George
Orwell "Animal Farm"
It is the history of a revolution that
went wrong — and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step
for the perversion of the original doctrine’, wrote Orwell in the original
blurb for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. His simple and tragic fable
has become a world-famous classic of English prose.
George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric
Arthur Blair. The change of the name corresponded to a profound shift in
Orwell’s life-style, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial
establishment into a literary and political rebel.
Orwell is famous for his novels Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. In 1944
Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the
Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In this book the group of
barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and
set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals intelligent
and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a
dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive a heartless than that of
their former masters.
Orwell derived his inspiration from the
mood of Britain in the ‘40s. Animal Farm confronted the unpalatable truth that
the victory over Fascism would in some respects unwittingly aid the advance of
totalitarianism , while in Nineteen Eighty-four warns the dangers to the
individual of enroaching collectivism. In these last, bleak fables Orwell
attempted to make the art of political writing in the traditions of Swift and
Defoe. The most world-known Gulliver’s Travels. This satire? First published in
1726, relates to the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchant
ship, and it shows the vices and
defects of man and human institutions. So far as satire has become the subject
of our research-work, it is necessary we look at the nature and sources of
comic.
What is comic? Similar considerations
apply to the historically earlier forms and theories of the comic. In
Aristotle’s view ‘laughter was intimately related to ugliness and debasement’.
Cicero held that the province of the ridiculous lay in the certain baseness and
deformity. In 19th century Alexander Bain, an early experimental psychologist,
thought alone these lines ‘not in physical
effects alone, but in everything where a man can achieve a stroke of
superiority, in surpassing or discomforting a rival is the disposition of
laughter apparent.’ Sidney notes that ‘while laughter comes from delight not
all objects of delight cause laugh. We are ravished in delight to see a fair
woman and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed
creatures, wherein certainly we can delight’. Immanuel Kant realized that what
causes laughter is ‘the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into
nothing’. This can be achieved by incongruity between form and content, it is
when two contradictory statements have been telescoped into a line whose
homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a popular adage. In a
similar way nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense. It
is interesting to note that the most memorable feature of Animal Farm — the
final revision of the animals revolutionary commandments: ‘All animals are
equal but some animals are more equal than others’, is based on that device.
Other sources of innocent laughter
are situations in which the part and
the home change roles and attention becomes focused on a detail torn out of the
functional defect on which its meaning depends. ‘A bird’s wing, comrades, is an
organ of propulsion not of manipulation’. Orwell displaces attention from meaning to spelling. One of
the most popular comic devices is impersonation. The most aggressive form of
impersonation is parody, designed to deflate hollow pretense, to destroy
illusion and to undermine pathos by harping on the weaknesses of the victim.
Orwell resorts to that device describing Squealer:’ The best known among them
was a small fat pig named Squealer with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes,
nimble movements and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker:’
A
succession of writers from the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes through
Swift to George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attention on
deformities of society that, blunted by habit , are taken for granted. Satire
assumes standards against which professions and practices vicious, the ironic
perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous point in the direction
of the grotesque which implies an admixture of elements that do not march. The
ironic gaze eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of
experience, marked by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of
coherence between the appearance and reality. This suggests one of the extreme
limits of comedy, the satiric extreme in which the sense of the discrepancy
between things as they are and things they might be or ought to be has reached
to the borders of the tragedy.
Early theories of humor, including even
those of Bergson and Freud, treated it as an isolated phenomenon, without
attempting to throw light on the intimate connections between the comic and
tragic, between laughter and crying. Yet these two domains of creative activity
form a continuum with no sharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity. The
confrontation between diverse codes of behavior may yield comedy, tragedy or
new psychological insights. Humor arouses malice and provides a harmless outlet
for it. Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping yields further clues of this
challenging problem. The detached malice of the comic impersonator that turns
pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty. Comedy is an imitation of common
errors of our life, which representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful
sorts that may be.
