General thoughts as a piece of writing: Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell
A strange read: I’m not quite sure what genre it was,
somewhere between travel writing (but instead of moving geographically, moving
economic situation and social class), short story, autobiography, and anthropological study. Orwell dons the 'beggar's cloak' (there's something slightly uncomfortable ethically now I reflect - using people's lives as material before hopping back out of poverty) and spends some months living the life of someone at the bottom of the pile, economically and socially-speaking. It’s written in such a way, with a cast of characters that seem more
literary than real that it’s hard to believe that it is (at least partly) non-fiction. There is ‘Charlie’,
who discourses on his discovery of ‘love’ with a terrified prostitute, and ‘Bozo’
the astronomer-screever (street
artist), among many, many others. Meanwhile the description of life as a plongeur (the bottom rung of employee
in a Parisian hotel-restaurant), the colourful and slightly disorientating account
of Saturday night at Orwell’s preferred Parisian tavern, and the Russian secret
society operating out of a laundrette similarly test the suspension of
disbelief. Which also made it incredibly readable and compelling; I gobbled it
up in about 4 hours.
Poverty 'over here'
 |
| The cover of my own 1984 edition |
Anyway, we’re all here to witness my journey of intellectual
enlightenment on development matters. Or for The Thick of It lovers, in Phil’s words, “my quest to become the
man I know I can be". And in that context, it’s a useful tonic as someone
who spends a fair amount of their life reading about and acting on poverty located
outside their own society. It’s a cliché but poverty is a massive problem in ‘developed’
countries too, perhaps even reaching levels of a 'humanitarian crisis', and though it was published in 1933 the
number of homeless people I awkwardly avoid eye contact with on a daily basis
in London or Madrid (especially) suggests it’s still unfortunately relevant. On
top of that, not only does the whole story take place in my own geographical space, the language and style
of the writing means that it’s coming from my own cultural and class world.
It shouldn’t be this way, but inevitably as a card-carrying public schoolboy
(sounds awful doesn’t it?), reading an account of extreme poverty as ‘discovered’
by an ‘Etonian’ about 90 years ago is even more potent for me in some ways than
having lived among extremely poor
people in a rural area of Uganda for two months. The fact that writing all that
has made me feel uncomfortable is probably another credit to the book. Too many
middle class white people with no idea what poverty is like in ‘development’.
ANYWAY.
A simple representation of poverty
Leaving aside nights spent in a postcolonial-theory-induced
cold sweat, Orwell is super eloquent at illustrating the daily hardships and
impossible decisions that people without money have to go through. It’s kind of
the literary counterpart to reading Poor Economics which similarly aims to get
away from grand theories and down to the realities of poor people, whatever
your opinion of RCTs. We see the reality of the people on the other side of the
wall in the fancy restaurant, who are basically invisible in contemporary media
or politics (though this is a good article if you read Spanish). Going without food for days at a time feels “as though all one’s blood had been pumped
out and luke-warm water substituted”. Life moving from one lodging house to
another is “a squalid, eventless life of
crushing boredom.”
One especially relevant point for this blog is the indignity
of poverty and the power relations charity hides: on more than one occasion
Orwell and his homeless friend Paddy are forced to accept a religious service
in exchange for food, which he describes as a humiliating experience. In development land, it kind of
links into Hattori's idea on giving as a means of legitimating the ethical hegemony of capitalism if that isn't too pretentious to mention (if you can stomach it, gated paper is here). Money, and especially charity, gives power at a very basic level. Orwell
notes,“[i]t is curious how people take it
for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon
as your income falls below a certain level”. The parallels with
international development here are obvious. Structural adjustment imposed by
the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s would do nicely, or, playing devil’s
advocate you might well draw parallels with some donors’ recent suspension of aid over Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. Don’t quote me on that.
Though Orwell also describes little acts of resistance which
are kind of brilliant. At one point a religious group spontaneously enters a
hostel to give a service to the lodgers, presumably to ‘save their souls’. “No more notice was taken of them than f they
had been earwigs”. Taking up the structural adjustment parallel again, you
can kind of see this in the way that some developing-country governments made a
complete mockery of the imposed conditionality. Easterly's great for this: in The Elusive Quest for Growth, he states that Pakistan was given no less than 22 adjustment loans conditional
on reducing its budget deficit... which was steady at 7% of GDP throughout.
Van der Walle also depicts this amazingly.
Anyway before I end up summarising the entire book, the
message in general is (if there is one) that the poor are people like you
and me. Orwell says it better: “the
rich and poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the
average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit”. There’s
a really poignant illustration of this (can’t help myself) quite late in the
book, when Orwell, clearly in low spirits, suggests to Bozo, a disabled homeless
person that “[i]t seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for
nothing from that moment”. And Bozo replies with moving defiance, “You’ve just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a
free man in here’ – he tapped his forehead – and you’re all right”.
The broader picture
Oh and Orwell is humble. Self-deprecating (British) and humble. And that’s the beauty: that there
is no stylised, trite narrative or direct attempt at mobilisation, just a plain
presentation of experiences. The political implications are left for the reader
to decide. It starts without back-story – “The
rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning.” – and ends just as simply -“My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial
story”. There’s definitely a moral to be drawn in the development world: the
importance of decentring the role of ‘outsiders’ in defining the issues.
Actually quite a nice illustration of this in this interview with Bill Easterly
(about two-thirds of the way through I think).
Having said that, Orwell does venture some tentative
opinions about the underlying dynamics of poverty and the injustice of the
system. His explanation of the utter social uselessness of a plongeur and of
fancy restaurants and hotels, for example, is persuasive (all that strife for a
“cheap, shoddy imitiation [of luxury]”). In general the attack on the materialism and superficiality of society is probably even more relevant now than then, even if the politics then were different, as we now unfortunately don’t have any politics in the UK at least ("Q&A centred on people lamenting the state of the British Left or even whether such a thing still exists"). But the Marxist-inspired ‘keeping-the-mob-occupied-for-fear-of-revolution’ argument was probably more
relevant in the 1930s, so I won’t dwell on the theorising too much, be cause neither does Orwell – just “a sample of
the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in a hotel”. Humble.
Much to think about, and development-related too, without
there being a single line of argument. It’s a great read, and I’ll definitely
be moving on to The Road to Wigan Pier and
Homage to Catalonia. I’ll leave you
with the man himself for a modest conclusion:
“I shall never again
think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful
when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor
subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill,
nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”
[note: I feel obliged to mention that Orwell is weirdly
racist and anti-Semitic for someone I think of as progressive, but I choose not
to dwell for the purposes of this blog]
