Horizon

Burmese Days Literary Club #4: Getting to Know You

Chapters 5 through 8 perform an audiacious, if bizarre trick: it sets up everything the reader needs to know about John Flory, introduces Elizabeth Lackersteen then sets up everything the reader needs to know about Elizabeth Lackersteen. And with all that, Orwell lets these two people--whom the reader knows are polar opposites and want vastly different things--get on with interacting with each other, blithely unaware of the other's true needs. I never realized how early it was indicated that the relationship between Flory and Elizabeth was completely and utterly doomed, but here it is by Chapter 8!

I agree with Bobby Farouk's sentiment in our last discussion that "It’s difficult to make a point with living, breathing people. Which is not to say his characters were uninteresting or wooden or unbelievable. But they did have to conform to where Orwell wanted them to go." and I think no where is that more evident than the biographical sketch of Flory that takes up chapter 5. The whole chapter feels like one of Orwell's essays from his Wigan Pier period, only barely disguised as clunky exposition. Flory seems, more than ever, a type than a character. And it's a type that I think Orwell used through his entire career: what I call the "Orwellian" character: someone who is aware that the situation he is in isn't right and wants to rebel, and tries to rebel, and fails.

And it's hard not to see Orwell's own biography in Flory's in some ways. Which may be why I find Elizabeth's background less inexpert in its handling. Orwell has to rely on his own imagination more, perhaps, and draws less off his own personal experience (although his descriptions of the pensions of Paris do have the smell of Down and Out about them...). I love how Orwell describes her code: "It was that the Good ('lovely' was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant and the aristocratic; and the Bad ('beastly') is the cheap, the low, the shabby the laborious".

But I don't want to completely trash Orwell's character skills because once you have these two almost mutually exclusive backgrounds out of the way, the relationship between Flory and Elizabeth is achingly poignant. Flory--who even his Indian friend is a supporter of the Raj-- is desperate for an intimate, someone who will see Burma with the same passion; of course, Elizabeth sees all of Burma as 'beastly'. When I read this book as an 18 year-old my identification was totally with Flory, because I understood as a teenager who couldn't get a date that massive yearning for someone to talk to who sees the world in your terms.

I was hoping to find a good link about pwe and pwe dancing but so far I haven't found one. If anyone finds one let me know.

Posted by Graeme Burk at December 17, 2004 06:46 AM