George Orwell

by

Bill V. Mullen, Youngstown State University

 

George Orwell's three major books of travel writing--Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938)--revived the tradition of excursionary literature as social and political analysis. "Into Unknown England" books were initiated by reform-minded Victorian and Edwardian authors. In his three travel books Orwell, who casts himself as a representative of English "lower-upper-middle-class" and as an imaginary social conscience, ventured into the slums of Paris and London, the mining towns of northern England, and the battlefront of the Spanish Civil War, addressing what he saw as a largely conservative and apathetic English readership. Orwell sought to prove that class inequality and the corruption of progressive political ideals were, in his evolving socialist estimation, damning England and the Western world to social division, provincial bigotry, and eventually world war. Yet Orwell's deep acculturation in traditional middle-class British mores and patriotic sentiments clashed with his sensitivity to class and racial bias. In particular Orwell's travel essays on Marrakech and Burma (now Myanmar) are ambiguous but important examples of how literature that seeks sympathy with or advocacy for other cultures and groups also demonstrates how the identities of writers, their subjects, and those who read their work are constructed by intercultural exchange. These complications, coupled with the political inconsistencies within Orwell's worldview over the course of his lifetime, have led to warring interpretations of his legacy. Recent critical debate has focused on Orwell's reliability as an observer, his idiosyncratic views on socialism, and the degree to which his reputation for fairness, decency, and common sense are attributable to his insistence on empirically verifiable political and moral "truths."

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Bengal, India, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was an administrator in the Opium Department of the government of India. Though Orwell left India when still a young boy, his father's involvement with the British colonial project determined Orwell's later decision at age nineteen to return to the country that became the subject for his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and essays. When he was three Orwell returned to England with his mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair, to be raised in what he called a "shabby-genteel family" at Henley-on-Thames. The modest pleasures of his upbringing, which Orwell recorded in the posthumously published essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" (written in 1947), were a touchstone for Orwell's lifelong sympathy for the durability of British middle-class values, against which he often compared the culture and castes of non-English societies while abroad.

In 1911 Orwell entered St. Cyprians, an elite private school, and in 1917 he enrolled at Eton College, the most distinguished preparatory school in Great Britain. There Orwell began to question the values of privilege and upward mobility that his upbringing seemed destined to fulfill. His rebellion was most obvious in his decision to leave Eton in 1921 and apply to join the Indian Imperial Police rather than attending college. This impulse toward the "road not taken" recurred throughout Orwell's career and is a perfect metaphor for his travel writing. The decision to go to India was not only a naive denial of personal privilege and class status but also the first of many impulsively chosen explorations of the structural causes of political and social inequality.

Orwell was accepted into the Indian Imperial Police in 1922. In October he began serving as assistant superintendent of police in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma. There Orwell quickly became uncomfortably self-conscious of his role as intruder, alien, and symbol of British authority and of the ways in which these aspects of position obscured and prejudiced understanding of the indigenous population. "A Hanging" (Adelphi, August 1931), his first published work of real travel writing, is a report of the execution of a Hindu prisoner to which Orwell, in the role of British police officer, was both inactive bystander and symbol of authority. The detached exposition of the event--and the conspicuous absence of political commentary by the author--stands in for Orwell's disquieting implication in the death of one whose anonymity is defined as his invisibility to the abstract system of rule under which he lives. The essay implies what Orwell stated much more overtly in "Marrakech," an essay published in the Christmas 1939 issue of New Writing: "People with brown skins are next door to invisible. . . . All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?" "A Hanging" is the first ambiguous evidence of Orwell's recognition of what contemporary criticism calls the "Orientalist" construction by Western cultures of the identities of non-Western persons. Recent criticism has noted, for example, that Orwell's portrait of the Hindu prisoner reinforces the anonymity of Indian culture to Western eyes even as it critiques colonial dominion.

As a literary text "A Hanging" reveals Orwell's early reliance on the realistic and naturalistic technique he encountered in reading the works of William MakepeaceThackeray, Charles Dickens, and others. This influence partly informs Orwell's naive early faith--one complicated by his later work--in the ability of empirical observation to render intercultural experience truthfully. The "meticulous descriptive quality" of "A Hanging" reflects an aesthetic Orwell developed in part through the jolting experience of being culturally dislocated. Orwell's self-conscious role as outside observer in another culture and the desire to eliminate subjective bias that was part of his journalistic orientation inform his best-known declaration of his own writing method as expressed in "Why I Write" (Gangrel, Summer 1946): "one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane." In "A Hanging" he adhered to this aesthetic of impersonality; yet it is strained by Orwell's temptation to draw negative conclusions about colonialism and his role in it, a role he was not confident or certain enough to voice.