Surely satire reflects changes in
political and cultural climate and it had it’s ups and downs. George Orwell’s
satire of the 20th century is much more savage than that of Jonathan Swift in
18th century. It is only in the mid 20th century that the savage and the
irrational have come to be viewed as
part of the normative condition of the humanity rather than as tragic
aberration from it. The savage and irrational amount to grotesque parodies of
human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it is the 20th century novelists
have recognized the tragicomic nature of the contemporary human image and
predicament, and the principal mode of representing both is the grotesque. This
may take various forms. In Animal Farm it takes a form of apocalyptic nightmare
of tyranny and terror.
The satire in Animal Farm has two
important aims — both based on the related norms of limitation and moderation.
First, Animal Farm exposes and criticizes extremist political attitudes as dangerous.
On the one hand, it satirizes the mentality of the utopian revolutionary — the
belief at through the conscious effort of a ruling elite a society can be
suddenly severed from its past and fashioned into a new, rational system.
Implicit in Snowball’s vision of high technology modernization is the
extirpation of the animals’ resent agricultural identity as domesticated
creatures and — if Boxer’s goal of improving his mind is any indication , their
eventual transformation into
Houyhnhnms. Instead, Snowball’s futuristic incantations conjure up the
power-hungry and pleasure-loving Napoleon.
An allegorical view of reality – the thing
said or displayed really meaning something else—suited the Marxist-oriented
social criticism of the 1930s,which was indefatigable in pointing out an
economically self-serving motives underlying
the surface features of modern bourgeois society. One form of allegory
is the masque, a spectacle with masked participants.
Analyzing
the novel we can hardly determine comedy from tragedy. We can’t find
those sharp boundaries which divide these two. Orwell can be called the true
expert of man’s psychology. Cause only a man who studied psychology of the
crowd could create such a vivid image of characters, which we see in Animal
Farm. Describing the characters Orwell attaches great significance to the
direct remarks which help the reader to determine who is the victim and who is
hunter in the novel. The features of the animals are : ‘A white stripe down his
nose gave him somewhat stupid appearance’, ‘Mollie , foolish, pretty white
mare’. Stupidity becomes a kind of leitmotif in the description of the animals.
Pigs on the contrary are represented as very clever animals: ‘the pigs were so
clever that they could think of the way round every difficulty’, ‘with their
superior knowledge...’
The author creates the image of the crowd
which plays a very important role in the novel. What is a crowd? This is not
only mass of individuals if to look
deeper from the psychological point of view
we shall find out that crowd is a gathering of people under the definite
conditions which has its traits, which differ from that of single individual.
The conscious person disappears , besides feelings and ideas of everyone who
forms that gathering which is called crowd, receive united , indivisible
direction. Orwell ridiculed that vice of the society. In this respect it takes
the form of innocent laughter. Old Major found an answer to all problems of the
animals and opened the thing on which ‘the support and pleasure’ of their days
depend on. ‘It is summed up in a single word— Man. Man is the only real enemy
we have’. That episode makes the reader laugh but at the same time this very
moment can be considered the tragic one, as the victim of the crowd has been chosen
and pointed out and now nothing can stop the proces. 'It is not crystal clear,
then, comrades, that all the ivels of the life of ours spring ffrom the tyrany
of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be
our own.Almost overnight we can become rich and free.’
Major provides animals with scapegoat. In
the nature of individual the image of an enemy excites aggressiveness but in the dimensions of the crowd the
hostility increases thousands times. S.Moskovichy wrote in his book ‘The
machine that creates Gods’, that ‘society is ruled by passions on which one
should play and even stimulate them in order to have an opportunity to rule
them and to subordinate to intellect’. Having read that episode we don’t pay
attention to it’s deep psychological sense, but simply enjoy the humor with
which the author speaks of it.
