Economics and Commerce students should not lose touch with the Humanities, and thereby miss out on the subjective experiences and expressions of people. They must read economic novels, economic poetry and economic humour in order to appreciate the “controlled hallucinations” of the people. As future policymakers, they cannot be oblivious or insensitive to people’s storytelling and narrative poetry.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is an economic novel by George Orwell. It is about the money code, and accepting and worshipping or rejecting and defiling it. Accepting it means moving on with corrupt capitalism, and rejecting it means saying NO to LIFE and choosing to live in abject poverty. That is the trade-off.
How can this dichotomous ambivalence be managed? This is the ‘eternal’ topic of humankind under capitalism, which is well-explored in the novel. And I fully empathise with all the dramatis-personae and their immediate perceptions and ways of life in relation to it.
The main character is Gordon Comstock—a promising poet. He is a discontented and embittered young man in London, who believes that ‘all modern commerce is a swindle’ and stubbornly attempts to drop out of the monetary system altogether. Refusing to advance himself in life and defying pressure from family members and friends, he falls willingly into the mire of poverty and self-neglect, until he is trapped by circumstances (of fathering a child with his humane and loving girl-friend Rosemary) into embracing the very values that he formerly despised.
Gordon reveals his troubled relationship with the money code through a poem he intermittently constructs thus:
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over
The bending poplars, newly bare,
And the dark ribbons of the chimneys
Veer downward; flicked by whips of air,
Torn posters flutter; coldly sound
The boom of trains and the rattle of hooves,
And the clerks who hurry to the station
Look, shuddering, over the eastern rooves,
Thinking, each one, ‘Here comes the winter!
Please God I keep my job this year!’
And bleakly, as the cold strikes through
Their entrails like an icy spear,
They think of rent, rates, season tickets,
Insurance, coal, the skivvy’s wages,
Boots, school-bills, and the next instalment
Upon the two twin beds from Drage’s.
For if in careless summer days
In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,
Repentant now, when winds blow cold,
We kneel before our rightful lord;
The lord of all, the money-god,
Who rules us blood and hand and brain,
Who gives the roof that stops the wind,
And, giving, takes away again;
Who spies with jealous, watchful care,
Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,
Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,
And maps the pattern of our days;
Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,
And buys our lives and pays with toys,
Who claims as tribute broken faith,
Accepted insults, muted joys;
Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,
The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,
And lays the sleek, estranging shield
Between the lover and his bride.
Gordon belongs to a middle-middle class lineage that is relentlessly and progressively troubled by dismal poverty out of moneylessness. He belongs to those depressing families in which “nothing ever happens”. His negative attitude towards money is captured by his tirades against money on these lines: “All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you…”. For him, 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 failure (not making money) and success (making money). It is not merely the lack of money that is bothersome to him. It is rather that, having money, the middle-middle class still lives mentally in the money-world—the world in which money is virtue and poverty, crime. It is not poverty per se but the down-dragging of respectable poverty that has done for people like him who have accepted the money-code, and by that code they are failures. They have never the sense to lash out and just live, money or no money, as the lower classes do. We can thus say, Gordon is a petty-bourgeois who despises and repudiates the money-code on the one hand and wants to get out of the money-world to lead a moneyless, anchorite existence on the other. He wants to live by his own values, not those of corrupt, materialistic system which grinds the life and spirit out of people. He hates the bloodiness of modern life and sincerely desires to see the money-civilisation blown to hell by bombs, so to say. His war on money is related to his perception that every life that is lived subject to the money-code must be meaningless and intolerable resulting in disintegration and decay that is endemic in our time. The attractive advertisements of the money-world basically reflect silliness, greed, vulgarity, imbecility and amorality of the system persistently drifting towards desolation, frightful emptiness and inevitable doom.
Gordon’s good friend and well-wisher by the name Ravelston is a wealthied one from the upper class, who stands for socialism as the antidote to all the ills of capitalism. He epitomises a life-long attempt to escape from his own upper-class and become, as it were, a honorary member of the proletariat (working class). But as the author comments, “Like all such attempts, it was foredoomed to failure. No rich man every succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.” Ravelston’s belief in socialism going to put things right is based on a mere theoretical knowledge of life under a decaying capitalism as deathly and meaningless.
Thanks to the nice girl-friend Rosemary, Gordon eventually settles down with a mindset as follows: “Our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people…, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras—they live by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrive to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpret it is not merely cynical and hoggish. They have their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They keep themselves respectable—keep the aspidistra flying. Besides, they are alive. They are bound up in the bundle of life. They beget children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.”
The aspidistra plant which he found everywhere with the middle-middle class and which he never adored since long is now a tree of life going to be placed in his new abode as a companion along with Rosemary as his wife!
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this old novel in these plaguing times even as I shudder to think what my work, family and life would be without money. How fortunate and grateful I am for a steady and rising income!
Even so, I would like to give you some homework which can make you transcend the concerns of this book. There are men and women in this world who have enjoyed living without money. Google-search and explore their experiences. There is Charles Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Sacred Economics. Which says that till now money has been a story that has caused harm to humankind via the dynamics of alienation, scarcity, competition, endless growth and community destruction built into it. A new story needs to be constructed now-on-wards that can reset the world by reclaiming life from harmful money on the principles of the ancient gift economies. Read this book. The same things are conveyed in terms of sanctifying money and bringing about an economy based on appreciation, respect and gratitude by the followers of the pre-Christian-Western-paganist, polytheistic (Hindu) and nature-oriented (Native American) religious communities. Explore their knowledge and wisdom. And their Gaia shamanism is not irresponsible occultism of dark ages.
There is indeed a beautiful world that does not yet exist all over the world but our hearts tell is very much possible without embracing the ideas of Marxist determinism and post-capitalistic socialism!
I suggest that you should read this socially critical novel—first published in 1936--after you have internalised your listening to Money by Pink Floyd, and to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. The heavy metal cover by Leo Moracchioli for the latter is even more arresting.
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
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