Doublethink!

Orwell manages to puncture the mystique of the colonial whites by depicting them off-duty, which is perfectly aligned with the reader’s assumption that once again, this book is going to be a great critique of imperialism (it is George Orwell after all). Orwell’s antipathy toward imperialism manifests itself rather bizarrely in his veiled disdain for Burmese nationalism, whom he paints as effectively terrorists, dacoits and puppet peasants firmly in the thrall of U Po Kyin who wishes to fulfil his desire to become even more of a “parasite” upon the British by becoming part of them, by inclusion into the Club. Burmese nationalism is then characterized as friable; the riot is easily broken up. Even the editor of the Burmese Patriot who was at the center of it all wasn’t spared- he evidently abandoned his hunger strike after a feeble six hours. At the end of it all we are left with the distinct impression that U Po Kyin, ironically, poses more of a challenge to British rule by wanting to become an agent himself and continuing his shenanigans. His cupidity is more likely to reshape colonial society by playing into the corruption that it is predicated on (Orwell has already glossed on the myopia of the British- no British officer would ever believe anything against his own men). After all, “absorbed in intrigue”, isn’t U Po Kyin “practically invulnerable”, being “too fine a judge of men”? Flory’s epithets come to mind: he praises the “absolute savages” that Elizabeth perceives, calling them “highly civilized”, even more so than them. Indeed, U Po Kyin is more vile, more ingratiatingly clever, and ultimately more imperialist than say Maxwell or Flory. Lynnette posits that desire is recycled into banality and it is this precise banality that U Po Kyin idealizes, living under the aegis of deception of the Empire on all fronts.

such unsexiness

What stood out the most for in Burmese Days was the very different treatment of sexuality and desire in the novel. Someone mentioned earlier that all characters in the novel were cast in a negative light, and I’ll add that all but one are decidedly physically unattractive. We’re already familiar enough with the subversion of white male superiority, hence Flory’s giant birthmark, the yellowing Mrs Lankersteen and a whole host of lazy, drunk colonials. However, unlike previous novels read on the course, the native Other is never exoticised or aestheticized into an object of desire. Even at her best Ma Hla May is “an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely beautiful one” (52); the clearest visual picture we get of the Burmese man is U Po – “fat, symmetrically, like fruit swelling”. Unlike Kurtz’s African mistress or the hunky punka-wallah of Passage to India, the native is no longer represented as possessing the virility, health and other attributes that the Empire is shown to have lost.

If the native is read as representative of the ‘East’ that is colonised, the novel suggest an attenuation of the colonial daydream of the East as Exotic Other. Colonies are no longer ideal sites constructed in opposition to the West, upon which the desires of the West can be projected. Neither does the East exist as an Other: when seen through the eyes of Orwell it takes on the same mundane, greyish hue as do the withering colonials. Even Elizabeth, the central object of desire, becomes by the end of the novel “the position for which Nature had designed her for from the first, that of a burra memsahib” (287). Desire is recycled endlessly into banality; the loss of desire suggests a dissipation of virility that heralds Empire’s impeding decline.

(Birth)marks, representality, “beastly” Art

As has been mentioned in many of the posts, I found it interesting that Orwell is deliberately reductive – he emphasizes the exterior, stereotypes, literary tropes – in Burmese Days. On one hand, this leads to some skilful puncturing of tired images and words in two of Orwell’s biggest concerns: contemporary English writing and the colonial project in general. For example, I found the description of Verrall rather hilarious: the emphasis of his “gleam[ing]” whiteness and martial appearance on a horse evokes the quintessentially British image of St George, but is subverted by his spear being “like a needle in his hand” and his resemblance to “a rabbit, perhaps, but a tough and martial rabbit”.

On the other hand, the notion of quintessence and representality in art is a vexed issue throughout Orwell’s text. Flory’s birthmark is both a literal mark of Cain and a physical, symbolic aspect of himself that his self struggles with constantly. Significantly, it is the only part of him that Elizabeth remembers after their estrangement, while it fades to a “faint grey stain” only after his death. A project, whether artistic or colonial, that tries to essentialize things in their representation is both inevitable and necessarily flawed.

But this creates a dilemma for the artist, who fundamentally traffics in representation: how is one to make art then? Orwell satirizes this dilemma in Flory and Elizabeth’s exchange on the pwe dance. Elizabeth’s dismissal of “the hated word Art” is juxtaposed against Flory the consummate artist (and proto-Orwell), who looks for the ‘higher’ values in objects and life; for him, “the whole life and spirit of Burma is summed up in the way [the dancer] twists her arms”. But as we see in Shooting an Elephant and Burmese Days, representation is much more complex than that for Orwell, particularly when it comes to representing the native – perhaps why he resorts to stereotypes. What then are we to make of his rounded, sympathetic portrayal of Flory and the narrator in Shooting – is it really an attempt at revising representality or does Orwell have other objectives in mind (since it’s a lost cause anyway)?

Fielding and Flory

I’m 9 chapters into Burmese Days(oops?) and I couldn’t help noticing how this novel evokes (Levine, Fanon and Chatterjee naturally but, particularly) Forster’s novel. Discussion about imperialism/colonialism undeniably entails looking at the dialogue between the white man and the native and the juxtaposition of these groups can be found in both these novels. But I found the dialogue and generally, relationships in BD to be more complex than they were in PI. I say so largely because I drew parallels between Aziz & Fielding and, Veraswami & Flory. In retrospect, A & F’s relationship seems so…cliché. White man inherently good, will withstand whole community for his principles, native collapses under white prejudice, native now got ‘once bitten, twice shy’ syndrome so relationship with white man affected. The native still comes out looking like the weak link in the relationship, as the one who couldn’t understand the white man’s generosity.

