Geoge Orwell's Animal Farm
Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, but was not published until August 1945, principally as a result of political objections that arose over the book's attack on Stalin and the Soviet Union. It was turned down by a number of publishers in England (including T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber) and America. One American publisher rejected it because, he said, Americans were not in the mood for animal stories. Orwell, fearing implicit censorship and convinced of the urgency of his message, considered publishing it himself as a two-shilling pamphlet. Finally, Secker and Warburg agreed to publish it, but it was still held for publication until the end of the war, ostensibly because of lack of paper, but more likely because it was still deemed imprudent to publish something attacking the Soviet Union when it was a valuable ally of the West. When the novel was finally published the magnitude of its success surprised Orwell as much as anyone. The first edition sold out the first month, and by the spring of 1946 it was being translated into nine languages. After the Book-of-the-Month Club in America chose it as a selection, it sold more than a half-million copies, relieving him from financial worries for the first t
But Orwell also dramatically emphasizes that the animals' lack of a cultural heritage (seen in their lack of memory and in their illiteracy, which deprives them of a conscious past) renders them powerless against the totalitarian oppression of the pigs. Their lack of a verifiable history and of a historical consciousness (what Orwell was trying to awaken in common-culture Englishmen in Coming Up for Air and in The Lion and the Unicorn) makes them easily subject to the manipulative uses of language and power. As they repeatedly witness the falsification of history and the rewriting of the seven commandments of Animalism, their disquiet is appeased only when they are convinced that "their memories had been at fault." Thus, the decay of the revolution stems not simply from the consolidation of power by the pigs but also from the animals' lack of a conscious moral-cultural tradition, for they have no heritage of justice and equality to fall back on. Without the agency of memory, which could preserve the ideals of the revolution and enable them to shape the future of their own society, the prerevolutionary shape of the farm is gradually restored, although under a different leadership. In 1947 Orwell said that 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." His fable is a remarkably effective integration of a political message within a unified fictional narrative, and it is significantly a radical departure in form from his documentaries and fiction of the 1930s. The use of the fable, the simplicity of style, and the notable absence of a narrative or authorial voice provide Animal Farm with the potential for a mythic quality that engages a deeper level of consciousness than either realistic fiction or the essay. While this is very likely Orwell's most perfect literary production, the form of the fable does limit the emotional and psychological complexity of the story, which is the limitation that Orwell sought to transcend in the more complex Nineteen Eighty-Four....
Some common words found in the essay are:
Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Love O'Brien, Comstock's Bowling's, Soviet Union, Englishmen Orwell, Lion Unicorn, Winston Smith, Nineteen-Eighty-Four Orwell, Marsh Farm, nineteen eighty-four, animal farm, soviet union, human spirit, political purpose, verifiable history, world 1984, ancestral memory, cultural consciousness, world orwell,
Approximate Word count = 2137
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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