Inside the Whale

Breaking Big Brother - Chapter 1

This is the first chapter of my book Breaking Big Brother, which will be published in installments here on Thinking Man. To read the introduction, click here.

“Every line of serious work 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.”

This quote is taken from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” and if there is any quote one can point to in order to glean a true understanding of George Orwell, this is it.

Orwell was a political writer, and if consulted on the issue, he would likely say that this was out of necessity rather than preference. He witnessed two World Wars and numerous minor ones. Communism and fascism were on the rise, and the once-dominant economic structure—laissez-faire capitalism—was dying. Times were changing, and in the face of this, Orwell surmised that there were only two options: to view the issue head-on, or to retreat into delusion.

Orwell states this opinion most clearly in his 1940 essay collection, Inside the Whale. The book came out in March of 1940, six months after the start of World War II.

There is a sentiment in Orwell’s writing that these times were unprecedented, and in many ways they were. While despotism is as old as time, totalitarianism was something new, brought about by the increased connectivity modern technology allowed.

Interestingly, though, Inside the Whale is not a political treatise—or, at least, not in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a collection of three pieces of literary criticism: “Inside the Whale,” a discussion of the author Henry Miller, “Charles Dickens” (whose title is self-explanatory), and “Boys’ Weeklies,” which analyzes a type of weekly pulp-fiction paper that was popular with boys at the time.

The essay collection can be viewed as a call to action of sorts—a plea to the masses that the political tensions of the era could not be ignored.

“Boys’ Weeklies” is the most straightforward essay of the three, attacking lowbrow works of fiction which are intentionally written as a distraction for young men, “pump[ing] into them the conviction that the major problems of [their] time do not exist,” and subtly indoctrinating them into right-wing worldview.

Orwell asserts that the political message was probably intentional, since seven of the twelve papers in question were owned by the Amalgamated Press, “one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers.”

In other words, Orwell’s suspicion was that easy-to-digest literature was distributed to the masses in different publications mostly run by one media conglomerate in order to distract them from the realities of the world, all while feeding them a political agenda. Sound familiar?

“Boys’ Weeklies” is the only one of the three essays which points to any deliberate deception. The remaining two essays in Inside the Whale examine deception of a much more subtle kind—self-deception, something which Orwell seemed very keen on preventing in his own writing.

First, let’s examine “Charles Dickens,” which tells us a lot about Orwell as a political thinker. Orwell shows a great respect for Dickens as a writer, yet he does not agree with his lack of political concern (which could be explained as a product of his time). Although he acknowledged and wrote about poverty and other social problems of the time, Dickens considered the injustices of the world to be moral issues rather than political ones.

“There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property.” - George Orwell, “Charles Dickens.”

Orwell criticized the archetype of the “good rich man” who often came about as the hero of Dickens’ stories. He asserted that human nature would never change, and that any person who would be inclined to grand acts of charity would be unlikely to become rich in the first place.

I’m not sure how Orwell reconciled this with his own socialist views—for all his talk about ‘changing the system,’ he never provided any adequate explanation for how changing the structure of society would alter human nature.

Regardless, it seems like the main reason Orwell was so politically active despite this was the overwhelming feeling that he should be doing something. Take this quote, from the collection’s eponymous essay, “Inside the Whale”:

“As a rule, writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win.”

Of all the essays in the collection, “Inside the Whale” is by far the most interesting. This time on the chopping block is the author Henry Miller, best known for his novel “Tropic of Cancer.” Again, Orwell thought he was a good writer. However, he considered him to be an exceptionally naive one (more so than Dickens, probably because he was more ‘modern’). His reason for this was that Miller refused to concern himself with politics at all.

“I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain [to fight in the Spanish Civil War]. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn't matter.” - George Orwell, “Inside the Whale.”

This was unfathomable to Orwell. How could someone see the world devolve before their very eyes and do nothing about it? Orwell compared Miller’s perspective to the biblical parable “Jonah and the Whale.” Miller, indifferent as he was to the mess of the world around him, was in the belly of the whale, a “womb big enough for an adult,” in which he could remain blissfully unaware of what was going on around him.

Orwell contrasts Henry Miller with Walt Whitman, a writer with a similar lack of concern for politics, but for reasons which were justifiable to Orwell. The reason Orwell gave was that the United States during Whitman’s time had a spirit of freedom and progress, as compared to the spirit of degeneration he witnessed in his own time.

There’s a lot to be criticized about this assertion. For one, the United States in the 1800s was not a land of magic and freedom. Walt Whitman witnessed the American Civil War. In place of poverty, the United States had slavery. The luxury Whitman enjoyed in being able to write non-political poetry was entirely due to his being born on the right side of the shackles—exactly the same type of luck that made Miller wealthy enough to roam the streets of Paris without a care in the late 1930s.

In other words, I think Orwell was kind of wrong. Not about everything—he was right that in political times such as the one he was living in, it was impossible to write anything at all without betraying some type of political bias. But I think he discounted the importance of good non-political literature, even in times of crisis.

Of course, 1940 was a particularly incendiary year, peculiar even for the highly politically-charged decade that would follow. Orwell’s position on the issue may have changed as his career progressed. He posed the question again in his 1946 essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.”

"Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so.”

Here, Orwell offers a slightly more relaxed conclusion than the one he presented in Inside the Whale in 1940. Perhaps, since the war was over and he was a bit wiser, he realized that there was no point in anything if one couldn’t enjoy life (which sometimes meant looking away from politics for a time).

“Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia?”

It’s strange—reading this quote, it seems like Orwell is trying to convince himself of this fact more than anyone else. Perhaps Orwell would’ve done well to learn how to stop and smell the roses.¹

Nevertheless, the fact that Orwell felt this way offers us great insight into why he wrote as he did, and Inside the Whale clearly delineates the monsters that Orwell was fighting—false propaganda, the death of literature, and of course, the global onset of totalitarianism.

“To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own 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. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among-others.” - George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”

We are in political times yet again. Perhaps this is why Orwell has posthumously made a name for himself as a pop culture icon. Predictably, though, many people are still living inside the proverbial ‘whale’ of Orwell’s imagination, while others, like Orwell himself, are having a difficult time ignoring it. 

---

Thank you for reading, and for bearing with me. As this is still a work in progress, this chapter may be expanded upon and changed as the project takes shape. 

We touched on Orwell’s ‘democratic socialist’ identity this week. The next chapter of this book will examine what Orwell meant by this.

As always, if you know something I don’t, or if I’ve made a mistake, please comment. I’m not a scholar or an expert—I’ve just read a lot of Orwell’s writing.

If you are enjoying this project and would like to support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Read Chapter Two:

1. This is a pun. Orwell was actually an avid gardener. There’s a book about this, titled Orwell’s Roses, that I will get around to reading one day.