That’s what I found refreshing about Orwell’s novel and Flory. Flory is anti- imperialist, his best friend is a native and he doesn’t like the fools at the Club. But he is restricted by his own inaction, by his utter refusal to take any sides/responsibility or to voice his genuine opinion. He is his own enemy in a sense. And with Fielding, a reader can almost predict that Fielding is going to vouch for Aziz but at this point, considering the conversation between Flory and Veraswami in chap 3 and Flory’s honest explanation that he wants to avoid “rows”, I can’t predict what he is going to do. Forster seems to still make use of the traditional white hero figure to represent the so-called unconventional Anglo-Indian Fielding while Forster complicates that figure by depicting inner struggle and showing what it really means to be that unconventional.

(295 words)

Topsy-Turvy

I found Flory and Veraswami’s friendship reminiscent of Aziz and Fielding in Passage. Both Flory and Veraswami respect and enjoy engaging each other in civil conversation. Flory especially seems to appreciate this aspect of their friendship, preferring it to the uncouth group of white men boozing and idling back at the Club. Yet I am not sure if Veraswami returns these sentiments, herein lies the first instance of topsy-turvy-ness in this text: Veraswami, unlike Aziz, does not harbour disdain for the white man. Instead, he adores them; he envies the “prestige” of being one, and wonders “if only I were a member of your European Club…How different would my position be!” Perhaps what he seeks in Flory’s friendship is only the accompanying prestige of being in the presence of a white man?

Similarly, Ma Hla May quite obviously doesn’t need/want Flory for love (she already has Bo Pe), yet clings on to him all for prestige: “It was the idle concubine’s life that she loved, and the visits to her village dressed in all her finery, when she could boast of her position…” Consider also U Po Kyin, (who for some strange reason reminds me of Kim Jong Il!) backstabbing his fellow countryman Veraswami just so he could enter the Club, again, to raise his prestige.

The tables seem to have turned on white-ness as it has now been reduced to a commodity; a “white accessory” to borrow Melissa’s term, as something for the natives to exploit. Funny how Veraswami corrects Flory’s griping that the Europeans have come to rob by saying “…at least you have brought to us law and order”, which raises two new questions: first, did not the ‘natives’ exploit the colonisers in their own way and second, can we say that Empire was not such a bad thing after all?

(304 words, and whee~23:51, just made it!)

Native-Colonial Friendships

What struck me as interesting of Orwell's Burmese Days was the seemingly similar relationship between Forly and Dr. Veraswami, and Forster's Fielding and Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India (Hey. They're both doctors.. interesting. Not.)

To me, these two native-colonial friendships reveal the inevitable strain between people of different races during the colonial period. As A Passage to India aptly ends with the notion that it was a matter of 'wrong time, wrong place' (316).

In Burmese Days, Flory and Dr. V share a close intimate relationship which is strangely 'allowed', unlike an "alliance, partisanship" (Burmese Chap. 6) which was forbidden. (Why so?) This, to me, is rather odd. And as much as Flory disses the colonial enterprise he "lack[s] the small spark of courage" (Chap. 5) that is required to make the right choice. He gives in to the immense pressure to act like a sahib (Chap. 13), this calls to mind Shooting An Elephant.

Similary, in A Passage to India, this pressure is summed up by the line, "The English always stick together!" (235) and that Fielding has once again abandoned Aziz for Miss Quested (236).

I think this native-colonial relationship presented in Burmese Days highlights an interesting point that not all the Englishmen were nasty buggers, some were under immense pressure to conform to both colonial and native expectations. To an extent, I actually find Shooting An Elephant and Burmese Days slightly sympathetic of the plight of 'certain' Englishmen.

P.S.: Am using the online text for Burmese Days so no page numbers! Pardon!

"If our prestige iss good, we rise; if bad, we fall"

Unlike in Forster's "Passage to India," where membership to the club is strictly British-only, the Kyauktada club in "Burmese Days" is considering the admission of orientals ( not sure what happens later. sorry, I'm only at chapter 10!). This seems to be an 'opening up' of the club. Hence, I find it strange that the narrative voice of "Burmese Days" should describe the club in esoteric terms -- as a "Nirvana" and as also as a "spiritual club." I believe it is through this contradiction that Orwell's "Burmese Days" highlights the importance of honor and reverence to maintaining imperial rule.

By describing the club as a transcendent space is to suggest that it is both exclusive to the honorable colonial masters and desired by the less honorable natives. When orientals are admitted however, spatial boundaries are eroded, and the colonizer/colonized relationship is threatened. Hence, the honor of this sacred space is vehemently protected by Ellis, when he says "No natives in this Club! It’s by constantly giving way over small things like that that we’ve ruined the Empire." Elli's sharp vehement dismissal simultaneously exposes the the frantic manner in which the colonizer clings onto his seat of honor -- "the real seat of the British power." This emphasizes the importance of maintaining this prestige. Similarly, as a colonial officer, the narrator in "Shooting an Elephant" must shoot the elephant in order to maintain the honor of the empire and by extension imperial rule.

Acts of Literature: The Margins of Flory's Inscription

What struck me as I was reading Orwell’s novel was the conspicuous amount of literary references and allusions that filters through Flory. He maps Paris through literary names like Baudelaire, Maupassant and Proust, implying that the best a culture and society has to offer is distilled through aesthetics. Orwell suggests however, that this focus can prove to be distorting, and shows this through the story of Elizabeth’s past, where all she encounters is squalor and “beastliness” (92) with none of “those interminable conversations with bearded artists” (91) that Flory thinks her life is surrounded by. Orwell ironizes Flory through his blissful unawareness of the stultification of European art that degenerates into sham artistic pursuits, and cannot provide an answer for societal and familial alienation and estrangement.

