128 pages, Penguin Books Signet Classics, ISBN-13:
9780451524669
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is
not only one of the greatest allegorical novels ever written, it is also one of
the most famous, and for good reason: the symbolism of the downtrodden animals
(the Russian peasantry) rising up and seizing the farm (Russia) from the
mismanagement of Farmer Jones (Tsar Nicholas II), only for the farm to morph
into something else (the Soviet Union) with the pigs (the Communist elite) in
control and their minions, the dogs (the Secret Police), enforcing their will
as the horses, cattle and sheep (the Russian people) are terrorized and
exploited and worse off than they ever were under Farmer Jones – is all easy
enough to understand and follow. Even children can grasp it. But there are
other animals that don’t quite fit within the social structure of the farm,
whose purpose in Orwell’s book was to expose not only the terrors of Soviet
Communism, but the flaws of Democratic Socialism, as well. These animals
represent the archenemies of Communism, the entrepreneurs and innovators who
are the true pioneers of society and who, throughout their endeavors, improve
the lot of all.
Take Mollie the cat, for instance: portrayed by Orwell as two-faced
and spoiled (she was the only animal allowed in the house, after all), the fact
is that cats help their human puppets by hunting vermin and saving crops. Oh,
interpretations of Mollie abound – she represents the spoilt bourgeoisie, the criminal underworld,
even spies – but the most apt interpretation is that of independence and
practicality; out of all of the animals in Animal
Farm, Mollie was the only one who was truly free at the time of the
revolution. It would be too much to say that Orwell identified Mollie with the
middle or upper-middle classes as Mollie’s natural home, seeing as he thought that
they “should sink without
further struggles into the working class where we belong”, failing to recognize
(like most on the left) that the working class hungered for the opposite, to
rise into the ranks of the middle classes, then as now.
Or take the various feral creatures in the book, the rats especially.
Perhaps they represent the great masses of the peasantry, the common folk in
whose name the revolution – both animal and man – was ostensibly held. Orwell
didn’t think much of humanity, and if he chose to portray them as rats it would
have been, regrettably, par for course (never forget: for all the Left’s talk
about being the friend and champion of the common man, they seek to control him
first). Added to this mass of vermin are the other creatures that are and are
not part of the farm, especially the rabbits (the cute vermin). All are the
lowest of the low in the pecking order of the farm, before and after the revolution, and don’t really
count as they consume resources without really producing anything of value
(while the rats are declared as comrades, nothing more is ever said on the
subject; the rabbits become non-persons, evidently).
Mustn’t forget the birds. We have geese
and ducks and chickens galore, who would seem to represent the more well-to-do
folks of the country; not the filthy lot of rats and rabbits, but those
peasants who have actually achieved a level of comfort for themselves. The Left
has a problem with country folk (and vice versa, for that matter), for being
able to grow your own food makes you less dependent on a lot of intellectuals
who have it All Figured Out; also, seeing as the cities the Left so admire are
dependent on the farms for survival, not having the countryside under your
thumb necessarily makes them a quasi-enemy. This is why, in Animal Farm,
the pigs order the expropriation of the hen’s eggs and order their rations cut
when the hens raise an almighty squawk. As a representative of the purposeful
famine in Ukraine that killed millions and even led to cannibalism, this is a
weak metaphor, to say the least.
Which all leads us to Moses the raven,
the symbol of the defeated Russian Orthodox Church and of religion, in general.
Moses was the Jones’ pet (even more so than Mollie the cat) who was a “clever
talker” who told tales about “Sugarcandy Mountain”, the animal heaven reserved
for the great and the good (could Marx’s line about religion being “the opium
of the people” be presented more obviously?). But this is a rather weak
representation, at best, for Moses, when the revolution comes, simply flies
away; Orwell makes no attempt to represent the savage persecution that the
Soviets inflicted on the church, both the priesthood and the laity. And while
Moses makes a reappearance later on (referencing Stalin’s loosening of
restrictions on the Church during the “Great Patriot War”), not much more is
made of the raven’s return.
“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”.
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