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Literary Review
Classics Revisited
Language as political tool
BY RAVI VYAS
Animal Farm, George Orwell, first published 1944, Indian edition, Rs. 36. Other books consulted: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, George Orwell (four volumes), Penguin Books. Orwell's Victory, Christopher Hitchens, Penguin Books. Geo rge Orwell: Critical Essays, edited by Raymond Williams, Prentice Hal.
POSSIBLY because four publishers had refused to publish George Orwell's classic, Animal Farm (including T.S. Eliot as editorial adviser to Faber), on the ground that at that time (1944) it was not possible to print a book attacking the Soviet Union, a military ally, it has gone down in popular imagination as the anti-Communist novel of all times. But, looking back on it more than 60 years on, this 90-page satire on dictatorships is much more than an anti-socialist diatribe. Of course it is a political novel, but Orwell's politics embraced a number of issues: the essential nature of all dictatorships, both of the Left and the Right, politics and the corruption of language, the ephemeral nature of human relationships or the only form of real angst, the menace of bureaucracies, but, above all, the commitment of language as the partner of truth.
Satire on dictatorships
Prima facie, Animal Farm is a short satire on dictatorships. The animals on the farm revolt against their master, Jones. They are successful in getting rid of the tyrant and in managing the practical work of the farm; but they are disastrously unsuccessful over some things they had never regarded as a problem, their dealings with each other. The Revolution is hardly complete before differences appear. The pigs do not actually work, but direct and supervise others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural they should assume the leadership. With the leadership, they also assume the buckets of milk yielded by the cows, and the apples from the orchard.
"Comrades!" cries Squealer, "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples...Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brain-workers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us...It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! ... Surely, comrades," cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?"
Once there was no longer any danger of Jones's return, a new threat must be found to keep the other animals working their hardest, contented in submission to the pigs. The new threat is himself a pig, Snowball, who believes the proper strategy is to "send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on other farms"; as opposed to the pig leader, Napoleon, backed by Squealer, who insists that "what animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them." Long after Snowball has been driven into exile, his name serves as a slogan of hatred: his machinations are held responsible for every failure on the farm, and every animal suspected of disaffection is denounced as an emissary of Snowball:
A goose came forward and confessed to have secreted six ears of corn during last year's harvest and eaten them at night. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool — urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball.
Grades of equality
At last the farm is established as a going concern, but the animals are surprised to find that — except for the pigs and their protectors, the watchdogs — life is exactly as hard and painful as it always had been. Even their sense of pride is destroyed when, on returning from the fields, they find that the pigs have taken to walking on two legs and carry whips. Meantime, the basic principle of the Revolution, "All Animals are Equal", inscribed on the barn wall after the expulsion of Jones, has a qualifying clause — "But Some Animals are More Equal than Others".
Animal Farm works as an allegory because the story is coherent on a number of levels. Since it is conceived and written in the classic tradition of satire — the tradition of going back and forth in time or what academics describe as the tradition of "receding planes" — it contains something for every reader. Like Gulliver's Travels or Aesop's Fables, it makes a delightful children's story. At another level, it is manifestly an attack on Stalinism, as Orwell said in his introduction to the Ukrainian edition (1947). "Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the USSR was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to giving up their power than any other ruling class."Orwell said later, "the great achievement of Stalinism was to replace discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive."
Politics and language
It can also be read as a lament for the fate of revolutions. As he saw the Soviet Union slip away into the grip of a faceless bureaucracy, he consoled himself by saying that "all revolutions are failures but they are not all the same failure. The consequences appear different at different times, and some only emerge decades later." Now that we have the luxury of hindsight, what Orwell predicted in Animal Farm seems to have come true. When all is said and done, it was the language of politics that was responsible for the dénouement: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."
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