Flory’s coding of a society through aesthetic lenses also leads him to dichotomize European art and all its attendant societal glories, and Eastern art which reflects “a civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times when we were dressed in woad” (105). Flory unconsciously articulates prevalent discourses about Asiatic society that needed colonialism as a spur to progress. Flory however wants it both ways: the landscape is also exoticized as an unsullied paradise which he wants to share with Elizabeth. The fantasy of an originary site of innocence relies on this objectification of space that must remain untouched. Flory’s psychic split manifests itself as a textual doubling of Elizabeth and Ma Hla May: however much he aspires after a model of European femininity, she is made desirable only against a native Other that precedes her. Orwell suggests that a framing of experience through literature only sets up false binaries between what must be preserved (at the cost of its artificiality) and what can only serve as a backdrop.

Glorious?

By telling the story of a small number of English expatriates living in Burma, far from major centers of power and commerce, Orwell highlights the consequences of believing and claiming that an individual's actions must conform to common communal thought rather than to the individual's mind.

In the case of colonial Burma, the central false premise is that there's any difference between black and white. Both oppressor and oppressed believe implicitly that the English are more worthy, more capable, more real than then Burmese or Indians. U Po Kyin is described as having "grasped that his own people were no match for this race of giants".

John Flory must count as the hero of the piece, though deeply flawed. A factor for a teak-wood company, he retreated to Burma in the face of an inability to come to terms with English society. Disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek, and deeply scarred by the complete social rejection this minor blemish produced in the England of his boyhood and youth, he hides in this most distant outpost of the Empire, running a lumber camp and coming into the town of Kyauktada when he can, spending his evenings at the local European Club, "playing bridge and getting three parts drunk”, hardly a glamourous picture for a white person in a colonized landscape. Flory is a good man, but his lack of self-esteem and self-confidence make him weak in the face of the enormous social pressures exerted by the tiny community of Europeans, from which he is profoundly alienated. To some extent, he is doubly alienated and stifled in this novel- by the colonized as well as his own people, placing him in a liminality that is in some ways similar to the narrator in Shooting the Elephant- a position that is enticingly glorious yet unfriendly.

(302 Words)

Flory's 'Glory' and Unsympathetic Characters in Burmese Days

I found the name of Flory quite interesting considering the character. The images conjured in me on first sight were that of 'glory' and 'flourish', which are certainly not attributes that the man himself usually conjures.  The only times when he is covered in 'glory' is under what one may consider false pretexts - when he chased away the tame buffalo, during the shooting trip, and later when he aided in dispersing the riot.  Every time, the 'glory' is ripped away, sooner or later (for example when Flory fell off the pony).  Flory as 'false glory', a slippage from the lette F to G; and the fact that it is a vaguely feminine-sounding name (especially when his dog's name Flo brings attention to that) - he ends up as a false hero, right to the end of the novel (which I'll not spoil here :p).

In fact, none of the characters come of the novel well; for example, Verasami's blind faith in the British Raj, Elizabeth's anti-intellectual snobbery, the Anglo-Indians' general racism (particularily Ellis's), U Po Kyin's slippery ruthlessness, even his wife's passivity.  Orwell, in fact, seems to go out of his way to make the characters unlikable, with few if any redeeming qualities.  By provoking dislike for the characters, Orwell invites us to condemn the sorts of attitudes and worldviews that drive them.

-- Yingzhao

The Machiavellian Oriental in Burmese Days

*Spoiler Alert*

In some ways I see a striking resemblance between U Po Kyin and Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. They are Machiavellian villains and (I find) rather delightfully so. Both exude fierce cunning and insight in reading human nature and manipulating it for their own ends. Devious yes, but laudable in their cleverness. UPK can then be seen as a figure through which Orwell critiques the social laws and strictures of colonial society, which attempts to demarcate White superiority vis-à-vis the colonized Burmese. U Po Kyin manipulates colonial society’s regulations on sexual behaviour, like the White female’s fear of being raped by the colonised subject, “raped by a procession of jet-black coolies” (142) in order to defame Dr Veraswami and attain the elusive Club membership for himself. Through the figure of UPK, Orwell indirectly critiques these paranoid assumptions of natives, as firstly we the readers know Dr Veraswami wouldn’t hurt a fly. Ironically he adores them and would have been an ideal Club member. Orwell can thereby be seen as critiquing the social laws set in place by the colonial subjects with regard to sexuality. While “kid-glove laws” are set in place by the English colonial government to include the natives as “equals” in theory, ultimately cultural strictures in the novel, particularly regarding that of sexual relations ingrained and perpetuated by colonials, uphold “white prestige” (Stoler’s essay), and darkly prevents justice from being perpetuated.

However certainly, a negative Oriental stereotyping, on Orwell’s part, is starkly evident in his depiction of UPK, like other natives in the text, as a grotesque figure “so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help” and UPK is detestable and cruel in raping young helpless virgins in front of their mothers. Moreover, I think his crime is foiled at first by Flory (not finished yet. And we are led to think he’s another Fu Manchu (Sax Rohmer character) defeated by the heroic Anglo-Saxon male.

But ultimately his plotting and scheming, sees him through. Unlike Iago (I read the ending…dislike being left hanging so I always ruin endings for myself by skipping ahead.) UPK does get away with his crime (well somewhat) as the English justice fails to be served. And it might be just me but I find he's also adorably comic in his childish delight and the text does make us biased against Englishmen like Ellis, who deserve to be hoodwinked.

