Can we extricate ourselves from the society we live in? How can someone create art in a commercial society?
Gordon Comstock lives in rebellion. He seeks to defy “the money-god”(48). Yet money torments and poisons his every thought. He wishes to write creatively, free from moneyed ideas of success. Yet his squalid poverty embitters him, choking his work in its crib. He accuses everyone around him of being obsessed with money. Yet he is the most obsessive and resentful in his environment. Gordon Comstock has not escaped money.
George Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistras Flying presents us in many ways with a bleak reality. There are repeated themes of staleness, deadness and decay surrounding the protagonist’s life.
Gordon submits himself to a gradual squalid decay through poverty; first in his clothes, then his relationships and surroundings. This fate is self-chosen. Gordon quits his ‘good’ job out of a defiance of the ways in which money structures his (our) society. He frames it as an act of satanic rebellion in Milton’s sense: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven; better to serve in hell than to serve in heaven.”(48) Declaring war on money, he wishes to escape its hold on his life. Therefore he accepts a job in a bookshop for two pounds a week rather than continuing a job in advertising which commercialises his creative writing talent.
Many a creative can relate to Gordon’s instinct of romantic rebellion. Of course, it would be wonderful to thrive of one’s uncorrupted creative talent. In his rare optimistic moments, Gordon wants to believe that he will still be able to make a living with poetry. After all, he has already published a book of poems with ‘exceptional promise’ according to some reviews; a promise upon which his magnum opus “London Pleasures” would build if he could only write it. But his success never truly arrives. Like so many artists, be it writers, musicians, or painters, he has to compromise his talents, employ them in a job that corrupts his writing, turns it away from his true visions. Instead, he attempts to seek rebellion in defying success.
As sympathetic as we may be to his plight, his romantic rebellion is futile. Gordon does not really defy money. In choosing ‘noble’ poverty, he instead narrows all his waking thoughts to money. He cannot write because of the squalidness of his life, and thus creativity leads back to wealth. There is no success in ever creating any lasting work or being in any way content with anything he writes, since his thoughts are driven solely by his material condition. He has a complicated relationship to his few friends because he has no money, but is also too proud to accept their help. He denounces women as unattainable to him because he is poor, despite the fact that there is a woman, Rosemary, who cares for him and stays patient throughout his spells of cruelness and lack of comfort in their relationship. But Gordon suspects she must in actuality despise him and refuse to sleep with him because he has little means. It seems to be obvious to him –“Of course it all comes back to money.”(124)
Even though readers may sympathise with his plight, the novel makes it increasingly easier to dislike Gordon. He is resentful, paranoid, prideful, and bitter, and he lashes out at everyone that wishes to help him. The true tragedy lies in the fact that Gordon is maybe not wholly at fault. He idealistically assumed that he could escape his money-driven society on an individual level solely by defying its ideas of success. However the idea of money poisons his life more through his rebellion than before, as he degrades and tortures his environment. His commitment to poverty may be initially romantically justified, but is ultimately useless. Rosemary’s pregnancy eventually forces him to return to the ‘good’ life and ‘good’ job, which inspires a feeling of relief as he admits that his attempt to live outside “the money-world” (266) brought nothing but misery.
What Gordon fails to recognise is that he never did leave the money-world. Nor does his rebellion break his creativity free from corporate fetters. His individual show of rebellion towards money and success demonstrates that one cannot escape one’s society. During the two years he spends in rebellion, he gains no positive gain or pleasure in any alternative world. He remains unable to write any meaningful work. Instead he just lets go of any effort or pleasures in life, turning rebellion into spite. Rosemary eventually proclaims to him that all he wishes is to “just sink”(218) into the mud. In truth he doesn’t want to live nor can he live outside the systems of profit and capital that characterise his environment. All he can do is spite its ideas of success and ‘good’ life, all to his own detriment. The novel does not present social reform as an option either. Ravelston, a rich publisher and “parlour socialist”(194) represents a cynical, surface deep socialism within the story. Ravelston’s position surrounds Socialism with an air of hypocrisy and ingenuity that the novel does not care to dispel.
What is left for the reader is a novel that provides no hope of escape or resolution. Gordon Comstock’s story wants to tell us that there is no way to extricate oneself from our society the way it is structured. Any defiance ultimately leads you deeper into its clutches or is disingenuous. All ways ultimately lead back to miming a performance of respectability and realignment with the goals of accepted society. Such a lack of Orwell’s typically ardent belief in socialism and reform within this particular text creates an interesting artefact in this cynical novel. It coheres with Capitalist Realism, the cultural malaise and feeling that there is no alternative to capitalism; and that it is easier to imagine the end of the world. In this manner, I found this novel to be strikingly resonant.
Almost 90 years later, feelings of entrapment in the structures of society that govern our lives have arguably increased. Compared to contemporary society with its complicated supply and distribution chains, Gordon Comstock probably would have had an easier time attempting his release. Meanwhile, how could I suggest or advocate escape while the very technological devices on which I write and you read this reflection are tied to the exploitation of natural resources and injustices in countries far removed. How can we still create meaningful, challenging, and uncompromised art when we cannot extricate ourselves from the unjust society we are able to recognise? This text does not aim to suggest that the novel’s implications were right and should go unchallenged. However, even though it is not Orwell’s best and most subtle work, maybe Keep the Aspidistras Flying is a difficult and necessary read because it confronts us with an uncomfortable tragedy. It is a sort of tragedy that makes us stare in the face of our complicity and entanglement with systems even as we intellectually unpack them again and again.
Sources
Orwell, George. Keep The Aspidistras Flying. London, Penguin Books, 1936.
Image: Cover of Penguin Edition, photographed by author.