Jackals and Arabs by Franz Kafka

https://www.kafka-online.info/jackals-and-arabs-page3.html

>>25418825
How are you on /lit/ without knowing the difference b/w a short story and an essay?

>>25418833
It was veiled to me in a dream

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In The Dehumanization of Art, Ortega y Gasset argues that art movements like Cubism, Futurism or Constructivism dehumanise art because they give little thought to, or even eliminate, the content and only retain the style (which he calls form). Note that when he says dehumanise, he means detached from human experience. I believe more people should read this, not to understand abstract art styles, but rather, to understand why style and substance is important and why one should be look beyond a work's content.
On a related note, I think it's funny that corporate styles like reddit or wokeslop are all content minimal style, yet they manage to be dehumanized, i.e. what people mean when they call something soulless. This comes from a mixture of Debord's ideas of spectacle: once a corporation takes a style, it sanitises and sterilises it, thus detaches it from any human experience no matter how humanitarian the content is.
The essay it's in the public domain, but the translation isn't.

>>25419050
I own it. Whats some other good philosophical essays? List five

>>25419058
On what branches? Aesthetics, history, nature?

>>25418769
davenport's essay on whitman

Bataille's The Psychological Structure of Fascism.

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/cd.aspx

>>25418769
I honestly hated this essay. It has such a self-pitying mentality. When Blair complains that he was forced to shoot the elephant by the expectations put upon him by his position as a colonial official, what he's really doing is denying responsibility for the actions he took to support British imperialism. When he whines about how the expectations of the Burmese force him to be heavy-handed it felt to me almost as if he were saying "look at what YOU made me do," as if he were arguing that the Burmese themselves were responsible for all the abuses of their colonial rulers. Blair could have simply not shot the elephant with few to no consequences besides maybe being laughed at by a few people in the crowd, but he decides to assign blame for his own choice to the Burmans.
Blair even complains that the people his empire is oppressing are instead the ones wronging him! When he saw the people his own government has imprisoned and beaten, he complained that they "oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt". THEY oppressed HIM? I think it's a very revealing sentence. This nominal anti-imperialist doesn't care at all about "anti-imperialism" or see the Burmese as victims. He knows, on some level, that he shouldn't be throwing these people in jail and beating them, but instead of taking any action against imperialism he just tells himself that he's the real victim here and that he's actually supporting the people he oppresses. "I'm on your side, I swear! Yes, I imprison you and beat you and rule over you, and I will fantasize about murdering you if you so much as glare at me because of this, but ignore all that; I'm against imperialism! I support my victims!" He barely even sees their lives as worth anything. When the Indian man is crushed to death by the elephant, he doesn't seem to care one bit, or show the slightest emotion in reaction, and he doesn't think at all of the dead man when he shoots the elephant. A corpse with the wrong color of skin might as well be part of the scenery for all he cares. Considering all this, it should hardly be a surprise that Mr. Blair, nominal socialist, spent his whole career attacking other socialists, just as his sole anti-imperialist activities consisted of complaining about how rather than the people experiencing poverty, misery, and oppression under the government he worked for, he was the true victim of imperialism. I suppose that this isn't the best structured critique, but I remember first reading that essay a few years ago and it made me very irritated.

>>25419537
a little brevity, please, mandeep

>>25419540
>is that...a multi-sentence paragraph?!? how DARE you!

>>25419537
I agree with your points. Most likely it was his way of coping after getting old and realizing what he had done - ironic coming from the author or 1984.

As for the topic of the thread: DFW wrote great, great essays. My favourite ones are the cruise one and the review of the tennis biography. He wrote better essays than fiction imo.

>>25419537
He was merely highlighting the cruel irony of being in a position of authority and still being a puppet of the natives. By taking up the task of fulfilling the white man's burden, he had lost his free will. And why are you calling him Blair?

>>25419537
The entire point was to make the mighty white colonial administration look pathetic and silly, just as easily cowed by the social expectations of his supposed subjects as they are by his arms.

Orwell basically had a complete moral collapse after his experience in British India. It's not something modern people with their infantile narcissism can understand.

>>25420057
>Why call him Blair
It's a standard tactic leftists use when talking about people they hate. Instead of using the popular pen name that the author has, they resort to their real name, as a way to signal their disdain towards him to their fellows, and on some subconscious level to also try to minimise the authors significance and status. First time I saw this phenomenon was with Harry Potter's author, when groups kept referring to her as Joanne instead of the popular usage that everyone else calls her by, J.K Rowling.

>>25418769
>He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
Very good essay anon, thank you for posting it

>>25420560
Orwell should unironically be known more for his non fiction way more than his fiction
1984 said nothing new We didn't already
Animal Farm was an allegory, and allegories fucking suck

Mark Twain - What is man?

>>25420167
I think you mean British Burma. He was just born in British India, he never lived there.

>>25419050
How long is it? Just post it on catbox since I can't find it; nigga is dead anyway.

