Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Grahame's stoats become the new lower classes, while the leading weasels, who sleep late and don't work, enjoy all the pleasures of the elite. Orwell's pigs overthrow one class system and replace it with their own. Taking advantage of their privileged position, they get up an hour later than all the other animals and drink the farmer's whisky. The pigs add to “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL” the illogical yet self-serving emendation “BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS,” the unspoken assumption of The Wind in the Willows.

  After the Hall is retaken, some of the captured enemy weasels deliver invitations to Toad's banquet and become his emissaries to the outside world. In Orwell, Mr. Whymper (echoing, perhaps, Eliot's “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”), a solicitor and former human enemy, “had agreed to act as intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world.”

  Grahame's animals have many agreeable human qualities. Orwell reverses this. His boar Old Major warns the animals that all man's habits are evil and that they must not adopt the vices of their natural enemy. He forbids them to walk on two legs, live in a house, sleep in a bed, wear clothes or drink alcohol. At the end, of course, the treacherous pigs consort with people, do all these forbidden things and resemble their original oppressors. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man,” Orwell concludes, “but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

  There are two military attacks in both books. In Grahame, the weasels and stoats, seeking more desirable accommodation and intent on overthrowing the landed gentry, take over Toad Hall. In the second battle, the Hall is finally recaptured by Badger and his followers. When the weasels are driven out and Toad regains possession, the revolution is happily repressed and the status quo restored. In Orwell, the pigs lead the animals in a revolt against the oppressor, take over Jones’ Manor Farm and enjoy a period of idyllic happiness. They first defeat the farmers’ attempt to regain the farm, and then repel Frederick when he attacks and tries to seize it. In the end, the pigs replace Jones with their own repressive regime, enslave their fellow creatures and betray the principles of the revolution.

  In The Wind in the Willows Toad acts like a child and must be punished by humans, who represent harsh law and order. In Animal Farm the animals are weak and exploited, and the pigs unite with the humans, who represent the forces of corrupt capitalism. Orwell hates the class system that Grahame endorses, but is disillusioned by the betrayal of twentieth-century revolutions. Yet he adopts Grahame's idea of rural peace and safety, and the joy of animals in their natural state. In Grahame, the animals remain animals and Eden is regained. In Orwell, the pigs are transformed into evil human beings and Eden is lost. Though both fables are counter-revolutionary, Grahame is a contented Conservative and Orwell a disillusioned Socialist.

  TWELVE

  ORWELL's BESTIARY

  The Political Allegory of Animal Farm

  I read extensively in the history of the Russian Revolution before writing this essay. In contrast to many critics who claimed the meaning of this satirical fable was so obvious that there was nothing more to say about it, I likened Animal Farm to the attacks on Stalin by Trotsky, Gide and Koestler, and showed that every detail in the book has a precise political significance.

  Orwell's hostility to the Russian Communists was a direct result of his experiences in Spain in 1937 when the Loyalists, like the revolutionaries in China in 1927, were betrayed by the Russians, and the Trotskyists whom Orwell had joined were mercilessly persecuted by their former comrades.1 Orwell writes in his Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1947): “These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them…. Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so, for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” Orwell often discussed and repeated the theme of this book. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), he states, “The Communist movement in western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy”; and he writes in his essay on James Burnham (1946), “history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.”

  Orwell's attempt to communicate the terrible discoveries he made in Spain was a failure in practical terms, for Homage to Catalonia sold badly and was largely ignored. Yet he felt it was vital to stimulate others into political awareness. As he writes in the Preface to Animal Farm: “Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi regime in Germany, and now, with the Soviet regime, they are still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion…. It was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet régime, for what it really was.”

  An experimentation with literary techniques that could most forcefully convey his social and political ideas is characteristic of all Orwell's nonfiction: the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London; the sociological reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier; and the personal, political and military history Homage to Catalonia. Orwell had considerable success as a polemicist and pamphleteer, but this genre was too blunt and too direct, and his views were extremely unpopular at the time he expressed them. Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, after Stalingrad and before Normandy, when the Allies first became victorious and there was a strong feeling of solidarity with the Russian allies, who even in retreat had deflected Hitler from England. Distinguished writers like Wells, Shaw, Barbusse and Rolland had praised Russia highly. Orwell's book belongs with Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1937),2 Gide's Return from the USSR (1937) and Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941), three prescient attacks on the Stalinist regime; and it anticipates postwar denunciations like Crossman's compilation, The God That Failed (1949), and Djilas’ The New Class (1957).3 Animal Farm was rejected in 1944 by Gollancz, Cape and Faber & Faber because it criticized a military ally, and Orwell planned to publish it himself as a two-shilling pamphlet until Secker & Warburg accepted what became Orwell's first financial success.

