11. Civilization, Death, and Money in Keep the Aspidistra Flying

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Edition used: George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011). Keep the Aspidistra Flying appears at pp. 251-470, and is referred to as KAF. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) may be Orwell’s angriest novel. Its rage, encapsulated in its moth-eaten protagonist, Gordon Comstock, is bound up not only with Orwell’s increasingly critical view of capitalism but also with his sense that civilization itself might be on the way out. Like the novel that follows it, Coming Up for Air (1939), the shadow of world war hangs gloomily over this text, which turns on several occasions to the imagery of bombers flying overhead, their incendiary payloads ready to drop at a moment’s notice. Keep the Aspidistra Flying doesn’t call for the destruction of the world, but it does suggest that the world is on the verge of a destructive conflagration. This larger possibility of calamitous change has a counterpart in Gordon’s departure from his job at the New Albion Publicity Company, his seething immersion in poverty, and his eventual return to ‘the clutch of money’ (KAF, p. 460), a prospect he loathes yet a reality he soon accepts. This is a novel, in other words, that’s concerned with large and small explanatory representations of different, albeit related, forms of ensnarement. Gordon’s escapades denote the impossibility of any simple or reductively utopian escape from the grasp of ‘a decaying capitalism’ (KAF, p. 295). The prospect of world war indicates the unstoppable march of history—what the novel calls ‘the great death-wish of the modern world’ (KAF, p. 265). The two ideas are connected in the novel’s critical account of a market-driven culture of publicity and sensation. Advertising doesn’t ‘mean’ bombs, in this novel, but the core implication of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that the ‘year of blight 1934’ (KAF, p. 385) is a point in history in which a publicity-obsessed—and therefore spiritually empty and morally vacuous—society is on the road to its doom.

Orwell’s novel turns to this theme on several occasions. Its most obvious targets are money—the keynote of Keep the Aspidistra Flying—and the social structures of commerce and exchange value within which human lives are remade as inhuman commodities. There are connections to be made in this respect between Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Orwell’s non-fictional work The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and, again, Coming Up for Air, both of which are interested in capitalism’s negative consequences for human bodies and souls. Keep the Aspidistra Flying presents ‘publicity’ and ‘advertising’ as ‘the dirtiest ramp [i.e. swindle] that capitalism has yet produced’ (KAF, p. 295), a claim echoed in the ‘aesthetically offensive’ (KAF, p. 326) sight of the marketing posters mentioned throughout the text and in ‘the beastly contaminating grime’ (KAF, p. 415) of Gordon’s night of debauched excess in London, after which he begins, reluctantly, to change his ways. Keep the Aspidistra Flying keeps close to Gordon’s point of view in all of these cases. This is his novel, not only in the sense that he functions as its main character but also because the novel’s claims about the modern world are articulated from something very tightly bound to his perspective. The novel never quite aligns with that perspective; it remains a third-person narrative told by an omniscient narrator, one with obvious similarities to Orwell himself, who does not participate in the story proper. Even so, there is enough of an association between this narrator and Gordon’s viewpoint to make the novel a character study as much as a study of characteristic socio-economic problems in the modern world.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying diagnoses a death-drive in Western civilization, which it depicts as a ‘dying’ (KAF, p. 269) enterprise. There is even a hint that Orwell may have had in mind a comparison with the loss of the RMS Titanic when he wrote the following passage: 

[Gordon] stood on the kerb gazing out into the hideous midnight-noon. For a moment he felt quite deathly. His face was burning. His whole body had a dreadful, swollen, fiery feeling. His head in particular seemed on the point of bursting. Somehow the baleful light was bound up with his sensations. He watched the sky signs flicking on and off, glaring red and blue, arrowing up and down—the awful, sinister glitter of a doomed civilisation, like the still blazing lights of a sinking ship. (KAF, p. 399) 

