Algunos pasajes del ensayo de George Orwell donde
aclara porque escribe, qué sentía de niño que le provocó el escribir y el
trabajo de reconciliar su vida interior con la realidad de su época. Al final,
para saber un poquito más, algo sobre Indian
Imperial Police. Señoras y señores Why
I Write, de George Orwell, …
Putting aside
the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at
any rate for writing prose:
(i) Sheer
egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after
death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,
etc., etc.
(ii) Aesthetic
enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand,
in words and their right arrangement.
(iii) Historical
impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store
them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political
purpose.–Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to
push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind
of society that they should strive after…
In a peaceful
age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have
remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced
into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable
profession (the Indian Imperial Police,
in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This
increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully
aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me
some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not
enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the
Spanish Civil War, etc…
The Spanish war
and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I
stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been
written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic
socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our
own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of
them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes
and what approach one follows….
What I have most
wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an
art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of
injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going
to produce a work of art'. I write it because there is some lie that I want to
expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is
to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long
magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience…
The job is to
reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public,
non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy.
It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way
the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of
difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, HOMAGE TO
CATALONIA, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written
with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to
tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other
things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like,
defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco…
ANIMAL FARM was
the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing,
to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not
written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon…
All writers are
vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a
mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of
some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand… (Paragraphs
from Why I Write, by George Orwell)
 |
| Kitchener, 1915 |
Para
saber
Indian
Imperial Police era parte del sistema de administración
policial en la India Británica, establecida en 1861. Sus miembros regían más de
300 millones de personas en India, Pakistán, Bangladesh y Birmania (entonces
bajo el dominio del Rajá Británico).
George Orwell
sirvió en esta organización en Birmania, llegando al rango de Assistant
District Superintendent, primero en Insein y después en Moulmein. Orwell escribió
que cómo estando en contacto “con el trabajo sucio del imperio” había afectado
sus puntos de vista personal y político. Algunos de los trabajos que refieren a
sus experiencias personales incluyen "A Hanging" (1931), que tiene
lugar en la notoria prisión Insein, su novela Burmese Days
(1934) y "Shooting
an Elephant" (1936),
Artículos
relacionados
George
Orwell, algo de su vida.
Nineteen Eighty-four,
resumen de la clásica historia de George Orwell.
Por
qué escribo, algunos párrafos en castellano del ensayo Why I Write.
De la web
George Orwell and Journalism,
Christopher Hitchens speaks about George Orwell, his works and political
opinions, and his poverty. Really interesting! Five minutes of video from
Youtube.
