“Beer and Cigarettes and a Girl to Flirt with”: Orwell, Drinking and the Everyday

Abstract

This article considers Orwell's representation of everyday life in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Focusing on his representations of drinking and public houses, it argues that Orwell emphasizes the symbolic complexity of ordinary acts, objects and spaces, which do not function as mere props and backdrops in the texts but are integral to their meanings. The essay considers in particular the implications of everyday disappointments resulting from the disjunction between myth and practice, between the desire for drink and the experience of drinking. It argues that whilst this disappointment has a political potential it can only be realized through a process of critical reflection and articulation that participants can rarely achieve in the moment itself. Reading Orwell requires a careful attention to the seemingly trivial that reveals the failings of advanced capitalism and the possibility of a more fulfilling examined life, glimpsed in the contours of its absence. In this sense, his novels demand the kind of critical strategies that later characterized cultural studies, which also grounded its challenge to the established order in the close analysis of the ordinary.