Animal Farm

20/01/2025

Literature    Download PDF  

A Fable Wrapped Inside an Allegory

         Animal Farm is of course first and foremost an allegory of Communism; yet how can that be so when an allegory is surely a secondary aspect of the work and not the primary one? If George Orwell’s novella were initially one thing it wouldn’t need to be de-coded as something else. No, we must insist that firstly Animal Farm is about a group of animals who overthrow a human-run dwelling and gain power chiefly thanks to the intelligence of the pigs and the strength of the horses, especially the powerful and brave Boxer. This is what the reader reads; the allegory one interprets. This doesn’t mean the allegory isn’t important but to assume that is how we must read the text is to impose an intellectual reading onto a primary affect. If, when Boxer is led off to the knacker’s yard near the end of the book, all the reader sees is Boxer signifying the proletariat, then Orwell has succeeded in his polemical aims but failed to render characters as living matter. While it is understandable Orwell wanted to write a book condemning totalitarianism and more specifically its Russian, Communist model, the danger of an allegorical reading as a priori is twofold: the reader foregoes affect for interpretation, and reduces the book to one moment in historical time, instead of allowing it to open up into a work that looks at the dangers of totalitarianism more generally. 

     Perhaps it is better to read the book as a fable as much as an allegory, since the fable might appear like a less sophisticated form but solves the two problems potentially evident in the allegorical: the intellectual imposition and the singularity of explication. Yet Orwell was insistent on its meaning and was aware that those at the Ministry of Information during the war years warned a publisher off the book, saying that if it were a general attack on totalitarianism that would have been ok, but a book that could so easily be read as an account of Russia in the twenty years after the Revolution was provocative. It “…does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships.” (New York Times) Orwell quotes this passage in a foreword he wrote to Animal Farm, and also says “the English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed nationalistic loyalty toward the U.S.S.R., and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy.” Orwell wanted to call a spade a spade; others wished he would call it a garden tool. Publishers rejecting the book could be accused of cowardice but had Orwell fallen victim to contemporaneousness? With most fables, a moral is extracted without any direct reference to socio-historical event. ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ tells us that it is better to save through the good times and have plenty when things become harsh, as the ant works and stores food during the summer, while the grasshopper prances around. In ‘The Lion and the Mouse’, a lion could easily crush a mouse that disturbs him but lets him sleep, and later when the lion is captured by hunters, the mouse comes and gnaws through the net. The stories are abstract accounts of a moral, not concrete accounts of an ideology. 

    Yet Orwell's book isn’t simply a pamphlet in fictional form and has easily outlasted Soviet Communism. It may not possess the complex metaphorical allusiveness of Kafka’s animal stories like ‘Metamorphosis’ or ‘Investigations of a Dog’, but it can now be read simultaneously as an account of the revolution and its aftermath, and also a story about stupidity in the context of transformation. The word stupidity comes up over and over again. “It was also found that the stupider animals, such as sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart”; the pigs, who initiate the revolution, were “at the beginning met with such stupidity and apathy”, and when Boxer is taken away in the van, the wise old donkey Benjamin says “Fools! Fools!…Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?” The narrator tells us that “…the stupid brutes [were] too ignorant to see what was happening…” Orwell’s revolution is based on power and stupidity over consideration and education: the pigs can lord it over the other beasts because they desire control and most of the animals have little interest in learning. It is of course partly why the initial commandments can slowly be altered. At the beginning of the revolution, these include that no animal shall sleep in a bed, no animal shall drink alcohol, all animals are equal. Before the end of the novella, these will be changed to no animal will sleep in a bed with sheets, no animal will drink alcohol to excess, and all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Yet the combination of poor reading skills and weak memories leaves most of the animals doubting themselves rather than seeing a terrible compromise to the cause, and so they accept this must have been what was originally written down. 

     If Orwell is using the Soviet Union as an example of failed revolution, this is slightly different from insisting that the book needs to be taken simply as a rejection of the revolution itself. First of all, because one would have to differentiate between Stalinist oppression and Trotskyite banishment, manifest here in perhaps the most categorical transpositions in the book of historical figures turned into allegorical form: Napoleon and Snowball. It is Snowball who, after farmer Jones has been thrown off the land, wants everyone educated, “indefatigable” in creating various committees and reading and writing exercises. Alas, many of the animals are incapable of advanced learning or too lazy to go any further than they feel they have to go. “The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything except the Seven Commandments.” “Benjamin could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty”, while Boxer couldn’t get beyond D in the alphabet. Another horse, the vain Mollie, only wished to master the letters that spelt out her name. Even if someone insists that Orwell’s book is a scathing account of the Russian Revolution in allegorical form, we can still rescue from it a demand for a different type of success. After all, both Napoleon and Snowball are equally involved in the revolution yet their positions seem quite distinct. “…It was noticed that these two were never in agreement: whatever suggestion either of them made, the other could be counted on to oppose it.” One of these disagreements is over education: Snowball wants everybody to learn; Napoleon reckons the priority should be on educating the young, and we can see a variation of it when he takes away some pups and turns them into his attack dogs. He trains them in absolute obedience and viciousness and we can assume the type of education Napoleon believes in has little to do with creating autonomous selves but automated ones. 

