"Lenin, A.J. Cook, and the dirty little poets in the Montparnasse Cafes" (Chap XVII)

Burmese Days is strikingly, and overtly, strewn with references to European, and specifically, British popular culture of Orwell's time. It opens with the epigraph from Shakespeare, but most of the novel proceeds to refer to a fair amount of British popular colloquial writing. Elizabeth's favourite author is Michael Arlen (Chap. VII) who, while not strictly considered lowbrow, did not gain the critical import of Charles Dickens, for instance, whom Orwell gestures towards. Mr Francis, an Eurasian, is said to speak "like Mr Chollop in Martin Chuzzlewit" (Chap X), though at this point it is not clear whether this emerges from Elizabeth's inner thoughts or is a narratorial comment. I am inclined towards the former, for Elizabeth's own disdain for the "highbrow" then might be read ironically - "all these Highbrow ideas — Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary." Verrall also shares her distaste for the "highbrow" - he "had not read a book since he was eighteen, and that indeed he 'loathed' books; 'except, of course, Jorrocks and all that' " , Jorrocks being a "vulgar ... cockney grocer" (Wikipedia) featured in a comic paper.

Perhaps Orwell is harshly caricaturing British citizens stationed in the colonies, striving to flaunt his own cosmopolitan status against their impoverished enculturation in this debut novel of his, and might be at the same time grappling with his own bohemian bourgeois status as an emerging writer (hence "dirty little poets"). Hence, in studding the novel with such references both to colloquial written culture and to what might be considered "high art", Orwell might be leveraging on the latter to distance himself from the former, aspiring towards something more than just a mere journalistic account of Burmese racial politics.

And so when Orwell borrows the lines of the traditional lyric "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down can rain" (Chap. XXI), he is perhaps not only longing for the rain to quell the heat, but for the Western aesthetics to sweep through what he saw to be the intellectually stultifying colonial outpost of the Far East. These references betray Orwell's own anxiety of losing touch with the bastion of high culture while in colonial Burma, but they also foster an ambivalent relation towards the Empire - Orwell is embittered with the colonial enterprise, and yet at the same time implicitly beckons for the proliferation of its high culture. A colonialism of a different kind?

I could go on about how this ambivalence is extended to Orwell's relation to the romantic tradition ... but I'll leave that for next week.