White Accessories

What does it take to be white? Let’s view the checklist: you must first have the skin colour and bone structure to match (by contrast the ‘native’ is “dark” or “bronze” and has a flat nose, not forgetting the reminders that they have “eyes like those of a dog”), next you need the attitude of a racist, and you also ought to know how to shoot or play polo. A rough checklist may be derived from Elizabeth’s likes and dislikes—they serve as a marker for what is socially desirable in a proper White man. My point in dwelling on this issue of White criteria has to do with the fact that the theme or the up-keep of appearances seems very central to the performance of Whiteness.
Flory looks the part of the White man (and thus pleases Elizabeth) when he talks about dogs and shooting, attends club activities and dresses in “silk shirts” or “shooting boots”; Ellis through his belief in “ruling [“damn black swine”] in the only way they understand”, i.e. aggressively; and Elizabeth by responding with an expression of horror and disgust at everything native (rejecting Chinese tea, Burmese dance, even innocently non-toilet trained native babies). I’d argue that even her “tortoise-shell spectacles” symbolically enhances her performance of White superiority and “self-possess[ion]”, especially because it is described as “more expressive, indeed, than eyes”—eyes, being the windows to a soul, should express the heart of a person, but those spectacles express the look of a confidence befitting a White woman. The only time I recall Elizabeth not wearing them is when she is trying to seduce Verrall. Similarly, the Eurasians wear “huge topis to remind you that they’ve got European skulls”, and make claims of suffering “prickly heat”. If Whiteness is a culture, then these are its signposts.

I am lonely, let me in!

I find it interesting to read Burmese Days after “Shooting an Elephant”. If I had not read “Shooting an Elephant” first, my attitude towards Burmese Days might have been quite different. As it is, I have problems with Elizabeth’s and Flory’s characters.

In my previous post, I said Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant” reflects the conflicts the White man faces simply because he is seen as a colonist. Flory seems to embody these conflicts and magnify them in Burmese Days. Both show an intense dislike for the British Empire and proclaim an interest in and sympathy for the Burmese. Both also reveal the pressures they are under to perform their proper prescribed roles in the colony. For Orwell, it was the act of having to shoot the elephant that highlighted his helplessness, that he even lacked control over whether or not he could shoot an elephant. For Flory, this helplessness was more profound. First, as a friend of Dr. Veraswami, he does not have as much power as the rest of the Europeans in the club. Second, despite his constant criticisms of ‘the British prestige, the white man’s burden, the pukka sahib sans peur et sans reproche’ (36), he still subscribes to it. He gives excuses for not being able to help his Oriental friend out: ‘No, he could not face that row! It was not worth it’ (46). Despite what Flory says, I still find that he desires to be a part of the White community, to fit in or at least, have someone else just like him. Which was why he desired Elizabeth, someone whom he thought would understand him and shared his point-of-view. This desire for her reflects his desire to conform and assimilate into British society more than to show his open-mindedness towards Burmese culture. Ultimately, Flory is still a White man who wants to belong somewhere, and this somewhere is still British society, whether he likes it or not.

"Their hearts are of gold..."

Capitalism moves insidiously into the heart of the Law within "Burmese Days". Equality before the law is shown to be perpetually non-existent. Any sort of equality or justice within the law is only shown to benefit a profit/power-making venture; "His [U Po Kyin’s] practice... was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case on strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality".

UPK is far from being the only “corrupter” of the Law within this text. As Flory points out in his debate with Dr. Veraswami, “the official holds the Burman down while the business man goes through his pockets… The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English”.

Law and order, [implemented, of course, with the governance of a particular colony], is laid down simply to reap profits for the Empire and ensure the smooth running of this business we call the Colonial Enterprise. Burma “might have slept in the Middle Ages for a century more if it had not proved a convenient spot for a railway terminus”.

The British who were “creeping round the world building prisons…and call[ing] it progress” could be seen as “modernizing” the colonies with such infrastructures for their own benefit, and “imprisoning” the colonies within their profit-making ventures.

Colonial law is a child of capitalism where the “universal” nature of Law becomes easily corrupted, used and abused. Capitalism, with its divisive rather than unifying nature, further corrupts the notion of Law [and to an extent, Modernism]. Hence, the notion of Modernization as well as the Law becomes nothing more than a farce in Burmese Days.

Burmese days

As compared to Conrad, Burmese Days didn’t appear to be as “racist” in the sense that racist descriptions are not all piled up on the native; neither does the narrator align himself with any particular race. Racial stereotypes and differences are certainly built upon, but Orwell in fact casts all characters, whether “white”, “black” or “yellow”, in a negative light. It is a colonial world that presents human nature at its worst – corrupted, greedy, immoral – “with theft as its final object” (68). U Po Kyin is presented as a scheming and devious (and fat) Burmese man who plots against his enemies, but believes in “acquiring” merit by helping to build pagodas and sending gifts to priests. The use of the word “acquire” ties in with the capitalistic nature of colonialism but also exposes religious hypocrisy, including the ironies of some aspects of Buddhism. On another level, the white man in Burma leads a degenerate and revolting life, “a life of lies” where “[he] is free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator” but [his] opinion…is dictated…by the pukka sahibs’ code” (69).

In relation to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, I think there may be recognition between master and slave, especially in Dr. Veraswami and Flory’s relationship, but it actually seems as though both natives and colonizers submit to the colonial system; so that, it is not exactly the native landscape that corrupts the “civilized” English and show the savagery of the natives, but that perhaps colonialism creates situations that puts both the English and the natives to a test of morality and human desires, and in which both parties fall into a sort of degeneracy.