        One can see then that the book is both a simple allegory of the Russian Revolution and a complex fable: it is this combination that makes the work valid almost eighty years after its publication and thirty- five years after communism’s collapse. Orwell doesn’t want to attack Socialist revolution but he does want to find an example of what he sees as a compromised one (hence the allegory), while also musing over what elements might lend themselves to a proper social emancipation. In an excellent article  on the book and its reception, V. C. Letemendia notes “Yes, Animal Farm was intended to have a wider application than as a satire on The Russian regime. Yes, it did imply that the rule of the pigs was "only a change of masters”. Yet it did not condemn to the same fate all revolutions…” (Journal of Modern Literature) Letemendia quotes an exchange between Orwell and the American critic Dwight Macdonald, with Orwell saying he acknowledged that the Soviet Union was the model proving socialism was possible. He didn’t wish for the country to be defeated and its government replaced, but he did want working-class people around the world to become disillusioned with it. “They must build their own Socialist movement without Russian interference.” Animal Farm isn’t only an allegorical satire on the failures of Russian communism, it is also a complex fable on what can be extracted from it. A fable is often defined as “…a narrative form, usually featuring animals that behave and speak as human beings, told in order to highlight human follies and weaknesses. A moral—or lesson for behaviour—is woven into the story and often explicitly formulated at the end.” (Encyclopaedia Brittanica) Fables are many but allegories relatively few, if one wants to be precise about it. Critics often give examples as varied as Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Camus’ The Plague, but in a strict sense allegories are rare. Taken from the Greek word allegoria, which means speaking about something else, numerous texts that are taken for allegorical propose more the metaphorical, the symbolic and the suggestive, rather than the transpositional. Animal Farm can clearly be taken as reconfiguring the Russian Revolution just as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can use the Salem witch-hunts as a commentary on the anti-communist McCarthy persecutions in the 1950s. If a critic claims Lord of the Flies or ‘Metamorphosis’ are allegories, what are they allegories of? It wouldn’t be enough to say they represent feelings of oppression, guilt or fear. These are states, not events, while The Plague (an allegory of Nazi-occupied France), The Crucible and Animal Farm can all be linked to correlative situations. This doesn’t mean it is the only way to read them: as David Dwan notes, “the questions the novella [Animal Farm] asks about equality are in many respects basic to its structure and may even arise behind Orwell’s back (as William Empson pointed out to Orwell, he had used “a form that inherently means more than the author means, when it is handled sufficiently well”). The fable is generally a bald narrative instrument and remains so in Orwell’s hands.” (‘Orwell's Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’) But it might be a useful starting point to assume that a strict allegory has a direct correlation with another event and perhaps no allegory is stricter than Orwell’s. 

      When Empson says that an allegory means more than the author intends this could be seen as twofold: the author by offering an indirect approach cannot insist on denotation because they have already asked for a connotative reading: they want the reader to view the text non-literally. Someone can read even Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby and say it is about a man who wants to capture a whale or a man who wants to recapture a woman. They might be reductive readings but they would be accurate accounts of what is on the page despite numerous connotations associated to the books about reckless ambition and the American Dream. To read Animal Farm, The Crucible and The Plague without an awareness of the events to which they allude would be reading them naively. It isn’t that you don’t need a historical context to comprehend The Great Gatsby: post-WWI prosperity, prohibition and the beginning of the Roaring Twenties are all very important — but they are intrinsically important not analogously so: they are vital to the texture of the book. They aren’t part of a double reading: to know of the Russian Revolution in the context of Dr Zhivago is very different from knowing it in Animal Farm. 

          But unlike The Crucible and The Plague, Animal Farm doesn’t only want the double reading of event, it offers its narrative in fable form. (The book’s sub-title is A Fairy Tale) What might seem odd is that the novella’s simplicity comes from its allegory and its complexity from the use of fable. In reading it allegorically all one need do is draw out the similarities with real people and with history. Napoleon is Stalin and Snowball Trotsky; Boxer is more broadly the proletariat but can specifically be seen as the great worker Alexey Stakhanov; the old farmer Mr Jones, Nicholas II. This allows us to decipher the allegory and it isn’t difficult either to comprehend its message. The revolution was co-opted by its most ruthless members and personal greed increasingly became the motto as the seven commandments are altered all the better so that Napoleon can sleep in a bed, drink alcohol and kill his animal enemies if he pleases. So far, so Stalin. But Orwell in his introduction said the image behind the book came to him in Spain. “He saw a little boy perhaps ten years old driving a huge horse cart along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. If only the horse could know of its own strength, it could easily overcome the boy.” (Journal of Modern Literature) Orwell tries to imagine himself into the mind of an emancipated horse and his thoughts on its possibility aren't too far removed from Tolstoy's use in his story ‘Kholstomer': “The words "my horse" referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words "my land," "my air," "my water.” But the words made a strong impression on me….” In his famous essay ‘Art and Technique,’ Viktor Shklovsky uses the tale as an important example of defamiliarisation, saying of Tolstoy’s depiction:  “The narrator of ‘Kholstomer,’ for example, is a horse, and it is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the ‘content' of the story seem unfamiliar.” In this sense, allegory can appear as a form of refamiliarisation, with a key difference between Orwell and Kafka resting on this difference. To reduce ‘Metamorphosis’ to allegory is to misread Kafka; to read Orwell through the precision of allegory is to read him as he intended. This can make Kafka potentially a far more complex writer than Orwell and easily a more slippery one, but if Kafka’s work can’t be decoded as Animal Farm can, there is more to Orwell’s work than the decoding.  

    When Orwell discusses the boy whipping the horse he doesn’t dwell on the perception and the feelings of the animal, he immediately turns it into a political question. He saw this was how the “rich exploit the proletariat”, and sees that if the horse could be aware of its power, it could overcome the boy. Yet there are two ways of seeing this: one of power and the other of consciousness — the animal is strong enough to overcome the boy but he doesn’t have the awareness to do so. Equally, another animal, even if it developed that consciousness, might not have the strength to do anything about it. The ideal, is that the two come together in an awareness of one’s strength. In Animal Farm, the animals collectively have the strength but too many lack the awareness, which in Orwell’s formulation comes across as stupidity. The pigs are less strong than other animals on the farm but they have greater mental acuity, and in Napoleon’s case the cunning to train up puppies to become attack dogs — giving him both strength and awareness. If one views the novella as one of strength, revolutions inevitably fail as anything other than a power grab. At the beginning of the novel, Mr Jones runs the farm and oppresses the animals; at the end Napoleon runs the farm,  drinks as copiously as Mr Jones, has moved into the house at Manor Farm and allows humans to join him there. From Napoleon’s point of view, he has all the power Mr Jones used to possess and the revolution need merely be seen as the interim process necessary to achieve it. If power is all that matters, then revolutions will inevitably fail except as tools for personal ambition, and why bother going through all the bloodshed when you can have the powerful who are already in place running things?  