>>25421033
just z-lib it nigga
https://z-lib.gd/book/wrmZkB1aXv/the-dehumanization-of-art-and-other-essays-on-art-culture-and-literature.html

>>25421042
Noted and appreciated.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/

A critical look at the beat ideology as portrayed in On the Road. Sample:

"Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends are brought to the brinks of a lot of things, actually. Aside from stealing things and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t, being brought to the brink of things is one of their main pastimes. Enlightenment, revelation, truth, the real meaning of America, the ultimate, the sacred – if it has a brink, they will come to it. Crucially, they never cross that brink or gain any lasting knowledge or satisfaction from the experience. Theirs is a religion whose object of worship is the burst of intense emotion, the sudden drenching of their brain in happy chemicals that come and go without any lasting effect except pages full of the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”."
https://extelligence.substack.com/p/to-move-righteously-and-without-hate

A man describes a far worse childhood than yours, the events that led up to his near murder of his stepfather, and the steps he ultimately took to let go of his hate. Sample:

"He’s surprised to find that he does love the baby. He didn’t think he could love anything. Hadn’t even thought love described anything real, but it’s there inside him and undeniable. A little firefly dancing in the dark.

I love you. Yes. I do. It’s okay. Lay down on my chest. See? That’s good. I’m sorry I don’t know how to swaddle you better. I’ll have grandma show me again. It’s okay. I’m sorry, she’ll be back soon. No one forgot about you.

Some nights the baby needs to hear this for hours and hours.

Some nights are ten years long."


https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-a-supposedly-fun-thing

A review/analysis of DFW's essay "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again", about a cruise ship holiday. A good companion piece to the original. Sample:

"The careful reader of this essay will notice that Tibor is just about the only non-pathetic passenger or employee aboard, the only one you don’t end up feeling sorry for. DFW’s tendency to portray all of humanity as kind of dithering, lost, and sad is so pronounced he even exaggerates the tendency into a verbal tick, wherein just about everyone is christened ‘Poor old X’ as convenient short hand for ‘here we have yet another example of endlessly fallible, petty, decaying human stock’ or else ‘Good Old X’ for ‘here we have same but of a kind with familiar and admirable qualities’."

>>25421042
>spoonfeeding
nice fucking job, retard

>>25419537
You're an idiot who personally identifies with the Burmese and refuses to recognise the points Orwell is making out of some stubborn preconception of righteousness. You can't understand Shooting an Elephant without looking at it from Orwell's (the English) point of view.

Orwell is saying that colonialism is bad for all participants because the social dynamics it sets up between colonial administrator and colonised subject are dehumanising in both directions. Present-day Orwell writing the essay never blames the natives for deriding him and actually portrays them fairly sympathetically as merely reacting to being colonised. He only points out the fact that this inspired violent fantasies in past-Orwell to show how the colonial power dynamic inescapably set them up to be enemies who hold each other in contempt. The same goes for how present-Orwell writes past-Orwell's disregard for the killed man: past-Orwell can't care about the man because his role forces him not to care in order to a) focus on enforcing order, and b) keep up the mask of authority. Past-Orwell needs to deny his own humanity because showing empathy, or weakness, as the English are concerned the Burmese might see it, would cause the whole colonial enterprise to fall apart. Nowhere is he claiming that the English are right or morally justified, only that they are doing what they must to perpetuate an oppressive government. The broader point he makes throughout the essay is that the English are actually morally harming themselves as well as the Burmese, because they've created a system where they're expected to live up to the role of cruel masters by the subjects they rule over, and it's ironically desperation and fear of the natives that motivates the English rather than pure arrogance.
>the wrong color of skin might as well be part of the scenery for all he cares
He makes this exact analogy in "Marrakech" to illustrate how everything about a colonised land is invisible to colonisers except the natives who live there. How is this possibly not anti-imperialist? I'm not even a socialist and I think Orwell can be naively bleeding-heart pretty often, but he is unequivocably genuine.
>Mr. Blair, nominal socialist, spent his whole career attacking other socialists
Oh, I see. You're a tankie or a third-worldist who can't stand when your hypocrisy is called out.

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G.K. Chesterton - "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family"

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.xiv.html

>>25422268
Regarding the beats, this is evidently true about Kerouac but its something that is referenced in his work itself and something he struggles with. Regarding his friends i disagree. Don't see how any of that would apply to a Gary Snyder, as an easy example.

>>25423898
Yes, I know that was his point. It comes across as self-victimizing and whiny. Complaining about how colonization is morally harming the poor British officials is frustrating not only because of this and his disregard for the primary victims of imperialism but also because he makes it clear that he had basically no genuine feeling behind his nominal anti-imperialist positions until he realized that it was harming him personally. This is a man who, despite already knowing that imperialism was wrong, decided to go become one of its enforcers. Blair could watch Burmese prisoners being beaten and locked up in abysmal conditions and still look at imperialism as nothing more than a theoretical issue. The issue I have is not that he points out that the British are expected to fulfill a certain role, it is that he appears completely incapable of fully comprehending that imperialism is wrong until he is affected personally by being "morally harmed," and even then he denies all responsibility for his actions by pinning it on the Burmese. Imagine someone testifying in court, saying that he was forced to do what he did because he was afraid that others would laugh at him and he would look weak. I don't think Blair is absolved of his past simply because he felt pressured into it or because he felt sad about it afterwards.
It's the same today, everyone involved always has to complain about how hard on them it was to go kill for imperialism. It's always "think of how hard it was for our soldiers," not "think of all the innocent people our soldiers killed," because to westerners even the slightest harm to a westerner is a thousand times more important than the death of some brown person a thousand miles away. I feel like the same mentality can be found in both the essay, where the most important thing is how the oppressor feels. It reminds me of how Israelis make those "shoot-and-cry" films, where they go off an kill some poor Palestinian kid and then go make a movie about how it made them feel very sad to do that and all the other soldiers peer-pressured them into war crimes and so on.

