– George Orwell
One reads Orwell if one feels the need to depress themselves as quickly as possible, for whatever reason. Animal Farm is normally considered the left-wing counterpart to the right-wing 1984, but as more time passes, the more I think such labels might not be accurate. Animal Farm is very definitely meant to be a critique of the developments that had undergone in the soon-to-be Soviet bloc countries at the time of its writing, with all the analogues to the fallout between Trotsky, Stalin, and the consequences thereof. While I must admit I found Road to Wigan Pier (also by Orwell) to be far more depressing from a left-wing angle, the storied parable of Animal Farm gives it a certain immortality that Wigan Pier lacks, even if that dangerously removes it from its necessary historical context.
It's therein that lies the rub, strangely enough. This book holds a particular sway in the pantheon of anti-communist education for people who grew up during the Cold War. It took me a while to remember, but my first encounter with the book was in my high school civics halfclass, with all the particularities of the Canadian Catholic system and its under-the-surface right-wing pretensions. It would've been one of those days where the teacher didn't quite have a full lesson prepared, so they just got a wheel-in VCR and played the 01954 animated movie. Many other students would've only seen that heartstrung Disneyesque to just assume “socialism bad” and move on to the next thing school will so thoughtlessly throw at them. I don't think the book was written as anything other than a personal diagnostic, the author trying to work out the exact reason why the bolshevik revolutions went off the rails, despite holding such emancipatory promise. (Considering everything else Orwell wrote, such as Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, there's no evidence to the contrary.)
History has been unkind to Animal Farm, as it's been retroactively twisted into a propaganda piece against its own will.
For the longest time, my opinion of this book was summarized: “I don't think it wanted to be a propaganda piece, but it happened anyway.” It is only with retrospect that I realize such pretensions were hopelessly naïve. I originally thought Orwell died, and the many extant systems of propaganda chose to reanimate his corpse. However reasonable that assumption seemed, I’ve since seen suggestion that Orwell may have been a more active participant in the process than I originally wished to believe.
I encountered this book of my own volition, at a time when I was frantically correcting the illiteracy of my childhood. Animal Farm was a cobblestone upon that road, yet there was a large system of diffuse forces which led me to encounter this book as an object of literary merit. After all, Orwell was a great and famous writer, so it's only natural to wonder what the big deal must have been. ... but in approaching with that preconceived notion, the reachable conclusions were invariably biased. Perhaps it was the romantic in me who desperately wished individuals could be judged apart from the terrible machinations which propelled them forward, but as I grow older, I chafe against this. The sad fact of the matter is, I wouldn’t have known about Orwell were it not for those machinations in the first place, and the result is thus tainted. Orwell will meet the standard which Orwell presents.
Animal Farm, and the far more infamous 1984, are both terribly burdened by their reputations. These are not books one reads for enjoyment, but instead for their ever-shifting rhetorical utility, upon which even Orwell's ideological opponents happily availed themselves. The major theme underscoring his widely-feared dystopia was the corrupting influence of mass media systems and political propaganda; yet through speaking it into being, his ideas were then put through every indignity that could befit them, just as would happen to anyone else who pondered the same thing. No matter how novel it may have seemed for the time, his framing of the issue led to the misguided notion that propaganda systems were somehow exclusive to totalitarian and repressive societies, which is perhaps why so many actual systems of propaganda felt safe in citing him towards their own purpose. When even the Devil can quote scripture, the Word becomes a cheapening prospect.
Am I better off having read Orwell? Does his echo from the past have clear resonance with me, here in my own milieu? Was I able to understand his books, as given, without having them explained to me by someone else of unclear motives? Can I truly say, in having read Animal Farm, that I better understand the subject of its allegory? There is a very strong possibility the answer to all those questions is simply “No,” and it can be freeing to acknowledge that. His political dystopia haunted the imaginations of many, but perhaps not by active choice, especially given the methods through which he arrives. The present moment is perfectly able to be its own uniquely impossible self, so we need not blind ourselves against it just to glimpse Orwell's ghost.
