I probably bungled by framing this as a response to some randos writing Youtube comments. What I really wanted to respond to was the widespread perception that Orwell abandoned socialism after Spain. This was something that I was even taught in high school, and I think it's commonly taught in American high schools. That's why I want to clear this up. The comments were just what set me off.
Addendum: The Youtube comments I complain about in this video are actually part of the same comment thread I mentioned in this post. In reply to my comment that great books are not necessarily apolitical, someone wrote:
Yes the new animated children's movie Orwell's "Animal Farm" suggests that Socialism will work just fine if we can only get the right people in office. To add insult to injury, the Angel Studios production also suggests that Capitalism is bad and perverts Orwell's intent and warning about totalitarianism.
I should have let this go, but the assertion that Orwell's message was perverted by the suggestion that capitalism is bad just was so wrong that I couldn't resist correcting it. So I wrote:
But you know George Orwell was a socialist, right?
Only until he went and fought in the Spanish Civil War and realised what a false economy (pun intended) socialism is.
That's when he wrote Animal Farm. In other words, he lived in the world, then started to critique and severely moderate his ideology in response to reality. You know, like an intelligent adult does.
Okay, well at least now we have pinpointed the exact nature of the error in need of correcting. So I attempted to do some correcting:
That's a popular misconception. I encourage you to do a bit more research on Orwell's politics. Possibly start with a collection of his essays. Maybe reread Animal Farm again. You can also google what were Orwell's politics, or read the wikipedia entry. Orwell was disillusioned in Spain not with the economics of Socialism, but with the way many socialists supported totalitarianism. He wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia, which is a book well worth reading.
But the best place to start is "Why I Write", an essay in which Orwelll discusses among other things why he wrote Animal Farm. You can find this essay online. Orwell states in the essay "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism"
Yes remember the same people who said Biden was sharp as a tack are the same ones who now try to tell us that Animal Farm has been misread and misinterpreted. They also say that political violence and assassination are better than voting. Remember, all literary criticism is equal, but some is more equal than others.
No one in this comment thread had previously mentioned Joe Biden or voting or political violence, etc. So his brain has obviously been fried by rightwing memes on social media, and whenever he gets into any sort of political debate, he can't help but just shout out the memes he's absorbed. That he should be doing this in a discussion about Orwell is an irony that is apparently beyond him. (Orwell despised the type of person who could only dialogue by repeating slogans. He complained about this frequently throughout his writing, and also lampooned this with the sheep in Animal Farm.)
I decided there was no value in continuing this discussion, but as you can see from the fact that I'm writing about it here, it did get under my skin somewhat.
(I actually finished this book a few days after starting it, but I've been waiting to post the video.)
This is a reread. I've read this book several times before, and I've mentioned this book on this blog before here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. But I've never reviewed it on this blog before, so I figured it was time to read it one more time, and give it a proper review.
in my youth, I have spent a lot of time getting into political debates about different ideologies. And over the years, I have learned a few things which, had I only known them years ago, would have saved me a lot of time. I now wish to impart my wisdom onto you in the hopes that you can also redeem some of your time which would otherwise be spent squabbling about politics. And that wisdom is:
1) Most political debates are actual semantic debates. (e.g. calling Obama's tax plan socialist or calling Trump's immigration policy fascist will quickly lead into a discussion about what "socialism" or "fascism" really means.)
2) Political labels have no agreed upon definition.
3) Therefore, most political debates are a waste of time.
Remember this the next time you are tempted to get into a political debate on Twitter or Facebook. It will save you a lot of time and energy.
I actually realized a long time ago that most political debates were actually semantic debates.
For example, I remember once, over 20 years ago, when I was at a party and I got to a long political debate with someone about whether capitalism or socialism was the worse system, and we both attempted to use China to illustrate our point. I cited China as an example of the problems with capitalism, and he cited China as an example of the problems with communism, and then we realized we were having this big long debate, and we didn't even agree on our terms.
"China has privately controlled corporations," I said. "Of course it's capitalist."
"China is ruled by a one-party system," he countered. "Of course it's communist."
That's just one example that sticks out in my mind, but I've had countless experiences like this over the years--experiences where halfway through a big long political debate, I realized my opponent and I were simply talking past each other, because we had completely different ideas of what "capitalism" and "socialism" actually meant. I'm sure you've had countless experiences like this as well.
I should have learned a lesson from this, but I didn't. Like a lot of arrogant people, I just assumed that I knew exactly what these words meant, and everyone else was wrong. (I was a political science minor back in college, so I had the illusion that I knew this stuff.)
* "capitalism" refers to a recent economic development in human history, emerging in the 19th century, in which the economy is dominated by corporations, and the corporations are privately owned by stockholders. Anyone who used the term to simply refer to buying and selling was wrong.
* "socialism" refers to the workers controlling the factories (as opposed to the stockholders). Anyone who used the term to refer to high taxes or welfare programs was wrong. That's welfare capitalism, not socialism.
* "anarchism" refers to the anti-authoritarian wing of the socialist movement. (Of course that's not the literal definition of anarchism--the word literally means "no government"--but the literal meaning doesn't matter, because it's the historical use of the word that's more important). Anyone who attempted to use the literal definition of anarchism was wrong.
* "Nazism" was fascism plus racism. Anyone who used the terms interchangeably was being imprecise.
* "democracy" referred to a system of government in which the people voted on the laws directly, a laancient Athens. Anyone who used the term "democracy" to refer to the United States was being imprecise. The United States is a republic.
So, you see, I thought I knew what I was talking about. But I was wrong, wrong wrong! The truth is that none of these words have any agreed upon meaning.
First of all, even among political scientists, there is widespread disagreement about what these words actually mean. But even if the experts could all agree, it still wouldn't matter. As any linguist can tell you, words don't actually mean what the dictionary says they mean. Words get their meaning from the way that they're used in real life. If enough ordinary people think that socialism means higher tax rates, then that is what the word means now--at least in one sense.
I have a memory or reading a linguistic textbook about 10 years ago, and coming across the section where the authors were discussing how words are paired with their meanings. And the authors said that most people don't really understand how unstable the nature of meaning often is. As an example, they mentioned how many people passionately talk about terms like "democracy" and "socialism" without ever realizing that there are no agreed upon definitions for these words.
And I remember looking up from the book and thinking to myself: "This linguistic textbook has just taught me more about politics than all the political science courses I ever took."
At any rate, Orwell says it eloquently, so I'm just going to quote him:
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. (full essay here)
I Was Wrong
Let's get some mea culpas out of the way. Here are my apologies for every time I've tried to insist upon an exact definition for a political label
(...and no doubt I've made other posts over the past 20 years which I'm just not remembering.)
In each of these posts I was wrong for trying to insist that there was some sort of correct definition of the word which the general public was just not getting. Apologies to everyone.
Also, while recently listening to Revolutions Season 7: The Revolutions of 1848 by Mike Duncan, I've been learning about the history of socialism, and I've learned that historically the word had a very broad meaning. Historically, a "socialist" was just anyone who was concerned with "the social question"--that is, the question about what to do about the problems of poverty accompanying the industrial revolution. The means, methods and solutions that the early socialist thinkers advocated differed tremendously from each other, but if they were at all engaged in trying to solve the social question, then they were socialists.
For years I've been telling people: "Socialism means the workers control the means of production, and if you use that term to refer to anything else, you're wrong." But it turns out I was wrong. The term has a very broad history.
Note to Self: Always Remember This
Having achieved middle-age, I think I've largely lost the urge to endlessly debate politics. (Having long political discussions that stretch into the night is something you only do in your 20s, right?) But, as the above list of links show, I can still get sucked into the temptation to try to define political terms. So I'm writing this post for myself as much as for anyone else.
Always remember--political labels are meaningless. Don't get sucked into the trap of trying to define them. Don't try to debate them.
If you have to debate politics, talk about the effects of individual policies instead. Don't say "Obama's tax policies are socialist". Pretend the word "socialist" doesn't exist and then talk about why you don't like Obama's tax policies.
Similarly, don't talk about Trump's fascist policies. Just talk about why you believe Trump's policies will have bad effects.
And for god's sake, I'm begging you, don't get sucked into an argument about whether or not China or North Korea or anywhere else represents a genuine communist state.
** In my mind at the time, I thought "mercantilism" meant an economy of exchanging goods for money--i.e. the system that pre-dated capitalism. But a trip over to Wikipedia indicates that I myself was misusing the term mercantilism.
I have some time ago decided that George Orwell is my favorite author of all time.
I suppose then it's a little bit odd that I've been so slow to tackle his collected works. But I figure, there's no great hurry with these things. And why spoil it by rushing? Better to savor it by just reading a little bit of Orwell every so often.
At any rate, I've now read almost everything. 1984 and Animal Farm (these two in my youth, before I was blogging, so no review to link to). Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Homage to Catalonia, Collected Essays, Burmese Days, and Down and Out in Paris and London.
There are only a couple of books left actually.
Recently, I found Coming Up for Air at a used book sale, and grabbed it.
The Review
This is a short little book (247 pages). But there's a lot of themes in here to comment on. I'll try to divide my comments into sections, although there is some overlap.
Style and Narration
I've always loved Orwell's readable prose, that seems to just effortlessly carry the reader along. Even when Orwell is writing about something boring, his prose style makes me interested. This is true right from the beginning of the book, in which the main character is describing himself in the bath. Orwell can pull it off because he writes so well.
The style is first person narration.
Given how many of Orwell's books and essays are autobiographical (Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out) I thought for the first page or so that this was actually Orwell narrating. But although the narration style is 1st person point of view, the narrator is not Orwell himself, but the fictional character George "Fatty" Bowling. (Although he does share the same first name as Orwell--or at least he would, if George Orwell weren't actually a pseudonym for Eric Blair). According to Wikipedia:
A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the "many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's."
I actually thought it worked. Mostly. Certainly Fatty Bowling is more intelligent than our stereotype of suburban insurance salesman, but then, maybe our stereotype is prejudiced. The book also explains that Fatty Bowling has had a literary background. (He had always been a reader, and had had a couple of years during the war when he was stationed out in the country with nothing to do, and educated himself by reading the classics.)
The only real problem is the problem with all first-person narration novels--separating Orwell's views from Fatty Bowling's. Mostly I assumed that Fatty Bowling's thoughts were also the thoughts of Orwell, but this can be dangerous.
There are a lot of serious and frankly depressing themes in this book (more on that below). But the narration style is frequently humorous or sarcastic. There's a lot of great sarcastic one-liners in this book. I couldn't possibly quote them all, but I'll give one below just to give you a taste:
Funny how we keep thinking about bombs. Of course there's no question that it's [the war] coming soon. You can tell how close it is by the cheer-up stuff they're talking about in the newspapers. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said the bombing planes can't do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good that the bombers have to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane's high enough the bombs don't reach the ground. Or more likely what he meant was that they'll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road [the street where the narrator lives]. (p.19)
That's typical of most of the book--Serious stuff, but the point is still made in a humorous way.
You'll also notice from the quote above that the narrator is already anticipating the outbreak of World War II. That's also another theme throughout the book.
Anticipating World War II
The book was published in 1939, right before World War II, and is an interesting time piece providing a glimpse of what people were thinking right before the war. According to this book, everyone knew the war was coming. Fatty Bowling narrates his thoughts while riding on a train and noticing a bomber airplane flying overhead.
One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was thinking. For that matter it's what everybody else is thinking. You don't have to be a highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years time, one year's time, what shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting our bags with fright? (p17)
Passages like this, in which the narrator asserts over and over again that everyone knows the war is coming, are all throughout the book. Orwell (or Fatty Bowling) usually predicts the war will come in 1941, which struck me as prescient, until I remembered that 1941 was only the American entry. England actually entered the war in 1939, so it actually came sooner than Orwell thought.
The book also provides an interesting insight into the politics of England on the eve of the war.
Sometimes you read articles complaining that people weren't sufficiently outraged about what was going on in Germany before the war. But Orwell paints a picture of a society pretty worked up about it.
