Flattering Myths Revered in Common
There is a point in Gustav Hasford's 'The Short-timers' in which Hasford tries to explain the dominance of the "pogue" - "non-infantry, non-combat soldiers, staff, and other rear-echelon or support units" - by writing, "Pogues survive not by courage or ability but by cultivated inertia, flattering myths revered in common, and an ignorance as hard as iron." But we all have our "flattering myths revered in common." As Mark Twain once said (and as we're reminded Ad nauseam during election cycles), "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Orwell's primary thematic concern in 'Down and Out in Paris and London' would seem to be just that: that the qualities and characterizations we assign to the "down and out," ("we" being anyone not in that condition), indeed, to poverty itself, are, by and large, completely arbitrary and mostly useless. As a matter of craft, we could do worse than to look at how Orwell subverts our ignorance and assumptions, often in the simplest and most unexpected ways.
One of the ways Orwell accomplishes this is to introduce a question with a brief exchange of dialogue. For example, when the narrator is told, while working as a plongeur in Paris, that he must "shave that moustache off at once!" he is, initially, baffled. Writes Orwell: "On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his shoulders. 'You must do what he says, mon ami. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except the cooks. I should have thought you would have noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the custom.'" Only now, having eased us through the door via dialogue, and fun, jaunty dialogue at that, does Orwell turn to exposition, elaborating that there are indeed "reasons" for the custom - waiters are superior to plongeurs and they do not wear moustaches, why then should plongeurs? Cooks do wear moustaches, how then to appear superior to waiters if waiters wear moustaches as well? In other words, "There is no reason" - not a real one, anyway, beyond trivia and appearances. It's just that, well, it is the custom.
Elsewhere Orwell uses the notion of the "smart hotel" itself to subvert preconceptions - the general preconception being that the smarter the hotel, the more expensive and fashionable, the better its service in terms of hosting, food, decorum, and so forth, and this would seem true at first glance as they only hire the best personnel, and drive them mercilessly. But Orwell subverts this by drawing a distinction: " - that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot - meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worst private houses in the things that matter." Later, Orwell uses visceral imagery to render the point: "Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered - a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body." It is a wonderfully apt metaphor, and the author of this post recalls thinking something similar when he worked as a night watchman during the restoration of the Davenport Hotel in Spokane. The rot and filth and bleed witnessed are of course still there, only gilded, and thinly. Orwell perpetuates this notion with his discussion of London lodging houses, casual wards, and so forth, at one point writing, "It was a filthy place. Yet the deputy and his wife were friendly people, and ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night."
Elsewhere, in service to his theme, Orwell asks a series of rhetorical questions, culminating with, "Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. [The plongeur] earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury." Orwell elaborates on this by using the example of the Indian rickshaw puller, or gharry pony: "They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals." He then draws an analog between the rickshaw puller and the plongeur, indeed, between the plongeur and the hotel itself, writing, "They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it." Having established, at least for the sake of argument, "that a plongeur's work is more or less useless," Orwell then questions the reason why anyone should find pleasure in the thought of "men swabbing dishes for life." He answers by paraphrasing Marcus Cato: "A slave...should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good - for slaves, at least."
It is here we draw closer to what is perhaps Orwell's central thesis, again, that the qualities and characterizations we assign to the "down and out," and to poverty itself, are completely arbitrary and mostly useless. Orwell makes his argument by subverting conventional wisdom on what is work and what is not. One of the ways he does this is to categorize and place into a hierarchy the various types of London beggar, from organ-grinders to screevers to hymn-singers to match-sellers. "As the law now stands," he writes, "if you approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by droning 'Nearer, my God, to Thee, or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches...you are held to be following a legitimate trade and not begging." Orwell then compares these trades to other trades such as bricklayers and literary critics, and finds no fundamental difference between them. "What is work?" Orwell asks rhetorically, and the answer is, well, begging. "It is a trade like any other," he writes, "quite useless, of course - but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless."
A final example of Orwell's craft may be found in the section on London slang and swearing. Here Orwell uses the origins and interpretations of words to further illustrate his theme, writing, "A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing." He then discusses how words mean different things to different people in different cultures, observing, "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."
Reason? There is no reason. It is the custom.