Orwell uses very popular device he gives
the description of the character and at
the end he gives a short remark which completely destroy the created image:
‘Old Major was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to
lose an hours sleep in order to hear what he had to say... they nestled down
inside it and promptly fell asleep’,’she purred contentedly throughout Majors
speech without listerning to a word of what he was saying’. He uses the same
device in the situation when Old Major is telling the animals about the song :
‘Many years ago when I was a little pig, my mother and other sows used to sing
an old song of which they knew only the tune and the first three words I had
known that tune in infancy , but it had long since past out of my mind, last
night however it came back to me in my dream’. The reader is carefully prepared
to hear some kind of patriotic march but instead of that the author in one sentence
breaks down the created image: ‘It was a stirring tune something between
‘Clementine’ and ‘La Cucaracha’.Through those short remarks we learn the
attitude the author towards what is going on in his novel. He laughs at his
heroes pretending that the things he speaks about to be very important while
making the reader understand the contrary thing.We can see hear again an
integral part of any kind of humour-incongruity between the reality and the
situation as it is said to be. The lack of coherance between things in it’s
turn lead to the very invisible boundary between comedy and tragedy.
Orwell’s novel is always balancing between
tragedy and comedy. In Animal Farm Orwell is exposing the selfish power-hunger
of the few behind a collectivist rhetoric used to gull the many . And in at
least two Orwell’s allegorical exposure
is also an exposure of allegory. Because the surface fiction tends to be
considered of lesser importance than the implied meaning , allegory is inherently hierarchical , and
the insistence on the dominant meaning makes it an authoritarian mode.
If allegory tends to subordinate narrative
to thesis, the structure of allegory, it’s dualistic form, can be
emphasized to restore a balance between
fictional events and conceptual massage. In Animal Farm there are signs of a
balance struck between satiric devices
allegorically martialed to expose and assault a dangerous political myth and
collateral apolitical elements — the latter akin to the ‘solid objects and
useless scraps of information’.
Orwell allows the reader to fix disgust at
cruelty, torture and violence on one leading character—Napoleon. The way Orwell
presents the figure is structural, in that the figure of the Napoleon clarifies his political intent for the
reader. There is no doubt about the way the reader feels toward Napoleon, but
Orwell’s handling of him is all the
more effective for combining ‘humor with the disgust’.’Napoleon was a large,
rather fierce looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much
of a talker but with the reputation for going his own way’.
Orwell presents Napoleon to us in ways
they are, at first amusing as, for example, in the scene where he shows his
pretended disdain at Snowball’s plans for the windmill, by lifting his leg and
urinating on the chalked floor. ‘One
day ,however, he arrived unexpectedly to examine the plans. He walked heavily
round the shed, looked closely at every detail of the plans and snuffed at them
once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating them out of the
corner of his eye; then suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans and
walked out without uttering a word.’ The increasing tension of description is
broken down immediately this makes the reader smile. Besides the author speaks
of Napoleon’s ridiculous deeds in such a natural way, as that is the normal
kind of behavior that we just can’t
stand laughing. ‘Napoleon produced no schemes of his own, but said quietly that
Snowball’s would come to nothing’. Napoleon is seen to have no respect for Snowball
who creates the plans. This is most apparent in his urinating on them which
emphasises his brutal and uncivilised character. Animals urinate on objects to
mark their territory. This is symbolic as Napoleon later takes the idea for the
windmill as his own.
On the allegorical level the differing
views of socialism held by Trotsky and Stalin are apparent. In contrast with
Snowball’s speeches, Napoleon merely makes the minimum response and when he
does speak it is usually to criticise Snowball. Speech becomes less and less
important to Napoleon. The sheep with their mindless bleating effectively
silence the opposing opinions as no-one else can be heard. ‘ It was noticed
that they were specially liable to break ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ in the
crucial moments of Snowball’s speeches. Snowball’s reduction of Animalism for
the benefit of stupider animals and the way the sheep mindlessly take it up ,
parodies the way socialist ideology reduces itself to simply formulas that
everyone can understand, but which stop any kind of thought. In the Communist
Manifesto, for example, there is the following sentence : ‘The theory of the
communists may be summed up in the single sentence: ‘Abolition of private
property’’. Set this beside the basic principle of Animalism: ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. Orwell’s feelings
about dangers of over simplification are clear. ‘The more short the statement
is the more it is deprived from any kind of provement, the more it influences
the crowd. The statement exert influence only if it is repeated very often, in
the same words’. Napoleon said that ‘there is only one figure of the theory of
orators art,which deserves attention —repetition. By the means of repetition an
idea installs in the minds so deeply,
that at last it is considered to be the proved truth.