     Reading the book as about the futility of revolution has been common, whether by a social democrat like the literary theorist, Northrop Frye, or right-wing journalists writing for small newspapers. As David Dwan notes, Frye saw Animal Farm as a “reactionary bromide” ('Orwell’s Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’), while Stephen Smith says, “When tried [Orwell shows], the leftist dream has always resulted in failure, death, and destruction. They use destruction and division as a methodology.” (The Signal) But this is merely to read the book allegorically, while what is more useful is to read it simultaneously as a fable about education over power. We might think again about the story of the mouse and the lion and imagine it written differently, with the moral sub-textually evident rather than asserted. In such a reading, there would be two mice, one lion and the hunters. The lion sees he can easily crush a mouse and does so, while the other mouse looks on horrified. Later, the lion is captured by hunters using a large net, and the mouse sees the lion in captivity and the lion asks the mouse for help. The mouse says he could gnaw through the net but why should he? When the lion had power he used it to kill; the mouse now uses his to leave the lion to die. If the fable were so told, we might still extract the same meaning: that power is relative and best to acknowledge that one’s strengths can be another’s weakness and vice versa. In the famous fable this is categorical; in our version, it can still be extracted but not directly. Someone could read the latter as no more than a tale of vengeance; that the mouse gets the chance to avenge his colleague’s death by leaving the lion to his captors. But, just as readily, one could read it as a tale about the need to be aware that power isn’t all-encompassing. 

       Why we are claiming Animal Farm is an allegory, while also a complex fable, is because though Frye and Smith read it as a take on the revolution and that the book makes clear what a disaster it was, Orwell could insist he is only saying it reflects one specific revolutionary failure. By stating he wanted to speak only of the Russian Revolution (and why we see it as an exemplary allegory), Orwell wished to show how a revolution can fail not that revolutions inevitably must. According to Letemendia, Orwell shows that “…what matters is a concern for freedom and equality in society and a form of ‘innate decency’.” This may be so but such a response might be worthy but remains woolly. Sure, early on we note negative qualities in Napoleon when after the cows have been milked he tells the animals not to worry about the milk and to go off and focus on the harvest. Napoleon says he will join them later. When the animals returned in the “…evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.” Quickly we realise Napoleon is greedy, lazy and underhand. Does this mean that revolutions can only succeed if instigated by the decent? That would leave Orwell’s text as potentially a very weak bromide indeed. No doubt, Napoleon is the villain and the reader might wonder if the revolution in the book would have been successful if there had been no Napoleon to manipulate things. But the reason Napoleon possesses such control, with the aid of Squealer, who always manages to convince the animals of whatever belief Napoleon is presently holding, lies in the animals’ limited consciousness. If Orwell simply believed in the animals’ general stupidity, then the reactionary bromide Frye sees would be true. But Orwell reckons that while some animals are smarter than others (with the pigs the cleverest), more often it is laziness, cynicism and false belief that leads either to revolutionary acceptance or oppressive acquiescence, whoever is in charge. Mollie is far from the stupidest, but the narrator credits her with the  most idiotic post-revolutionary question: “Will there be sugar after the Rebellion?” Benjamin the donkey is smart but cynical, bad-tempered and pessimistic, best summed up in his claim that God gave him a tail to keep off the flies but he would have preferred to have no tail and no flies. This is far from the best of all possible worlds, and though Benjamin is smart enough to see through some of the ruses, he is old and tired and doesn’t want to get too involved. Then there is Moses, a raven who is Mr Jones' favourite creature and tells all the animals that when they die everything will be better: “in Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days of the week, clover was in season all year round, and lumps of sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges.”

       Rather than saying all would have been well were it not for arch-villain Napoleon, Orwell proposes that there are various reasons for the revolution’s likely failure — including other animals that aren’t useful to the cause. If we assume that all the problem characters need to be eradicated, then we aren’t too far from the beliefs that led Stalin to take out all those he thought were detrimental to progress. Better to have in place pedagogical tools that counter the capacity of the self-interested than assume by eradicating the Napoleons, the Squealers and The Moseses the post-revolutionary period will run smoothly. However, if propaganda is more prominent than education, if people (or animals) assume that overthrowing one regime is all that is needed (and overthrowing another regime if that is needed), then this will only perpetuate masters and slaves over emancipated selves. What Orwell shows is that freedom doesn’t come from freeing oneself from oppression alone, but by putting in place a full awareness of what constitutes its components. The main difference between Napoleon and Mr Jones is that Napoleon needs to work harder at constantly convincing the animals that their lives are good. Mr Jones relied on Moses offering a version of Heaven, Sugarcandy Mountain. The animals’ lives might be miserable at present but what an afterlife they will have. Napoleon has to convince them of the good life in the here and now, relying on constantly moving dogma to keep the animals from seeing that the pigs don’t have their best interests at heart after Snowball is forced off the farm. 

