Orwell (23 page)

The three main Russian political events that are most extensively allegorized in
Animal Farm
are the disastrous results of Stalin's forced collectivization (1929–33), the Great Purge Trials (1936–38) and his diplomacy with Germany that terminated with Hitler's invasion in 1941. Orwell writes that “after Snowball's expulsion, the animals were somewhat surprised to hear Napoleon announce that the windmill was to be built after all” (49). The first demolition of the windmill, which Napoleon blames on Snowball, is the failure of the first five-year plan. The destructive methods of the hens during the “Kronstadt Rebellion”—they “made a determined effort to thwart Napoleon's wishes. Their method was to fly up to the rafters and there lay their eggs, which smashed to pieces on the floor” (65)—are precisely those used
by the
muzhiks
in 1929 to protest against the forced collectivization of their farms: “In desperation they slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements, and burned crops. This was the
muzhiks'
great Luddite-like rebellion.”
²⁴
The result of this enormous ruin was, as Orwell writes in a 1938 review of Eugene Lyons' book on Russia, “years of appalling hardship, culminating in the Ukraine famine of 1933, in which a number estimated at not less than three million people starved to death.” Deutscher mentions the recurrent cannibalism during times of starvation.
²⁵
Orwell refers to this famine when he writes that “For days at a time the animals had nothing to eat…. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face…. It was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease … and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide” (63).

The most dramatic and emotional event of the thirties was the Great Purge Trials, the minute details of which were published in the official translation in 1938. Stalin's motive, according to the editors of the trial's transcript, was a craving “to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess in 1934.”
²⁶
They also state, “What unfolds before us in the trial, then, is a gigantic texture of fantasy into which bits and pieces of falsified real history have been woven along with outright fiction.”
²⁷
A perfect example of this is when the animals “remembered that at the critical moment of the battle Snowball had turned to flee” but forgot that it was a deliberate ruse to set up the victorious ambush (69). In the trial of Trotsky's friend, Karl Radek, in February 1937, the Prosecution claimed Trotsky “was organizing and directing industrial sabotage in the Soviet Union, catastrophes in coal mines, factories, and on the railways, mass poisonings of Soviet workers, and repeated attempts on the lives of Stalin and other members of the Politbureau.”
²⁸
After the destruction of the windmill, Napoleon roars: “In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year…. A rumour went around that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food” (60, 90). In the last and most important trial of Bukharin in March 1938, Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, confessed, “I arranged long walks for Alexei Maximovich, I was always arranging bonfires. The smoke of the bonfire naturally affected Gorky's weak lungs.”
²⁹
During the purge in
Animal Farm
, two other sheep confessed to having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon, by chasing him round and round a bonfire when he was suffering from a cough (71).
³⁰

In his review of Lyons' book, Orwell is horrified by the fact that “the GPU are everywhere, everyone lives in constant terror of denunciation….
There are periodical waves of terror … [and] monstrous state trials at which people who have been in prison for months or years are suddenly dragged forth to make incredible confessions.” In
Animal Farm
, hens “stated that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders…. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool [Napoleon had urinated on Snowball's plan during their dispute]—urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball” (71). Tucker and Cohen state that nine million people were arrested during the purges and that the number of people executed has been reliably estimated “at three million.”
³¹
In
Animal Farm
, all the “guilty” animals are “slain on the spot” and the most terrifying moment of the satire comes after the confessions and executions, when “there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood” (71–72).

After solidifying his domestic power through massive liquidation, Stalin turned his attention to the increasing menace in Europe, and attempted to play off the democracies against Hitler. Deutscher describes how “he still kept his front doors open for the British and the French and confined the contact with the Germans to the back stairs…. It is still impossible to say confidently to which part of the game Stalin then attached the greatest importance: to the plot acted on the stage or to the subtle counter-plot which he was spinning in the twilight of the
coulisse.”
³²

Similarly, the animals “were struck dumb with surprise when Napoleon announced that he had sold the pile of timber to Frederick…. Throughout the whole period of his seeming friendship with Pilkington, Napoleon had really been in secret agreement with Frederick” (82–83). But Napoleon is sadly deceived: Frederick's bank notes (the Hitler-Stalin nonagression pact of 1939) are forgeries, and he attacks Animal Farm without warning and destroys the windmill. Orwell's letter to his publisher in 1945 gives a fascinating insight into the precision of his allegorical technique: “In chapter VIII (I think it is Chapter VIII), when the windmill is blown up, I wrote ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces.' I would like to alter it to ‘all the animals except Napoleon.' If the book has been printed it's not worth bothering about, but I just thought the alteration would be fair to Joseph Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.” Hitler's defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) was the turning point of the Russian campaign: when the enemy “saw that they were in danger of being surrounded, Frederick shouted to his men to get out while the going was good, and the next moment the cowardly enemy was running for dear life” (87).

