Animal Farm
Animal Farm
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George Orwell on Animal Farm
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Spain, a cart-horse, and a myth to exposeOrwell spent 1936 and part of 1937 fighting in Spain for the Republican side, and what he saw there was not heroic resistance but Soviet-aligned forces systematically destroying their own allies. He left Spain in mid-1937 shot through the throat and barely free. The book that came out of that experience was not journalism. He wanted something a reader anywhere in the world, in any language, could follow without needing to know the political background.
On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.
The political intention arrived before the form did. The specific image that gave him the book’s internal logic came while he was living in a small village, when he watched a scene of ordinary agricultural labor and found in it the entire argument he needed.
I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.
By late 1943, when he started writing, he was also clear-eyed about what the book would cost him professionally. Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, and attacking Stalin in print meant attacking a wartime ally. He wrote to the Russian academic Gleb Struve in February 1944, well before he had found a publisher.
I am writing a little squib which might amuse you when it comes out, but it is so not O.K. politically that I don’t feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it. [paraphrased from audio]
He was right to worry. Victor Gollancz, who had published four of his previous books, declined it. So did Nicholson and Watson, and Faber and Faber. Secker and Warburg finally published the book in August 1945.
How he wrote it
Fairy tale as precision instrumentWhen Orwell wrote to Victor Gollancz to describe what he had written, he framed it as a genre piece, which was not modesty but method. By 1943, anti-Stalin pamphlets existed and readers had learned to hold them at arm’s length. A story about pigs and horses on a farm demanded a different posture from its audience: you follow the story before you argue with it.
I think this comes under the heading of fiction. It is a little fairy story, about 30,000 words, with a political meaning. But I must tell you that it is — I think — completely unacceptable politically from your point of view (it is anti-Stalin). [paraphrased from audio]
Orwell had been writing politically engaged books for years before Animal Farm, but he identified this book as the first time the two ambitions, the political and the artistic, were deliberately the same thing rather than one bleeding into the other. He described the shift in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ written the year after the book came out.
Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.
Orwell was specific, in a December 1946 letter to the American editor Dwight Macdonald, about where exactly in the narrative the story’s argument was supposed to turn. Macdonald had told him that American readers were treating the book as a verdict on revolution in general, and Orwell pushed back by naming the scene he had engineered as the hinge. The parenthetical he included, ’(Kronstadt),’ points to the 1921 naval uprising in which sailors who had supported the Russian Revolution turned against the Bolshevik government and were crushed.
The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right.
By encoding the Kronstadt moment in a scene of stolen milk and stolen apples, Orwell built into the book a historical claim: the corruption was visible early, there was a window to stop it, and the other animals let it close.
On what’s at stake
Every line since 1936Two years at the BBC, where he wrote propaganda aimed at India, had given Orwell a close view of how institutions build justifications for pointless work and persuade the people inside them to take it seriously. But when he tried to account for his writing as a whole, the BBC years were a parenthesis. Spain was the axis.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
Orwell’s starting condition for every book was not aesthetic but adversarial. He described this in ‘Why I Write’ not as a theory of fiction but as a personal compulsion, and it explains why the form of Animal Farm, a fairy tale, was never in tension with its purpose. The form was chosen to maximize the chance that the argument would land.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
When critics said that any attack on the Soviet Union was helping the Nazis, Orwell recognized the move instantly. It was a way of ruling certain arguments out of bounds before they could be heard, and he had watched Soviet-aligned forces use the same logic in Spain to suppress inconvenient allies. D.J. Taylor, in his biography Orwell: The Life, records how Orwell characterized this kind of argument.
a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths
What he wants us to sit with
What kind of revolution, and who runs itThe reading that most frustrated Orwell was not right-wing appropriation but fatalism: the book as proof that revolution always produces new masters, so the sensible course is to leave the existing order alone. When Macdonald relayed this interpretation from American readers in late 1946, Orwell replied with a distinction he had built the book around but apparently needed to state in plain terms.
Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters.
Having drawn the line between ‘that kind of revolution’ and others, Orwell answered directly the charge that the book defended the status quo. The accusation rested, he thought, on readers having already given up on alternatives.
If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.
Orwell’s two most compressed statements of the book’s intended moral came in the same December 1946 letter. The first names the condition under which revolution can work. The second, written as though addressed directly to anyone who had ever waited for a leader to deliver freedom on their behalf, names the condition under which it cannot.
I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
He put the same point in even shorter form in the same letter: ‘What I was trying to say was, You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictat[or]ship.’ The book made him more money than anything he had previously published, and it arrived with a specific anxiety attached: that a left-wing critique of Stalinism would be read as an attack on socialism itself.