Misogyny in Burmese Days

Burmese days seems to have an misogynistic male bias because it has a tendency to gloss over rape and events of sexual exploitation in a matter-of-fact manner. Rape seems to be “naturalized” and described as simply a banal, mundane, commonplace by-product of the tyrannical patriarchal imperialist regime. Rape is an event that is stripped of its symbolic meanings (brutal male violation of female individual freedom, psychological trauma) when the text either describes it as an insignificant, unremarkable event that demands no further explication or represses the event as a non-event altogether. For instance, after U Po Kyin’s callous dismissal of the young village girl with a baby (that requests to see him, claiming the baby to be his) because he did not “recognize her” since he engages in too much rape that all the girls become faceless, the third person narrator does not represent the subjectivity or individuality or point of view of the girl who was raped by U Po Kyin. She remains unidentified, unnamed, unknown--the voiceless subaltern who cannot speak. This event is then dismissed and silenced by the misogynistic text as one of the many mundane events in U Po Kyin’s life that demands no further elaboration. Thus, the text is inflicting metaphorical textual violence on the female victims of sexual exploitation; an exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal gender politics of Imperialism, which is an androcentric male enterprise. The narrator is also disturbingly misogynistic in how he depicts Mr. Lackersteen’s sexual exploitation of the Burmese prostitutes in a comic, light-hearted and amused manner, when he jokes that “Mr. Lackersteen managed to enjoy quite a number of good times (of quickie sex with Burmese prostitutes), although they were hurried ones.” The text’s use of the subject of sexual violence as a joke to highlight the comic relations between a henpecked husband and a domineering wife is misogynistic because it trivializes and obscures the grave consequences of sexual violence and exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal colonial regime.

Aestheticizing Performance and Performing Art

I am interested in the modernist aestheticization of the Burmese pwe in Orwell’s Burmese Days. As “a kind of Burmese play; a cross between a historical drama and a revue” (101), the pwe embodies “nativeness”. We are told that the skirts of the pwe’s best dancer “curved outwards above her hips . . . according to the ancient Burmese fashion” (103); the significance being that the pwe is a form of homage to Burmese heritage and tradition. Although the pwe is a material embodiment of “Burmese-ness,” it is presented as a modernist aesthetic. If the subjugation of Blacks is aestheticized – in that while in service to the Whites, they are dressed in stylistic clothes – in the music box that Jean Genet saw, then the subjugation of the Burmese “natives” can similarly be said to be aestheticized. This aestheticization takes place not only because the dancer is reduced to inanimate objects, but more importantly, because her movements are compared to aesthetic commodities: she has the movement like “one of those jointed wooded figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and elbows rotated was precisely like a jointed doll” (104, italics mine). Burmese subjugation, in other words, is stylicized and incorporated into literary texts in a manner that we do not question, precisely because it has been naturalized.

After establishing how Burmese subservience is aestheticized in the text, it is necessary to discuss the reaction towards this ‘aesthetification’. The European reaction to the pwe is that of both attraction and revolt: Flory tells us that it is “grotesque, it’s even ugly . . . yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it!” (105). In this respect, the conflicted response to the pwe is similar to the European response towards U Po Kyin right from the start of the novel: he was a man “shapely and even beautiful in his grossness” (1). The response to both the pwe and U Po Kyin remind us of the narrator’s response towards the dead “native” in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant; in the latter case, likewise, the narrator is both fascinated and repulsed by the dead Indian coolie.

the east and the west in dialogue

I was particularly interested in Flory's conversation with the Dr Veraswami in Chapter 3. Orwell sets it up as an easy relationship in which both the characters respect the other as equals. It is similar to the relationship between Aziz and Fielding. The Doctor pines for "cultured conversation". The veranda then becomes a stage on which this exchange can happen.

The veranda was wide and dark, with low eaves from which baskets of fern hung, making it seem like a cave behind a waterfall of sunlight.

The veranda is positioned as a place where Flory escapes from the heat and realities of the other Whites. The shape is also similar to a proscenium stage. There are references to Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and even a parody of a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet in his "how noble a type iss the English gentleman!" speech. There is gesture (nipping the thumb and forefinger together), action happening "offstage" (Muttu's begging) and declamatory statements "Behold there the degeneracy of the East".

However, there is a certain perfunctoriness in the dialogue - as if both actors already familiar with the script.

The joke that the "British Empire was an aged female patient of the doctor's" had gone on for two years, the doctor "grew agitated, as he always did" when Flory criticised the Club members, they have a "favourite argument" which takes place "as often as the two men met". Even the form of the argument is repetitive since he always interrupts the argument at the same point which "as a rule it followed the same course, almost word for word"

Dialogue is not "alive" but repetitive and to no fruitful end. Equality is a myth as Flory claims in the next chapter that the doctor does not understand what he says. The roles that Flory and the doctor take up seem to be mere stereotypes which continually perform the roles of the colonised and the colonialist who has "gone native".

MindYour Language

''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'

'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'

Ellis' sentiment jumped out at me because it seems to share some qualities with our current contemporary debates on English/Singlish in Singapore: A particular mode of language use becomes the defining characteristic of a certain class or category. So the colonised should speak with a kind of broken mangled English; the ah beng with a particular kind of chinesey singlish (i've always felt that singlish varies depending on the race of the person speaking and which asian grammar s/he incorporates).

Chatterjee already points out language as a site of colonial difference (cf The Nil Durpan affair). In a slight variation, we can say that even within one language, English, the mode of usage itself is a site of difference. Perhaps this has its descendants in the realm of English Language teaching, with the strange aura attached to "native speakers".

As the little episode above shows, language use seems less rigidly fixed by our physical boundaries; one thinks of 'impressions' as a kind of stand up comedy staple. Yet it is interesting to see how closely we associate language with these other markers of difference: for Ellis, to hear a grammatically correct sentence spoken by a native servant is revolting in itself.