Although the Titanic is not mentioned explicitly here, Orwell emphasized in his essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940) that the Titanic disaster had left a lasting impact on his mind, and that nothing in the First World War, which he lived through as a teenager, moved him ‘so deeply as the loss of the Titanic’ had done in 1912. He added that the event ‘gave [him] a sinking sensation in the belly’ which he could ‘still all but feel’ over two decades later.[1] Images of sinking ships appear elsewhere in Orwell’s writing and for different reasons, but here the comparison with a sinking ship implies that civilization has crashed, and that it’s going down into deep waters.[2] We know that Gordon wants to ‘sink’ down from ‘the nagging consciousness of his failure’ (KAF, p. 424) to make a success out of being a struggling poet. His desire to get under ground into ‘the safe soft womb of earth, where there is no getting of jobs or losing of jobs’ (KAF, p. 430) intensifies this emphasis from a different angle, making it seem like what Gordon wants most of all is, in fact, to die, to be put back into the dust from which he was ‘born’. But the sinking ship metaphor suggests that Gordon’s desire to sink ‘down into the mud’ (KAF, p. 427) is just one among many other figurative deaths lying in store for civilization as a whole. The world Gordon belongs to, the world he hates, is on its way down—just as Gordon is, too—into ‘grey, deadly failure’ (KAF, p. 440), its glittery hollowness being the perfect image of a society that is all outward show at the expense of a substantial, enduring core.[3]

In other places, Keep the Aspidistra Flying suggests that this dying civilization has, in fact, already died. Gordon likes to think of London, for example, as a quasi-Egyptian necropolis, a ‘city of the dead’ (KAF, p. 330) populated by the ghost-like remnants of once-human souls. The mist he encounters outside the Crichton Arms pub turns ‘the passers-by into ghosts at twenty yards’ distance’ (KAF, p. 341), and Gordon himself often feels ‘invisible’ (KAF, p. 344) in the city streets, like some kind of dejected wraith. Even the beech woods on Farnham Common stand ‘like ghosts in the still, misty air’ (KAF, p. 361), in a space that makes Gordon feel substanceless and etiolated (a foretaste, perhaps, of Winston Smith’s comparable exhaustion in the May sunshine). Prostitutes—never given much sympathetic attention in Orwell’s work—have faces ‘like skulls coated with pink powder’ (KAF, p. 397), and the ‘awful, sinister glitter of a doomed civilisation’ already mentioned is further emphasized not only in the ‘red satanic gleam’ of the neon lighting that illuminates London’s streets, but also in ‘the frightful corpse-light’ (KAF, p. 402) that falls on the crowds of people walking past its theatres. This reference to the folkloric concept of ignus fatuus (‘capricious flame’), the will-o’-the-wisp, once again puts the accent on social frivolousness. This is a society whose values are deadening. Gordon is ‘reassured, revivified, [and] reborn’ (KAF, pp. 386-7) once he has money in his pocket, and this experience brings it home to him how easy it is to despair at the state of things when day-to-day cares have fallen away: ‘It was great fun—it is fun when you have good food and good wine inside you—to demonstrate that we live in a dead and rotting world’ (KAF, p. 392). But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious problems with the world as Gordon actually experiences it. Keep the Aspidistra Flying does a lot of work to criticize modernity from Gordon’s point of view, and to suggest that his criticisms exist among other possible readings of society. Yet the novel suggests at the same time that Gordon’s views are part of a broader, more objective assessment of ‘the modern’ as a category and value system.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is particularly clear-eyed, in this respect, in its account of the status of the professional class. Gordon’s colleagues at the New Albion remain unaware of his activities as a poet, taking him to be ‘just the same as any other City clerk—just a soldier in the strap-hanging army that sways eastward at morning, westward at night, in the carriages of the Underground’ (KAF, p. 293). A little further on in the novel this imagery is invoked again when Gordon thinks of ‘the Tube stations at early morning. The black hordes of clerks scurrying underground like ants into a hole; swarms of little ant-like men, each with despatch-case in right hand, newspaper in left hand, and the fear of the sack like a maggot in his heart’ (KAF, p. 307). In contrast to the image of London as a city of the dead, passages like these make it seem more like a city populated by machines, or by machine-like insects. There are some connections to be made here with T. S. Eliot’s epic modernist poem The Waste Land (1922), with its celebrated Dantean lines about a crowd of sighing workers flowing over London Bridge in an ‘Unreal City’.[4] With this imagery in mind we could link Keep the Aspidistra Flying to Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel To the Lighthouse (1927) as well, focusing on Woolf’s references to the existence of an underground ‘slave class’ in the tunnels beneath London’s streets, thoroughfares, and gardens.[5] The connection between these lost and losing lives, on the one hand, and money, on the other, is made even more explicit when Orwell’s narrator describes the shivering vibration of a Tube train, ‘sliding through middle earth’, and Gordon’s ‘vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money’ (KAF, p. 383). The image coincides with, although probably not intentionally, the scene of slaves sacrificing themselves to the machine-god, Moloch, in Fritz Lang’s expressionist film Metropolis (1927). On its own terms, this ‘vision of London’ restates the main anxiety and source of disgust in the novel: money, and the ‘money-priesthood’ (KAF, p. 383) that preaches in its name.