What the truth is? The Russian dictionary
gives the difinition of truth as:the truth is ,what corresponds to the reality.
But is it always so? Very often it happens so that we exept as the true the
false things which we want to be true, or the things that someone whant us to
exept. That is one of the most intresting perculiarities of man’s psychology,
that Orwell ridicules.There is one univerce truth , but the man has a strange
habit to purvert truth.
Napoleon appears to have gained the
support of dogs and sheep and is helped by the fickle nature of the crowd.
From the start it seems, Napoleon turns events to his own
advantage. When the farm is attacked in the ‘Battle of Cowshed’, Napoleon is
nowhere to be seen. Cowardice is hinted
ft and his readiness to rewrite history later in the novel shows the
ways in which Napoleon is prepared to
twist the truth for his own ends. The
Seven Commandments in which are condified the ethnical absolutes of the new
order, are perverted throughout the book to suit his aims.
There is an interesting thing to notice
about Seven Commandments. That is an important device to use the ‘lucky number’
to deepen the impression of animals misfortune. Every time the changing of the
commandment takes place, we see an example of how the political power , as
Orwell sees it, is prepared to alter the past in peoples minds, if the past
prevents it from doing what he wishes to do. Firstly the fourth commandment is
altered in order that pigs could sleep comfortably in warm beds. A simple
addition of two words does it. ‘read me the fourth commandment. Does it not say
something about sleeping in beds? With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out. ‘It
says that ‘ no animal shall sleep in the bed with sheets’’. Whenever the pigs
infringe one of Major’s commandments, Squealer is sent to convince the other
animals that that is the correct interpretation . ‘you didn’t suppose , surely,
that there was ever a ruling against beds? A bed merely means the place to
sleep in. A pile of straw in a stall is a bed, properly regarded. The rule was
against sheets, which are a human invention’.
Napoleon secures his rule through an
unpleasant mix of lies distortion and hypocrisy / there are two scenes where
Napoleon’s cruelty and cold violence
are shown in all their horror : the scene of the trials and the episode
where Boxer is brought to the
knacker’s. The veil of mockery is drown aside. In these episodes humour is
absent, the stark reality of Napoleons hunger for power, and the cruelty
‘And so the tale of confessions and
executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses lying before the
Napoleon’s feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood, which had been
unknown there since the expulsion of Jones’.
Napoleon in the novel stands for Joseph
Stalin, and of course we can’t omit the way the author skillfully creates this character. Everything from
purvation of communist ideology to the cult of personality of Stalin, found
it’s reflection in the novel.
Orwell in the cruelest kind of parody
gives to Napoleon such titles as: ‘Our ,leader, Comrade Napoleon’, ‘The Farther
of all animals, Terror of Mankind,
Protector of the Sheepfold, Ducklin’s Friend.’
The novel mainly is based on the
historical facts, and even the relationships of Soviet Union and Germany are
shown in that fairy tale. For the all cleverness of the Napoleon, though, he is
fooled by Frederic of Pinchfield ( he stands for Hitler’s Germany) who gets the
timber out of him, pays him false money, then attacks the farm, and blows up
the windmill.