Difference exists, it is the set of values (e.g. British Superiority) written into that difference that is problematic. But when we become attached to the values, then the difference cannot ever be allowed to mutate in character, or worse, to vanish: it becomes as if an attack on those values. Which is what happens in the passage above, and perhaps why the rest of the chapter degenerates into a load of nostalgia for the old Raj where the values of British Superiority were unchallenged.

Insidious Absorption?

Chapters 1 to 18 of Orwell’s Burmese Days was, in my honest opinion, are the most painfully racist writing I have read. In fact, in shifting the reader’s perspective between the omniscient narrator, Flory and the other characters, Orwell’s writing insidiously aligns the reader with the racism, even though the surface text is revolting in its raw prejudice, and shows the reader how he has been tricked into it.

Perhaps how Orwell’s writing subtly allies the reader with the imperial racism of the text is the description of the landscape. This can be clearly seen in the way Flory’s perspective of the wretched landscape is continued from the omniscient narrator’s introduction of the township to the reader (14-15). From the “scorched and khaki-coloured” maidan, the “wastes of paddy fields” and the “blackish hills” (14), Flory’s description of the place in his loneliness (of suitable European companionship) is simply a “bloody” hole improvised into a song as he “switched at dried-up grasses with his stick (15).

The about-turn comes when Flory describes gardening as the “greatest consolation” in Burma, which includes how phloxes, African marigolds and zinnias grow in the land (84). Interestingly Flory starts saying how he loves “that somber yellow colour [of] the maidan”, when Elizabeth remarks “what a perfectly divine view you have”(85).

And what else can we say about the racism in Orwell’s writing when not just the landscape is preferential to the enjoyment by Europeans, but animals as well? Flory’s dog Flo, upon meeting Elizabeth, tries to get her attention by “frisking” around her (84). The most hilarious line I have found is perhaps this:

“She always barked at strange Orientals, but she liked the smell of a European.”

Whether Orwell can be qualified as a racism by our terms and conditions in this present day, there is no doubt that his writing is obviously showing us the most extreme sense of racism, and perhaps in revealing it to us in this way, parodying it cleverly.

stereotypes in burmese days

spoilers for the ending ahead...

i felt that what could have been quite a convincing case made on Orwell's part against the Empire was seriously undermined by the flatness of the characterizations in burmese days. practically all but the protagonist were stereotypical characters fleshed out by the narrative only in so far as they (the characters) affected Flory or any main plot forces.

men: Dr. Veraswamy (subservient, obsequious native who worships colonials that serves to play up Flory's anti-imperialism), Ellis (racist colonial that does the same), Mr. Lackersteen, Mr. Macgregor, Westfield (faceless white colonials who cling together socially to preserve their 'whiteness'), Verrall (quintessential embodiment of patriarchal ideals of 'maleness' against which Flory's deficiencies are enhanced), UPK (corrupt native), etc...

women: Ma Hla May (fawning, materialistic Oriental mistress), Elizabeth and Mrs. Lackersteen (typical memsahibs who prize marriage above all and frown upon natives)

That Flory wants to believe more in these characters, particularly Elizabeth - whom he idealises and romanticises as better than the rest, and a means of escape from his loneliness - points to his naivete and obvious deficiencies as an adequate spokesperson and representative of the text's anti-imperialist sentiments. further, the text portrays these characters as one-dimensional agents of their individual simplistic capitalist or racist agendas, manipulating and puppeteering them in favour of the narrative's consensus that anti-imperialism, or even any sort of ambivalence towards clear-cut colonizer/colonized, white/black binaries, must end in tragedy and failure. (as evidenced by Flory's suicide)

Women in Burmese Days

Orwell criticizes colonialism and attempts to expose “the lie that [colonizers are] here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them”, but his critique of the evils of colonialism is confined to the male-centred world. Orwell does not extend the same critique to colonialism’s complicity in reinforcing the subjugation of women. This disparity is embodied in Flory’s treatment of indigenous men, striking friendships with Veraswami and other indigenous men while simultaneously mistreating Ma Hla May like a domesticated pet-slave; he purchases her from her parents and describes her as having “rather nice teeth, like the teeth of a kitten”. The manner in which Flory mistreats and abuses Ma Hla May serves as a parallel to Elli’s misogynistic contempt for indigenous women. English colonizers exert ‘control’ over indigenous women’s bodies by commodifying their bodies. The multiplicity of women’s identities is embodied in Ma Hla May; she is “the woman”, “mistress”, “concubine”, “wife”, “prostitute” depending on how the Englishman defines her or how she defines herself in relation to the colonizer.

In Burmese Days, both European and indigenous women are subjected to the oppression of the male colonizers. The club functions as the symbolic space in which imperial superiority and more significantly, white-male authority is reinforced by its’ exclusive “clubbability”. It is a place where misogynistic jokes are exchanged and while European women are admitted into the club, they are excluded from the right to vote, a privilege reserved exclusively for English males. The club serves as “the Indian marriage-[meat] market” where single white females are objectified as “carcasses of frozen mutton, to be pawed over by nasty old bachelors”. The symbolic oppression of women’s freedom becomes a literal imprisonment when “in cases of riot European ladies were always locked inside the jail until everything was over”. So, Orwell was anti-imperialist and as some called him, a socialist but women are excluded from his campaign against oppression. . . Hmmm. . .

ps/ sorry my quotes do not have page references cos I read the text online...

you're sooooo good!