    In this sense, religion is a static belief while ideology is active: it is the difference between the bible and Pravda, between a text that embeds itself into a culture over many generations, and an ongoing journal that changes with the times. Orwell may have used the Ten Commandments as the basis for the seven the animals are expected to memorise, but they of course all get turned around as the moment demands. If for Marx religion was the opium of the people, Orwell wouldn’t disagree. After all, as John Redden notes, “he mocked the Catholic (and Anglican) priesthood and notions of heaven in Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter. He frequently denounced "Romanism" as the ecclesiastical equivalent of Stalinism in his journalism and in The Road to Wigan Pier, and castigated the Spanish church in Homage to Catalonia.” (College Literature) But if Orwell saw too that religion is an opiate, communism isn’t much better than MDMA or any other synthetic drug that can be altered at will — and hence the propagandistic. If religion is profound brainwashing then propaganda is closer to gaslighting, a constant, provisional need to keep others unaware of reality. When the animals’ anthem is banned, then changed, Squealer convinces the animals that the anthem Old Major had them sing was only necessary for the Rebellion; now that the animals have been running the farm for some time it is no longer useful and must be banned. It is replaced by the two line: “Animal Farm, Animal Farm/Never through me shalt thou come to harm!” And Animal Farm will soon be replaced with the farm’s old title: Manor Farm. While ‘Beasts of England’ contained the lines “and the fruitful fields of England/Shall be trod by beasts alone,” as Napoleon increasingly deals with humans, now the whole anthem has to go. Equally, when Napoleon replaces ‘Death to Humanity’ with ‘Death to Fredrick’, a nearby farmer, it allows Napoleon to create a figure of human hate while suggesting it is okay for the animals to negotiate with others. However, Napoleon does decide to trade with Frederick when the farmer offers a decent price for the animals’ timber and pays with forged bank notes. When Napoleon finds out, he doesn’t take the blame for his gullibility, and promptly Frederick takes advantage of what he perceives as the animals’ weaknesses. A battle takes place and the animals manage to defend their land, with Napoleon directing operations from the rear, perhaps to see the events in front of him, more likely to avoid getting too involved in the fray (though his tail is chipped by a pellet). Afterwards, he awards himself a special medal called the Order of the Green Banner, and the money is forgotten. What matters is that he constantly negotiates his position of power, and uses whatever tools he possesses, and whatever memories he can suppress in others, to retain it.

      If we have earlier thrust into the article the all too contemporaneous (but nevertheless useful) term gaslighting, why not offer another? That the animals lack 'critical thinking’. If gaslighting is defined (courtesy of Patrick Hamilton’s 1930s play Gas Light) as “the process of causing someone to doubt their own thoughts, beliefs and perceptions” (Cambridge Dictionary), critical thinking was coined by John Dewey in the early 20th century. But like gaslighting it has become much more commonly used into the 21st. It is a “mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem. From the perspective of educators, critical thinking encompasses both a set of logical skills that can be taught and a  disposition toward reflective open inquiry that can be cultivated.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica) While gas lighting and propaganda aren’t quite the same thing, as Alex Sinha notes, saying the former is focused on “forms of interpersonal  manipulation” and the latter " to mean some sort of persuasive or even manipulative communication.” (‘Lies, Gaslighting and Propaganda’), nevertheless they can be usefully correlated. There is much more to Sinha’s definitions than what he offers in the statement above, but what we can see is that a distinction is often made between gaslighting as personal and propaganda as impersonal and public. If Animal Farm might seem to practise both, it rests on the smallness of the community where everybody knows everybody else. But they have enough in common for practical thinking to be applicable and much of Orwell’s irony comes from its absence — in the examples we have given and in numerous others. A good instance of attempting the critical is when “even Boxer, who seldom asked questions”, isn’t immediately convinced as Squealer wants him to believe that Snowball was in cahoots with Jones at the Battle of the Cowshed, where the animals gained their independence. “Snowball fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed. I saw him myself,”  Boxer notes, adding that Snowball was awarded Animal Hero, First Class. Squealer insists this was not so, that in reality, secret documents have since revealed that Snowball was a traitor as he describes how Snowball was helping the opposition. Most of the animals are convinced by this imaginative reinterpretation, but Boxer remains uneasy, leaving Squealer to appeal to authority: speaking very slowly and firmly, he says Napoleon has stated “categorically - categorically comrade - that Snowball was Jones’s agent from the very beginning…” Boxer concedes, “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be true.” Instead of insisting on evidence and proposing that Squealer is relying on the authority fallacy, he acquiesces. A smarter Boxer wouldn’t have done so.  

      If many find Orwell’s book a cynical account of failed revolution,  seeing no point in even trying to revolt since something no better will replace the earlier regime, others can insist that Orwell isn’t cynical at all. While he realistically exposes the failure of a left-wing movement, to make too much of this wouldn’t only be simplifying the text for one’s own political ends, it would also be merely reading the allegorical aspect of it. The left can see cynicism; the right realism, but the book contains too the fabular aspect that insists the allegorical is only a surface reading of the text, no matter if it is an indirect one. Orwell clearly wanted to acknowledge the failure of the Russian Revolution, but the very fact that he wished to reveal its specific failure didn’t mean that he saw radical change as inevitably unsuccessful. To do so would be to ignore the many statements Orwell made and the many actions he insisted upon for this to be readily tenable. Whether it lies in statements proposing that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, investigating the lives of mining communities in the Road to Wigan Pier, becoming homeless himself to explore destitution in Down and Out in Paris and London, or fighting for the Republican cause in Homage to Catalonia. Robert Lieberman notes: “The lives of the poor may not look like our lives, but their souls are certainly like our souls; anyone who thinks otherwise cannot have looked closely enough. Orwell looked closely enough, closer than most of us could stomach.” (American Prospect) It seems unlikely a writer would then say change is a waste of time; and that the poor will inevitably always be with us. 