  Orwell believed “the business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it.” His choice of a satiric beast fable for Animal Farm (1945) was exactly what he needed. The fantastic genre enabled him to avoid the difficulty of assimilating his personal experience into a traditional novel, a form in which he was never entirely at ease. Orwell's portrayal of character was always rather weak, and the flat symbolic characters of the fable did not have to be portrayed in depth. The familiar and affectionate tone of the fable and its careful attention to detail allowed the unpopular theme to be pleasantly convincing, and the Soviet myth was exposed in a subtle fashion that could still be readily understood. It was written in simple language that could be easily translated, and was short so that it could be sold cheaply and read quickly. The gay genre was a final attempt to deflect his profound pessimism, which dominated his final realistic vision of decency trampled on and destroyed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Orwell fused his artistic and political purpose so well that the animals are completely convincing on the literal level. His precise portrayal of the beasts is based on his practical experience as a farmer in Wallington, Hertford (where he had a goat named Muriel) between 1936 and 1940. Though critics emphasize his statement, “Most of the good memories of my childhood … are in some way connected with animals,” the most important animals in the story, the pigs (and their dogs) are frightening and ferocious. Orwell utilizes the repulsive associations of Circean and Gadarene swine
that have prevailed since ancient times,4 and was undoubtedly influenced by the talking horses in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels. Yahoos slave for Houyhnhnms as animals do for pigs, and horses “milk their Cows, and reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands”5 just as “the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well-adapted to this task.”6 He also has strong personal feelings about pigs. In Coming Up for Air (1939), Bowling is frightened by “a herd of pigs [that] was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn't pig faces at all, it was only schoolchildren in their gas-masks…. But I tell you that for a moment they looked exactly like a herd of pigs.”7 Orwell wrote from Jura in 1948, “I have tried the experiment of keeping a pig. They really are disgusting brutes…. The pig has grown to a stupendous size and goes to the butcher next week. We are all longing to get rid of him, as he is so destructive and greedy, even gets into the kitchen sometimes.”

  Like the American publisher who rejected Animal Farm because “it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” critics have been deceived and disarmed by the apparent simplicity of this “fairy story.” Atkins writes in 1954, “In his revaluation of Animal Farm in World Review (June 1950) Tom Hopkinson says that this novel is one of the two modern works of fiction before which the critic must abdicate…. There is so much truth in this that I find it very difficult to say anything useful about the book and yet a study of Orwell cannot ignore it altogether.”8 Two years later Hollis concurs that “the story of Animal Farm is so familiar that it hardly needs detailed recapitulation. The interpretation of the fable is plain enough…. As I say, there is no difficulty in interpreting the symbolism of the story.”9 In 1962 Rees agrees, “Animal Farm is so well known that it cannot be necessary to do more than mention some of its major felicities”;10 and Thomas repeats three years later, “The story is too-well known for anything but a brief summary to be given here.”11 The next year Woodcock reaffirms that Orwell “produced a book so clear in intent and writing that the critic is usually rather nonplussed as to what he should say about it; all is so magnificently there.”12 Though critics have often interpreted the book in terms of Soviet history, they have never sufficiently recognized that it is extremely subtle and sophisticated, and brilliantly presents a complex satiric allegory of Communist Russia in which virtually every detail has political significance.

  Orwell describes the creative impulse of the book in his Preface: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the animals’ point of view.”

  Major's speech is an accurate exposition of orthodox Marxism and is very similar to the last paragraph of the Communist Manifesto (1848).13 The Communists

  openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

  All the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! This is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! (8)

  In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx stated, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; when Animal Farm is established, “everyone worked according to his capacity” (25). Squealer's ingenious gloss of “Four legs good, two legs bad” is a witty and ironic example of specious Marxist polemics: “A bird's wing, comrades … is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg” (29).

  Comrade Napoleon, the poem of Minimus (who is based on the poet Mayakovsky),14 is a close imitation of adulatory Soviet verse like the “Hymn to J. V. Stalin”:

  The world has no person

  Dearer, closer.

  With him, happiness is happier,

  And the sun brighter.15

  Friend of the fatherless!

  Fountain of happiness!

  Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on

  Fire when I gaze at thy

  Calm and commanding eye,

  Like the sun in the sky,

  Comrade Napoleon! (78)

  Parts of the revolutionary song, “Beasts of England,” is a close paraphrase of certain lines of “L’Internationale” (1871):

  C’est l’éruption de la fin

  Soon or late the day is coming

  Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!

  Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown

  La terre n’appartient qu’aux hommes

  And the fruitful fields of England

  Shall be trod by beasts alone

  Foule esclave, debout! Debout!

