Džordžs Orvels "Posts Parīzē un Londonā"




nesanāk nocitēt latviski.. bet 22. nodaļa šai grāmatā spēcīgi sper pa neaizsargātām vitām..



F O R what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris plongeur. When
one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem city should
spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is
why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why I am not
taking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a
plongeur’s life.
I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is one of the slaves of the modem world. Not
that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still,
he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just
enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he
marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save
into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for
ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man
cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought
impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has
made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that
all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and
think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example,
is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but
somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur’s work. Some people must feed
in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of
civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
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.
We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just
because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a
beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a plongeur. He
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.
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as
one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern
town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loincloths.
Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in
the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey
moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or
forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt,
vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master
looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation —
whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is
still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the
pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the
pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for
gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are
luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small
amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his
case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less
useless. For, after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are
supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly
everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as
good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt
hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of
people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to
represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and
the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a
striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like
devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If
the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency,
plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a plongeur’s work is more or less useless. Then the question follows,
Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic
cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life.
For there is no doubt that people — comfortably situated people — do find a pleasure in such
thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, 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. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The
mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it
is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he
is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing
ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We
are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight like
devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are.
The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free,
even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our
trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in
a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year,
and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor
is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the
educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very
much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more
his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a
supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious,
fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like
Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the
poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the. average millionaire is only the
average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the
justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite
well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected
to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people
know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to
explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu’aux fenestres’ by a footnote; so remote is even hunger
from the educated man’s experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man
pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set
him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, ’any injustice,
sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that since there is no difference between the
mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose
now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of
boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.
To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary
work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he
had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because
they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur
because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types
of worker. These are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur’s life, made without
reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a
sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.