Orwell's narrator describes a lecture he attended:
...Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn't particularly keen to hear what he was saying--get the same stuff in the News Chronicle ever morning--but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that stuck out and caught my attention.
"Bestial atrocities.... Hideous outbursts of sadism. ... Rubber truncheons. ... Concentration camps. ... Iniquitous persecution of Jews. ... Back to the Dark Ages. ... European civilisation. ... Act before it is too late. ... Indignation of all decent peoples. ... Alliance of the democratic nations. ... Firm stand. Defence of democracy. ... Democracy. ... Fascism. ... Democracy. ... Fascism. ... Democracy... ."(p.153)
What's interesting though (and this comes through a little bit in the passage I just quoted above) is that instead of being sympathetic to the anti-fascists, Orwell is mocking them. He views the whole thing as a type of group-think, where people just get together to mindlessly hate. Orwell even views the title "anti-fascist" as being ridiculous. To quote from the same page:
What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It's a queer thing, I thought, to be known as "Mr. So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist." A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? ... But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He means it. Not faking at all--feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy (p.153-154)
If you've read 1984, these themes should be sounding familiar. (More on that below). Although I was surprised to find these critiques applied to the anti-fascists instead of to the totalitarian regimes themselves.
The meeting Orwell's narrator is describing is a meeting of the Left Book Club (W), and from reading Orwell's collected essays, I know the Left Book Club was a frequent target of his ire. Although I believe he was also a member, and they did publish a lot of his works. So I don't know what his exact relationship with them was. Maybe familiarity had breed contempt. Orwell had just grown contemptuous of the kind of mindless groupthink that occurred at these anti-fascist meetings, even if he knew they were on the right side of history.
(That's me being charitable, of course. The uncharitable explanation is that at this point in time Orwell wasn't taking the fascist threat seriously enough. But I got the sense from his collected essays--not to mention his own personal history fighting in Spain--that Orwell was always a committed anti-fascist.)
At the same time, however, Orwell's narrator does feel nervous about Hitler and Stalin.
He goes to talk to a classicist friend of his. (Classicist in the sense of someone obsessed with ancient Rome and Greece.). Orwell's narrator says that Hitler and Stalin are something that the world has never seen before, and expresses his fear for the future. The classicist says that nothing is new under the sun, and points out that ancient Greece had tyrants just like Hitler.
Orwell's narrator thinks to himself:
It's funny. I'm not a fool, but I'm not a highbrow either, and God knows at normal times I don't have many interests that you wouldn't expect a middle-aged seven-pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I've enough sense to see that the old life we're used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think. (p.166)
Orwell was right enough about the war coming of course. But what about the other stuff? Did life ever return to the way it was before the war? I'm not sure because I have no memory of what life was like before the war. Nor do most people nowadays. We certainly have some level of organized propaganda and government surveillance nowadays, but is this a change from before the war, or has it always been like this?
I suppose this gets into a larger debate--the debate people are always having about whether or not 1984 ended up coming true, and how much of it came true.
Which brings me to my next section...
Connections with 1984
Critic John Carey said of this book: "Nineteen-Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm." (As quoted on the back cover of my paperback edition). Certainly a lot of the same ideas that would later pop-up in 1984 are in this book. Actually I've already referenced most of them.
The two-minutes hate, the empty slogan, and the duck-like men who give speeches in which they rhythmically quack empty slogans can be seen in the sections describing the anti-fascist meeting I described above. (Although, as I also noted above, it's ironic that all of this is being used to describe the anti-fascists instead of the fascists.)
The fear of a new world in which you're constantly being exposed to propaganda is in this book as well.
The protagonist in this book is middle-aged, just like Winston Smith. (Fatty Bowling is 45. Winston Smith was 39. Although Winston Smith's body was falling apart a lot more than Fatty Bowling who, aside from his false teeth, is relatively healthy for his age.)
The Nostalgia for Pre-War Small Town England
So, I haven't even gotten to it yet, but none of what I've been talking about so far are the main themes of the book.
The main theme is a comparison between the modern world, and the pre-war world that the character grew up in. (That's pre-war as in pre-World War I.)
A chance newspaper headline causes the narrator to start remembering his childhood, and a large section of the book is an extended flashback to him describing his childhood, and his childhood town.
There is an assertion that before the war, people lived a certain way, and that way of life is now gone forever. And that it's somewhat of a pity.
There's a lot of stuff in here, and it's probably no good me trying to summarize it. You really want to read the book to get the whole flavor of it. Orwell does a beautiful job of describing what it was like to be a boy in a small town before the modern world. He talks about fishing in the river, finding toads and birds nests, fighting with the other boys, playing tricks at school, et cetera.
It made me feel nostalgic for that life even though I never lived in England before the war.
What's interesting is that Orwell was lamenting the loss of childhood already in 1939--before air conditioning, before television, before ipads, before smart phones, and before Facebook.
I'm not sure what the lesson is. Perhaps the advancement of technology has now really ruined childhood in a way Orwell only vaguely saw coming.
Or, perhaps the lesson is that every generation is afraid modern technology will ruin childhood, and we should take these fears with a grain of salt. I don't know.
Orwell's character goes back to his small town to try to escape from modern life and regain some of the peace of his youth. Only to find that his small town has been destroyed by urban sprawl, the natural areas and fields have turned into suburbs, and there are too many people everywhere.
Here, I was immediately reminded of The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey. (Thank you again Whisky).
The premise of The Intellectuals and the Masses was that in the early 20th century, there were a lot of English writers complaining about how population explosion and urban expansion was ruining the English countryside. (Lady Chatterley's Lover , published 10 years earlier, also had a lot of passages talking about how the old town was being transformed by urbanization.)
In fact, I thought large parts of Coming Up for Air were sounding familiar, so I picked up my copy of The Intellectuals and the Masses, and sure enough, John Carey had summarized large sections of the plot in support of his thesis.
John Carey raised some interesting questions in his book about how fears of population explosion can lead (and did lead) to philosophies of population control or extermination. So there's obviously a dangerous edge here to all this. And yet, I find myself sympathizing with Orwell's lament about the loss of the small town.
The whole thing is a complex topic. I won't attempt to get into it all here.
Actually there's a lot of complex conversations that could be had. How much of the pre-war way of life was lost? And should it be lamented, or are we better off in the modern world? How much of this was unique to Orwell's generation, and how much of this sense of loss and childhood nostalgia is common to every generation?
Other Stuff
There's a lot of stuff in this book: Orwell's somewhat misogynistic portrayal of women, Orwell's narrator talking about how horrible World War I was, and trying to talk some men out of enlisting for World War II (different than the view you get in Orwell's essays, in which he views fighting against Hitler a necessity). Orwell's description of aging, and encountering his old girlfriend who is now middle-aged. Et cetera, et cetera.
This is one of those books that if I tried to write about everything in it, I'd be here all day.
And besides, what is the point of me spoiling everything? You'd be much better off picking up the book and reading it yourself. So I'll just end things here.
From George Orwell:
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. From Noam Chomsky:
Why I Read This Book
So, after our book club finished The Brothers Karamazov, we talked about which book we would read next.
This was one of my suggestions.
I've read several of George Orwell's books now:
Keep the Aspidistra Flying: review here
Homage to Catalonia: review here
Essays: review here
Burmese days: review here 1984: (before I started blogging, so no review)
and Animal Farm (also before I started blogging, so no review).
But there are still several George Orwell books left to read, and this was one of the remaining ones.
To my pleasant surprise, the other book club members reacted very well to this suggestion. (George Orwell is one of those authors that just about everyone likes). And so this was decided as our next book.
The Review
You've really got to give Orwell credit--the man could write extremely readable prose.
A comment I made when I reviewed Orwell's collection of essays was that he could make anything interesting to read about. He just had a talent for very clearly explaining everything.
I have yet to read anything by Orwell that I didn't like, but my expectations for this book were initially slightly lower. This was, after all Orwell's first book. (He had published essays before this, but this was his first book.) It might be expected that his writing style was still developing.
But nope. This book was just as readable as everything else.
It is the mark of every good writer that their actual subject matter becomes less important than their skill at telling it. So it was with this book. There are descriptions of any numbers of things that I wouldn't normally have been particularly interested in, but I was captivated by Orwell's description.
An example mentioned by several people in the book club was Orwell's description of what life was like working in the kitchen of a big fancy hotel in Paris. All of us agreed that we would never have thought that this would be interesting, but there was something about Orwell's writing style that just made us keep turning the pages.
There's a ton more to discuss in this book (and I'll get around to nitpicking it to death down below), but the basic review probably can stand with just this simple recommendation: It's very readable, so I'd recommend it.
The Plot and Background Information
A good book should be entirely self-contained. And this one is, kind of. But it raises so many questions about Orwell's biography that it's bound to cause speculation on the part of the reader.
The book starts out with Orwell in poverty in Paris.
When the book starts out, Orwell is hovering around the poverty line. After he has his meager savings robbed from him, and then loses his job, he goes quickly into absolute starving poverty.
But what is Orwell, an Englishman, doing in Paris? And how did Orwell end up in such a bad state of affairs to begin with? Didn't he come from a middle-class family? Didn't he go to a good school? Didn't he have prospects? Didn't he have friends and family he could have telegrammed? How did he end up starving on the streets of Paris?
At our first book-club meeting, we debated this, and suggested various possibilities.
Then I did my research on Wikipedia.
Apparently the realism of the book has been in debate ever since its publication. And likely will continue to be. But there is at least some indication that Orwell's descent into poverty may have been more of a choice than a matter of circumstances. (Apparently Orwell was really interested in writing about poverty for some time before this book came out, and he wanted to gain the experience. So the fact that he got the experience might not have been a coincidence.)
This may rankle some as "poverty tourism", but in my book club, we agreed that books like this need to be written. (After all, Someone needs to document what happens to the poor on a daily basis). So we were willing to forgive Orwell's choice to go poor. Although Orwell definitely could have been more honest about it.
(It also raises the question of who is writing these kind of books now. Is anyone out there documenting what is happening to the people on the streets of London and Paris nowadays?)
Other Notes
At my bookclub, we got a lot of discussion out of this book--about 2 hours of discussion out of the Paris section, and then about another 2 hours when we met up to discuss the London section. [The book club has expanded since The Brothers Karamazov. We now have about 10 people showing up for the discussions, which gets a lot more opinions into the mix.]
There's a lot in here to discuss. On just about every page, Orwell is making some sort of comment about politics, or society, or human nature. And these comments can be remarked upon. Sometimes we just highlighted them as particularly insightful, other times we debated their truth value.
I'm not going to try to comment on absolutely everything in this book. And really, there's no point in me re-writing what Orwell already wrote so well. I'll just jot down a some brief notes on a few things, and then call it a day.
* One of the main themes in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that, despite some people's tendency to romanticize the adventures of the poor, poverty in actuality is just really dull and boring. This is also a theme in Down and Out. The enforced idleness of being poor, plus the way being perpetually hungry robs you of your energy, just makes the life of poor people more boring than anything else.
* There appears to be some anti-semitism and racial prejudice on display in this book. It's not a main theme, but there are a few casual comments which are disturbing.
However having read Orwell's Essays, I remembered that Orwell had written on the problem of antisemitism in Britain. [LINK HERE]. So what was going on? How could the same man who wrote about the problems of casual antisemitism in one essay write casual antisemitic remarks in another essay?
We debated this at bookclub, without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. My best guess is that Orwell evolved over the years, and that the Holocaust probably went a long way to changing attitudes in Britain. But that's just guesswork on my part. Another interesting article on the subject is here.
As for Orwell's racial prejudice, there are a couple of lines in this book that could be interpreted as looking down upon non-white people.
But then again, in Burmese Days, Orwell appeared to be critical of the racial-prejudice of the English colonials. So it's difficult to reconcile those two books.
* There are also some sexist remarks in the book.
I think this is something the women in the bookclub picked up on more than the men. I noticed the remarks when I was reading, but I was more quick to forgive them as just harmless, and just forget about them.
* So it turns out I had already read some of this book. Orwell integrated into this book portions of an essay which he had previously published separately: "The Spike", and I had previously read The Spike when I read Orwell's collection of essays.
