George Orwell: Animal Farm. 1946, 1974 Harcourt Brace & Co. This review is based on a version published by Literature Connections, Animal Farm and Related Readings, McDougal Littell, 1997. 100 pages.
In 1936, Lois and Charles Orr, students at the University of Louisville, were volunteering in Spain, doing admin work for the Workers (Communist) Party, which was fighting against Franco. One morning in December, they were told of the arrival of an Englishman. “I went down to see who this Englishman was and what his business might be. There I met him — Eric Blair…. Exhausted, but excited, after a day and a night on the train (from London), he had come to fight fascism…. He was tongue-tied, stammered and seems to be afraid of people.” (from Spain in our Hearts, Adam Hochschild.)
Eric Blair was a writer; his pen name was George Orwell. I suppose he must have seen somethings that caused him to go to fight with the International Brigades in Spain; or maybe he saw things in Spain that changed him. Before he left London, he had completed a book on poverty in industrial England; a book waiting to be published. With Hemingway, Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Martha Gelhorn and others, he covered the war, but he also fought the war. Eight years after that war ended, Orwell published Animal Farm.
I honestly feel a little ridiculous “reviewing” a book that has been in circulation half a life longer than I, but here we are.
You probably know the story: the animals on a farm revolt, take over the farm, banish humans, and set about making a perfect society. Four legs good; two legs bad. In almost no time at all, Napoleon and Squealer pave the way for the pigs to be in charge, with privileges of indoor living, better food and lighter work. Napoleon shortly dispatches Squealer, and is alone at the top of the heap, where he lords over the subjects who worship him without question. Barely 100 pages of parable take us from revolution to re-establishment of the same old same old but with Napoleon rather than Farmer Jones in charge, weaving a narrative of gullibility and distraction that explores how easily folks can be led to embrace what is not good for them.
I hadn’t read this in high school (don’t ask me how that happened), so as I was reading it for the first time, I thought of Egypt and Israel (the book of Exodus), and of Flik and the circus insects who do battle against the racketeering grasshoppers in A Bug’s Life (Pixar, 1998).
In A Bug’s Life, the issue is the ant colony’s failure to pay tribute they owe to the grasshoppers, who prefer to extort the ants’ crops rather than do their own work and grow their own winter stash. Said one tweeter: “Aged 25, I’ve suddenly realized A Bugs Life is about workers seeing that they outnumber the bourgeoisie and seizing the means of production.” (Side note: this was a key theme of the war in Spain also.)
In Exodus, the Israelites have been enslaved to the Egyptians ever since the death of Joseph, their connection, their relative who was a friend of Pharaoh. They’ve been looking for freedom for generations.
“You let one ant stand up to us, and they all might stand up! Those ‘puny little ants’ outnumber us a hundred to one. And if we ever let them figure that out…. THERE GOES OUR WAY OF LIFE!” said the head grasshopper.”
In Exodus: “Pharaoh said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.’ Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labour.” It’s a theme to which the Pharaoh will return over and over again — there are more of them than us!
It’s a theme in American society as well: the demographics are shifting and white people are terrified of the coming reality that people of color will outnumber white people in just another generation.
Power cannot always be a numbers game, so it has to be a power game. In Orwell’s telling, it is the cunning of the pigs and the malleability of the sheep which combine to do in the rest of the animals — who rebelled with the expectation of a new egalitarian way, but who soon fall prey to just another power monger, just another capitalist iteration. In A Bug’s Life, the grasshoppers were always predators; in Exodus, the Pharaohs were likewise predators, attentive mostly to which side of their bread was buttered. (In America, we have capitalists.)
In Exodus, the enslaved people are led into a wilderness to learn to live a new way, to learn to create a new society of well-being. But in barely a generation, they recreated what they despised — a hierarchy with “big deals” at the top and slaves at the bottom, and the top supported by the good lieutenants — military and clergy (Manna & Mercy, Daniel Erlander). To see this in action, visit almost any local church on July 4, Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day or “Scout Sunday.”
The question is why does every generation have to relearn this lesson?
The turn of events in Pharaoh’s Egypt was, according to Exodus 1:9, that a pharaoh arose who did not remember Joseph. In Animal Farm, it is no one person, animal or event, but the relentlessness of the indoctrination, the patience of Napoleon, the subtleties of the changes, the determination to let the old ways die with memory, the old revolutionary songs die with the generations. (Every revolution needs a song. In Animal Farm, the song is The Beasts of England; in the Spanish civil war, it is The Internationale. Among Jewish peoples it is The Song of the Sea from Exodus 15: “horse and rider God has thrown into the sea.”
When the songs die, we are found still vulnerable, reminded still to be on guard. It’s never one thing, one moment. And here, now, the U.S. in 2023, we are well down the path toward fascism, White Christian Nationalism. It’s a dangerous time.
So, if you haven’t, maybe read this book.