Outside the Whale

The title of this essay derives, obviously, from that of an earlier piece (1940) by the year's other literary phenomenon, Mr Orwell. And as I'm going to dispute its assertions about the relationship between politics and literature, I must of necessity begin by offering a summary of that essay, 'Inside the Whale'.

It opens with a largely admiring analysis of the writing of Henry Miller:

On the face of it, no material could be less promising. When Tropic of Cancer was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler's concentration camps were already bulging... It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the day is generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere account of the subject matter of Tropic of Cancer, most people would probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was...a very remarkable book. How or why remarkable?

His attempt to answer that question takes Orwell down more and more tortuous roads. He ascribes to Miller the gift of opening up a new world 'not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.' He praises him for using English 'as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetic word. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it.' And most crucially he likens Miller to Whitman, 'for what he is saying, after all, is "I accept".'

Around here things begin to get a little bizarre. Orwell quite fairly points out that to say 'I accept' to life in the thirties 'is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders.' (No, I don't know what a Bedaux belt is, either.) But in the very next paragraph he tells us that 'precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience, Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive.' Characterizing the ordinary man as a victim, he then claims that only the Miller type of victim-books, 'non-political...non-ethical...non-literary...non-contemporary,' can speak with the people's voice. So to accept concentration camps and Bedaux belts turns out to be pretty worthwhile, after all.

There follows an attack on literary fashion. Orwell, a thirty-seven-year-old patriarch, tells us that 'when one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.' At first he picks easy targets – A. E. Housman's 'roselipt maidens' and Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester' ('a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names'). But then the polemic is widened to include 'the movement', the politically committed generation of Auden and Spender and MacNeice. 'On the whole,' Orwell says, 'the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.' It is true he scores some points, as when he indicates the bourgeois, boarding-school origins of just about all these literary radicals, or when he connects the popularity of Communism among British intellectuals to the general middle-class disillusion with all traditional values: 'Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline – anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes.' In this vacuum of ideology, he suggests, there was still 'the need for something to believe in,' and Stalinist Communism 'filled the void.'

But he distorts, too. For instance, he flays Auden for one line in the poem 'Spain', the one about 'the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.... It could only be written,' Orwell writes, 'by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally, I would not speak so lightly of murder.'

Orwell's accusation is that the line reveals Auden's casualness – a politically motivated casualness – towards human life. Actually, it does nothing of the sort. The deaths referred to are those of people in war. The dying of soldiers is all too often spoken of in euphemisms: 'sacrifice', 'martyrdom', 'fall', and so forth. Auden has the courage to say that these killings are murders; and that if you are a combatant in a war, you accept the necessity of murders in the service of your cause. His willingness to grasp this nettle is not inhuman, but humanizing. Orwell, trying to prove the theory that political commitment distorts an artist's vision, has lost his own habitual clear-sightedness instead.¹ 

Returning to Henry Miller, Orwell takes up and extends Miller's comparison of Anaïs Nin to Jonah in the whale's belly. 'The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult...a storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo.... Miller himself is inside the whale...a willing Jonah.... He feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism.'

And at the end of this curious essay, Orwell – who began by describing writers who ignored contemporary reality as 'usually footlers or plain idiots' – embraces and espouses this quietist philosophy, this cetacean version of Pangloss's exhortation to cultiver notre jardin. 'Progress and reaction,' Orwell concludes, 'have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism – robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale – or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process...simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt.'

The sensitive novelist's reasons are to be found in the essay's last sentence, in which Orwell speaks of 'the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.'

And we are told that fatalism is a quality of Indian thought.