            If Animal Farm is thus a fable within an allegory, and if our reading has any validity, it is that it allowed Orwell to reject the Russian Revolution and the perpetuation of myths around it, one that saw left-wing thinkers of his time accepting the event uncritically enough to try and block the book’s publication. But Orwell wanted to reject the Russian Revolution and yet accept that this needn’t be the end of the radicalisation of the working class. It was more of a false beginning, and the longer it was accepted as a success, the further away other opportunities would be to transform oppression. Orwell’s book is thus an allegory of the revolution and a fable about pedagogy, on the need to rely on a revolution that has a higher respect for education than propaganda, for a constant questioning of authority over its reaffirmation, and for a people willing to see that the hard work of gaining power comes with it a constant need to interrogate those who are practising it in our name. This needn’t be so complicated, Orwell seems to suggest, and might even be possible chiefly in the form of a fable that a child could understand. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Animal Farm

A Fable Wrapped Inside an Allegory

         Animal Farm is of course first and foremost an allegory of Communism; yet how can that be so when an allegory is surely a secondary aspect of the work and not the primary one? If George Orwell’s novella were initially one thing it wouldn’t need to be de-coded as something else. No, we must insist that firstly Animal Farm is about a group of animals who overthrow a human-run dwelling and gain power chiefly thanks to the intelligence of the pigs and the strength of the horses, especially the powerful and brave Boxer. This is what the reader reads; the allegory one interprets. This doesn’t mean the allegory isn’t important but to assume that is how we must read the text is to impose an intellectual reading onto a primary affect. If, when Boxer is led off to the knacker’s yard near the end of the book, all the reader sees is Boxer signifying the proletariat, then Orwell has succeeded in his polemical aims but failed to render characters as living matter. While it is understandable Orwell wanted to write a book condemning totalitarianism and more specifically its Russian, Communist model, the danger of an allegorical reading as a priori is twofold: the reader foregoes affect for interpretation, and reduces the book to one moment in historical time, instead of allowing it to open up into a work that looks at the dangers of totalitarianism more generally. 

     Perhaps it is better to read the book as a fable as much as an allegory, since the fable might appear like a less sophisticated form but solves the two problems potentially evident in the allegorical: the intellectual imposition and the singularity of explication. Yet Orwell was insistent on its meaning and was aware that those at the Ministry of Information during the war years warned a publisher off the book, saying that if it were a general attack on totalitarianism that would have been ok, but a book that could so easily be read as an account of Russia in the twenty years after the Revolution was provocative. It “…does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships.” (New York Times) Orwell quotes this passage in a foreword he wrote to Animal Farm, and also says “the English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed nationalistic loyalty toward the U.S.S.R., and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy.” Orwell wanted to call a spade a spade; others wished he would call it a garden tool. Publishers rejecting the book could be accused of cowardice but had Orwell fallen victim to contemporaneousness? With most fables, a moral is extracted without any direct reference to socio-historical event. ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ tells us that it is better to save through the good times and have plenty when things become harsh, as the ant works and stores food during the summer, while the grasshopper prances around. In ‘The Lion and the Mouse’, a lion could easily crush a mouse that disturbs him but lets him sleep, and later when the lion is captured by hunters, the mouse comes and gnaws through the net. The stories are abstract accounts of a moral, not concrete accounts of an ideology. 

    Yet Orwell's book isn’t simply a pamphlet in fictional form and has easily outlasted Soviet Communism. It may not possess the complex metaphorical allusiveness of Kafka’s animal stories like ‘Metamorphosis’ or ‘Investigations of a Dog’, but it can now be read simultaneously as an account of the revolution and its aftermath, and also a story about stupidity in the context of transformation. The word stupidity comes up over and over again. “It was also found that the stupider animals, such as sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart”; the pigs, who initiate the revolution, were “at the beginning met with such stupidity and apathy”, and when Boxer is taken away in the van, the wise old donkey Benjamin says “Fools! Fools!…Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?” The narrator tells us that “…the stupid brutes [were] too ignorant to see what was happening…” Orwell’s revolution is based on power and stupidity over consideration and education: the pigs can lord it over the other beasts because they desire control and most of the animals have little interest in learning. It is of course partly why the initial commandments can slowly be altered. At the beginning of the revolution, these include that no animal shall sleep in a bed, no animal shall drink alcohol, all animals are equal. Before the end of the novella, these will be changed to no animal will sleep in a bed with sheets, no animal will drink alcohol to excess, and all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Yet the combination of poor reading skills and weak memories leaves most of the animals doubting themselves rather than seeing a terrible compromise to the cause, and so they accept this must have been what was originally written down. 

     If Orwell is using the Soviet Union as an example of failed revolution, this is slightly different from insisting that the book needs to be taken simply as a rejection of the revolution itself. First of all, because one would have to differentiate between Stalinist oppression and Trotskyite banishment, manifest here in perhaps the most categorical transpositions in the book of historical figures turned into allegorical form: Napoleon and Snowball. It is Snowball who, after farmer Jones has been thrown off the land, wants everyone educated, “indefatigable” in creating various committees and reading and writing exercises. Alas, many of the animals are incapable of advanced learning or too lazy to go any further than they feel they have to go. “The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything except the Seven Commandments.” “Benjamin could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty”, while Boxer couldn’t get beyond D in the alphabet. Another horse, the vain Mollie, only wished to master the letters that spelt out her name. Even if someone insists that Orwell’s book is a scathing account of the Russian Revolution in allegorical form, we can still rescue from it a demand for a different type of success. After all, both Napoleon and Snowball are equally involved in the revolution yet their positions seem quite distinct. “…It was noticed that these two were never in agreement: whatever suggestion either of them made, the other could be counted on to oppose it.” One of these disagreements is over education: Snowball wants everybody to learn; Napoleon reckons the priority should be on educating the young, and we can see a variation of it when he takes away some pups and turns them into his attack dogs. He trains them in absolute obedience and viciousness and we can assume the type of education Napoleon believes in has little to do with creating autonomous selves but automated ones. 

