Supply Before Demand
BY KARDELEN KALA (TRIN/I)
kala@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Have you ever been inside a mall? If you're reading this right now, you're probably in Ankara, the mall capital of Turkey (as well as its actual one), so I'm assuming that you have. Next time you go into one -- Bilkent Center, for example -- pay attention to the person at the entrance. He will smile at you, and maybe search your bag, if it's your unlucky day. You probably will not smile back. You will hardly even notice that someone is there. Yet there he will be, all the time. He doesn't need to be, he serves no purpose whatsoever, but he will be anyway. Weekdays, weekends, at any hour of the day. Working shifts and getting paid the bare minimum. He is what George Orwell would have written about had he lived in the postmodern times that we live in: the embodiment of what the writer termed a "plongeur." And this is what I want to talk about this week.
George Orwell was an English writer who rose to prominence after the Second World War. He is best known for his dystopia "1984" and "Animal Farm," a satire of the USSR under Stalin. His semi-autobiographical short stories, mostly on life in the South Asian British colonies, are also greatly respected. However, I have always felt that my favorite Orwell novel, “Down and Out in Paris and London,” is criminally undervalued. Hardly anyone has heard of it, which is such a shame, since it's a very interesting read, with fascinating insight into the underbellies of two of the biggest and most famous cities in the world.
The book chronicles the writer's life as a struggling English teacher in Paris doing odd jobs, and later as a tramp in London and the English countryside, the former part being the more interesting. His adventure in France starts promisingly enough. He lives in a hotel that rents rooms by the week, has several students who pay him well to learn English and intends to keep a detailed diary of his life in Paris.
Things start to go downhill, however, when somebody steals almost all his savings, and his students start dropping him. Little by little, he descends into poverty. Long periods of hunger, accompanied by crazed delusions and a frightening indifference, dominate his life. Even obtaining his daily slice of bread with margarine turns into a challenge. After several tries at finding jobs, having pawned almost all of his possessions, he starts to work at a hotel as a "plongeur," literally a "diver," a dishwasher, someone who is lower than the lowest in the food chain of that cruel establishment. He spends his days in a cavernous basement room with others as desperate as he is, washing dishes, running errands and serving as punching bags to cooks, waiters and managers -- people who are looking for someone to blame for their own misery and failure in life.
At the end of the chapter describing his life at the hotel, Orwell questions the necessity for such an occupation to exist. A "plongeur" serves no purpose; he creates a demand rather than meeting one. People start needing his services after they become available. He works 16-hour days in filthy conditions and has to take a lot of abuse, only to help create a sense of false luxury in the fancy dining room upstairs. Orwell has the advantage of knowing that he will, as a British citizen and a man of letters, get out of that place, but what about the others who have to stay behind? He can't help but identify with his comrades in that torturous maze. What is the point? He can't find a satisfactory answer to that.
Unfortunately, little has changed since Orwell's Parisian days. The practice lives on, as torturous and perplexing as ever. The "security staff" of a shopping mall is just one of the many examples. What about all the others we can't see, in basement kitchens, in warehouses, in sweatshops, who work to create something we have no need for? We take their work for granted. We don't ever stop to think about the implications this has on society and on our collective conscience. So, the vicious circle is never broken and the world keeps on going. I think "Orwellian" is a pretty good adjective to describe the situation, wouldn't you say?