Orwell’s satire will be no iconoclastic
wrecking job on the Stalinist Russia whose people had been suffering so cruelly
from the war and whose soldiers , under
Stalin’s leadership, were locked in desperate combat with the German invader even as Animal Farm was being written. That Orwell’s assault is
primarily on an idea, the extremists fantasy of technological utopianism devoid of hard work, and less a living
creature, the commander is chief, is demonstrating during the most dramatic
moment of Farmer Frederick’s attack on the farm—the juxtaposition of dynamited
windmill and the figure of Napoleon alone standing unbowed. And despite
Orwell’s fascination with Gulliver’s Travels, it is a sign of his attempt to
draw back from the Swiftian revulsion at the flash — a disgust that , as Orwell
later noted could extend to political behavior — toward the more balanced and
positive view of life that Animal Farm, despite it’s violence, has few
references to distasteful physical
realities, and those two are appropriate to the events of the narrative.
Napoleon is a simple figure. Orwell makes
no attempt as to give reasons as to why he comes to act the way he does. If
Napoleon was a human character in the novel, if this where a historical novel
about a historical figure Orwell would have had to make Napoleon convincing in
human terms. But isn’t human and this is not a novel. It is an animal fable and
Orwell presents the figure of Napoleon in ways that make us see clearly and
despise what he stands for. He is
simplified for the sake of clarity. He lends force of Orwell’s political
massage, that power tends to corrupt, by allowing the reader to fix his disgust
at cruelty torture and violence.
The primary objective of the tale is that
we should loathe Napoleon for what he stands for. The other animals are used to
intensify our disgust or else to add color and life to the tale by the addition
of the farmyard detail. The most significant of the other animals is
undoubtedly the cart-horse Boxer, and in his handling of him Orwell shows great
expertise in controlling the readers reactions and sympathies and in turning
them against what is hates.
Throughout the novel boxer is the very
sympathetic figure. Honest and hardworking, he is devoted to the cause in a
simple-minded way, although his understanding of the principles of Animalism is
very limited. He is strong and stands nearly eighteen feet high, and is much
respected by the other animals. He has two phrases which for him solve all
problems, one, ‘I shall work harder’, and later on, despite the fact that
Napoleon’s rule is becoming tyrannical, ‘Napoleon is always right’. At one
point he does question Squealer, when he, in his persuasive way, is convincing
the animals that Snowball was trying to betray them in the Battle of Cowshed.
Boxer at first can not take this, he remembers the wound Snowball received
along his back from Jones’s gun. Squealer explains this by saying that ‘it had
been arranged for Snowball to be wounded, it had all been part of Jones’s
plan’. Boxer’s confused memory of what actually happened makes him ‘a little
uneasy’ but when Squealer announces , very slowly that Napoleon ‘categorically’
states that Snowball was Jones’s agent from the start then the honest
cart-horse accepts the absurdity without question.
Orwell through the figure of Boxer is
presenting a simple good-nature , which wishes to do good, and which believes
in the Rebellion. So loyal is Boxer that he is prepared to sacrifice his memory
of facts, blurred as it is. Nevertheless, so little is he respected, and so
fierce is the hatred the pigs hatred the pigs have for even the slightest
questioning of their law that, when Napoleon’s confessions and trials begin,
Boxer is among the first the dogs attack. Wish his great strength he has no
difficulty in controlling them: He just simply, almost carelessly ‘put out his
great hoof , caught a dog in mid-air, and pinned him to the ground’. At a word
from Nahjleon he lets the dog go , but still he doesn’t realize he is a target.
Boxer’s blind faith in the pigs is seeming disastrous. Confronted with the
horrifying massacre of the animals on the farm, Boxer blames himself and buries
himself in his work. This show of power pleases us as a reader, in what we like
to think of physical strength being allied to good nature, simple though a good
nature may be. Boxer has our sympathy because he gives his strength selflessly
for what he believes, whereas Napoleon gives nothing , believes in nothing and
never actually works. Boxer exhausts himself for the cause. Every time the
animals have to start rebuilding of the windmill he throws himself into the
task without a word of complaint, getting up first half an hour, then three
quarters of an hour before everybody else.
