Cash money

In Hotel World physical cash becomes a signifier for more than just purchasing power. It represents different things to different people throughout the novel. Else has the most personal relationship with it. She spends her days in the sidewalk outside of the hotel asking people for their spare change, slowly accumulating the cash that will ensure her survival for the next little stretch of life. Her occupation is much more closely related to the procuring of income, in the form of physical cash, than is anyone else’s in the novel. She spends most of her time attempting to procure money. It is interesting though that when she is given money it is usually dropped on the pavement around her rather than handed directly to her or put into a cup. Also interesting is her seeming reluctance to pick it up from the pavement, preferring rather to save her energy and economize her movements to pick up as many coins at once as she can. Once she finally does, her existence is physically tied to the coins when they slip within the lining of her jacket and literally form a barrier between her and the cold world.

Else’s coins also serve as a point of connection between her and some of the other characters, signifying a possible link to people for whom the coins signify something other than what they do to her. For the reporter, the 10p that she asks from Else signifies a chance to escape the strange world that she explores with Else and crawl back within her neatly packaged hotel room. For Sara’s sister Else’s coins represent a potential opportunity to connect with her dead sibling by acting as a physical tool, not for purchasing anything but for gaining a purchase in the slot of the screw that hides the dumbwaiter shaft from her view. It is also interesting that physical money represents a second point of connection between her and her sister. She retains the five-pound note that she receives in payment of the bet with the bellhop as a memento of her sister. It no longer signifies material goods after she folds it into a nearly unrecognizable tiny square and removes it from circulation.

The same banknote, or rather its transmission to Sara’s sister, symbolized an opportunity to expunge the guilt that the bellhop felt over Sara’s death. Perhaps by employing physical currency in this way Smith is commenting on the fact that the relationship between signified and signifier is purely subjective and that money has the ability to stand in for just about anything.