Page 9 - Animal Farm and 1984

efforts to make the novel into something that it was not. The Book-of-the- Month Club in the United States, for example, asked that the passages of Emmanuel Goldstein’s “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” be dropped—because they, too, were too “Trotskyist” as well as too dense. Orwell declined this demand, at the risk of losing a highly lucrative promotion. He also issued a written statement repudiating those who interpreted or conscripted the novel as an attack on the socialist movement in general. Having known continuous neglect and suppression because of his principles, he was to experience a final, closing moment of literary success partly because of those who wished to use his principles against him. Having set 1984 in England, in order, as he put it, to show that the English were no better than anyone else and that the totalitarian danger existed everywhere, he was in a strong position to appreciate the irony of this exploitation. A later CIA-sponsored cartoon-film of Animal Farm, produced for purposes of Cold War propaganda, cut out the closing passage about the restoration of Farmer Jones as head of the farm. That chapter just did not, for immediate practical purposes, quite “fit” the needs of the Agency. This makes the same point in a slightly different way.
Despite being set in England, the book is obviously drawn from Orwell’s literary knowledge of Russia and of the Soviet Union. The manipulation of numbers by the authorities (most famously the Party’s ability to insist that Two and Two can if necessary make Five) is anticipated in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. And Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, an early dystopian fantasy written in the early years of Communism, was among Orwell’s acknowledged inspirations. During the hideous period of Stalin’s “Five Year Plan,” it was at one point claimed by the authorities that the goal of the plan had been attained early, in two heroic two-year spurts. This huge lie was sometimes rendered for the stupider believers as 2 + 2 = 5. Orwell’s novel is full of meaningless announcements about the continuous achievement of ridiculous “production targets,” which form a sort of background noise to the drabness and scarcity of daily life.
It was details like this which won Orwell a tremendous literary compliment that he didn’t live to see. Today, Czeslaw Milosz is the acknowledged literary laureate of his native Poland. But in 1951, he was a minor cultural official in recently Stalinised Warsaw and experiencing the first stirrings of dissent. In his incisive book The Captive Mind, which was eventually published in 1953, he wrote about his fellow heretics within the apparatus:
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