>>25424756
>he makes it clear that he had basically no genuine feeling behind his nominal anti-imperialist positions until he realized that it was harming him personally
This is absolutely not what he's saying, but you seem incapable of engaging with the narrative without designating an oppressor and a victim. Don't you understand that Orwell is writing the essay retrospectively about a time before he had securely formed his beliefs regarding imperialism, and that even at that past time he experienced tension between feeling sympathetic to the Burmese and reluctant contempt for them that was fostered by his position? He's not saying one side is the true "victim" and the other is evil, and he's certainly not trying to absolve the English of their complicity in imperialism.
>even then he denies all responsibility for his actions by pinning it on the Burmese
Did we read the same essay? He's saying that it's the English who have constructed a certain socioeconomic structure that forces them to rule cruelly because their rule is illegitimate and founded on displays of force, and that showing the slightest weakness to the Burmese would shatter the illusion of strength the English rely upon to remain colonial masters. This is obviously primarily harmful to the Burmese, who are abused and killed, but the point is that the average English colonial police officer is incentivised to act cruelly by existing power structures.
>saying that he was forced to do what he did because he was afraid that others would laugh at him and he would look weak
Orwell deliberately evokes this sentiment to underline how farcical English rule of Burma is.
>Complaining about how colonization is morally harming the poor British officials
>everyone involved always has to complain about how hard on them it was to go kill for imperialism
He is writing for an English audience to dissuade them from colonialism, so of course he is going to focus on colonialism's effects on the English. It's very basic rhetoric and not at all an assertion that the Burmese are relatively unharmed.
>to westerners even the slightest harm to a westerner is a thousand times more important than the death of some brown person a thousand miles away
To the Burmese in the village, the death of the man killed by the elephant is a thousand times more important than the death of some Englishman a thousand miles away. I know that as a non-westerner, you are emotionally invested in the Burmese cause, but Orwell focuses on the English because he's trying to make the point to the English that colonialism is bad for them, too, and that they should stop perpetuating it. You should read
https://orwell.ru/library/articles/niggers/english/e_ncn
and
https://orwell.ru/library/articles/marrakech/english/e_mar
because Orwell is absolutely on your side and makes that more explicit in other essays.

>>25424992
>you seem incapable of engaging with the narrative without designating an oppressor and a victim
It's absurd that you think I should read this essay without recognizing the objective fact that the Burmese were being oppressed by the British
>Orwell is writing the essay retrospectively about a time before he had securely formed his beliefs
That he already knew imperialism was wrong but never developed that into any sort of material action during the years he had watched the Burmese suffer under imperialist rule is no point in his favor.
>he's certainly not trying to absolve the English of their complicity in imperialism
To me it did. He presents it like the Burmese were pressuring him into doing all the things he did. So what if not shooting the elephant would have made the colonial regime look bad? Didn't he oppose it? When he shot the elephant it showed that he cared more about the preserving colonial rule than about doing the morally correct thing.
>Orwell deliberately evokes this sentiment to underline how farcical English rule of Burma is.
I invoked it to emphasize the absurdity of Blair's excuses. No one would forgive the criminal, and neither should Blair be forgiven for his complicity in the colonial system. Blair was a perpetrator of colonial oppression and an accomplice in countless murders by colonial authorities. Every word of his should be considered with that in mind.
>He is writing for an English audience to dissuade them from colonialism, so of course he is going to focus on colonialism's effects on the English
Westerners need it hammered into their heads that the thing that is wrong with imperialism is the oppression of people in the periphery, not whatever harm comes to their soldiers. Otherwise, the only message they get is "next time we do this we need to make sure our soldiers aren't harmed," not "next time we need to avoid harming other people." If you have to teach a boy not to beat up other kids, you don't do it with warnings that it will make his fists hurt. Otherwise we get what we have now, where veterans who volunteered to go slaughter innocents whine about how it gave them PTSD and made them sad without the slightest shame or remorse or repercussions.
>To the Burmese in the village, the death of the man killed by the elephant is a thousand times more important than the death of some Englishman
To the Burmese in the village, perhaps, but to all the west the slightest scratch on some westerner is more important than the lives of a thousand non-whites, and they show it by their actions.
Re: the linked essays: Blair has a bad habit of projecting his flaws onto others. He complains that the British left is pro-imperialism after spending years as a colonial official. He accuses other socialists of detachment from the working class, as if he wasn't from an affluent, well-connected background and wasn't repulsed by working-class people. This is not to defend the rest of the largely worthless British left.

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