Alice Minium

George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in 1945 after the end of World War Two. Orwell had previously fought in the Communist army, but his own personal beliefs were more complicated. In Animal Farm, he does not make those beliefs clear. He does, however, posit one thing about human beings in the context of history: whether fascists, dictators, or imperialist-capitalists, we are all enslaved to human nature.

Orwell believed this human nature was animalistic. Orwell’s fundamental principle, and the thesis of my paper, is Animal Farm is used to illustrate this fact. He believes humans are condemned to their instincts and the petty conflicts that have historically polarized us through all of time. We are not equipped to move past these political misunderstandings. Jeffrey Meyer, in “The Political Allegory of Animal Farm,” says Orwell saw human beings as “prisoners of history, inadequately equipped to deal with our own flaws.” Our flaws are a universal of human behavior, no matter what political ideologies we mask them in. Orwell does not advocate Communism, nor does he explicitly argue against it — rather, he seeks to lay bare the open structure of political systems themselves. He does this by showing us a ludicrous tale of animals conducting, overthrowing, and, gradually, regressing in “government.” It is no accident he uses animals to convey this. Orwell’s premise is, though we call ourselves human beings, our principles, morals, and behavior are no different. It is all the same thing with a different name — Christian or Muslim, fascist or capitalist, oligarchy or theocracy — our nature is the same, regardless of government.

The choice of animals for a fable on government is no accident as well. It is, after all, “civilization” and “enlightenment,” which we hail as the crown champion of Man, and it is these ideological superior states we aim to create with “revolution” or government. Orwell’s political animals not only underscore the tale’s purpose as a universal fable, but they emphasize the absurd condition and grotesquely violent “tactics” of the players in the story. The joke is that, with all our talk of “revolution,” we are really only brutes, animals playing dress-up, after all.

It is no accident those who preach are “ravens” — carrion crows encircling whoever they’re about to eat. It is also no accident those who govern are “pigs” — animals who, quite literally, roll around in their own excrement.

Orwell is not shy about using the features of these specific animals to symbolize specific kinds of people, as Christopher Hollis, in “Animal Farm is a Successful Animal Fable,” also notes. Pigs, for example, are smart and greedy; sheep are complacent and compliant; dogs are loyal and willing to overlook faults; and horses are the workers upon whose backs men carry their burdens.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, Orwell conducts his puppet show illustration of a failed revolution with literal animals. The tale is not believable, nor particularly funny. It is somewhat disturbing. Rather than a portrait of animals or government, it is a portrait of ourselves as animals. We are revealed to ourselves as we truly are: uncivilized, animalistic, and unevolved. He shows us how the hymn “Beasts of England,” and the overly repetitive chanting, is the one thing to which the sheep are recurringly drawn (Animal Farm 13). It is our animal nature and simple mannerisms that hold up the illusions of our social institutions. As one of the literary critics we studied, Jacques Lacan said all of what we believe of ourselves and the structures of mind within which we function are just a mirror of our imagination. Our governments and religions are reflections of our subconscious needs and desires, as Freud reminds us,  which, also, are projections of ourselves. These reflections, which we believe to be real, propel our relationships and hijack our emotions. Orwell shows us these emotions are simple responses. These responses are not as complex as ideologies make them out to be — rather than our impetus being governed by ideology, all ideology is the didactic captive and puppet-toy of impetus. Our animal desires compel us in our politics, our choices, our economies, and our morals — “revolutionary” or not.

There is no “revolution,” according to Orwell, as the animals at the end of the story are in exactly as bad of a predicament as they were at the beginning. If anything, their predicament is worse and more complex.

There is a phase of regression undergone by the animals as they move from the first pig’s revelation in a dream and into their complete upheaval of society. The animals regress from intelligent and comprehensive to becoming slowly dulled and compliant. This is interesting because it shows how fear can dull the inquisitive mind of society and make people lax and dependent on their superiors.

Boxer the horse is a particularly significant choice. In his unwavering loyalty, dedication to the fatherland, and tireless work, Boxer represents the revolutionary working class. Orwell describes Boxer’s priorities by telling us, “His answer to every problem, every setback was ‘I will work harder!’ — which he had adopted as his personal motto” (Animal Farm 58). In this sense, Boxer is like the ever-laborious and loyal proletariat. Boxer as the working class is an even more ironic depiction if you consider Boxer is the prominent horse in the story, and horses have been considered beasts of burden throughout almost all of history — not unlike the working class. Yet it is Boxer, in the end, who is tricked and killed, but instead of resisting Boxer deems it to be his lot — or one could argue, he doesn’t even realize. This, too, is analogous to the struggle of the working class. As mentioned before, horses are literally the backs on which objects are carried, and the working class is literally the back upon which the burden of the government’s luxuries and enforcement is carried.

Maintaining the power structure was the pigs’ main focus. By taking the other animals’ rations and feeding themselves with them, they quite literally feed off the masses while starving them out. Brains can’t function without proper nutrition. It’s an intentional oppression of the lower classes to benefit and sustain the upper class, all the while convincing the lower class this starvation is actually for their benefit. Marxist literary theorists Adorno and Horkheimer would see this as an analogy for the culture industry, perhaps, and the massive parasitic machine of consumer greed which feeds off men’s minds and imagination in the modern age, all the while convincing us, as we are robbed, that we are being “entertained” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2188).