Boxer’s sacrificial break down in the
service of what he and the other worker animals believed to be technological
progress might be interpreted as
allegorically portending the future deterioration of the animal community.
At last his strength gives out and when it
does his goodness is unprotected. The pigs are going to send him to the
knacker’s to be killed and boiled out into glue. Warned by Benjamin the donkey
(his close, silent friend throughout the book), and by Clover he tries to kick
his way out of the van, but he has given all his energy to the pigs and now has
none left to save himself. The final condition of Boxer, inside the van about
to carry him to the knacker’s in exchange for money needed to continue work on
the windmill, emblematically conveys a message close to the spirit of Orwell’s
earlier warnings : ‘The time had been when a few kicks of Boxers hoofs would
have smashed the van to mach wood. But alas!
His strength had left him; and in the few moments the sound of drumming
hoofs grew fainter and died away’. This is the most moving scene in a book
Indeed our feelings here as reader’s are so simple, deep and uninhibited that
as Edward Thomas has said movingly, ‘we weep for the terrible pity of it like
children who meet injustice for the first time.
Boxer can be attributed to the tragic heroes cause he doesn’t struggle with
the injustice as the tragic hero should do. And surely we can consider him a
comical hero as all through the story the reader has compassion on him. Orwell managed to unite tragedy and comedy in
one character. Boxer arouses mixed contradictory feelings. His story is no
longer comic, but pathetic and evokes not laughter but pity. It is an
aggressive element, that detached malice of the comic impersonator, which turns
pathos into bathos and tragedy into travesty.
Not only Boxer’s story reminds us more of
a tragedy. The destiny of all animals makes us weep. If at the beginning of the
novel they are ‘happy and excited’ in the middle ‘they work like slaves but
still happy’, at the end ‘they are shaken and miserable’. After Napoleon’s
dictatorship has showed it’s disregard for the facts and it’s merciless
brutality, after the animals witnessed the forced confessions and the
execution, they all go to the grassy knoll where the windmill is being built
Clover thinks back on Major’s speech before he died, and thinks how far they
had gone from what he would have intended: ‘as Clover looked down the hillside
her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would
have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves
years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. This scenes of terror
and slaughter where not what they had looked forward to on that night when old
Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of
the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and whip,
all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the
week. Instead — she did not know why — they had come to a time when no one
dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when
you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking
crimes’.
From the sketch of the political
background to Animal Farm it will be quite clear that the main purpose of that
episode is to expose the lie which Stalinist Russia had become. It was supposed
to be a Socialist Union of States, but it had become the dictatorship. The
Soviet Union in fact damaged the cause
of the true socialism. In a preface Orwell wrote to Animal Farm he says that
‘for the past ten years I have been convinced that the distruction of Soviet
myth was essential if we wanted a revival of socialist movement’. Animal Farm
attempts, through a simplification of Soviet history, to clarify in the minds
of readers what Orwell felt Russia had become. The clarification is to get
people to face the facts of injustice, of brutality, and hopefully to get them
to think out for themselves some way in which a true and ‘democratic socialism’
will be brought about. In that episode Orwell shows his own attitude to what is
happening on his fairy farm. And he looks at it more as at the tragedy than a
comedy, but still he returns to his genre of satire and writes: ‘there was no
thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that even as things
were they were far better than they had been in the days of Jones, and that
before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the humanbeings’.
Finally, the moderateness of Orwell’s
satire is reinforced by a treatment of time that encourages the reader’s
sympathetic understanding of the whole
revolutionary experiment from it’s spontaneous and joyous beginnings to
it’s ambiguous condition on the final
page. A basic strategy of scathing social satire is to dehistoricize the society of the specific sociopolitical
phenomena being exposed to ridicule and condemnation.
In Animal Farm the past that jolts the
creatures from the timeless present of the animal condition into manic state of
historical consciousness is a quick, magically transformative moment .
Список литературы
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