NOT ALL BOOKS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Byrne, Katharine
NOT ALL BOOKS ARE CREATED EOUAL Orwell & his animals at fifty Katharine Byrne Although he was a respected novelist and journalist in England during the '30s and early '40s, George Orwell (1903-50)...
...A thoughtful teacher told me, "The book is talking about any concentration of power...
...In fact, Animal Farm had earlier entered the canon of required reading in most high schools for some of the wrong reasons, its author would say-and he did say so...
...All animals are equal...
...The book has never been out of print since then, read by millions in dozens of languages...
...These were sold out within weeks...
...Orwell lays out the story and asks us to look at it...
...In a letter to Dwight Macdonald, editor of Politics, Orwell further explained, "Revolutions led by power-hungry people can only lead to a change of masters...
...If you were in high school at any time since the 1950s, you probably read Animal Farm, a story of the revolt of Farmer Katharine Byrne taught an Orwell course for many years at Mundelein College/Loyola University in Chicago...
...At first they gambol in joy at the prospect of living out their lives in dignity, sharing in the prosperity their labor produces...
...Are we to believe that this is the inevitable fate of rebellion...
...We are left morally indignant at the injustice suffered...
...I was glad to hear one of them say, "I'd hate to lose it as required reading...
...Nineteen ninety-six marks its fiftieth anniversary of publication in the United States...
...Indeed, if Orwell were alive and well and had all his marbles he would be fighting as he did all the days of his brief life, writing against oppression and corruption wherever it exists, glad to know that the young are still reading and learning from Animal Farm...
...What went wrong...
...If Orwell were alive today," Crick said, "he would be a very old man...
...Orwell was distressed to find his Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four being used, especially in the United States, as cold-war weapons, purportedly the work of a repentant Communist who saw the light and wanted to warn the world of the inevitable fruits of revolution...
...Or that other political systems are better than Stalinist communism...
...The hard-working wretches of the world contribute to their own fate in their ignorant loyalty and apathy...
...Last year a bright student suggested that 'the story warns us not to fight for our rights as students and then let class officers impose their ideas on the rest of us.'" After a lecture, Bernard Crick, one of Orwell's biographers, was asked by a listener, "If Orwell were alive today, what would he be...
...Should Animal Farm be read during the next fifty years...
...In the book, the huge cart-horse, Boxer, a faithful, unquestioning worker ("I will get up earlier...
...NOT ALL BOOKS ARE CREATED EOUAL Orwell & his animals at fifty Katharine Byrne Although he was a respected novelist and journalist in England during the '30s and early '40s, George Orwell (1903-50) had a hard time getting Animal Farm into print...
...In the ultimate reversal of Old Major's words, "all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others...
...With this declaration, the meeting is ingloriously ended...
...A book that satirized the betrayal of Russia's revolution by its leaders was regarded, at the very least, as an affront to a friend...
...Victory is sweet for the liberated animals but also brief...
...The Queen dispatched an emissary to her bookseller-by-appointment, but his shelves were bare...
...they drink it only to keep up their strength so that they can pursue the welfare of all...
...Not until the end of the war in 1945 and the customary reshuffling of friends and enemies was a publisher willing to invest enough precious paper to produce 450 copies...
...Sammler is attempting to defend Orwell's position, but he is interrupted by one of the bearded and unwashed students with "Orwell was a counter-revolutionary shit, and you're an old shit too...
...Each works hard to sustain the revolution...
...World War II was in progress...
...an anarchist book shop offered the Queen a complimentary copy...
...In their version of the book, "the animals, united, came on relentlessly" and a brick was thrown through the window, "shattering Napoleon's magnificent portrait under the impact of yet another revolution...
...I have spoken to ten or twelve English teachers, from Highland Park, Illinois, to Highland Park in Dallas, Texas, about the continuing relevance of Animal Farm...
...As to that, Orwell does not uphold the political systems of the West...
...The tendency of power to corrupt must always be recognized...
...Napoleon is always right") is sent to the knackers as soon as his usefulness is over...
...Led by the pigs, the animals rout Jones and take possession...
...His ringing words to the clandestine assemblage of animals remind them that their lives are "miserable, laborious, and short," with no share in the fruits of their labor...
...One form of repression has been replaced by another...
...The tale about independence won but lost continues to remind us that freedom is fragile and precious...
...Morale is high...
...He finished it in 1944 and sent or carried it from one publisher to another, but no one would take it...
...Crick's answer sidestepped the questioner's effort to pull Orwell politically to the right or to the left and put a tag on him...
...Virtue is crushed and wickedness triumphs...
...As he is carried off to his death, the weak protest of his hooves against the side of the van sounds the dying hope of the animals betrayed...
...The barnyard is roused to revolution...
...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...
...Only if it is read for the wrong reasons...
...Addressing a Columbia University seminar, Mr...
...Understandably, students like this version better than the original...
...Maligned by the Left, Orwell has often been appropriated by the Right...
...Power corrupts, and there are forces at work seeking to wield it...
...Sammler's Planet describes the situation succinctly...
...The men who come to deal with the ruling pigs, Pilkington from capitalist England and Frederick from Nazi Germany, commiserate with the pigs: "You have your lower animals and we have our lower classes...
...people's hold over their own fate must prevail: an alert, informed, and wary electorate...
...In the flurry of interest that coincided with the year 1984, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, claimed that Orwell would, if he had lived, subscribe to the conservative magazine and to the principles of its editor...
...A self-defined democratic Socialist, Orwell had a hard time with other members of the Left...
...there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship...
...I will work harder...
...Of course, but for the right reasons: setting up as it does, with crystal clarity, the price paid when we do not safeguard our freedoms...
...Jones's Manor" is now called "Animal Farm...
...Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers...
...Lies and terror now rule "Animal Farm...
...he would probably be counting the marbles in his head and hoping they were all there...
...When he saw the issue of Henry Luce's Life magazine expounding this idea, Orwell insisted that he had not written a book against Stalinism to deny the right of revolt by oppressed people, nor to advance American foreign policy...
...It is such a great story, told with precious touches of humor...
...The wily pigs explain that they really don't like the milk that they refuse to share with the other animals...
...Russia was our ally and Britain's...
...Another added, "It's a rare classic that students really enjoy...
...You can't have a revolution unless you make it for your self...
...An episode in Bellow's Mr...
...While ascribing all their troubles to "man," his speech ends with the warning: "Above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind...
...My books," he said, "are about the perversions that any centralized economy is liable to...
...John Halas and Joy Batchelor, in their animated cartoon film of the book (1954), apparently could not bear this ending...
...From his earliest years as a policeman for the British Empire in Burma-an "unsuitable career," he called it-Orwell always spoke out against oppressors of the poor and helpless: returning to England he spoke for the rights of tramps, hop-pickers, or coal miners...
...The venerable boar, Old Major, is the philosopher of the revolution...
...But then, inexorably, methodically, equality and freedom are stripped away as the pigs, under Napoleon, a ruler as brutal as Jones was, develop a ruling elite that abrogates all privilege to itself at the expense of the "lower" animals...
...In the end, the wretched animals are looking in the window at an economic summit between Men and Pigs, "Looking from pig to man, and from man to pig they observe that there is no difference between them...
...But as Orwell tells it, the fable ends with all the brave hopes in ruins...
...Moreover, an American publisher told him you just can't sell an animal story to adults...
...Jones's livestock against their brutal, drunken owner...
...This is what happened, but we know it is not right...
...Is Animal Farm out of date since the Soviet Socialist Republics, as constituted, have failed...
...He does not moralize...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 10