Animal Farm is entertaining, but its tone is two-dimensional — almost intentionally so, so as to underscore the device of parable it employs.

The narrator in Animal Farm is distant, detached, and unemotional. His matter-of-fact, detached tone only emphasizes the horror of the events he describes. He creates a flat, sinister effect, almost as if to say, “Why should this surprise you?” To say “they sang” in the same tone as “they ripped out their throats” is to say the reality of Animal Farm is happening right now, right next to you in day-to-day life, and you are not shocked.  It is not sensationalist in tone at all, exactly unlike the sweeping rhetorical tone of most thinkers or of the pig-philosophers in this book.

The reader observes an almost flat puppet show: rather than compelling one toward an objective, like most ideological texts or like an advertisement would, Animal Farm is, instead, a bleak retelling of what is occurring. It asks you to fill the character voids yourself, and, using a story form used to convey a moral or virtue, Animal Farm’s is noticeably absent.

This is perhaps most ironic of all. Orwell takes a realist device, stylistically reminiscent of Socialist Realist writing such as the Stalin-approved propaganda novel Cement. This device is usually used as a vehicle for ideology, moral instruction, or, more generally, propaganda. It is a form of storytelling used to say other things. Orwell, quite radically, took the realist device of ideology and propaganda and gave it back by using it as a fable on ideology and propaganda. He said, in essence, “Here’s your moral fable. The moral of this fable is about moral fables and how they work.”

The fact the tale is told of animate animals accentuates its deeper meaning as an obvious allegory. Like a fable or parable, from Aesop to the Grimm Brothers, it is clearly intended to be instructive and illustrative in message and tone. You think you’re going to read a beautiful fable, but you don’t. Animal Farm is, if anything, a parable. The parable is the timeless device of ideology. Yet it is ideology, perhaps most ironically, of which Animal Farm is absent. It is an empty device — making it all the more meaningful.

We must also note higher literacy is associated not with higher truth but with trickery. Orwell displays a distrust for intellectuals and their twisting of words. On page 63, Orwell shows how the mastery of language is associated with agency, as the narrator reminds us that, “Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

The more linguistic ability a creature has, the more powerful that creature is — in a vein of word-supremacy that would have resonated with deconstructionist and fellow doubter of words Jacques Derrida. Words retain power in and of themselves, in evidence to what Frederic Jameson, author of The Political Unconscious, would have called literature’s “ideology of form.” In this essence, words are functions of the overall social and political institutions they serve, or, as Jameson puts it, “The symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production” (1337). The connection between language and the “modes of production,” and/or the upholders of power, is evident in the fact the pigs, the most powerful of creatures, can read, while most others can’t. An animal’s capacity to communicate through language is directly proportional to the amount of political power it possesses in Animal Farm. Linguistic ability and cognitive capacity, are, in Orwell’s world, analogous to agency.

The simpler creatures, and those most affected by Napoleon’s policies, cannot read at all. Those who can, such as Squealer, who uses language and clever words to sow seeds of support for Napoleon’s administration, are using language as a weapon for manipulation and evil. Rather than using complex wording to elucidate the truth, complex wording is used to obscure it.

This makes Orwell’s choice to convey the tale in a simplistic tone all the more meaningful. Orwell is not trying to persuade us with vast, sweeping illusions of ideology nor rhetorical acrobatics. He is speaking as if we are the sheep — not because his meaning is overtly simple, but because the complexity of his meaning is most accurately conveyed through an intentionally simple tone. If this were a tract against or for communism, perhaps he would use lengthy adjectives and argument. Yet the characters are flat, the plot is linear, and the sentence structure is simple: this is a device for ideology intentionally without the ideology — it is a barren womb. It is the skeleton of propaganda made transparent and handed to us so we might say, “It is empty, don’t you see?”

Orwell’s book Animal Farm uses the story of the Russian Revolution to tell us about human nature in a way both political and timely, yet boldly historic in scope and unapologetic in its brashness. Orwell’s suspicion of intellectuals and complex ideologies as concealers of truth is doubly evident both in the tone in which he tells his tale and in his depiction of the power of the spoken word itself. Orwell took the narrative device of fable to write an analogy of government, but it is, more than anything else, an analogy of human nature — which Orwell believes is, at its core, not that exceptionally “human” after all. He uses animals to show us ourselves, and, in the end, he claims he cannot find much of a difference (121).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodore W; Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Culture Industry.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, New York: Norton, 2010. Print. 1110- 1127.

Derrida, Jacques. “The Exorbitant. A Question of Method.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: Norton, 2010. Print. 1691-1697.

Hollis, Christopher. “Animal Farm is a Successful Animal Farm.” Ed. Terry O’Neill., Greenhaven, 1998. Web.

Jameson, Frederich. “The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, New York: Norton, 2010. Print. 1822-1846.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: Norton, 2010. Print. 1163-1169.

Meyers, J. Orwell’s bestiary: “The Political Allegory of Animal Farm.” Studies in the Twentieth Century, 8, 65-84. 1971. Web.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946. Print.