Orwell (21 page)

Taking advantage of the lapse in vigilance, Badger and the animals arm themselves for battle: “First, there was a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on the other side to balance it. Then a pair of pistols, a policeman's truncheon, several sets of handcuffs, some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case.” The excessive weaponry and incongruous supplies (which might impair their ability to fight) are amusing. The cavalier's sword is balanced by the pirate's cutlass and then superfluously compounded, since they have only two paws, by the more modern pistols. Since Toad, for once, is on the right side of law and order, they add a policeman's baton and handirons. Finally, they carry medical supplies in case of wounds, grub in case of hunger.

The final provocation is the Chief Weasel's song, delivered in a high, squeaky voice. He mocks the bachelor-owner of the premises by echoing the anonymous nursery rhyme, “A frog he would a-wooing go,” with “Toad he went a-pleasuring.” Badger chooses this opportune moment to attack the drunken gluttons and retake the Hall. Grahame clearly states his political message
(contra
his friend's advice) on the penultimate page: “After this climax, the four animals continued to lead their lives, so rudely broken in upon by civil war, in great joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions.” The novel ends as the mother weasels warn their children that if they don't behave “the terrible grey Badger would up and get them.” The hero of the battle of Toad Hall, like the weasels who once threatened the peaceful animals on the river, becomes demonized by his former enemies.

Orwell was five years old when
The Wind in the Willows
was published. That delightful work made perfect childhood reading, and he shared Grahame's love of the peaceful Thames Valley. The hero of his novel
Coming Up For Air
(1939), like Grahame's characters, longs to escape from the harsh realities of contemporary life and tries to recover the lost Eden of his
Edwardian childhood. Both authors believed, with Bertrand Russell, that anyone born after 1914 has never known real happiness. Choosing carefully and covertly, Orwell borrowed and absorbed many elements of Grahame's beast fable. Toad, after escaping from his house, has breakfast at the Red Lion inn. Orwell tips his hand and slyly hints at his source when Farmer Jones drinks at the Red Lion inn.

Grahame's Rat and Orwell's pig Minimus write poetry. Like Rat, Orwell's pig Snowball was best at expository writing and, precariously balancing himself on a ladder, writes the soon to be traduced Seven Commandments on a wall. Toad, like Orwell's animals, loves to burst into song, and his “Last Little Song” meagerly compensates for the narcissistic speech he's forbidden to give at his banquet. Toad's song praises himself; Minimus' song praises the dictatorial pig, Napoleon. Grahame's characters use schoolboy slang; Orwell's pigs simplify and parody Marxist ideology.

In Grahame, machines wreak havoc on the river, the fields and the roads. In Orwell, the disappointing electrical windmill is built and, like Toad's cars, destroyed: first by a raging gale and then by the invasion of Frederick. Grahame's animals arm themselves before recapturing Toad Hall. Orwell's pig Napoleon urges the animals “to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them.”

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.

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.