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103 orwell’S “a hanging” Politics and the First-Person Singular/Plural his is an exhortation of sorts—to note the point of view in a personal essay. Such commonsense advice as to need no urging, were it not for the fact that the firstperson singular is so conventional an aspect of the personal essay that it’s taken for granted as the default point of view, and deviations from it are virtually ignored, as I discovered from the shock of realizing what I (and others) had missed by ignoring the split point of view in Orwell’s “A Hanging.” An essay as relevant for our own time as for Orwell’s, given its haunting depiction of life and death in a far-flung colonial prison. My story begins in a college English course some sixty years ago, when I first read “A Hanging”—so brief an essay and so transparent , it seemed, as to raise no problems of interpretation. How could there be any question of its central theme, its opposition to capital punishment, given the painfully detailed hanging it depicts and Orwell’s memorable insight on the way to the gallows? It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. Reading that passage back then, I had no doubt of its import and neither did my instructor. Nor, in fact, have I ever had any question about its significance—“the unspeakable wrongness” speaks for itself. Speaks so clearly and forcefully that commentaries on the essay have invariably referred to that sentence as the essay’s thematic statement. Indeed, twenty years after my first encounter with “A Hanging,” Robert Scholes and I cited it in Elements of the Essay as “the persuasive point of the essay.” Though we were concerned in that book with literary rather than expository forms of the essay, we were still influenced by the long-standing practice of sonal essay that it’s taken for granted as the default point of view, T Personae and Culture 104 interpreting an essay in terms of its author’s thesis-​ like statements. And Orwell’s essay looked like a perfect example, given its emblematic story and explicit thesis. Yet we paid hardly any attention to the narrator and his point of view, so compelled were we back then by Orwell’s vividly detailed scenes and incidents—by the jail yard cells “like small animal cages,” by the lashing of the prisoner’s arms “tight to his sides,” by the processional march to the gallows, by the prisoner’s reiterated “crying out to his God,” and the final image of the prisoner, “dangling with his toes pointed straight downward, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.” Given such disturbing images, it seemed perfectly reasonable to regard them as documentary evidence reflecting the evil of capital punishment and thus to regard the essay as being devoted to that theme.To think otherwise would have required an almost perverse refusal to recognize the obvious. Yet just a few years later, when I was teaching a graduate course on Orwell and a handful of other essayists, I was surprised and unsettled by aspects of “A Hanging” that I hadn’t taken full stock of before—aspects that led me to perceive “the unspeakable wrongness” as just one part of the entire story and by no means the most important part. A counterintuitive reading, particularly given Orwell’s well-​ known commitment to putting things as clearly and straightforwardly as possible. My uneasiness was first aroused when I noticed that “A Hanging ” involves a split point of view—first-​ person plural in most of the essay, except for the moment of insight and a few other spots in first-​ person singular, each no longer than a brief clause. Orwell’s extensive use of the plural first-​ person was probably occasioned in part by his fidelity to the situation, since he viewed the hanging as part of an official group of jailers, magistrates, and the like. Even so, I was puzzled by the extent to which he portrayed himself as having been allied with the official group on the way to the gallows: We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner. . . . The rest of us, magistrates and...

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