The Anti-Imperialism of George Orwell

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on George Orwell’s attempt to define the nature of a perennial political concern-the proper relationship between the rulers and the ruled-by metaphor, by telling stories. I propose to analyse some of the stories he tells, in order to decipher what I take to be his central themes, and to indicate what Orwell, through imaginative literature, has added to our understanding of the ruler-ruled relationship. But first I should put some cards on the table. Whilst each reading of a work of imaginative literature, bound as it has to be in what Eagleton calls a ‘socially structured way of perceiving the world’,1 constitutes what might be termed a deconstruction, texts can nevertheless be said to impose certain restraints on the reader; we are not free agents in this matter. I do not subscribe to the view that ‘there are no poets only poems’ (which can be interpreted as the reader pleases). This view implies trampling on ‘the claim of literary texts in general-to be taken as a social act’;2 that is to say, a communication referring to the world as we know it, with a structure and meaning designed by human intelligence and accessible to human intelligence. I would argue that: ‘In every sentence of a novel or poem, if we know how to read it, we feel the speaking voice of the writer’,3 what George Steiner referred to as the writer’s real presence. In short, the writer’s personality and experience will shape our understanding of a novel. We are not free to read, or deconstruct Orwell or anybody else as we please. Whilst there may be no absolutely right way to read him, there are very clearly wrong ways. We know enough about Orwell’s experiences in Burma and about his own attitudes towards those experiences to have a very clear idea of what he felt about his function as an imperial policeman, and why he wrote so dismissively about the imperial mission. There can be littledoubt that in his writings on Burma Orwell sought to use these experiences as a kind of metaphor for the whole imperial experience and later to construct from the same metaphor a critical model of relations in capitalist society which reflected the same ‘imperial’ nexus quite unambiguously.