* Connections with other books I've read: In the Paris section, Orwell makes a comment that ever since the Siege of Paris, it was impossible to catch fish in the Seine. (Orwell says that during the Siege, the fish grew too cunning and learned how to escape fishing nets).
I remember this line because one of the books I'd read on the Paris Commune (if memory serves, it was Alistair Horne) had quoted this line when describing the Siege, using this line as indication that even by Orwell's time, the fish stocks in the Seine had not recovered from the Siege.
* Orwell devotes chapter 32 to talking about the slang of the London Tramps, and then he goes on to reflect on how strange and seemingly arbitrary it is that some words are regarded as taboo in middle-class society, while other words are not.
I agree with his thoughts on this completely, and have written up my own thoughts on this before here and here.
* Orwell will occasionally break from his narrative to offer his opinions, and these are interesting as well.
The problem of poverty is, Orwell acknowledges, a complex one. And one that there is not a quick fix to.
However, in the short term there are any number of things that could be done to make life less miserable for the tramps.
One of the big problems, according to Orwell, is that people believe that the homeless tramps have become homeless because they're lazy or because they drink. Therefore most of England's laws are based on making life for tramps as uncomfortable as possible. The theory is that if tramps got too comfortable, they would never be motivated to find work.
Orwell argues that these laws actually have the opposite effect--by needlessly making the tramp's life so difficult, they actually make it harder for the tramps to get out of poverty.
For example, one law in England at the time Orwell was writing was that tramps couldn't re-enter the same shelter twice. This was done to discourage tramps from becoming too dependent on these shelters, but the result was that the tramps had to be always on the move walking from one town to the next. And the result of this was that they never could establish a stable life or income for themselves, and so by necessity could only live off of charity.
I assume the law has changed now in Britain--although I asked the British members of the book club about this, and they told me to the best of their knowledge the law hasn't changed. But either way, I think the larger point remains the same. I suspect although the specifics change, the generally principle remains the same-- lot of the government programs in place to address poverty have a lot of onerous restrictions on them meant to discourage people from becoming too dependent on the government, but making life more difficult for poor people only makes it harder for them to move out of poverty.
* I'm going to try to resist the urge to requote the whole book. (You should just read the book instead of reading my summary of it). But I'll indulge myself in just one last point here before I wrap up.
I thought Orwell made a really good point on chapter 31, when discussing how people despised beggars. Orwell said that most people will tell you they despise beggars because beggars are parasites, bringing nothing of value to society. But, Orwell said, if you examine any number of "respectable" jobs, you will see that they also bring nothing of value to society. So why don't we despise those jobs as well?
The reason, Orwell says, is that we respect money and despise poverty. If beggars were able to make a middle-class income by begging, we wouldn't despise them.
I thought that was a really good point, and in fact to Orwell's own examples, I think I can add several examples of my own.
For example, anyone involved in the production of soda (Pepsi, Coca-cola, etc) is contributing nothing of value to society, and is actively making society worse. And yet thousands of people employed by the soda companies live respectable middle-class lifestyles.
Anyone involved in the production or sale of tobacco or alcohol is a parasite on society.
Arguably a lot of the jobs in the stock market or finance sector do not create anything of value for society.
And yet all these people live respectable middle class lifestyles while we despise the poor.
Book Club Notes:
For whatever it may or may not be worth, here are some of the posts I put on our bookclub Facebook page. February 17, 2017
Okay, so here's the plan moving forward. (Correct me if I'm remembering.)
The next book is "Down and Out in Paris in London" by George Orwell.
Bookstores in Vietnam don't carry it, so we're going to use on-line copies.
Some people prefer to read it off of their kindles or other devices, but I'm going to print out a physical copy for myself on Monday. Anyone who wants me to make a copy for them, let me know before Monday.
February 25, 2017
Tom and I were discussing some of the anti-Semitic remarks in "Down and Out" this morning.
I mentioned an essay of Orwell I had previously read (in a collection) in which Orwell appears to be aware of the problem of antisemitism.
As for what this means for how we interpret his remarks in "Down and Out" , your guess is as good as mine. (Do we forgive him because he said the right thing in another place?) But the essay is at least worth reading, if for nothing else than to show Orwell wasn't a total asshole. http://orwell.ru/library/articles/antisemitism/english/e_antib March 3, 2017
Great discussion guys.
We agreed to meet up again in 10 days on Wednesday March 15th, with a goal to having finished the book by then. Time and place to be decided. March 5, 2017
Chapter 32:
I really enjoyed Orwell's chapter on swearing, because it so well expresses what I have long thought.
A couple times at school workshops now I've gotten into this debate.
It was during a workshop on classroom management (both times, if memory serves), and the question was asked what to do if a junior or teen said a bad word.
I said (and still say) that I wouldn't reprimand the kid.
I said that I didn't believe there was anything such thing as a bad word, and that it was ridiculous to assign moral qualities to a certain set of phonemic utterances.
Besides which, most "swear" words don't really have any sort of meaning (whatever the dictionary says) because they're just used as interchangeable expletives.
Besides which, to the extent that any "swear" word has the power to offend, it is only offensive because of the cultural taboos in its own language. So there is no such thing as "swearing" in a foreign language.
The only reason we English speakers are offended by the word "Fuck" is because we've been conditioned to be offended by it. Based on the word alone, the phonemic utterance itself is inoffensive, and it's almost always used in a delexicalized way in which it has no meaning other than simply as an expletive. Therefore, a Vietnamese person couldn't be expected to be offended by the word.
Not everyone was of my opinion, and we got into a long debate.
But I was pleased to find Orwell articulating what I had previously thought.
On how swear words are essentially meaningless, Orwell writes:
The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic—indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret—usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example ——. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with —— which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in French—for example —— which is now a quite meaningless expletive.
And on the way foreign swear words become instantly inoffensive the moment they cross cultural boundaries, Orwell writes:
Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but m practice its insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is ‘bastard’—which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst insult to a woman, either in London or Paris, is ‘cow’; a name which might even be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear words, being what public opinion chooses to make them. In this connexion it is interesting to see how a swear word can change character by crossing a frontier. In England you can print ‘je m’en foils’ without protest from anybody. In France you have to print it ‘je m’en f——’. Or, as another example, take the word ‘barnshoot’—a corruption of the Hindustani word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of Aristophanes’ plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.
