Theatre of the (Colonial) Absurd: The Performance Of: Shooting An Elephant

Orwell's colonial tale emphasizes the theatrical aspects of European subjectivity vis-à-vis the colonized, internally and externally. The modernist focus on the alienation of the self within the colonial subject gets inflected through the consciousness of the narrator who "was hated by large numbers of people” (280) in Burma. The narrator's psyche gets interestingly caught in a split between sympathy for the colonized and rage against their acts of retaliation against the colonial system. It is a curious tangle, however, that is locked in a circle and self-perpetuates: the motivating factor for sympathy is precisely the dehumanizing colonial regime that fuels such acts of counter-aggression in the first place. Both positions obviate any genuine relation to the colonized independent of what Chatterjee calls “colonial difference”: the narrator's compassion remains faceless and abstract, without transcending the ideological paradigms of imperialism that also inscribes the native person as a “damn Coringhee coolie” (287) whose life is worth less than that of a piece of machinery.

Colonial difference is theatricalized externally in Orwell's story as the white man, through his superior technological arsenal, brings control and order through a show of force. This staging however, proves to be disempowering. Orwell shows how the European and the native relate to each other through images and constructions of the other that are completely inauthentic; therein lies the dilemma. The white man must constantly perform his role: what actually distinguishes his subjectivity belongs not to him, but is negotiated through a process of mediation with the colonized. The narrative distance gained in Orwell's tale betokens this fracturing of consciousness that is necessary for the colonial enterprise. The interplay of modernism and colonialism manifests in the alienated subject's psyche as a performance of dissonance, which he then carries into the sphere of physical action.