I find it slightly disturbing that from Chapter 1 to 18 of Burmese Days, all the Natives I have come across are fawning over the Europeans. Dr Veraswami came out tops in his disillusionment of the greatness of Europeans:

And consider how noble a type iss the English gentleman! Their glorious loyalty to one another! The public school spirit! Even those of them whose manner iss unfortunate – some Englishmen are arrogant, I concede – have great, sterling qualities that we Orientals lack. Beneath their rough exterior, their hearts are of gold.

The Doctor’s disillusionment is so ludicrous that I begin to suspect if he is truly sincere with all this talk. Apparently, he is: “Dr. Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken”.

However, while LOL (at least I did) at Veraswami’s highly misguided admiration, it also exposes how (a) this image of the almighty European is an empty illusion, (b) how there are natives who are as brainwashed as Dr Veraswami in worshiping the Europeans and/or the idea of an European.

While Dr Veraswami is certainly sincere in his remarks, I am rather sure that the narrator does not share the same view. I think the narrator is taking a jibe at Europeans indirectly, and who else does it better other than a misguided Native. Everything that praises the Europeans is presented in a comic and ironic fashion. There is a reversal of roles here: we have Flory (a white), who openly criticizes the hypocrisy of Colonizers, and we have Dr Veraswami (a native), defending the Europeans and their greatness. It is Dr Veraswami’s “positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerated race” that makes bitter irony in his defense of the Europeans.

The punchline:

“The weakness of your argument, my dear friend,” he said, beaming at his own irony, “the weakness appears to be, that you are not thieves.” (mine in bold)

I've read something like this before, but Napolean was actually a pig in that one.

"Shooting," an "essay," possessed disputable fictionality, and I quailed to think the narrator's seemingly unconscious hypocrisy might have been Orwell's own. However, in Burmese Days, I find much less 'reproduction of racist structures,' and though I also find everyone disagreeable, there is a certain representational democracy in that. There is a poignant truth in "booze as the cement of empire," (32) especially with the thesis' address to poor 'native intellectual' Dr. Veraswami, who has internalised the coloniser's Manichean delineations. Where "Shooting" exasperated me, here I do grasp the sense of the European protagonist (and writer) as an ordinary, relatively decent man able to see the beauty of an "alien yet kindly land," (249) but caught in the cogs of Empire and the pukka sahib's "Precepts." (39)

The portrayal of the female characters, however, clashes with this fair(ish) representation of both coloniser and colonised. We have discussed the misogynistic impulses of Passage, but where at least Adela is just, Elizabeth is explicitly "silly, snobbish, heartless," (207) with her causes for sympathy outweighed by her "hardness of manner" (263) and "mercenary thoughts" (255) Doubtlessly there is comic irony in the conclusion "she fills with complete success the position for which Nature had designed her from the first, that of a burra memsahib," (263) but it nevertheless bestows the suggestion of 'natural order' upon this "position" and thus upon Imperialism and the 'racial hiearchy' enforced by the "rule of colonial difference," a naturalness underlined by Elizabeth's earlier discriminatory rejection of Flory (and lepers and lunatics) as "instinct…deeper than reason or even self-interest." (255) With the intensely negative portrayals of the women and such suggestions that their unpleasantness and prejudice are naturally part of them, I feel that the otherwise sympathisable portrayal of pukka sahibs as racist imperialist bastards by circumstance is terribly undermined.

Chatterjee and Burmese Days

I think Chatterjee’s article has certain resonances in Burmese Days, because language is indeed a “simple and practical sign of difference” (Chatterjee 25) between the colonizer and colonized in the text. This is evident when Ellis tells his butler, “Don’t talk like that, damn you—“I find it very difficult!”…“Please master, can’t keeping ice cool”—that’s how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can’t stick servants who talk English” (23). I think Ellis is infuriated precisely because that which differentiated his butler and him as different peoples has been lost—the colonized native can now imbibe the white colonial master’s speech perfectly, what then separates them and marks Ellis as superior?

This idea of language being a sign of difference is also evident in Verswami who is constantly depicted as speaking with an ‘s’ at the end of some words like “iss”, “wass”, “hass”. By showing how Veraswami speaks a less perfect form of English, the text inadvertently shows how he is different and ultimately inferior to his colonial master.

However, there is one occasion where I feel that the difference that is based on language is shown to be reconcilable. This is the scene where Flory and Elizabeth are on a canoe together and Flory asks the canoewoman “How far, grandmamma?’ (163):

‘The distance a man can shout’, she said after reflection.
‘About half a mile,’ Flory translated.

Despite the apparent differences in the languages of the colonized and the colonizer, here, there is a very successful translation from a language that is based on sentiment to one that is based on rationality and I thought this was a very brief moment where differences were shown to be reconcilable and meaning translatable across culture and language.

"Lenin, A.J. Cook, and the dirty little poets in the Montparnasse Cafes" (Chap XVII)

Burmese Days is strikingly, and overtly, strewn with references to European, and specifically, British popular culture of Orwell's time. It opens with the epigraph from Shakespeare, but most of the novel proceeds to refer to a fair amount of British popular colloquial writing. Elizabeth's favourite author is Michael Arlen (Chap. VII) who, while not strictly considered lowbrow, did not gain the critical import of Charles Dickens, for instance, whom Orwell gestures towards. Mr Francis, an Eurasian, is said to speak "like Mr Chollop in Martin Chuzzlewit" (Chap X), though at this point it is not clear whether this emerges from Elizabeth's inner thoughts or is a narratorial comment. I am inclined towards the former, for Elizabeth's own disdain for the "highbrow" then might be read ironically - "all these Highbrow ideas — Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary." Verrall also shares her distaste for the "highbrow" - he "had not read a book since he was eighteen, and that indeed he 'loathed' books; 'except, of course, Jorrocks and all that' " , Jorrocks being a "vulgar ... cockney grocer" (Wikipedia) featured in a comic paper.