What do you guys think? Agree with Orwell or disagree?
So...I've already expressed my thoughts on the Olympics 10 years ago. But I'll say my bit again. I believe the Olympics encourages nationalism, that it is harmful to the future of humanity, and that the best thing we can do is to boycott it or ignore it completely. When reading a book of George Orwell's essays a couple years ago, I discovered that he made the point much better than I did all the way back in 1945. So I'm just going to re-print his essay here instead of trying to say it myself. (I've stolen the text from here).
The Sporting Spirit by George Orwell (December, 1945)
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.
Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.
And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.
Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921. Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is far worse. Worst of all is boxing. One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience. But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago, when Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep the women out.
In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even fiercer passions are aroused in young countries where games playing and nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment. The first big football match that was played in Spain about fifteen years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don't intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and “rattling” opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”.
I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
Why I Watched This Movie
As with the 1999 version, I watched this in class with a group of students who had completed reading the book (different class this time.)
Positives
* The production values and animation quality of this film are decent (at least for a 1950s British film).
Negatives
* Tonally inconsistent—when making a cartoon about farm animals, the filmmakers were unable to resist the temptation to put in a lot of animated whimsical material, which I’m not sure mashed well with the heavier scenes.
* Related to the above point, it’s very unclear who the target audience of this film is—the film is a bit too dark for kids, and a bit too silly for adults.
* Orwell would probably not have approved of the film’s changed ending—if the whole point of the book is that revolutions naturally devolve into dictatorships, then what is the purpose of having a second revolution at the end to overthrow the first revolution?
The Review
Because a film engages you on a different level than a book does, not all great books make great films. Because it is dense with political allegory and symbolism, doesn’t have an identifiable protagonist, and lacks any satisfying character arcs, or climactic resolutions, Animal Farm may be one of those books that is never going to work as a movie.
Despite my complaints about the film’s minor faults, the filmmakers give a good try here at adapting Orwell, and if it doesn’t quite succeed as a movie, it’s because the project was always doomed to failure anyway.
Other Things I Would Talk about if I Wasn’t Limiting Myself to 100 Words
* Comparing this film to the 1999 version—but the short version is that although both films are flawed, this is the vastly superior adaptation.
Rating : 2 out of 10 stars (I’m sympathetic to the fact that the filmmakers were doing the best they could with the source material they had, but in terms of watchability and enjoyability, as someone in the audience I can’t rate this higher than a 2).
I was assigned to teach the book Animal Farm to an advanced English
class, and after finishing the book we watched and discussed the movie
together.
Positives
* The puppetry is impressive, and Jim
Henson’s studio clearly did a good job on this.
* Although made after Jim Henson’s death,
the production contains elements of Jim Henson’s type of dark humor and
grotesque caricatures
* The cast is impressive: Patrick Stewart,
Kelsey Grammar, and Pete Postlehwaite
* Some great character acting by the human
actors in this movie
* The film adds in some characterization to
the human characters that was absent from Orwell’s original book
Negatives
* George Orwell’s original book wasn’t
exactly subtle to begin with, and it needed no extra emphasis to make its point—this
movie, however, was made by people who were worried you weren’t going to
understand that the pigs were bad unless everything was constantly
over-emphasized.
* As impressive as the puppetry is, the
technology just wasn’t quite up to telling the story the filmmakers wanted to
tell
* Some of the added characterization to the
human characters comes at the expense of the animal characters, most of whom
are much less developed in this film than they were in the book.
* Related to the above point—some of the
added scenes with the human characters went absolutely nowhere, and added
nothing to the story at all: the scene with Farmer Jones sleeping with Farmer
Pilkington’s wife, for instance.
* They changed Orwell’s original
pessimistic ending to an optimistic happy ending
The
Review
Although
it has most of the same plot points from Orwell’s novel, this fails completely
as an adaptation.The important scenes
are rushed through, and the ending is criminally changed.
However,
the dark humor of the tale is reminiscent of some of the darker toned fairy
tales that Jim Henson experimented with in shows like The Jim Henson Hour (W).The great character acting and great expressive facial expressions by
the human actors also makes the movie feel like a Jim Henson Hour episode.
Other
Things I Would Talk About if I Wasn’t Limiting Myself to 100 Words
* My love for the original book, and my
history with the original book
* My experience teaching this book
* Reflections on my experience teaching
this book, and thoughts on whether or not the themes of the book should be
taught, or if the students should just be assigned to read the book and be left
to draw their own conclusions
2 out of 10 stars, judging this movie as an
adaptation of Orwell’s book—if this movie existed in a universe where Orwell’s
book never existed, it might earn 5 out of 10 stars for a dark Jim Henson-esque
fairy tale.
Burmese Days was Orwell’s
first novel, and was based on his experience as an Imperial British Police
Officer in Burma,
where he served from 1922-1927.(The
book wasn’t published until 1934, but as it is based loosely on Orwell’s own
experiences, I’m assuming it represents life in Burma during the 1920s.)
Like a lot
of lesser works by famous authors, this book both benefits and suffers by
comparison to Orwell’s later novels.
It
benefits in the sense that (arguably) no one would still be reading Burmese Days these days if its author
hadn’t also written 1984 and Animal Farm.
But
it suffers because it must inevitably be compared to Orwell’s later work.
The
contrived plot of Burmese Days, with
the macguffin (W) of U Po Kyin’s scheming is probably unworthy of
Orwell, as is the climax, which artificially forces a contrived resolution to
the personal relationships of the characters.
But
it’s only because it is Orwell that
one would even think to complain about it.If this was any other author, one would just accept the contrived plot
and move on.Because this is an Orwell
book, the expectations are higher.This
book is nowhere near as good as 1984.But then, what is?1984
is a masterpiece.
But
if the plot is the weak point of Burmese
Days, the characters are the strong point.They are lifelike, identifiable, and I saw many of my own strengths and
weaknesses very clearly mirrored in the characters Orwell has created.
