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奥威尔闲操心(一)||Rock Steady|博客|lukesun|Rock Steady–Life In Blogcn
FOR 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 loin-cloths. 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.
奥威尔闲操心(一)
（《巴黎伦敦落魄记》第二十二章）
奥威尔 著
孙仲旭 译
不管有无价值，我还是想说说我对巴黎洗碗工生活的看法。想一想就会觉得奇怪，在一个现代化大都市里，会有成千上万人除了睡觉，全部时间竟然都待在地底下热腾腾的小房间里。我问的是这种生活为何要继续下去，有何目的，谁想让它继续下去和为什么。我并非只抱有反叛性和懒散的态度，而是想衡量一下洗碗工生活的社会意义。
我认为首先应当说，洗碗工是当今世界的一种奴隶。这并不是要为他们鸣不平，因为他比很多体力工人还要强一点，然而他并不比可供买卖的人更自由。他的工作就是被奴役，也没有技术含量。他挣的钱只够糊口，惟一休假是在被炒掉时。他与婚姻无缘，要么他能结婚，可是他老婆也得干活。除非鸿运当头，否则他根本摆脱不了这种生活，除了进监狱。此时，在巴黎还有揣着大学学位的人刷盘子，每天干活十到十五个钟头。不能说他们懒，懒人当不了洗碗工，他们只是被一种日常生活所束缚，使得不可能思考。如果洗碗工当真思考，他们早就会成立工会，为争取更好待遇而罢工。然而他们不思考，因为他们没有空闲时间可以思考，他们的生活让他们成了奴隶。
问题在于，这种苦役为何要继续下去？人们有种思路，想当然认为一切工作之所以得干，都有个很好的目的。他们看到别人在干不舒服的活，说一句那种活得有人干，便自以为解决了问题。例如，挖煤辛苦，可是总得有人干——我们一定得有煤用。在下水道里干活并非乐事，可是总得有人在下水道里干活。对洗碗工的活也类似看待。肯定有人要去餐馆吃饭，所以别人就得一星期擦洗盘子八十个钟头。文明要如此运作，所以无可置疑。这一点值得考虑。
对文明而言，洗碗工的工作真的必要吗？我们有种感觉它一定是“老实的”的工作，因为这种工作辛苦而且不好做，我们已经对体力工作形成一种迷信。我们看到一个人砍倒一棵树，确信他满足了一种社会需求，只因为他使用了自己的肌肉。我们却没想到也许他砍倒一棵漂亮的树，是想腾地方摆一座丑陋的雕塑。我相信洗碗工一事上也是如此。他汗流浃背地挣钱糊口，然而并不能因此说他干的是有用的活，也许只是提供了一种奢侈享受而已，而很经常的是，这种奢侈享受并非名实相符。
我所说的名实不相符的奢侈享受可以举例说明，举一个在欧洲很少看到的极端例子吧：拿印度的人力车夫或者拉马车的矮种马来说，远东任何一个镇上，都有几百个人力车夫，全是肤色黝黑的可怜鬼，体重八英石，围着腰布。有的还生着病，有的上五十岁了。他们顶着太阳或者冒着雨一路小跑，一口气就是几英里，低着头拉车，灰白胡子上往下滴着汗水。走得太慢，乘客就会破口大骂。人力车夫一个月挣三四十卢比，拉上几年就咳得没完没了。拉车的矮种马又瘦又不中用，价钱便宜，因为只能干几年活了。它们的主人用鞭打来代替喂食。这种马干的活可以用一个等式来表示——鞭打加食物等于力气，通常是六成的鞭打和四成的食物。有时，马脖子一圈都有面积很大的溃疡，结果拉车时整天都是垫在新肉上。然而还是有可能让它们干活，只用狠狠抽打它们，让屁股上的疼超过脖子上的疼。过上几年，就连鞭子也不管用了，马就被卖了宰掉。这些都是不必要工作的例子，因为并非真正需要马车和人力车，它们之所以存在，全是因为东方人认为走路没派头。坐人力车或马车是奢侈享受，可是任何一个坐过这两样的人都知道，这是种很糟糕的奢侈享受，只提供了一点点方便，不可能抵消人或动物所受的痛苦。
洗碗工与此类似。跟人力车夫或者拉马车的矮种马比起来，他称得上是国王，然而他跟前两者有相似性。他是酒店或餐馆的奴隶，他所服的苦役多少说来，是全然无用的。因为说到底，大酒店和高档餐馆到底有何真正必要之处？按说都是提供奢侈享受，然而实际上提供的，是对奢侈享受的廉价而且蹩脚的模仿。几乎没人喜欢住酒店。有的餐馆比别的好一点，然而不可能以同样花费在餐馆里吃到和私人家里同样好的一顿饭。无疑酒店和餐馆必得存在，可是没必要奴役几百个人。酒店和餐馆里的工作不是为了满足基本需要而确定下来的，而是由按说代表奢侈享受的假象而确定。依其字面意思，高档事实上意味着员工干活干得更多，客人花的钱更多。谁也没有获益，除了餐馆的老板，他很快就能让自己去多维尔买幢别墅了。从根本上说，“高档”酒店就是这样一个地方：一百个人累得要死要活，好让两百个人花大价钱，得到的却不是他们真正想要的。如果酒店和餐馆不去搞那些无聊玩意儿，只用讲效率地把活干了，洗碗工有可能每天只用干六到八个钟头，而不是十到十五个钟头。