Perhaps Orwell is harshly caricaturing British citizens stationed in the colonies, striving to flaunt his own cosmopolitan status against their impoverished enculturation in this debut novel of his, and might be at the same time grappling with his own bohemian bourgeois status as an emerging writer (hence "dirty little poets"). Hence, in studding the novel with such references both to colloquial written culture and to what might be considered "high art", Orwell might be leveraging on the latter to distance himself from the former, aspiring towards something more than just a mere journalistic account of Burmese racial politics.

And so when Orwell borrows the lines of the traditional lyric "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down can rain" (Chap. XXI), he is perhaps not only longing for the rain to quell the heat, but for the Western aesthetics to sweep through what he saw to be the intellectually stultifying colonial outpost of the Far East. These references betray Orwell's own anxiety of losing touch with the bastion of high culture while in colonial Burma, but they also foster an ambivalent relation towards the Empire - Orwell is embittered with the colonial enterprise, and yet at the same time implicitly beckons for the proliferation of its high culture. A colonialism of a different kind?

I could go on about how this ambivalence is extended to Orwell's relation to the romantic tradition ... but I'll leave that for next week.

Maybe Samuel and Francis Would Be Models Today

I found the discussion of the two Eurasians in Orwell's "Burmese Days" rather interesting, especially when considering 1) how Elizabeth views them and 2) how they look at themselves.

Elizabeth's horror at the existence 'of such extraordinary creatures' (125) is twofold; she is incredulous at the thought of a white man 'hav[ing] anything to do with native women' (127), and is scandalized by the knowledge that they 'cadge from the natives' (125). Together these taint the reputation of the white community, with Eurasians are not 'one of us' (125), but lumped into the category of the 'degenerate[s]' (126).

Next, the Eurasians believe that 'their drop of white blood is the[ir] sole asset' (126) and hence constantly strive to align themselves with 'Europians' (125)- asserting that they too are 'torment[ed]' by 'prickly heat' and 'menace[d]' by 'sunstroke' (124). In doing so, they are complicitous in acknowledging and perpetuating the superiority of the Europeans, and are ultimately unable (and even unwilling), in spite of their racial difference, to transcend the dictates of the status-quo.

These negative views of Eurasians are especially interesting in today's context, considering how they are no longer considered 'half-cast[e]' (126) pariahs, with the 'pan-asian' look is now considered extremely beautiful and highly sought-after. This is fascinating to me as yet another example of time overturning social norms and configurations, necessitating our sensitivity as 21st-century readers of Orwell.

(300 words)

Similtude & Difference: Ma Hla May & Elizabeth

The tension set up by the relationship of similitude and difference between Elizabeth and Ma Hla May is embodied in their dramatic first encounter (87). While the passage delivers an account of their differences – “No contrast could have been stranger […]” – it closes with a hint that the two women might not actually be that different after all – “neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there is no saying.” This placement of the women on equal footing, so to speak, is further sustained and elaborated in subsequent moments in the novel. For example, in Chapter VII, the history of Elizabeth tells us she is effectively penniless, and unskilled, and hence the reliance on marriage for survival represents the sole source of income she could allow herself to imagine; this is not dissimilar to Ma Hla May’s situation, as far as the penniless part is concerned. The difference between them lies in that Elizabeth would possibly not spread her legs before a marriage is actually procured i.e. institutionally recognized. But would the institution recognize a marriage such as that between Flory and Ma Hla May, if he indeed chooses to walk down that white aisle?

What interests me further is the observation that the ending of the novel has not imagined what I perceived to be a “finer” resolution for Ma Hla May: the latter ends up a destitute and a prostitute – “her good looks are all but gone, and her clients pay her only four annas and sometimes kick her and beat her” (285). On a strictly material level, I would say that Elizabeth fares infinitely better than Ma Hla May: Mr Macgregor proposes marriage and she “[accepts] him gladly”; and that “they are very happy” in their matrimony (287). Perhaps such diverse resolutions for these women spring out of an imagination that finds unconvincing the representation in which the embodying of similar attitudes towards marriage as a form of survival would ensure both women – despite the “colonial differences” between them – eventually experiencing the same sort of destiny?

Divide and Difference

Stoler’s “concept of an interior frontier” (516) is something that can perhaps be seen in many of the texts we have done so far this semester. In Forster’s Passage to India we saw that internal divide of the Indians within Chandrapore and between Flory and the rest of the white men at “The Club”. This existence of different kinds of colonizers and colonized seem to come from a “relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed …the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself.(Stoler 514). As the colonial empire was set up, the social relationships intra-racially and inter-racially resulted in not just complications and a more glaring rift between the two, but within each community as well.

We see this idea of difference and divide manifested in physical aspects as well. In Orwell’s Burmese Days, we see two clear instances early on in the story of how physical difference marks a certain social difference as well. In chapter 5 we see Flory’s insecurity over the “blue birthmark on his cheek” and how “his trouble …had begun in his mother's womb”, setting him “against public opinion” because of both physical appearance and later in a social context because of his friendship with Dr Veraswami. This shows one instance of physical difference being a site of both “interior frontier” (Stoler 516) and racial divide between colonizer and colonized. Flory’s description of the two women, Elizabeth and Ma Hla May also shows vast physical differences between them and the social implications of their status because of their race. With” the one faintly coloured as an apple-blossom, the other dark and garish […] neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there [was] no saying”(ch6). This shows the gaze of divide(of social status :mistress vs. European, of race) embodied in physical difference, that for the moment alienates Flory in their mutual gaze, but also encapsulates(and complicates him) in the power-relations of difference and divide when the physical, racial and social realms collide.