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Reflections on A Hanging.

I wish to share with you an essay by George Orwell, “A Hanging.” It’s less than 2000 words long, and yet, when I first read it, the effect on me was quite startling, and the feeling has stayed despite having read this essay many times over the years.

Orwell was a man tortured by his upbringing, a rebel in many ways against authority; he fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became disillusioned with humanity in the relentless pursuit of war and inhumanity against each other.

His one constant in all this mayhem is that he was always against the Totalitarian State, for the worker in its various guises, and inheritably believed with a passion that the basic human psyche was good, but could never quite, despite his inherent genius,  believe he was quite good enough as a writer.

When a Police Officer in Burma in the “sodden morning of the rains. We were waiting outside the condemned cells…” You are taken straight into the prison; the scene is set for a hanging. Already, in this first paragraph you can feel death’s icy grip.
“Six tall Indian wardens were guarding him…” the condemned.
Two held guns with bayonets fixed. You feel his plight is hopeless, as they “close about him.”

The impatient Superintendent, wished to get it over with so he can have his breakfast. To him, it is just another day at the office, hang a few and then breakfast, an ordinary day. Quicker the better, no compassion, remorse, nothing, only impatience, hurry up, we can’t delay breakfast is his dominating thought.

A dog appears in the yard, happy, wagging its tail, jumps and tried to lick the prisoner’s face. And the Superintendent, well, he’s annoyed. This dog – how dare it delay his breakfast!

Suddenly, the realisation with Orwell sets in: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” A picture of the gallows floods into your mind, erected in a small yard overgrown with weeds.

The prisoner was “half pushed… clumsily up the ladder.” A rope was placed around his neck. The prisoner cried out. “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!” Not urgent and fearful, but prosaic, almost like the tolling of a sad bell.”

The dog replied. Barked.

Minutes passed.

Blank faces. A clanging noise.

“Chalo!” shouted the Superintendent.

Silence.

Prisoner gone.

Rope twisting.

Orwell shows it to you, the image is there, he indelibly prints the picture into your mind’s eyes as if you are standing there watching the man hang, a participant; a part of the action.

The dog was let loose: “it galloped… to the back of the gallows… stopped… barked, and then retreated into a corner… looking timorously out at us.”

The Superintendent poked the body with a stick. “He’s all right… Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning…”

An enormous relief sweeps over everyone, the cloud lifts, the day is yet to come. A hanging is all in a day’s work – nothing special, it happens all the time.

“One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.”

Now it was time to eat.

The comment: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man) when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir?”
Fright, cigarettes, a silver case: What is happening here? How the extraordinary is made to feel ordinary. “Several people laughed… I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing.”

How forced death can be so trivialised, see it enough in its raw state, and yes, I suppose, it does become ordinary. I think the German concentration camps proved that. You become anaesthetised, and it ceases even to seem wrong. Indeed, it even grows into a kind of rightness. Somehow, you seem to wriggle out of its reality.

And then what did they do? “We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

Read the Essay:

http://www.george-orwell.org/A_Hanging/0.html

Let me know what you think, leave a message on my blogsite http://roytomkinson.blogspot.com, or tweet me on Twitter, <@RoyTomkinson> alternatively, contact my publisher and they will pass it the message on to me.

Have a Peek at my novel “The Tour”

www.strategicbookpublishing.com/TheTour.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books

Novels published to date

Of Boys, Men and Mountains: ISBN: 0862438683

Anger Child ISBN: 978095597360-4

The Tour: ISBN: 978-1-60693-682-5