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Three The Ethics of Responsibility Burmese Days 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 AudenSpender school of the Thirties, though he was unsympathetic to them.4 3. the ethics of responsibility 23 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...

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