The subject of "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), Orwell's other well-known and widely anthologized essay on his Burma experience, is the impossibility of either objectivity or the effacement of the writer's own political role in the events he describes. The essay explodes a paradox particular to nearly all Orwell's travel writings, his participation in the events he describes as a first-person test of political conscience. While serving as a subdivisional police officer in Lower Burma, Orwell was called on to kill an escaped elephant rampaging through the small town of Moulmein. As "the white man with his gun" standing before an unarmed native crowd, Orwell suddenly saw himself as he imagined the natives did. While "seemingly the leading actor of the piece . . . in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind." Orwell's self-consciousness threw into relief the conventional relationships of colonialism and allowed him to interpret his participation as part of an allegory of political power: "I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys."

Orwell's Burma experience heightened his suspicions of social inequities and his sympathy for oppressed peoples. On his return to England in 1927 he aggressively transferred this suspicion and sympathy to the British class structure. In 1928 Orwell wedded these newfound ideas to a strong desire to become a full-time writer. He abandoned his apartment and set out for the East End of London to document the lives of the poor and homeless. He lived first for several months in and around the London slums and then went to Paris, where he lived among the poor for a year and a half. His mixed motives behind the book that eventually became his first, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), indicate a crossroads in his career. In 1936 Orwell wrote that his desire to "submerge myself, get right down among the oppressed" reflected the "bad conscience" he had acquired from the Burma experience. Yet in the preface to the French edition of Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1935, Orwell wrote that he went to France "so as to live cheaply while writing two novels. . . . and also to learn French." The confusion of these two tasks delayed composition of the book and its publication. A first version, titled "A Scullion's Diary," was completed in 1930 and included only the Parisian experiences. After it was rejected, Orwell expanded and revised it, adding the more documentary section on London, only to have it rejected again in 1932 by T. S. Eliot, representing Faber and Faber. When Victor Gollancz finally agreed to publish the book, Orwell requested that it be done pseudonymously, and came up with the name George Orwell. Published in January 1933, the book sold out its first printing.

Though in large part social documentary, Down and Out in Paris and London is called a "novel" because Orwell had set out to write one. Its narrator is not named--part of Orwell's strategy of personality "effacement"--and the first part of the book has the dramatic momentum and anecdotal power of fiction. As a piece of travel writing, the first half is characterized by enthusiastic curiosity for the marked bohemianism of Paris that must have struck Orwell as very un-English. Somewhat exoticized vignettes of Paris street life, prostitution, and thievery nearly eclipse Orwell's more characteristic anthropological analysis of alien cultures. Almost as if to make good on a forgotten promise early in the book to write about "poverty," Down and Out in Paris and London focuses toward the end on the caste system among employees in the Hotel X, where the narrator is employed as a dishwasher. Here Orwell reverted to a favorite strategy: illustrating through analogy so that British readers might apprehend a lesson about class structure. Hotel cooks, he noted, are the most "workmanlike class" among the employees; plongeurs (dishwashers) are "one of the slaves of the modern world" and are compared to English coal miners; waiters, whose skills are "chiefly in being servile," are closer to snobs than socialists, with the exception of a friendly Italian who "looked just like an Eton boy." The book reveals a fundamental strategy of virtually all Orwell's travel writings: to consider the English social situation in light of the international picture.

Indeed, the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London is a grim-faced documentary of Orwell's London street experiences that is in marked contrast to the ribaldry of the Paris section. Fragments of these London experiences were initially published as "The Spike" in Adelphi (April 1931) and later reshaped to become chapters 27 and 35 of the finished book. "Spikes" were British poorhouses where Orwell lodged as he traveled. Their despicable conditions moved him to write in increasingly dark and prescriptive tones about the conditions of the underclass, describing the marginalization of the poor as resulting from characteristically royalist British fear of the mob. Orwell also assaulted British vagrancy laws for contributing to the squalor. In the tradition of Henry Mayhew, Orwell added a "glossary" of words used among the street poor and ended with a plea to make lodging houses cleaner and safer for the "tramps."

What is finally most significant about Down and Out in Paris and London, however, is its tentative formation of Orwell's method of social inquiry and the vague discerning of principles that would soon make him turn socialist. "At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty," he wrote near the end of the book, chastening himself by insisting he would never again "enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning." Down and Out in Paris and London closes with an admission that, while no temporary excursion into poverty equals social change, it does provide a necessary perspective from which to live and write, a point of view that may be carried back to one's "lower-upper-middle-class" and intellectual life. Recent criticism, however, has challenged Orwell's achievement of his purpose, noting that he never overcame a middle-class detachment from the poor and that the book lacks formal coherence and a decisive political point of view. (con't)