        One can see then that the book is both a simple allegory of the Russian Revolution and a complex fable: it is this combination that makes the work valid almost eighty years after its publication and thirty- five years after communism’s collapse. Orwell doesn’t want to attack Socialist revolution but he does want to find an example of what he sees as a compromised one (hence the allegory), while also musing over what elements might lend themselves to a proper social emancipation. In an excellent article  on the book and its reception, V. C. Letemendia notes “Yes, Animal Farm was intended to have a wider application than as a satire on The Russian regime. Yes, it did imply that the rule of the pigs was "only a change of masters”. Yet it did not condemn to the same fate all revolutions…” (Journal of Modern Literature) Letemendia quotes an exchange between Orwell and the American critic Dwight Macdonald, with Orwell saying he acknowledged that the Soviet Union was the model proving socialism was possible. He didn’t wish for the country to be defeated and its government replaced, but he did want working-class people around the world to become disillusioned with it. “They must build their own Socialist movement without Russian interference.” Animal Farm isn’t only an allegorical satire on the failures of Russian communism, it is also a complex fable on what can be extracted from it. A fable is often defined as “…a narrative form, usually featuring animals that behave and speak as human beings, told in order to highlight human follies and weaknesses. A moral—or lesson for behaviour—is woven into the story and often explicitly formulated at the end.” (Encyclopaedia Brittanica) Fables are many but allegories relatively few, if one wants to be precise about it. Critics often give examples as varied as Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Camus’ The Plague, but in a strict sense allegories are rare. Taken from the Greek word allegoria, which means speaking about something else, numerous texts that are taken for allegorical propose more the metaphorical, the symbolic and the suggestive, rather than the transpositional. Animal Farm can clearly be taken as reconfiguring the Russian Revolution just as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can use the Salem witch-hunts as a commentary on the anti-communist McCarthy persecutions in the 1950s. If a critic claims Lord of the Flies or ‘Metamorphosis’ are allegories, what are they allegories of? It wouldn’t be enough to say they represent feelings of oppression, guilt or fear. These are states, not events, while The Plague (an allegory of Nazi-occupied France), The Crucible and Animal Farm can all be linked to correlative situations. This doesn’t mean it is the only way to read them: as David Dwan notes, “the questions the novella [Animal Farm] asks about equality are in many respects basic to its structure and may even arise behind Orwell’s back (as William Empson pointed out to Orwell, he had used “a form that inherently means more than the author means, when it is handled sufficiently well”). The fable is generally a bald narrative instrument and remains so in Orwell’s hands.” (‘Orwell's Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’) But it might be a useful starting point to assume that a strict allegory has a direct correlation with another event and perhaps no allegory is stricter than Orwell’s. 

      When Empson says that an allegory means more than the author intends this could be seen as twofold: the author by offering an indirect approach cannot insist on denotation because they have already asked for a connotative reading: they want the reader to view the text non-literally. Someone can read even Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby and say it is about a man who wants to capture a whale or a man who wants to recapture a woman. They might be reductive readings but they would be accurate accounts of what is on the page despite numerous connotations associated to the books about reckless ambition and the American Dream. To read Animal Farm, The Crucible and The Plague without an awareness of the events to which they allude would be reading them naively. It isn’t that you don’t need a historical context to comprehend The Great Gatsby: post-WWI prosperity, prohibition and the beginning of the Roaring Twenties are all very important — but they are intrinsically important not analogously so: they are vital to the texture of the book. They aren’t part of a double reading: to know of the Russian Revolution in the context of Dr Zhivago is very different from knowing it in Animal Farm. 

          But unlike The Crucible and The Plague, Animal Farm doesn’t only want the double reading of event, it offers its narrative in fable form. (The book’s sub-title is A Fairy Tale) What might seem odd is that the novella’s simplicity comes from its allegory and its complexity from the use of fable. In reading it allegorically all one need do is draw out the similarities with real people and with history. Napoleon is Stalin and Snowball Trotsky; Boxer is more broadly the proletariat but can specifically be seen as the great worker Alexey Stakhanov; the old farmer Mr Jones, Nicholas II. This allows us to decipher the allegory and it isn’t difficult either to comprehend its message. The revolution was co-opted by its most ruthless members and personal greed increasingly became the motto as the seven commandments are altered all the better so that Napoleon can sleep in a bed, drink alcohol and kill his animal enemies if he pleases. So far, so Stalin. But Orwell in his introduction said the image behind the book came to him in Spain. “He saw a little boy perhaps ten years old driving a huge horse cart along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. If only the horse could know of its own strength, it could easily overcome the boy.” (Journal of Modern Literature) Orwell tries to imagine himself into the mind of an emancipated horse and his thoughts on its possibility aren't too far removed from Tolstoy's use in his story ‘Kholstomer': “The words "my horse" referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words "my land," "my air," "my water.” But the words made a strong impression on me….” In his famous essay ‘Art and Technique,’ Viktor Shklovsky uses the tale as an important example of defamiliarisation, saying of Tolstoy’s depiction:  “The narrator of ‘Kholstomer,’ for example, is a horse, and it is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the ‘content' of the story seem unfamiliar.” In this sense, allegory can appear as a form of refamiliarisation, with a key difference between Orwell and Kafka resting on this difference. To reduce ‘Metamorphosis’ to allegory is to misread Kafka; to read Orwell through the precision of allegory is to read him as he intended. This can make Kafka potentially a far more complex writer than Orwell and easily a more slippery one, but if Kafka’s work can’t be decoded as Animal Farm can, there is more to Orwell’s work than the decoding.  

    When Orwell discusses the boy whipping the horse he doesn’t dwell on the perception and the feelings of the animal, he immediately turns it into a political question. He saw this was how the “rich exploit the proletariat”, and sees that if the horse could be aware of its power, it could overcome the boy. Yet there are two ways of seeing this: one of power and the other of consciousness — the animal is strong enough to overcome the boy but he doesn’t have the awareness to do so. Equally, another animal, even if it developed that consciousness, might not have the strength to do anything about it. The ideal, is that the two come together in an awareness of one’s strength. In Animal Farm, the animals collectively have the strength but too many lack the awareness, which in Orwell’s formulation comes across as stupidity. The pigs are less strong than other animals on the farm but they have greater mental acuity, and in Napoleon’s case the cunning to train up puppies to become attack dogs — giving him both strength and awareness. If one views the novella as one of strength, revolutions inevitably fail as anything other than a power grab. At the beginning of the novel, Mr Jones runs the farm and oppresses the animals; at the end Napoleon runs the farm,  drinks as copiously as Mr Jones, has moved into the house at Manor Farm and allows humans to join him there. From Napoleon’s point of view, he has all the power Mr Jones used to possess and the revolution need merely be seen as the interim process necessary to achieve it. If power is all that matters, then revolutions will inevitably fail except as tools for personal ambition, and why bother going through all the bloodshed when you can have the powerful who are already in place running things?  

