negotiating social hierarchies

Over the Martin Luther King Day holiday I started reading what I thought were two unrelated books: a novel by Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America, and Shamus Khan’s new book about elites in a prestigious boarding school, Privilege. By the end of the week I realized that the two books have fairly similar themes. Parrot and Olivier, which is loosely based on Alexis de Tocqueville’s visit to America, and Privilege are both about how people negotiate social hierarchies, figuring out how to maximize the potential of their role in that hierarchy and, if they’re lucky, to move up that hierarchy. Of course, the point of a hierarchy is that the positions at the top are limited in number and difficult to attain. Thus, people who start at the top find it easier to reproduce those positions than people at the bottom are able to move up.  In some systems, like the old French aristocracy, upward mobility was nearly impossible, but in other systems, like present day U.S., moving up the ladder depends in part on your ability to master the nuanced rules of the game at each successive level.

Shamus’s book deserves a post of its own. I’ll comment more on it later, but for now let me just say that it’s a really great read. Somebody forgot to tell Shamus that sociology is supposed to be dryly written.

Parrot and Olivier isn’t quite as good as I hoped. If you’re a fan of Tocqueville, you might be disappointed like I was by Carey’s frivolous depiction of him. I didn’t recognize the brilliant intellectual in his Tocqueville embodied in the character Olivier de Garmont. But the novel is superb in other ways, most notably in its ability to juxtapose Tocqueville’s world of French aristocracy with the new meritocratic class system of America.

Carey uses Tocqueville’s servant, Parrot – born a poor, working class Englishman and servant to the rich – , to illustrate how changes in the social hierarchy didn’t just affect the fortunes of the privileged elite from Europe but also those of a lower caste, whose lives were bound to the caretaking of the elite. Parrot realizes, after some length of time in the United States, that his old skills and knowledge about how to serve the needs of privileged aristocrats did not serve him well in the U.S.  The new social order upset the rules for achievement for not only the elite, like Olivier, but also for the old poor. In a touching scene from the book Parrot realizes that his peers from France, who like Parrot had served aristocrats their entire lives, had ingeniously reinvented themselves as  European artists. He, however, was still caught up in the old role of master/servant that bound him to Olivier.

[W]hen I sat in the Bull Inn on Greenwich Street and saw Eckerd lock his door, I suddenly comprehended that the entire house was occupied by people who had occupations suited for the present age. They lived in the New World, and what an awful shock it was to finally understand.  I was abandoned to this New World, but I was a habitual servant to a dying breed. I might be on my grandes vacances, but I was of no damn use. I had no art, no trade. I had traveled all my life to arrive here, but here was an abyss. I was beached on the corner of King and Greenwich, a creature with no purpose in the world (288).

Olivier, in contrast, realizes that despite being of a “dying breed,” he can cash in some of his symbolic capital as a French aristocrat to gain a great deal of influence. But cashing in that capital puts him on the outside of the American hierarchy. He’s respected and adored for his Old World connections, but as much as he’d like to blend in with the new elite, he can’t.  As much as he tries to fit in, he’s always a French aristocrat. The kind of cultural capital he possesses puts distance between him and the American elite. Similarly, for all their wealth and success, a successful American businessman’s family can’t just buy their way into French aristocracy. The forms of capital most valuable to each elite class were not commensurable (birthright for the French, wealth for the Americans).

Parrot and Olivier isn’t a perfect novel or even a very good historical account of Tocqueville. But the book is a wonderful literary telling of the cultural underbelly of social hierarchies and inequality.