Orwell Lecture

 By Franklin L. Foster, Ph.D.

Historians construct meaning.  They are sometimes said to be the entire law enforcement system operating in one person.  Historians solve historical problems by collecting evidence, tracking down clues, then trying that evidence in the court of evidence and logic.  Finally, historians write a learned judgment.  It is these written judgments that make up what is called history.  

Some might think that it is difficult to miss that George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story about history.  However, it is impossible to overestimate people’s capacity for block-headedness.  So it is that Animal Farm has been considered a children’s fable and its most popular film adaptation is an animated cartoon version with a “happy ending”.  Even in its first months of publication, we have an account of Orwell visiting bookshops in London and physically removing copies from the Children’s Section.

 If Animal Farm is a history, what story does it tell?  Time permits me to explore only three levels at which Animal Farm is a history.  The first is that it conveys the true meaning of what happened as a result of the Russian Revolution.  The second is that it gives us an insight into how Orwell’s personal history – his biography – contributed to his writing generally and to Animal Farm.  The third, partly for the benefit of my learned colleagues, is to raise some considerations that show that Orwell’s life actually illustrates the themes of Animal Farm in a way that he did not intend or realize.

 Now as a preface to all this, I want to point out that primarily George Orwell was a preacher.  A preacher’s task is to unflinchingly and honestly describe the current reality, to provide a clear warning of the consequences of current behaviour in the current reality, and then to provide an escape from these consequences by showing how new understandings can and should lead to new behaviours.  Animal Farm was Orwell’s most successful of several sermons calling on people to realize that under Josef Stalin, the Revolution had been completely perverted.  Unless and until people admitted this reality, Orwell believed, they could not get back on the track of pursuing the Socialist ideal which Orwell advocated.

 So we have the story of what really happened to the Russian, or Soviet, or Stalinist Revolution.  Even the most bored undergraduate can probably, after glancing at his trusty Coles Notes, pass a matching test where one lines up Old Major with Marx, Napoleon, with Stalin, Snowball with Trotsky, Boxer with the working class, etc.  Today’s undergraduates were not Orwell’s target congregation.  Rather, he was concerned with reaching British supporters of left-wing reform.

 Now any good historian should read the primary sources in order to collect the evidence first hand.  No good detective would rely entirely on hearsay.  So, read Orwell.  Like most authors, he is not trying to disguise his message.  One of many places that Orwell preaches this same message is in The Road to Wigan Pier written six or seven years before Animal Farm. 

The only thing for, which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal "underlying." It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-baked "progressivism" until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world. ... We, have reached a stage when the very word "Socialism" calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.[i]

 In short, Orwell is saying, the Soviet Union is not a model of socialism in action; that there is no justice or liberty.  As Tanya Agathocleous has written:

Orwell’s point was that the Communists were now using Fascist methods to suppress others – that the fight against Fascism had become Fascist itself. But his views were met only with censorship and criticism.[ii]

 Who was it that was refusing to listen to Orwell’s sermon?  It was not the bored undergraduates of 1937 or 1945.  It was the professors and academics, the journalists and broadcasters, the so-called intelligentsia or chattering classes of England.  These folks ignored the evidence - millions who had died of famines caused by Stalin’s five-year plans to industrialize Russia, they ignored the show trials and the purges with their additional thousands tortured and executed, and they ignored the millions languishing in the Soviet gulag of prisons and slave labour camps.

 It is this question – Why do educated people ignore the evidence of real life and persist in believing in empty and false ideologies? – which is central to Orwell’s work. 

 There were two answers that occurred to Orwell.  Both had to do with the role of language.  One answer was that people cannot think clearly because they do not write clearly.  In perhaps his best-known essay, “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell observes:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.[iii]

This means that there are very few people who actually can think clearly.  The second answer is then that political leaders, and others, learn to take advantage of this mental fuzziness and laziness in order to manipulate others.  As Orwell put it:

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.[iv]

A modern example would be calling the killing of unborn babies a pro-choice right.  In Animal Farm the process of language manipulation is followed when Old Major’s philosophy is reduced to the Seven Principles of Animalism, and then further reduced to one slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad!”[v]

Orwell came to believe it was his responsibility to be one of those who think clearly by writing clearly.

He was determined to use his writing to speak out against injustice wherever he saw it.  As a result, he became one of the first of his generation to see and openly denounce the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Russia. [vi]

Orwell had the advantage of having first hand experience when Soviet agents narrowly missed killing him and his wife, Eileen, before they could leave Spain where they had been fighting with the left-wing revolutionaries.   Upon his return to Britain, Orwell tried to sound the alarm about the true character of the Soviet Union but the left-wing British intellectuals would have none of it.

In fact, Animal Farm could not be published until after the Allied victory in Europe.  Another example of intellectual fossilization was the insistence that in the French edition, Napoleon be renamed Cesar.

So we see that Orwell’s life experiences had much to do with his message but how do we account for the unusual lightness of tone and the humour of Animal Farm?  As his biographer, Michael Shelden, comments, “His other major books have so little humour in them that it is amazing to find so much in the pages of this one small book.”[vii] 

Again, the answer lies in Orwell’s life experiences. Orwell’s other works were written when Orwell was alone, often in grimy, dreary conditions.  Animal Farm was written while Orwell, and his wife, Eileen, enjoyed a period of domestic companionship, added to by their recent adoption of an infant son.  Eileen apparently read daily drafts of the book and submitted her ideas and comments.  Her friends later commented they heard something of her in the humorous situations and even in the dialogue.  Orwell would later acknowledge her contributions, although perhaps not as generously as he might have. [viii]

 This brings me to my final point – what about the example of Orwell’s life?  Orwell wanted to alert socialists to the false chimera of the Soviet Union.  He wanted to urge all of us to the duty of perceiving the truth in order to avoid manipulation and the loss of the freedom and justice he desired.  He clearly demonstrated how language was misused and abused as an instrument of political power and persuasion.  He wanted to lead the fight for justice and liberty.  But did he, or was he really more like the activist who marches to save the rainforests but won’t clean up his own bedroom?

Would that Orwell had applied his intellectual rigour to living out justice and liberty in his own life.  Two examples. First, Orwell persisted in chain smoking even after episodes in hospital for tuberculosis, a disease characterized by lesions of the lining of the lung.  Did this liberate him from the chains of disease and addiction?  Did it free him to continue his writing and therefore his contribution?  Secondly, after Eileen’s untimely death, he admitted, again according to Shelden, that he had had some brief tawdry episodes of fornication with other women. [ix]  Was this justice for Eileen?  Did it reward her for her support and her very real contributions to Animal Farm?

Orwell’s famous writing advice included; “if it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out”. [x]  Perhaps it is even more important to edit your life than to edit your writing.  Perhaps the failure of the revolution on Animal Farm is nothing more than the failure of most of us, including Orwell, to practice what we preach, to hold to those ideals that could transform our lives and our world. 

Orwell was yet another example of the failure to transform general ideals into personal actions.  If we look at the muddle-brained defenders of Stalinism on the one hand, and the chain-smoking adulterer on the other, is it possible to say which is which?