     Reading the book as about the futility of revolution has been common, whether by a social democrat like the literary theorist, Northrop Frye, or right-wing journalists writing for small newspapers. As David Dwan notes, Frye saw Animal Farm as a “reactionary bromide” ('Orwell’s Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’), while Stephen Smith says, “When tried [Orwell shows], the leftist dream has always resulted in failure, death, and destruction. They use destruction and division as a methodology.” (The Signal) But this is merely to read the book allegorically, while what is more useful is to read it simultaneously as a fable about education over power. We might think again about the story of the mouse and the lion and imagine it written differently, with the moral sub-textually evident rather than asserted. In such a reading, there would be two mice, one lion and the hunters. The lion sees he can easily crush a mouse and does so, while the other mouse looks on horrified. Later, the lion is captured by hunters using a large net, and the mouse sees the lion in captivity and the lion asks the mouse for help. The mouse says he could gnaw through the net but why should he? When the lion had power he used it to kill; the mouse now uses his to leave the lion to die. If the fable were so told, we might still extract the same meaning: that power is relative and best to acknowledge that one’s strengths can be another’s weakness and vice versa. In the famous fable this is categorical; in our version, it can still be extracted but not directly. Someone could read the latter as no more than a tale of vengeance; that the mouse gets the chance to avenge his colleague’s death by leaving the lion to his captors. But, just as readily, one could read it as a tale about the need to be aware that power isn’t all-encompassing. 

       Why we are claiming Animal Farm is an allegory, while also a complex fable, is because though Frye and Smith read it as a take on the revolution and that the book makes clear what a disaster it was, Orwell could insist he is only saying it reflects one specific revolutionary failure. By stating he wanted to speak only of the Russian Revolution (and why we see it as an exemplary allegory), Orwell wished to show how a revolution can fail not that revolutions inevitably must. According to Letemendia, Orwell shows that “…what matters is a concern for freedom and equality in society and a form of ‘innate decency’.” This may be so but such a response might be worthy but remains woolly. Sure, early on we note negative qualities in Napoleon when after the cows have been milked he tells the animals not to worry about the milk and to go off and focus on the harvest. Napoleon says he will join them later. When the animals returned in the “…evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.” Quickly we realise Napoleon is greedy, lazy and underhand. Does this mean that revolutions can only succeed if instigated by the decent? That would leave Orwell’s text as potentially a very weak bromide indeed. No doubt, Napoleon is the villain and the reader might wonder if the revolution in the book would have been successful if there had been no Napoleon to manipulate things. But the reason Napoleon possesses such control, with the aid of Squealer, who always manages to convince the animals of whatever belief Napoleon is presently holding, lies in the animals’ limited consciousness. If Orwell simply believed in the animals’ general stupidity, then the reactionary bromide Frye sees would be true. But Orwell reckons that while some animals are smarter than others (with the pigs the cleverest), more often it is laziness, cynicism and false belief that leads either to revolutionary acceptance or oppressive acquiescence, whoever is in charge. Mollie is far from the stupidest, but the narrator credits her with the  most idiotic post-revolutionary question: “Will there be sugar after the Rebellion?” Benjamin the donkey is smart but cynical, bad-tempered and pessimistic, best summed up in his claim that God gave him a tail to keep off the flies but he would have preferred to have no tail and no flies. This is far from the best of all possible worlds, and though Benjamin is smart enough to see through some of the ruses, he is old and tired and doesn’t want to get too involved. Then there is Moses, a raven who is Mr Jones' favourite creature and tells all the animals that when they die everything will be better: “in Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days of the week, clover was in season all year round, and lumps of sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges.”

       Rather than saying all would have been well were it not for arch-villain Napoleon, Orwell proposes that there are various reasons for the revolution’s likely failure — including other animals that aren’t useful to the cause. If we assume that all the problem characters need to be eradicated, then we aren’t too far from the beliefs that led Stalin to take out all those he thought were detrimental to progress. Better to have in place pedagogical tools that counter the capacity of the self-interested than assume by eradicating the Napoleons, the Squealers and The Moseses the post-revolutionary period will run smoothly. However, if propaganda is more prominent than education, if people (or animals) assume that overthrowing one regime is all that is needed (and overthrowing another regime if that is needed), then this will only perpetuate masters and slaves over emancipated selves. What Orwell shows is that freedom doesn’t come from freeing oneself from oppression alone, but by putting in place a full awareness of what constitutes its components. The main difference between Napoleon and Mr Jones is that Napoleon needs to work harder at constantly convincing the animals that their lives are good. Mr Jones relied on Moses offering a version of Heaven, Sugarcandy Mountain. The animals’ lives might be miserable at present but what an afterlife they will have. Napoleon has to convince them of the good life in the here and now, relying on constantly moving dogma to keep the animals from seeing that the pigs don’t have their best interests at heart after Snowball is forced off the farm. 

