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.