People, Animals, & Traditions
Brief Reflections from Two Worthwhile Books by George Orwell
The subtitle of George Orwell’s Animal Farm offers a kind of interpretive key to the entire story, filled with talking animals, plotting pigs, and drunken farmers. A fairy story is one concerned wholly with the “other.” What makes a fairy story powerful is how it is simultaneously not the world presently inhabited, while always maintaining enough of a shadow that it could be this present world. The other place must be real in some way if it is to possess the sense of otherness which serves as the right warning or cautionary message. Blend too much reality in with the fairy, and the reader simply ignores the message or even gets lost in the imagery itself. Too much allegorizing does not a good novel make. However, balancing between these things, a touch of reality here, a touch of fairy land there, and what is borne of that union is a story which captivates and horrifies, which convicts and entertains. In Animal Farm, Orwell struck the right balance. But how is this blending made evident in the text?
Orwell begins with a simple assertion from the animals who desire rebellion: Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? . . . It is summed up in a single word—Man . . . Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.”1 What could it mean to remove Man from the scene? It cannot mean the removal of those things that are uniquely Man’s, items such as songs and mottos and morals and so on. For even the first act of Snowball, once the oppressive Mr. Jones had been driven away, was to erect a religious icon: THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS.2 Though these are initially crafted to drive the distinction between Man and Beast even further, outlawing walking on two legs and the consumption of alcohol, it does not rid the animals of the very thing which would most likely connect them to humanity. The rule of law, expressed through a religious icon, ensures that the animals cannot ever truly rid themselves of the evil human element of their world.
This interconnectedness is further expressed in the form of songs, or anthems. In particular, the Beasts of England stands out as an imitation of what the animals seem to abhor.3 Even if Percy Bysshe Shelley’s original, “Men of England,” could be interpreted in a way favoring rebellion, it only rings true to the hearer or reader because it beckons to that aspect which is decidedly humane, the recognition of one’s value for simply being human. By adopting this mode of identity, expressive through music and words, the animals bind themselves to the word, which becomes the very method of their undoing as Squealer teaches the sheep to cry “Four legs good, two legs better!” and manipulates the commandments until the entire rebellion is reduced to a single thought.4 The other animals in the barnyard comply, not because they are blind to the absurdity of the pigs walking on two legs, but because they are beholden to the power of language that has been adopted by the animals despite their hatred of all things human.
How do these things hold together? The answer lies in A Fairy Story. While the world of Snowball and Old Benjamin is like the world which the reader knows, it is decidedly not the same. Before penning Animal Farm, Orwell detailed his experiences during the Spanish Civil War in a memoir entitled, Homage to Catalonia. Here, Orwell deals with the world as it is; not as it might be nor as though it were some place other than this present world. Slogans played a chief role in the Republican cause, with “Don’t fight against your own class!” and “The war and the revolution are inseparable!” crowding out any sensations of cold or sense that might have caused the rebels to rethink their position.5 Likewise, songs played a critical role in keeping the army motivated and moving “drowning out the rattle of the trains” even in a city the size of Barcelona.6 Even an old English tune accompanies Orwell throughout his account: “There are rats, rats, / Rats as big as cats, / In the quartermaster’s store.”7 But the final time Orwell hears this song is as a shell screams over their heads, and they duck in the hopes of surviving.8 The difference between a pig and a person seems to be that a person knows when a song’s comfort has come to an end.
There is good reason to suspect that Orwell’s real-life experiences shaped his portrayals within Animal Farm. But he did not simply fictionalize the events. Orwell chose, instead, to give the world another world, one where Squealer’s claims that Snowball was in league with Mr. Jones all along can give someone a sense of laughter, rather than a horrid fright.9 For the animals, everything continually comes back to Mr. Jones. It was he who showed them how to run the farm in his absence, his presence which gave them the cultural mores to build their new society upon, and even Mr. Jones’s bad habits found their way back into the barnyard as poor Squealer fell from his ladder in a drunken stupor.10 What the animals needed to make sense of their newfound freedoms could be recalled from the very traditions and culture they had only recently driven away. Mr. Jones represented what was both good and bad about their world, which is what humanity does in reality as well. The slogans, the songs, the fighting, these things are born from the same place in Man. They emanate from the same place that humanity senses the other in this world, and so these touchstones provide the perfect meeting point for Orwell’s real world to intersect his fairy land. But to any who tread traditions and cultures unawares, one could easily choose the wrong one to imitate. To do so would make it hard indeed to look “from pig to man, man to pig” and find it “impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Preface by Russell Baker. Introduction by C. M. Woodhouse (New York: Signet Classics, 1996), 7.
Orwell, Animal Farm, 24.
Ibid., 12-13.
Ibid., 132-134.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia. Introduction by Lionel Trilling (New York: Harvest/HBJ Book, 1980), 42, 70.
Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 5, 109.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 106.
Animal Farm, 80-81.
Ibid., 108-109.