherwise lost to history James Burnham and some shorter pieces apparently written for a newspaper towards the end of his life, my favorite of which was a rare upbeat piece about the wonders of spring.
As ever, even when expressing another unsubstantiated, almost crackpot denunciation of capitalism, Orwell‘s prose commands the reader‘s attention: “… the civilization of nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilization at is bets. Soon after the Civil War the inevitable deterioration started.” (200) The book’s primary interest for me was the insight Orwell’s writing about writing provided into why I am finding him so compelling:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known. (106 - from a “Revivalist hymn)

To write in plain, vigorous language, one has to think fearlessly (114)

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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 the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. (4)

They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. (6)

… suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the [now calm and harmless] 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. (8)

… I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. (25)


Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. (48)
“what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?” (72)

The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. (76)

“no modern writer of the kind I am discussing … would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.” (84)

Rules for effective prose:
“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (DG note: the quote above about the British Raj violates this rule.)
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (91-2)

One may feel … a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi … [or] feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! (103)

“Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.” (132)

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples … that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. (152)

All he knows, at least if he’s a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick or even your finger, w\he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. (162)

Echoes of patients etherized upon tables: “As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.” (163)

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, steeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. (165)

Variations of the following sentiment from the essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” have occasionally crossed my mind during the book-a-week campaign:, “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”(174)