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Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations: Animal Farm Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of Great Expectations One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn The Great Gatsby Solitude The Age of Innocence Gulliver’s Travels Persuasion Alice’s Adventures in Hamlet Portnoy’s Complaint Wonderland The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice All Quiet on the Heart of Darkness Ragtime Western Front I Know Why the The Red Badge of Animal Farm Caged Bird Sings Courage The Ballad of the Sad The Iliad Romeo and Juliet Café Invisible Man The Rubáiyát of Omar Beloved Jane Eyre Khayyám Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Scarlet Letter Black Boy Julius Caesar A Separate Peace The Bluest Eye The Jungle Silas Marner The Canterbury Tales Long Day’s Journey Slaughterhouse-Five Cat on a Hot Tin Roof into Night Song of Solomon Catch-22 Lord of the Flies The Sound and the The Catcher in the Rye The Lord of the Rings Fury The Chronicles of Love in the Time of The Stranger Narnia Cholera A Streetcar Named The Color Purple The Man Without Desire Crime and Qualities Sula Punishment The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji The Crucible Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities Darkness at Noon Moby-Dick “The Tell-Tale Heart” Death of a Salesman My Ántonia and Other Stories The Death of Artemio Native Son Their Eyes Were Cruz Night Watching God Don Quixote 1984 Things Fall Apart Emerson’s Essays The Odyssey To Kill a Mockingbird Emma Oedipus Rex Ulysses Fahrenheit 451 The Old Man and the Waiting for Godot A Farewell to Arms Sea The Waste Land Frankenstein On the Road Wuthering Heights The Glass Menagerie One Flew over the Young Goodman The Grapes of Wrath Cuckoo’s Nest Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations George Orwell’s Animal Farm New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Animal Farm—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data George Orwell’s Animal farm / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-582-4 (acid-free paper) 1. Orwell, George, 1903–1950. Animal farm. 2. Political fiction, English—History and criticism. 3. Satire, English—History and criticism. 4. Dystopias in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PR6029.R8A746 2010 823'.912—dc22 2009018851 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America IBT IBT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Political Fiction and Patriarchal Fantasy 3 Daphne Patai Animal Farm: An Allegory of Revolution 23 Valerie Meyers Language as Theme in Animal Farm 35 Samir Elbarbary Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell’s Neglected Commentary 45 V.C. Letemendia Animal Farm 59 Roger Fowler Orwell, Tolstoy, and Animal Farm 79 Robert Pearce vi Contents An Absence of Pampering: The Betrayal of the Rebellion and the End of Decency in Animal Farm 87 Anthony Stewart George Orwell’s Dystopias: From Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four 125 Peter Edgerly Firchow Chronology 151 Contributors 153 Bibliography 155 Acknowledgments 159 Index 161 Editor’s Note My introduction grants that Animal Farm remains relevant, because the dangers of a computerized society carry on from Orwell’s horror of Stalinist terror, even though I find the book less than an aesthetic achievement, since a beast fable needs a psychological clarity that is lacking here. Daphne Patai offers a feminist critique of Animal Farm that does not persuade me, but then I am seventy-nine and resistant to ideologues, as in fact Orwell was. Valerie Meyers sensibly unravels the allegorical thread of the beast fable, while Samir Elbarbary follows Orwell in his concern for language mystifica- tion in politics. Orwell’s continued belief in a democratic socialism is argued by V.C. Letemendia, though I myself read Animal Farm as despairing of all politics. Roger Fowler interprets Animal Farm as an allegory of the falsification of history by politics, after which Roger Pearce demonstrates Tolstoy’s influ- ence on the book. The fable is seen as a parable of the self-destruction of human decency by Anthony Stewart, while Peter Edgerly Firchow traces the transition from Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction One critic remarked of George Orwell that he wrote sympathetically about human beings only when he presented them as animals. The truth of this can be tested by comparing Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four; Napo- leon (Stalin) is preferable to the torturer O’Brien, perhaps because even a whip-wielding boar is more tolerated by Orwell than a sadistic human. Poor Boxer, the martyred workhorse, is certainly more lovable than Winston Smith, and Mollie the flirtatious mare is more charming than poor Julia. Orwell’s dislike of people resembles that of a much greater moral satirist, Jonathan Swift: Each loved individual persons, while despising mankind in the mass. Whatever the aesthetic flaws of Animal Farm, it seems to me a better book than Nineteen Eighty-Four, primarily because it allows us a few animals with whom we can identify. Even Benjamin, the ill-tempered old donkey, silent and cynical, and incapable of laughing, still becomes some- what dear to us, largely because of his devotion to the heroic Boxer. I’m not certain that I don’t prefer Snowball (Trotsky) to anyone at all in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because at least he is vivacious and inventive. The great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed that Animal Farm adapts from Swift’s A Tale of a Tub the classical formula of much literary sat- ire: “the corruption of principle by expediency,” or the fall of Utopia. Unlike Swift, however, as Frye again notes, Orwell is not concerned with motivation. The reader is not encouraged to ask: What does the inscrutable Napoleon- Stalin want? Orwell’s point may be that absolute power is desired by tyrants simply for its own sake, but Animal Farm hardly makes that very clear. The beast fable is a fascinating genre, but it demands a certain psychological clar- 1 2 Harold Bloom ity, whether in Chaucer or in Thurber, and Animal Farm mostly evades psy- chological categories. Orwell essentially was a liberal moralist, grimly preoccupied with pre- serving a few old-fashioned virtues while fearing that the technological future would only enhance human depravity. Animal Farm, like Nineteen Eighty- Four, retains its relevance because we are entering into a computerized world where a post-Orwellian “virtual reality” could be used as yet another betrayal of individual liberty. Part of the residual strength of Animal Farm is that we can imagine a version of it in early twenty-first-century America in which all the “animals” will be compelled to live some variant upon a theocratic “Con- tract with the American Family.” Perhaps the motto of that theocracy will be: “All animals are holy, but some animals are holier than others.” D aphne P atai Political Fiction and Patriarchal Fantasy n his essay “Marrakech,” Orwell elaborates on the perception that came toI him, during his stay in Morocco, that “All people who work with their hands are partly invisible.” Describing the file of “very old women,” each bent beneath a load of firewood, who passed by his house every afternoon for several weeks, he comments: “I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing—that was how I saw it” (CEJL, 1:391). One day he happened to be walking behind the firewood and finally noticed “the human being underneath it”—a woman. By contrast, he writes, his aware- ness of the mistreatment of animals was immediate: “I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.” Orwell then describes the small Moroccan donkey, a faithful and willing worker, in the anthropomorphic terms he was later to use for Boxer, the immense and hardworking cart horse in Animal Farm, and concludes: “After a dozen years of devoted work, it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold” (1:392). In a fascinating example of his tendency to generalize from personal reactions, Orwell states: “This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas—on the whole—the plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact.
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