假如我们都认为洗碗工干的活多少说来毫无用处，那么又要问了：为什么会有人想让他继续干下去？我现在试着从直接经济原因之外来探讨，并衡量一下在想到有人洗了一辈子盘子时，究竟为什么会让人感觉舒服。因为无疑，人们——那些养尊处优的人 ——想到这里确实感到舒服。马库斯·加图说过，奴隶不睡觉时就该干活。他干的活需不需要无所谓，可是他一定得干，因为干活本身是好的——至少对奴隶而言是这样。这种心理如今依然存在，而且它堆起了无用苦工的大山。
我相信让无用工作永远存在的本能根本而言，只是害怕群氓。群氓（对他们的想法如此）是这样一种低等动物，让他们闲下来会带来危险，让他们忙得没时间思考才更安全些。如果有一位有钱人刚好心直口快，要是有人问他对于改进工作环境有何意见，他通常会这样说：
“ 我们知道贫困不好过，事实上，既然我们离贫困这么远，我们很喜欢忧心忡忡地考虑它的不好过之处。但是别指望我们会为此做什么。我们同情你们下层阶级，就像我们同情一只长了癣的猫，可是我们会拼命抵制对你们的处境做任何改善。我们觉得你们像现在这样让人觉得更安全些。现状适合我们，我们不准备冒险让你们自由，每天多休息一个小时也不行。所以，亲爱的兄弟，因为显然你们必须得流汗，才能让我们有钱去意大利，那你们就流汗吧，而且永世不得翻身。”
特别是那些具有才智和有修养的人，他们就持这种态度，在上百篇文章里，你都能读出这种意思。有修养的人很少一年收入不足四百镑，他们自然跟富人站到一起，因为他们觉得跟穷人有关的任何自由对他们自身的自由都构成了威胁。对那些受过教育的人来说，换个思路，他们预见到了否则会来的令人心悸的马克思式乌托邦，所以他们更愿意保持现状。他有可能不是很喜欢富人同侪，然而他觉得和穷人比起来，就算那些富人中最为粗俗者，对他的舒服感造成的威胁也要小一点，那些人跟他声气相投，所以他最终跟他们站在一起。就是因为害怕想像出来的危险性群氓，让几乎所有的才智之士都态度保守。
对于群氓的恐惧是种迷信的恐惧，是基于这种想法，即在穷人和富人之间，有种神秘而且是根本性的区别，似乎是两个种族，如同黑人和白人，然而事实上，这种差别并不存在。富人群体和穷人群体完全是由收入而不是其他区别开来的，一个普通的百万富翁只是个穿了新套装的普通洗碗工而已。换换位子，猜猜看谁是法官，谁是小偷？任何一个跟穷人打成一片的人都很清楚这一点。然而问题出在那些具有才智和有修养的人身上，本来指望这些人思想开明，他们却从来不跟穷人打成一片。受过教育的人对贫困又了解多少呢？我手头有一本维庸的诗集，编者竟然觉得需要给“只能看看窗台上的面包”一句加注解，饥饿跟受过教育的人所经历的相距更远。出于此种无知，很自然就形成了对群氓怀有迷信性质的恐惧。受过教育的人想像有一大群人下人渴望能得到哪怕一天的自由，就会去洗劫他家，烧掉他的书，让他去干活——小心照看一台机器或者扫厕所。“采取任何措施，”他想，“任何不公正的措施都行，也别让群氓不受约束。”他没看到的是因为富人和穷人群体本无区别，就根本不存在让群氓不受约束这一问题了。群氓实际上现在就不受约束，而且——以富人形象出现——正利用自己的权力去建起通过厌烦来折磨人的巨型机器，比如“高档”酒店。
总而言之，洗碗工是奴隶，而且是多余的奴隶，干的是乏味却基本上不需要的活。他之所以被拴在工作上，归根到底，是出于一种模模糊糊的感觉，即如果让他闲下来，就具有危险性。受过教育的人本来应该支持洗碗工，却默许人们这样做，因为他们对洗碗工一无所知，结果害怕他。我说的是洗碗工，因为我一直衡量的是他的情形。我所说的同样适用于其他无数种干活人。这些只是我自己对洗碗工生活中基本事实的认识，并未考虑直接的经济问题，无疑大都是老生常谈。我写出来，是想说明在酒店里干活会形成什么样的想法。
本系列译文集：
奥威尔讲故事(一)
奥威尔讲故事(二)
奥威尔讲故事(三)
奥威尔讲故事(四)
奥威尔讲故事(五)
奥威尔闲操心(一)
奥威尔闲操心(二)
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发表于 2013-11-7 11:04:54
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