The novel repeatedly stresses the malign influence, as Gordon sees it, of this class of quasi-religious puppet-masters and the vertiginous structure of domination from which they derive their power. Gordon envisages two old people outside McKechnie’s bookshop as mere ‘by-products’ and ‘throw-outs of the money-god’ (KAF, p. 265), as slaves to ‘the tyranny of money’ (KAF, p. 461) with little chance of escaping their position in its malevolent hierarchy. This is familiar stuff: the predictable criticism of a socially conscientious novelist wanting to foreground the injustices that differences in economic fortune wreak upon society. Those who have money, thrive; those who don’t, suffer. But Keep the Aspidistra Flying is careful to indicate that this is not just a one-way parasitical relationship. Money, as religion, is a reciprocal affair in this novel. The ‘strange gods of capitalism’ (KAF, p. 296), later described as ‘cunning’ (KAF, p. 455), oppress those at the bottom of the pyramid, but they also make their subjects into devoted worshippers who are consoled by capital’s simultaneously soothing and abusing influence. The thought that troubles Gordon is not that money-worship is a corrupted variant of religion, but that money-worship has come to occupy the place of religion in modern life:

At an earlier age than most people [Gordon] grasped that all modern commerce is a swindle. […] But there was more to it than the mere fact that business is a swindle. What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion—the only really felt religion—that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except as failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers—the elect, the money-priesthood as it were—‘Thou shalt make money’; the other for the employed—the slaves and underlings—‘Thou shalt not lose thy job.’ (KAF, pp. 288-9) 

It’s Gordon’s fate, try as he might otherwise, to remain trapped in this hierarchy of need and greed, to serve the money-god or end up going under (KAF, p. 383).

Orwell was never particularly satisfied with Keep the Aspidistra Flying as a novel. His references to it later in life are full of regret and dissatisfaction. It’s a text that, for a long time, he wished he hadn’t written. But for all that, Keep the Aspidistra Flying remains a characteristically nuanced analysis of a large-scale system (capitalism) and its effects upon the individual (Gordon). In this respect it differs only very slightly from Orwell’s other novels, with their comparable interest in the effects of massive structures of thought and being upon everyday lives: imperialism’s consequences for John Flory, in Burmese Days; patriarchy’s restrictions of Dorothy Hare, in A Clergyman’s Daughter; nostalgia’s distortions as experienced by George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air; Stalinism’s bearing down on the people, reimagined as animals, in Animal Farm; and totalitarianism’s oppressive rule over Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. An uncharitable interpretation of these similarities is that Orwell knew only how to write one kind of novel—that he recycled each novel into superficially different, but essentially identical, stories. A more positive response would be to say that he remained concerned with the fate of the individual in modern life, with all its imperious, domineering, and bossy forms of social and psychological organization, throughout his career—that he wrote similar novels because he recognized that the same problems were cropping up in life again and again. His interest in the negative implications of capitalism, of money, can be seen in this light.

