Page 8 - Animal Farm and 1984

did not sell well in America, and though it was declined by Angus Cameron of Random House after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had sent him a copy (Cameron was a leading Communist fellow-traveler), it did eventually see print, from Harcourt, Brace, in 1946. By that time, Orwell had only a few years to live and was to exhaust himself physically and mentally by writing and then typing out 1984. The contrast between the two books is an extraordinary one, which partly reflects Orwell’s own race against time.
Animal Farm, with its original tongue-in-cheek subtitle “A Fairy Story,” is biting but essentially good-natured. The pastoral setting has a reassuring patina; Mr Jones, the wicked farmer, is also a figure of farce. The fate of some creatures, most obviously the noble work-horse Boxer, has additional pathos and tragedy—in Boxer’s case because of his dumb, equine bravery— but the pigs are the pigs and they are amusing as well as nasty in their anthropomorphism. (Many children have enjoyed the book for its own sake, heedless of the history of the Soviet Union and its ruthless, witless collectivisation, and Martin Amis in Money has a hilarious passage in which his dumb-ox of a narrator, John Self, is given a copy of the novel and laboriously makes the self-same mistake.)
In 1984 , by contrast, Orwell made extensive and almost melodramatic use of his own buried knowledge of cruelty. In his life, he had witnessed sadistic and authoritarian behavior among small boys at English boarding-schools, again while serving as a policeman in colonial Burma and further as a journalist pretending to be a loser in slums and sweatshops. He had also gained first-hand experience of political terror as a fighter against both fascism and Stalinism in Spain. The novel makes a double-distillation of every nightmare of monstrous entrapment and powerlessness to which the average human brain is vulnerable. It also makes an almost conscious attempt to destroy the very concept of hope. Those who read it first, like its original publisher Fredric Warburg, were made physically afraid. I still come across students in their twenties who were terrified by their initial reading.
The original title of the novel was The Last Man in Europe, as if to summarise the utter loneliness and despair of Winston Smith, but it was a stroke of genius that changed this into the almost hieroglyphic title—often rendered in numbers rather than in Orwell’s words—that we know today. No more than an inversion of the year 1948 in which it was being completed, the date gave an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule. This time, no outright attempt at censorship was undertaken. Instead, there were
https://largepdf.com/