‘Animal Farm’ at 75: Art and Enduring Political Purpose
On 17th of August, 1945, Penguin Books published “Animal Farm”, the classic political satire by George Orwell (real name: Eric Arthur Blair). Initially intended as an anti Stalinist satire to dissuade Europeans from embracing Stalinist totalitarianism, Orwell’s slim ‘fairy tale’ has gained wide acceptance among the English speaking readership and in homes, libraries and school curricular in over 70 languages around the world. Orwell, who was himself a social democrat, was mortally petrified by the prospects of the spread of revolutionary absolutism, bloody dictatorship and upheaval in Europe especially in Britain.
For the last 75 years, ‘Animal Farm’ has cemented its position as one of the most remarkable literary events of the last century. It remains an undying political allegory of universal appeal and enduring contemporary resonance. Not even Orwell’s other much celebrated futuristic and prophetic novel, “1984”, has found nearly as much popular appeal and contemporary relevance.
Thus, wherever revolutions have occurred and self imploded, wherever the heroes of revolutionary disruption have turned the sword of subterfuge against each other, wherever the promises of messianic political change have turned into ashes of disappointment and mass betrayal, ‘Animal Farm’ has found meaning as a literary paradigm of human political behavior and experience. To the extent that such tragic reversals remain a permanent feature of politics and human behavior, the appeal of this otherwise simple animal fable has endured with recurrent freshness and troubling echoes.
Since after reading ‘Animal Farm’ as a high school junior in 1966, I have found myself repeatedly returning to the tiny novel ever so often. As a matter of personal choice and habit, each time any of my children began reading, I would instinctively gift them two books as primers: George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’. My aim has been to prepare them in advance for two basic experiences that will recur in their future lives. The first is the ever present reality that every political change usually carries in its womb the seeds of its own reversal. The second is the inevitability of change as the only permanent thing in the world, be it political, cultural or indeed technological. As a teacher, I always included “Animal Farm” in reading lists for courses in ‘Literature and Politics’ or, for that matter, as textual matter for graduate courses in ‘Literary Theory’ or ‘Literature and Society’.
Ordinarily, a simple imaginative recreation of an animal fable should not graduate beyond bed side entertainment or, at best, a reading primer for young adolescents. “Animal Farm” fulfills both functions and rises to loftier heights. It is a revolt among animals in an English countryside farm. The animals in the farm, led by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball mobilize the rest for a violent revolt against Mr. Jones, a countryside farm owner. The revolt succeeds in chasing off the unsuspecting Mr. Jones and his family, thereby ending an era of ostensible human exploitation and ushering in a regime of government of animals by animals for animals with the memorable hilarious moto: “Two legs bad, four legs good”!
Soon enough, supplies run thin as the capacity of the animals to run the farm diminishes, leading to unavoidable hunger and widespread discontent. The totalitarian Napoleon deploys the wily propaganda skills of Squeler, a gifted propagandist to disinform and misinform the animals while justifying every act of the ruling oligarchy of pigs. The height of this propaganda blitz is the subversion of the original anthem of the revolt: “All Animals Are Equal” by a crafty emendation: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. Soon enough, an oligarchy of pigs emerges with an entitlement to the good things with all the vices and excesses of the discredited humans.
Soon enough, Snowball overthrows Napoleon and the vanguard of animals spawns an opposition camp of silent malcontents. Devotees of the toppled Napoleon are routinely liquidated while widespread disillusionment among the animal population erodes and subverts the original ‘revolutionary’ fervor. In the end, the elite regime of pigs invites representatives of humans to an event that resembles a banquet and perhaps a disguised rehearsal for handing back the farm to human management. At the climactic moment, the other animals look in through the window. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
This simple allegory which Orwell insisted on calling a ‘fairy tale’ captures the historical twists and turns of great revolutions and even the reversals in partisan democratic political changes of baton. The Bolshevik revolution bred the great purges of revolutionary ‘fellow travellers’ under Stalin and later led to the rise of a privileged communist elite class that lived in luxurious dachas in the suburban outskirts of Moscow. Similarly, the Chinese revolution under Mao Tse Tung produced the unintended rise of the infamous Gang of Four and the serial abuses and corruption that led to their subsequent purge in the post Mao era.
Elsewhere in the world where the adoption of leftist ideologies led to popular revolutions, there would seem to be a bit of the wisdom of ‘Animal Farm’ in the subsequent tragic reversals of the original revolutionary ideals. In Venezuela, the populist autocracy of Hugo Chavez and his comrades literally crippled the economy of one of the world’s potentially richest countries and sent millions of impoverished citizens into the streets literally with begging bowls. It is only perhaps in Cuba that the original revolutionary ideals and spartan discipline of Fidel Castro and his successors was never substantially diluted, leading to the survival of Cuba today as easily the most credible surviving vindication of socialist progress and humanism.