Orwell wrote in his essay ‘Culture and Democracy’ (1941) that it’s ‘the easiest thing in the world to show that all the compulsions which are put upon the individual crudely and openly in a totalitarian state are put upon him in a slightly more subtle way by the money-squeeze in a so-called democratic society.’ Orwell put the point in this slightly mocking tone because he was irritated by the assumption that if people are oppressed under totalitarianism and oppressed under democracy then this means that there is no difference between the two political systems—a ‘fallacy’, in Orwell’s view, that boils down to saying ‘that a difference of degree is not’, in the end, ‘a difference.’ Orwell was not apathetic about human suffering under capitalism. Yet he was keen to maintain conceptual precision in the analysis of socio-political structures, and he insisted that ‘there is a real difference’ between ‘old forms of society’ like the one in which he lived and came to adulthood, imperial Britain, ‘and the newer totalitarian states’, like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.[6] This is not to say that Orwell didn’t see oppression in British imperial society. Burmese Days is very clear in claiming that imperialism amounts to a form of tyranny held in place through violence and colonial exploitation. It does, however, give us an intriguing basis on which to think about Gordon’s attitude to money in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The novel signals its focus on money from the outset—in its epigraph, taken from Corinthians 1:13 (which also appears in A Clergyman’s Daughter), and in its reference to the money clinking in Gordon’s pocket, which is mentioned on the novel’s first page. With these means Keep the Aspidistra Flying immediately establishes the motif with which it will be concerned throughout: the ever-present thought of and worry about money, always there in the back of Gordon’s mind, like a half-forgotten but not-quite-forgettable coin in his trousers.[7] Gordon comes from the ‘middle-middle class, the landless gentry’ (KAF, p. 283), and the money-consciousness that this background has given him has made him opposed not only to middle-class respectability, and the ‘filthy money-world’ (KAF, p. 422) it denotes, but also to poverty, which he variously describes as a form of slime, a dirty wound, and a kind of ‘spiritual halitosis’ (see KAF, pp. 277, 331, 333). Gordon’s worldview is defined by this set of contradictions. Although in his youth his family background gives him a ‘crawling reverence for money’ (KAF, p. 287), this eventually transforms into a hatred of capitalism and the rituals of sympathy and charity with which capitalism overlaps. Gordon hates being given money by others, imagining it as a ‘secret hatred’ (KAF, p. 426) between the giver and the receiver, and he hates the thought of having enough money to be charitable, too, given that both situations, in his view, reflect a deeper inextricability from capitalist ‘tyranny’. If we think about Gordon’s attitudes with Orwell’s comments about the ‘money-squeeze’ in mind, it’s possible to interpret Gordon’s hatred of money as a reductive angst.[8] Gordon imagines the tyranny of money all around him, and he experiences the real effects of how money can shape a life for the worse. However, this is not quite the same thing as living in an authoritarian tyranny of the kind hovering on the fringes not only of the novel’s imaginative world, but also on the edge of Orwell’s development as a novelist.

Nevertheless, Keep the Aspidistra Flying remains an intelligent investigation into the pressuring sway of money on human lives. The financialization of Gordon’s mind has given him a horribly misogynistic view of women as mermaid-like hangers-on, dragging men down from liberty and freedom into a murky world of economic security (KAF, p. 351). He views marriage as ‘only a trap set for you’—by which he means men, first and foremost—‘by the money-god’ (KAF, p. 342). And sexual intimacy, likewise, is haunted by the consciousness of financial instability with which Gordon so constantly battles. When Gordon and Rosemary have their day in the countryside, Rosemary pushes Gordon away from her as they begin to get intimate with each other. He’s forgotten to bring protection with him. Rosemary’s unwillingness to continue leads to Gordon angrily thinking that ‘filthy cold-blooded precautions for money’s sake’ (KAF, p. 375) stand between him and his own satisfaction. Rosemary’s feelings don’t really get a look-in, as far as he’s concerned. Gordon is always conscious of what he thinks is a ‘film of money’ (KAF, p. 350) between him and Rosemary. When they do eventually have sex it’s an act fraught with half-spoken doubts and anxieties, over themselves and over money. The act is ‘done’, and ‘without much pleasure’ (KAF, p. 446). Gordon’s obsession with money has turned what should have been a loving act into a transactional one.