  Rings shall vanish from our noses

  Le soleil brillera toujours!

  Bright will shine the fields of England.

  “L’Internationale” expresses the brief but idealistic exhilaration that Orwell experienced in Barcelona. As he wrote to Cyril Connolly from Spain in 1937, “I have seen wonderful things & at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” His moving description of life in the Spanish militia is similar in feeling to the joyous freedom of the animals after the Rebellion:

  One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality…. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.”16

  Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement…. Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed [it] with speechless admiration…. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could hardly believe that it was all their own (18–19).

  Immediately after the pigs celebrate their victory and bury “some hams hanging in the kitchen” (a wonderful detail), the revolutionary principles of Major are codified by Snowball into “The Seven Commandments” (which are reminiscent of the Five Chief Beatitudes of the Pukka Sahib in Burmese Days). The corruption inherent in the Rebellion is manifested as each of the Commandments is successively betrayed, until none of the original revolutionary idealism remains. The structure of the book is circular, and by the time the name is changed back to Manor Farm, there has been a painful return to the status quo (or worse) with whiskey and whips in the trotters of the pigs.

  In the Preface to Animal Farm, Orwell writes: “although various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed.” Thus, the human beings are capitalists, the animals are Communists, the wild creatures who could not be tamed and “continued to behave very much as before” (27) are the muzhiks or peasants, the pigs are the Bolsheviks, the Rebellion is the October Revolution, the wave of rebelliousness that ran through the countryside afterwards is the abortive revolution in Hungary and Germany in 1919 and 1923, the hoof and horn is the hammer and sickle, the Spontaneous Demonstration is the May Day celebration, the Order of the Green Banner is the Order of Lenin, the special pig committee presided over by Napoleon is the Politbureau, and the revolt of the
hens—the first rebellion since the expulsion of Jones (the Czar)—is the sailors’ rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921.

  The carefully chosen animals’ names are both realistic and highly suggestive of their owners’ personality and role in the novel. The imperious Major (Marx-Lenin) is military, dominant and senior (in public school slang); the rather stupid and self-sacrificing Boxer (the proletariat), who is contrasted to the cynical Benjamin and the indifferent and unenthusiastic cat, is named after the Chinese revolutionaries who drove out foreign exploiters and were themselves crushed; Mollie (the White Russians) suggests folly, and her retrogressive defection for vanity and luxury is a paradigm of the entire revolution; Moses (the Russian Orthodox and later the Catholic Church) brings divine law to man; Squealer (a living Pravda) is onomatopoetic for a voluble pig; and Whymper, the pigs’ agent, suggests a toady. Pilkington (Churchill-England), the capitalist exploiter, connotes bilk and milk (slang): he is an old-fashioned gentleman who enjoys country sports on Foxwood, which has associations of both craftiness and the Tory landed gentry. Frederick (Hitler) refers to Frederick the Great, the founder of the Prussian military state and Hitler's hero. Frederick is a tough, shrewd man who drives hard bargains, steals other people's land for his own farm, Pinchfield, and practices terrible cruelties upon his subjects. These cruelties are related to the most moving scene in the novel—when Boxer is taken to the slaughterhouse. The knacker's van recalls the terrible gas vans used by the Einsatzgruppen for mobile extermination. Though Clover screams out, “They are taking you to your death!” the sound of Boxer's drumming hoofs inside the van “grew fainter and died away” (102).

  The most important animals are Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), whose personalities are antithetical and who are never in agreement. Both characters are drawn fully and accurately, though with simple strokes, and reflect almost all the dominant characteristics of their historical models. Like Trotsky, Orwell compares Stalin to Napoleon, for both turned revolutions into dictatorships (Bonapartism was the successor to Thermidor), and both transformed a national popular “revolution from below” into a foreign conqueror's “revolution from above” and forcibly imposed their revolutionary ideology on other countries. Napoleon the pig is fierce-looking, “not much of a talker [his speeches are “short and to the point”], but with a reputation for getting his own way” (13). He dominates the party machinery, controls the education of the young and is superb at plotting and “canvassing support for himself” in between meetings.17 Napoleon never presents any plans and always criticizes Snowball's, though he eventually adopts these plans and even claims he invented them. He first distorts and then changes history, blames Snowball for all his own failures, accuses him of plotting with foreign enemies, drives him into exile and finally pronounces his death sentence. He also publishes fantastic production figures, takes “credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune” (78), wins elections unanimously, names cities after himself and replaces the cult of Major (“the animals were required to file past the skull in a reverent manner”) with a more elaborate one of his own (49). As Orwell wrote in 1941, “One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges etc are suddenly forgotten.”