Burmese Days is one of those books that
is primarily a character study.There
are long sections of the book where nothing much really happens plot wise, but
you spend a lot of time hanging out with the characters and really getting to
know them.Some people really like this
kind of book, and some people really hate it, so I guess it’s best if the
reader is warned beforehand.
I
normally don’t go in for this kind of book myself, but in this case the writing
and the characterizations were so good that I thought Orwell pulled it
off.There were a couple times when I
got a little bit restless (wondering where this story was going and when it was
going to get there) but on the whole I enjoyed just observing these characters.
(I
know I was complaining about the plot earlier, but the plot really has very
little to do with the book.The plot is
just an excuse for the novel to exist—it starts up at the beginning, goes away
for most of the middle, and then comes back at the end to bring things to a
conclusion.)
The
really great thing about this book is how completely Orwell has nailed the
portrayal of expatriate life in Southeast Asia.
I’ve written - before about the tendency of expats to complain endlessly about the
country they’re living in (something I’m not completely
blameless about myself.)And I think Orwell
captures this atmosphere perfectly, with long scenes of Englishmen sitting in
the club drinking all day complaining about the Burmese people.(When describing the feeling of the British
in Burma,
Orwell writes “…most people can be at
ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants” –From
Chapter 10.)
Now,
granted, my situation as an English teacher in 2014 is not exactly the same as
the position of British Colonialists in 1920.For one thing, the power dynamic was much different—they were actually
ruling the natives they complained about. Another difference is that it was much more
accepted to be openly racist back in the 1920s.The same type of complaints about the laziness and insolence of the
natives still occur these days, but nowadays, all complaints always have to be
prefaced with, “I’m not a racist but…..
But
the tendency of expatriates to continually disparage the inhabitants of the
country they live in is still very much present, which is why I can so easily
believe the portrait Orwell paints.Although
none of us actually lived through the age of colonialism, I don’t doubt that
Orwell has captured its essence.
Here
is one small excerpt from a longer conversation that Orwell describes in chapter
2:
“…We’ve got to hang together and say, ‘We are
the masters, and you beggars—’” Ellis pressed his small thumb down as through
flattening a grub—“'you beggars keep your place!’”
“Hopeless, old chap,” said Westfield.“Quite hopeless.What can you do with all this red type tying
your hands?Beggars of natives know the
law better than we do.Insult you to
your face and then run you in the moment you hit ’em.Can’t do anything unless you put your foot
down firmly.And how can you, if they
haven’t the guts to show fight?”
“Our burra sahib at Mandalay
always said” put in Mrs Lackersteen, “that in the end we shall simply leave India.Young men will not come out here any longer
to work all their lives for insults and ingratitude.We shall just go.When the natives come to us
begging us to stay, we shall say, ‘No, you have had your chance, you wouldn’t
take it.Very well, we shall leave you
to govern yourselves.’And then, what a
lesson that will teach them.”
“It’s all this law and order that’s
done for us,” said Westfield
gloomily.The ruin of the Indian Empire
through too much legality was a recurrent theme with Westfield.According to him, nothing save a full-sized rebellion, and the consequent
reign of martial law, could save the Empire from decay.“All this paper-chewing and chit
passing.Office babus are the real
rulers of this country now.Our number’s
up.Best thing we can do is to shut up
shop and let ’em stew in their own juice.”
“I don’t agree, I simply don’t
agree,” Ellis said.“We could put things
right in a month if we chose.It only
needs a pennyworth of pluck.Look at
Amritsar [W]Look how they caved in after
that.Dyer knew the stuff to give
them.Poor old Dyer! [W]That was a dirty job.Those cowards in England have got something to
answer for.”
There was a kind of sigh from the
others, the same sigh that a gathering of Roman Catholics will give at the
mention of Bloody Mary.Even Mr. Macgregor,
who detested bloodshed and martial law, shook his head at the name of Dyer.
“Ah, poor man! Sacrificed to the Paget
M.P.s. Well, perhaps they will discover their mistake when it is too late.”
My old governor used to tell a story
about that,” said Westfield.“There was an old havildar in a native
regiment—someone asked him what’d happen if the British left India.The old chap said—.”
Flory pushed back his chair and
stood up.It must not, it could not—no,
it simply should not go on any longer!He must get out of this room quickly, before something happened inside
his head and he began to smash the furniture and throw bottles at the
pictures.Dull boozing witless porkers!
Was it impossible that they could go on week after week, year after year,
repeating word for word the same evil-minded drivel, like a parody of a fifth
rate story in Blackwood’s?Would none of them ever think of anything new to say?Oh, what a place, what people!What a civilization is this of ours—this
godless civilization founded on whisky, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures!God
have mercy on us, for all of us are a part of it.”
There
is a sense in which a fictional book, if it gives a literary picture of a time
and place, can be of more historical value to future generations than a factual
recounting of events.No doubt, the
Romans stationed up in Gaul probably had
similar conversations to the ones Orwell recorded, but the Romans left us no
literary picture of life in their colonies.However centuries from now, when everyone who can remember the British
Empire is long dead, Burmese Days
will still give future generations a very accurate picture of the nature of colonialism.
Footnote 1: Although…given the tremendous
amount of writing that did not survive the collapse of the Roman
Empire, it’s entirely possible that the Romans actually might have
written a similar book, but one which did not survive.This in turn must make us cautious about
assuming anything from our own age will survive a millennium.But assuming Burmese Days survive the ages, its historical value will be
immense.
Footnote 2: I should mention there is some
dispute about the accuracy of Orwell’s picture of expatriate life in Burma.According to this academic essay [LINK HERE], some of Orwell’s contemporaries accused him of exaggerating
things.But to me, it certainly feels like an accurate account of what
the conversation among the 1920s British expatriates must have been.
The
Climax
I have
mixed feelings about the climax of this book.
On
the positive side, given the slow pace of the book, and given how much time the
reader spends getting to know the characters, when the climax of the novel
finally comes it really feels like it’s earned—it feels like it’s something
real and important because we’ve spent so long getting to know these
characters.