Despite Gordon’s protestations about wanting to escape the capitalist logics he finds all around him, this possibility is denied to him. This aspect of the novel structures it at the level of large-scale form—Gordon’s departure from and then return to the New Albion confirming his inability to escape from the middle-classness he loathes—and in more focused elements of the text, such as when Gordon thinks of Hermione Slater’s ‘body, naked, like a ripe warm fruit’ (KAF, p. 335). The image literalizes market consumption as a consumption, or prospective consumption, of the body—and of a woman’s body, at that. Gordon knows that you ‘do not escape from money merely by being moneyless’ (KAF, p. 294), a thought shared by Orwell, who investigates it at length in The Road to Wigan Pier. Gordon repudiates the money-code (KAF, p. 296), but his experiences in Keep the Aspidistra Flying bring home to him how impossible it is ‘to live like an anchorite outside the money-world’ (KAF, p. 461). The image of an ‘anchorite’, or religious recluse, brings back to mind the focus on the money ‘priesthood’ that the novel lays such stress on. It also points to the essential problem that Gordon faces: to turn one’s back on money by reclusively avoiding it is simply to avoid, not overcome, the so-called ‘money-code’. The most succinct encapsulation of these thoughts in the novel comes from Gordon’s envy of the ‘birds of the air’ (KAF, p. 294) who seem to fly above and beyond the world of money, just as a starling sits on a tree branch (KAF, p. 308) safely out of reach of the cat waiting patiently beneath it, hoping it will fall into its mouth. Birds differ from Gordon, however, in being different in kind. Although they face their own dangers, they have neither a consciousness of money nor a need for it.

So Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a peculiarly complex text. If on the one hand it traces in a large amount of detail the way money imprints itself upon a human mind, making that mind reductively transactional and materialistic in the process, it also insists on the difficulty and perhaps also the inescapability of money insofar as it structures the modern world, on the other. Gordon is quite clearly not a heroic figure. His rebellion against the money-code fails, and his reasons for rebelling in the first place are far from ideal. Keep the Aspidistra Flying explores at length a thought articulated briefly in Burmese Days—namely the thought that money doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Gordon discovers not only that money doesn’t make you happy, but also that not having money doesn’t make you happy either. The trap he falls into, has already fallen into, is being part of a money-driven society, in which the logics of exchange value have permeated so thoroughly into every aspect of human life that there is no way to escape from or even to imagine forms of life beyond them. Gordon’s ‘rage at being back in the clutch of money’ (KAF, p. 460), at the end of the novel, isn’t merely the anger of a man who can’t hold true to his principles, but the distress of someone who knows that the contours of rage itself have already been shaped by the financial imperatives to which that rage has been raised in protest.

[1] George Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 12: A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 269-72, at p. 269.

[2] The image comes back in Coming Up for Air (1939), in George Bowling’s conviction that post-First World War life has a ‘peculiar, ghastly feeling’, akin to being ‘on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts’ (George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 576). Sinking ships are peculiarly prominent in Winston Smith’s dreams, too.

[3] For an overview of the symbolism of the sinking of the Titanic in relation to Edwardian modernity more generally, see Gareth Russell, The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era (2019; New York: Atria, 2020).

[4] See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), part 1 (‘The Burial of the Dead’)—available here.

[5] Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 37, and see the explanatory note at p. 181.

[6] George Orwell, ‘Culture and Democracy’ (1941), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 13: All Propaganda is Lies, 1941-1942, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 67-79, at p. 68.

[7] Orwell took this consciousness of money with him to revolutionary Spain, where he reflected on ‘the money-tainted air of England’ (see Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 87).

[8] Gordon can also be viewed as a questionable source of value. As Andrzej Gąsiorek writes: ‘Comstock is an unreliable witness, and Rosemary’s interjection—“What absolute nonsense you do talk, Gordon!”—provides a further reminder that this cliché-ridden, pathos-seeking individual merits little sympathy’ (see Gąsiorek, ‘The Politics of Antinomianism: Orwell, the Everyday, and the Dream of a Common Culture’, in Annette Gomis and Susana Onega (eds), George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005), pp. 99-120, at p. 115).