In Defeat

Very occasionally I've found myself asking what it would have been like if I had been a teacher in this part of the world in the early twentieth century, given the attitudes towards race that prevailed in that period. It's a disconcerting question because one possible, indeed likely, answer is that I would have considered myself vastly superior to the native peoples whose lives I would have been attempting to illuminate, heroically bearing the white man's burden, as it were, bringing light to dark places. And this less than a hundred years ago if we take, say 1926 as a hypothetical date for our journey back in time.

To be honest even as I ask the question - which I generally do in the classroom, conjecturing in front of my students to make the question more real, I suppose - I find it difficult to believe that it was so easy to think in such terms back then, less than a couple of generations ago. The complete illogicality of basing judgments on race when you have the complex reality of actual individuals to deal with seems like a given, part of the very nature of things. But reading Orwell's Burmese Days, set in 1926, hence my not-so-arbitrary choice of year above, has been a reminder of how things really were - assuming Orwell got it right, as he usually did.

It's an extremely painful book to read, in more ways than one. Flory, the protagonist, is one of Orwell's deeply depressing losers, and you know things will turn out badly for him from the beginning. He's a study in the corroding nature of loneliness, of a decent man adrift in an endlessly corrupted world - socially, politically, personally. When he finally does away with himself it's almost a relief; the writer cannot torture him anymore.

But the real pain of the novel lies over and above the tragedy of a life being emptied and thrown away. The disconcertingly cruel racism that pervades the little world of Kyauktada results in a claustrophobic sense of hopelessness that made me glad when I was finally able to put the book to one side (yet, such is its power, not quite out of mind.) And there's a nagging suspicion that Orwell sort of accepts all this as the way of things, even though he illuminates its horrors.

The scene in which Flory makes it clear to Ma Hla May, his Burmese mistress, that her services are no longer required is made disturbing beyond measure by the fact that the reader is placed tentatively on Flory's side. We know exactly why he needs to get rid of her and rather hope she'll do the decent thing and go quietly away and find another life. And with effortless ease we are made complicit in a world in which race counts for almost everything an individual might achieve. After ruining Flory's life she ends up in a brothel in Mandalay regretting the good time when Flory was alive, and when she had not the wisdom to put aside any of the money she extracted from him. Does Orwell really mean to sound so cold? Yes, he does, because he isn't prepared to grant full humanity to any of his 'oriental' characters despite his understanding of the cruelty of their predicament. Mind you, it's fair to say that his Europeans are also caricatures, though vibrant with life, manifesting a frightening verisimilitude. The impossibly racist Ellis is a nice, or rather not very nice, example. The fact that the reader has little doubt that there were plenty of men like Ellis around in 1926 just adds to the sense of depression engendered by the novel. 

I wouldn't want to recommend this novel to anyone - it really is that strong. It leaves you defeated.