Also,
after the reader has shared so long in the characters’ world of assumed
superiority to the domicile Burmese, the reader shares their incredulity when
the revolt finally does happen, and the sanctuary of the European club is actually
violated.
But
on the other hand…the climax does sort of ruin the subtlety of the novel.Part of me wanted to just see how the
relationships described in the novel would have played out naturally without any
outside interference, and I thought the climax kind of ruined things by forcing
a resolution.
John
Flory and Me
I
strongly identified with the main character John Flory.In fact, I don’t remember the last time I
identified so much with a character in a novel.
[The
last time I remember seeing my own personality so clearly in the characters of
a novel was War and Peace ,
and even then it wasn’t just one character I identified with but aspects from
many of them—for example in Pierre I identified with the social awkwardness,
the immature youthful radicalism, the naïveté, and the poor judgment in
relationships.From Prince Andrei I
identified with the pessimistic outlook, and from Prince Vasily I identified
with the ability for self-deception, and the ability to convince yourself that
you’re not being selfish even when you are.]
At
35, John Flory is pretty much exactly my age (I’m 36 now.)
Like
me, John Flory is described as coming to Asia when he was young and he got
sucked into the excitement of life in Asia and the camaraderie that fosters
among young men in an expatriate community, and enjoyed the quick and easy
friendships, without quite realizing until it was too late that he was getting
himself stuck in Asia in a career path that had a limited future.As Orwell describes it:
“He was young then, young enough for
hero-worship, and he had friends among the men in his firm.There were also shooting, fishing, and perhaps
once in a year a hurried trip to Rangoon—pretext,
a visit to the dentist. Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips!The rush to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshops
for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks
and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious
drinking-bout! He was too young to realize what this life was preparing for
him.He did not see the years stretching
out ahead, lonely, eventless, corrupting. (from chapter 5).
I
also quite clearly identified with Flory’s desire to go home, yet his fear of
facing home: “He was pining for England, though
he dreaded facing it, as one dreads facing a pretty girl when one is collarless
and unshaven.When he left home he had
been a boy, a promising boy and handsome in spite of his birthmark; now, only
ten years later, he was yellow, thin, drunken, almost middle-aged in habits and
appearance.” (from chapter 5).
I
also saw in myself John Flory’s cowardice, and his desire to avoid
confrontation at all costs, even if it met sacrificing his moral principles to
preserve social harmony in the Club.
And
furthermore, I saw in myself the same propensity for self-criticism that John
Flory had, and in one section, Orwell’s description of how John Flory talked to
himself sounded very similar to my own self-talk:
“Cur, spineless cur,” Flory was thinking to
himself, without heat, however, for he was too accustomed to the thought.“Sneaking, idling, boozing, fornicating,
soul-examining, self-pitying cur.All
those fools at the Club, those dull louts to whom you are so pleased to think
yourself superior—they are all better than you, every man of them.At least they are men in their oafish
way.Not cowards, not liars. Not
half-dead and rotting.But you—”
Much
of John Flory’s awkwardness with Elizabeth
I also identified with.
But
after listing all those similarities, I should say there is also a limit to my
point of identification.(No one ever
identifies with anyone else 100%.We’re
all too much individuals for that.)John
Flory’s depends on alcohol to get him through the day in a way that I never could—not
because I’m a saint, but just because my body reacts badly to alcohol, and
alcohol puts me to sleep.I could never
drink gin throughout the day like John Flory does, and I especially couldn’t
drink it in the morning.However, if you
substitute my dependence on coffee for Flory’s dependence on gin, then perhaps
you could argue for an equivalence after all?
I’m
curious how much of himself Orwell put into the character of John Flory.John Flory worked in private business in Burma, whereas
Orwell was with the Imperial Police.However, much like Flory, Orwell reportedly shunned European society in Burma, and
instead got on well with the natives (W).Orwell also, like Flory, was one of the few
Europeans in Burma
who made an effort to learn the language.(Another way in which I’m not like Flory and Orwell.I have, to my shame, done a terrible job here
in Cambodia of learning the language—although I did tolerably well learning the local language back when I was in Japan). Orwell would have been much younger than Flory during his time in Burma, but about he would have been about the same age as Flory by the time he got around to writing the book.
Elizabeth
Lackersteen
I have one
small nitpick about the character of Elizabeth Lackersteen—namely that she was
too negative about Burma
from the beginning.
Modern
psychology has shown that culture shock has four stages.The first stage is the honeymoon stage, in
which everything about the new country is new and wonderful.Only after passing through the honeymoon
stage (about the 2 or 3 month mark) do people become overly negative about the
country they are living in.
It
makes sense that all the old-jaded expatriates in the European club should be
negative about Burma—much
as Orwell describes.But Elizabeth
Lackersteen should have gone through a period of interest and fascination about
her new country.Instead, Orwell
portrays her as wanting nothing to do with Burma and the Burmese right from
the beginning.
I
suspect this oversight might be because the psychological research on culture
shock, and the 4 stages model, probably came after Orwell’s time.And perhaps I’m being overly prescriptive by
insisting that his characters follow this psychology model.But, the four stages of culture shock very
closely model my own experience, and the experience of the other people I’ve
watched.I’ve never seen anyone be
negative about a new country upon first arriving, so I have a hard time
believing that this would be Elizabeth Lackersteen’s reaction.(Although, I don’t know, maybe back in the
1920s racism might have been more of a factor?Britains
might have absorbed a disdain for the native inhabitants of their colonies even
before they got off the boat, which would cause them to bypass the honeymoon
stage?Perhaps?)
Other
Observations
* Another similarity between Burmese
Days and modern expatriate life in Southeast Asia
is the excess drinking.Although I
wonder if the causes might be different now.The way Orwell describes it, the expatriates drink throughout the day in
Burmese Days because of the boredom
of their lives.
Nowadays,
one suspects that because of the cheapness and availability of alcohol in Southeast
Asia, Southeast Asia attracts European
alcoholics rather than produces them.
* According to Wikipedia (W), Orwell was greatly influenced
by E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.As someone who has not read A Passage to India, but has seen the movie, I can attest that there are a number of similarities in the
plot.
