Responding to Comments on My ACX 'Down and Out in Paris and London' Review

Why did Orwell hardly comment on the most obviously debased act in a book about the debasement poverty causes?

Edit: If you haven’t yet, click here to read the full review on Astral Codex Ten.

Most of the substantive discussion in the comments on my review focused on an incident in the book where Orwell listens to an eccentric, dissolute drunk describe a rape he committed as such: 

And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment, it was finished, and I was left—to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion, I even felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room…but there, messieurs et dames, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of my life.

In response to which I wrote: 

Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment."

Many commenters thought otherwise, and because of my own terse and inadequate response to Orwell’s terse and inadequate response, I think misunderstood my qualms with the story and the context in which it was presented. Here are two representative comments:

I thought, when reading the book, that the last option was obvious, and that, moreover, Orwell had been successful in making the reader share his extreme if stiffed-lipped disgust. After all, it is Orwell who recreates "Charlie"'s words, which paint him in full.

The review wonders why Orwell is so detached from the report of the rape. The description of the 'rape' is rather lengthy and altogether not very believable. I think Orwell is trying to say: "Charlie clearly said that, and enjoyed hearing himself speak. None of it is true, obviously. But what a colorful lie!”

And the one comment that actually kinda hurt my feelings:

Did Orwell not realize that in 2021 there would be no room for creative subtlety when virtue signaling was involved?

But on the contrary,  I wasn’t hoping for glib moralizing on the horrors of rape, but more intellectual curiosity from Orwell in regards to the early 20th century particulars of culture that contributed to Charlie’s attitude towards what he’s done (or professes to have done). 

He speaks rapturously of his violence, like an Oscar Wilde protagonist crossed with a caricature of Nietzche’s overman, careful to detail the aesthetic particulars that made the scene compelling for him, as well as his small capacity for empathy crying out to him in the form of revulsion and a desire for flight, despite the fact that he has dehumanized the prostitute to the point that she’s nothing more than one element of the orgiastic aesthetic experience that he declares ‘the happiest day of his life’.

Meanwhile, Orwell’s response to the story is so general that it could’ve followed nearly any criminal anecdote, though I am sympathetic to the idea that the cultural currents I mentioned would be so obvious to his readers as to not need any explanation. But regardless, the characterization of Charlie seems ahead of its time. He wouldn’t be out of place taking part in the violent revels of the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, a novel that would come out almost thirty years later. Not to say that popular philosophies of the time had a role in actually causing Charlie’s crime, but it’s interesting to explore the ways criminals of different eras justify what is really nothing new: the enjoyment of violent crime when perpetrated against thoroughly dehumanized victims. The terms with which the victims are dehumanized may change, but I doubt the subjective experience of perpetrators and victims are changed altered much by those new terms and rationalizations. Orgiastic violence is orgiastic violence, whether described in Nietzchian, religious, or American inner-city terms (which differ mainly in the level of regard they give to aesthetics).

As to the idea that the story is made up, and Orwell is subtly communicating to the reader that this is the case…I do get a tone of dismissal from Orwell’s terse response, but not so much that I can feel confident that the story was made up: 

He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.

But then the nagging question in my review remains: why does Orwell seem not to care much about this story? Why does he spend thousands of words delving into the moral failings of the hotel industry, but hardly spares two sentences for the most chilling anecdote in the entire book? A couple of commenters wrote generally about Orwell’s attitude towards women:

I don't think Orwell was a misogynist, but I don't think he had the greatest sympathy or respect for women -- particularly when they treated poor men badly, something we see in the review. In an article about the novelist George Gissing, he writes, "Doubtless Gissing is right in implying all through his novels that intelligent women are very rare animals, and if one wants to marry a woman who is intelligent and pretty, then the choice is still further restricted, according to a well-known arithmetical rule. It is like being allowed to choose only among albinos, and left-handed albinos at that." There's the well-known quote from 1984 about women being the most relentless enforcers of Party orthodoxy. Other quotes could be furnished. I agree with the people who think Orwell doesn't believe Charlie's story. But I suspect if he were a little more sympathetic to women, he would not have recounted the story in exactly that way.

(Again, this commenter is confident that Orwell doesn’t believe the story. But why? Why should Orwell or we think Charlie incapable of such a thing? It’s not as if he’s recalling some feat of criminal genius. It’s a story about raping and beating a prostitute, which seems just the sort of thing we could expect young, dissolute alcoholics in 1920s Paris to be capable of doing.) 

Honestly, though, I don’t think Orwell’s slightly progressive but not-in-any-way-exceptional attitude towards women has anything to do with his response to the story. Now that I’ve reflected on the text itself, and the review’s comments a little bit more, I think it’s simply a matter of progress on the ‘what can and should be discussed in writing’ front. This feature of the book is hard to spot, especially because in form and tone it feels astonishingly modern, and would not seem out of place in today’s NYT.

But in Orwell’s time, the morality of rape was (literally) not up for discussion, in the sense that an exploration of Charlie’s psychology might’ve struck readers (and Orwell) as a form of justification, or even a defense of the crime, if not just a vulgar, tabloid-style exposé of criminal psychology. I very much see Orwell as someone who is old fashioned, for all his intellectual bravery, and not much interested in moral subversions, or aesthetic justifications for this or that previously taboo way of life. He’s anything but post-modern, and therefore not attracted to deconstructions of any but those concepts and institutions that might be reformed to the clear benefit of the common good. Charlie and his ilk are past the point of reformation, as are so many of the features of Orwell’s experience in Paris and London that don’t get the attention that I or other readers may feel they deserved. One of Orwell’s other books, The Road to Wigan Pier, makes for a good contrast: the moral degradations of the northern coal miners’ lives are recorded and speculated on in detail because they are seen as an inevitable consequence of a few singularly immoral and reformable institutions: the coal mining companies. Charlie, on the other hand, is not a unique or changeable social phenomenon, in Orwell’s eyes, and therefore not worthy of a lengthy investigation.