Orwell also portrays one of Stalin's diplomatic blunders. The reappearance of the raven Moses “after an absence of several years” (97) and his eternal talk about the Sugarcandy Mountain represents Stalin's queer attempt, in the spring of 1944, “at reconciliation with the Pope.” In order to gain Catholic support for his Polish policy, he received a lowly and unaccredited American priest, Father Orlemanski, and “was twice closeted with him for long hours” during a most crucial period of the war. Nothing came of this, of course, and the result of this stunt, writes Deutscher, was that Stalin was made “the laughing-stock of the world.”
³³

The satire concludes, as Orwell says in the Preface, with “the Teheran Conference, which was taking place while I was writing.” Deutscher, who knew him, relates that Orwell was “unshakably convinced that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it for good, among themselves, and to subjugate it in common….
'they
are all power-hungry', he used to repeat.”
³⁴
The disagreement between the allies and the beginning of the cold war is symbolized when Napoleon and Pilkington, both suspicious, “played an ace of spades simultaneously” (118). The point of the conclusion is not merely that the pigs are like men, but that men are like pigs.
³⁵

The political allegory of
Animal Farm
, whether specific or general, detailed or allusive, is pervasive, thorough and accurate, and the brilliance of the book becomes much clearer when the satiric allegory is compared to the political actuality. Critics who write “it makes a delightful children's story”
³⁶
and who emphasize that “the gaiety in his nature had completely taken charge”
³⁷
do Orwell a serious disservice by ignoring the depth and complexity of his satire. Orwell wrote to Middleton Murry the year he finished the book, “I consider that willingness to criticise Russia and Stalin is
the
test of intellectual honesty,” and by his own or any standard it is an honest and even a courageous book.

In its own subtle and compressed manner
Animal Farm
is as serious as
Nostromo
, whose theme it shares. In Conrad's novel Dr. Monygham states of the capitalistic revolutionaries: “They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. The time approaches when all that . . [it] stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back.”
³⁸
And Emilia Gould murmurs with deep grief: “There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.”
³⁹

 

 

In this essay I argued forcefully against the prevailing critical opinion that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a “nightmare vision” of a totalitarian future. I believe, instead, that it is a realistic portrayal of the present and the past. Czeslaw Milosz has testified to Orwell's acute perception of contemporary totalitarianism.

I published this piece in
English Miscellany,
edited in Rome by Mario Praz. One day in Rome, when all the museums were closed, I visited Praz's flat, crammed with art, in the Fondazione Primoli. Short and heavy, with slightly Mongol eyes and dilated nostrils, he impressed me as an immensely learned man (only Donald Greene, of the people I've met, equaled his erudition), not without vanity, who had read everything and knew everything—and had very nearly written about everything.

The most common cliché of Orwell criticism is that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a “nightmare vision” of future totalitarianism.
¹
I believe, on the contrary, that it is a very concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the present and the past, and that its great originality results more from a realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials than from any prophetic or imaginary speculations.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is not only a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years, but also a culmination of all the characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the Depression to the cold war. The origins of the novel can be found in Orwell's earliest books, and its major themes, precise symbols and specific passages can be traced very exactly throughout his writings. For example, Orwell characteristically expresses the poverty and isolation that oppresses the characters in his novels in terms of personal humiliation, so that Winston's frustrating sexual
experience with his wife Katharine (who is frigid like Elizabeth in
Burmese Days
and Dorothy in
A Clergyman's Daughter)
is exactly like that of Gordon with Rosemary in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Orwell felt that he had to evolve a new literary technique in order to frighten people into a recognition of the dangers that threatened their very existence. His statements about
Nineteen Eighty-Four
reveal that the novel, though set in a future time, is realistic rather than fantastic, and deliberately intensifies the actuality of the present. Orwell wrote that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
“is a novel about the future—that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel … [it is] intended as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in Communism and fascism…. Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”
²
Irving Howe (and the “nightmare” critics who follow him) asserts, “it is extremely important to note that the world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is
not
totalitarianism as we know it, but totalitarianism after its world triumph.”
³
It would be more accurate to say that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
portrays the very real though unfamiliar political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia transposed upon the landscape of London in 1941–44.
⁴

The naturalistic setting of wartime London is combined with brutal characteristics of eighteenth-century England to emphasize the moral and material regression under “Ingsoc.” The people palliate their dreary existence with large doses of acidic gin, prisoners march through the streets in leg-irons and public hangings provide popular amusement.
⁵
The major Augustan influence on
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is
Gulliver's Travels
, especially Book Three, which, Orwell says, is an attack on totalitarianism and “an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted Police-State, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.” Julia's mechanical job on the novel-writing machines is clearly derived from the Engine in the Academy of Lagado “so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as the square bits of Wood moved upside down.”
⁶
The absurd scientific experiments described in Goldstein's book are very like those Swift used to mock the Royal Society; the “Floating Fortress” is reminiscent of Swift's “Floating Island” that also reduces rebellious subjects to obedience. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to
diminish
the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum” (304); the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express lying, falsehood or anything evil. And State control of love, sex and marriage is similar in Houyhnhnmland and Oceania. Love is deliberately excluded from
marriage, which is an objective and dispassionate conjunction for the sole purpose of propagation. It is arranged by the State or parents on a pragmatic basis, and adultery and fornication are forbidden or unknown.