Snobbery

George Orwell is my hero because there’s something in his achievement which to me defines what I should be doing. This is partly due to his relentless curiosity, his desire to put himself time and again into what Jonathon Frantzen has called ‘The Discomfort Zone’. 

Orwell ‘tramped’, living with the poor in English doss houses, in order to recalibrate his sense of what it was permitted to consider normal. He himself went to Eton, the son of a colonial administrator, yet he was determined not to be framed by this experience. If he wasn’t tramping he was otherwise restless for novel social and political understanding. He was as carefully attuned to the political turbulence of his time as anybody else but for me makes his name as a participant, as somebody in on the ground floor. He often seems to have only a vague idea of why he decides to walk from The Black Country to Wigan for example, or to sign up to fight in the Spanish Civil War; but then out of this experience his art comes quite quickly. 

The reason I'm writing about Orwell here is because when i write about teaching in some of the terms i have earlier in this blog I feel guilty, as guilty as I do on behalf on Orwell when i look at some of the portraits of people and places which fall under his pitiless literary gaze. As D.J. Taylor has noted in his biography of Orwell there is a certain cruelty involved in preparing characters for publication, or as Taylor puts it when referring to individuals Orwell uses in The Road to Wigan Pier: '... The Brookers cease to be a pair of draggled lodging-house keepers with some disagreeable personal habits and are transformed into lurid pantomime grotesques'.

When describing state education there is a residual feeling of 'I shouldn't be talking about this, especially in this way', because firstly my subject matter is vulnerable, and secondly because i feel like a snob. It is true that writers tend to define a style that comes to be expected, and this style for me here could well be described as 'lurid'. I'm not entirely happy with this, yet teaching throws up so many 'middle class moments' that you cannot help but be shocked/appalled etc and this tends to define your style.

I just wanted to get that off my chest.