    In this sense, religion is a static belief while ideology is active: it is the difference between the bible and Pravda, between a text that embeds itself into a culture over many generations, and an ongoing journal that changes with the times. Orwell may have used the Ten Commandments as the basis for the seven the animals are expected to memorise, but they of course all get turned around as the moment demands. If for Marx religion was the opium of the people, Orwell wouldn’t disagree. After all, as John Redden notes, “he mocked the Catholic (and Anglican) priesthood and notions of heaven in Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter. He frequently denounced "Romanism" as the ecclesiastical equivalent of Stalinism in his journalism and in The Road to Wigan Pier, and castigated the Spanish church in Homage to Catalonia.” (College Literature) But if Orwell saw too that religion is an opiate, communism isn’t much better than MDMA or any other synthetic drug that can be altered at will — and hence the propagandistic. If religion is profound brainwashing then propaganda is closer to gaslighting, a constant, provisional need to keep others unaware of reality. When the animals’ anthem is banned, then changed, Squealer convinces the animals that the anthem Old Major had them sing was only necessary for the Rebellion; now that the animals have been running the farm for some time it is no longer useful and must be banned. It is replaced by the two line: “Animal Farm, Animal Farm/Never through me shalt thou come to harm!” And Animal Farm will soon be replaced with the farm’s old title: Manor Farm. While ‘Beasts of England’ contained the lines “and the fruitful fields of England/Shall be trod by beasts alone,” as Napoleon increasingly deals with humans, now the whole anthem has to go. Equally, when Napoleon replaces ‘Death to Humanity’ with ‘Death to Fredrick’, a nearby farmer, it allows Napoleon to create a figure of human hate while suggesting it is okay for the animals to negotiate with others. However, Napoleon does decide to trade with Frederick when the farmer offers a decent price for the animals’ timber and pays with forged bank notes. When Napoleon finds out, he doesn’t take the blame for his gullibility, and promptly Frederick takes advantage of what he perceives as the animals’ weaknesses. A battle takes place and the animals manage to defend their land, with Napoleon directing operations from the rear, perhaps to see the events in front of him, more likely to avoid getting too involved in the fray (though his tail is chipped by a pellet). Afterwards, he awards himself a special medal called the Order of the Green Banner, and the money is forgotten. What matters is that he constantly negotiates his position of power, and uses whatever tools he possesses, and whatever memories he can suppress in others, to retain it.

      If we have earlier thrust into the article the all too contemporaneous (but nevertheless useful) term gaslighting, why not offer another? That the animals lack 'critical thinking’. If gaslighting is defined (courtesy of Patrick Hamilton’s 1930s play Gas Light) as “the process of causing someone to doubt their own thoughts, beliefs and perceptions” (Cambridge Dictionary), critical thinking was coined by John Dewey in the early 20th century. But like gaslighting it has become much more commonly used into the 21st. It is a “mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem. From the perspective of educators, critical thinking encompasses both a set of logical skills that can be taught and a  disposition toward reflective open inquiry that can be cultivated.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica) While gas lighting and propaganda aren’t quite the same thing, as Alex Sinha notes, saying the former is focused on “forms of interpersonal  manipulation” and the latter " to mean some sort of persuasive or even manipulative communication.” (‘Lies, Gaslighting and Propaganda’), nevertheless they can be usefully correlated. There is much more to Sinha’s definitions than what he offers in the statement above, but what we can see is that a distinction is often made between gaslighting as personal and propaganda as impersonal and public. If Animal Farm might seem to practise both, it rests on the smallness of the community where everybody knows everybody else. But they have enough in common for practical thinking to be applicable and much of Orwell’s irony comes from its absence — in the examples we have given and in numerous others. A good instance of attempting the critical is when “even Boxer, who seldom asked questions”, isn’t immediately convinced as Squealer wants him to believe that Snowball was in cahoots with Jones at the Battle of the Cowshed, where the animals gained their independence. “Snowball fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed. I saw him myself,”  Boxer notes, adding that Snowball was awarded Animal Hero, First Class. Squealer insists this was not so, that in reality, secret documents have since revealed that Snowball was a traitor as he describes how Snowball was helping the opposition. Most of the animals are convinced by this imaginative reinterpretation, but Boxer remains uneasy, leaving Squealer to appeal to authority: speaking very slowly and firmly, he says Napoleon has stated “categorically - categorically comrade - that Snowball was Jones’s agent from the very beginning…” Boxer concedes, “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be true.” Instead of insisting on evidence and proposing that Squealer is relying on the authority fallacy, he acquiesces. A smarter Boxer wouldn’t have done so.  

      If many find Orwell’s book a cynical account of failed revolution,  seeing no point in even trying to revolt since something no better will replace the earlier regime, others can insist that Orwell isn’t cynical at all. While he realistically exposes the failure of a left-wing movement, to make too much of this wouldn’t only be simplifying the text for one’s own political ends, it would also be merely reading the allegorical aspect of it. The left can see cynicism; the right realism, but the book contains too the fabular aspect that insists the allegorical is only a surface reading of the text, no matter if it is an indirect one. Orwell clearly wanted to acknowledge the failure of the Russian Revolution, but the very fact that he wished to reveal its specific failure didn’t mean that he saw radical change as inevitably unsuccessful. To do so would be to ignore the many statements Orwell made and the many actions he insisted upon for this to be readily tenable. Whether it lies in statements proposing that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, investigating the lives of mining communities in the Road to Wigan Pier, becoming homeless himself to explore destitution in Down and Out in Paris and London, or fighting for the Republican cause in Homage to Catalonia. Robert Lieberman notes: “The lives of the poor may not look like our lives, but their souls are certainly like our souls; anyone who thinks otherwise cannot have looked closely enough. Orwell looked closely enough, closer than most of us could stomach.” (American Prospect) It seems unlikely a writer would then say change is a waste of time; and that the poor will inevitably always be with us. 

            If Animal Farm is thus a fable within an allegory, and if our reading has any validity, it is that it allowed Orwell to reject the Russian Revolution and the perpetuation of myths around it, one that saw left-wing thinkers of his time accepting the event uncritically enough to try and block the book’s publication. But Orwell wanted to reject the Russian Revolution and yet accept that this needn’t be the end of the radicalisation of the working class. It was more of a false beginning, and the longer it was accepted as a success, the further away other opportunities would be to transform oppression. Orwell’s book is thus an allegory of the revolution and a fable about pedagogy, on the need to rely on a revolution that has a higher respect for education than propaganda, for a constant questioning of authority over its reaffirmation, and for a people willing to see that the hard work of gaining power comes with it a constant need to interrogate those who are practising it in our name. This needn’t be so complicated, Orwell seems to suggest, and might even be possible chiefly in the form of a fable that a child could understand. 


© Tony McKibbin