By RAVI VYAS
George Orwell's classic, Animal Farm has gone down in popular imagination as the anti-Communist novel of all times. But, looking back on it more than 60 years on, this 90-page satire on dictatorships is much more than an anti-socialist diatribe. Of course it is a political novel, but Orwell's politics embraced a number of issues: the essential nature of all dictatorships, both of the Left and the Right, politics and the corruption of language, the ephemeral nature of human relationships or the only form of real angst, the menace of bureaucracies, but, above all, the commitment of language as the partner of truth. Prima facie, Animal Farm is a short satire on dictatorships. The animals on the farm revolt against their master, Jones. They are successful in getting rid of the tyrant and in managing the practical work of the farm; but they are disastrously unsuccessful over some things they had never regarded as a problem, their dealings with each other. The Revolution is hardly complete before differences appear. The pigs do not actually work, but direct and supervise others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural they should assume the leadership. With the leadership, they also assume the buckets of milk yielded by the cows, and the apples from the orchard. Once there was no longer any danger of Jones's return, a new threat must be found to keep the other animals working their hardest, contented in submission to the pigs. The new threat is himself a pig, Snowball. Long after Snowball has been driven into exile, his name serves as a slogan of hatred: his machinations are held responsible for every failure on the farm, and every animal suspected of disaffection is denounced as an emissary of Snowball. Meantime, the basic principle of the Revolution, " All Animals are Equal", inscribed on the barn wall after the expulsion of Jones, has a qualifying clause — "But Some Animals are More Equal than Others".Animal Farm works as an allegory because the story is coherent on a number of levels. Since it is conceived and written in the classic tradition of satire — the tradition of going back and forth in time or what academics describe as the tradition of "receding planes" — it contains something for every reader. Like Gulliver's Travels or Aesop's Fables, it makes a delightful children's story. It can also be read as a lament for the fate of revolutions. When all is said and done, it was the language of politics that was responsible for the dénouement: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind." The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 07, 2005
George Orwell's classic, Animal Farm has gone down in popular imagination as the anti-Communist novel of all times. But, looking back on it more than 60 years on, this 90-page satire on dictatorships is much more than an anti-socialist diatribe. Of course it is a political novel, but Orwell's politics embraced a number of issues: the essential nature of all dictatorships, both of the Left and the Right, politics and the corruption of language, the ephemeral nature of human relationships or the only form of real angst, the menace of bureaucracies, but, above all, the commitment of language as the partner of truth. Prima facie, Animal Farm is a short satire on dictatorships. The animals on the farm revolt against their master, Jones. They are successful in getting rid of the tyrant and in managing the practical work of the farm; but they are disastrously unsuccessful over some things they had never regarded as a problem, their dealings with each other. The Revolution is hardly complete before differences appear. The pigs do not actually work, but direct and supervise others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural they should assume the leadership. With the leadership, they also assume the buckets of milk yielded by the cows, and the apples from the orchard. Once there was no longer any danger of Jones's return, a new threat must be found to keep the other animals working their hardest, contented in submission to the pigs. The new threat is himself a pig, Snowball. Long after Snowball has been driven into exile, his name serves as a slogan of hatred: his machinations are held responsible for every failure on the farm, and every animal suspected of disaffection is denounced as an emissary of Snowball. Meantime, the basic principle of the Revolution, " All Animals are Equal", inscribed on the barn wall after the expulsion of Jones, has a qualifying clause — "But Some Animals are More Equal than Others".Animal Farm works as an allegory because the story is coherent on a number of levels. Since it is conceived and written in the classic tradition of satire — the tradition of going back and forth in time or what academics describe as the tradition of "receding planes" — it contains something for every reader. Like Gulliver's Travels or Aesop's Fables, it makes a delightful children's story. It can also be read as a lament for the fate of revolutions. When all is said and done, it was the language of politics that was responsible for the dénouement: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind." The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Aug 07, 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment