Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Middletown: Brawtley, 2012. Print.
- Reading for, controlling values, registers, etc
Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, is the fictional story of a group of barnyard animals, lead by pigs Napoleon and Snowball, who overthrow their neglectful owner, Mr. Jones, and establish their place to control the farm. They establish a set of commandments which would make a system of equality for the animals. Unfortunately, as time goes on, Napoleon begins twisting the system for his own gain. While this is going on, the humans do fight back, and while the animals pushed them back, many begin to question who really keeps control between the two pigs. When Snowball attempts to suggest a windmill to help the farm, Napoleon uses his new guard dogs to stage a coup and chase him away. Without Snowball’s reasonable approach to leadership, Napoleon takes control of the farm as its dictator. He forces the animal to work harder on the windmill while putting more of his own select pigs to serve alongside him, such as Squealer, who feeds the animals lies about their freedom. One of the neighboring farmers, Mr. Frederick, blows up the windmill, hurting the most loyal of animals in the process. Despite this attempt at destroying their farm, Napoleon allies himself with Frederick in exchange for whiskey and clothes. Years pass and the pigs start to resemble humans, as they walk upright, carry whips, and wear clothes while ruling over Non-Pig animals. Napoleon rids the practice of the revolutionary traditions and restores the name of the farm before it changed. As the animals look from pigs to humans, they realize they can no longer distinguish between the two.
Unlike most books, I didn’t have too much trouble separating myself from the mimetic register for this story. I focused more on reading towards the Thematic, as truthfully, the story’s reputation of being satirical/allegorical doesn’t try to be as subtle as I initially expected.
Through the story, the controlling value would be “Overthrowing the ruling class of oppressors through revolution and ruling yourself leads to happiness, independence, and equality,” with the context would be that “Being governed by an oppressive higher class leads to feelings of inferiority, inequality, and exploitation.” With that value in mind, the opposing controlling value would be “Allowing yourself to be ruled and controlled by a higher class provides a life of stability where everyone has a purpose that helps uphold society,” with the context being Taking power into your own hands and abolishing the higher ruling class will lead to a purposeless life on no productivity, and therefore no happiness or fulfillment.
- Form and Genre
Orwell uses different forms to pull in the reader to this world. These forms are elaborated on in Kenneth Burke’s book Counter Statement, more specifically in the Lexicon Rhetoricae. Using ‘categorical expectancies,’ or events in a story that the audience sees coming, for Conventional form, this revolution the plot had opened with played out how we expected it to. Through this logical based form of the story, it leads to the use of the qualitative form which allowed us to relate to these animals in a fantasy story. Qualitative Form is about the different moods that are present while reading a text, and how they change and relate to one another. Knowing the characters’ emotions, such as Boxer’s after the Battle of the Cowshed, where he thought he had killed a Stable-Lad and became distraught, pulls the reader in and puts them into the part that Orwell intended us to be: an audience in the mimetic register. The characters themselves each play a role symbolizing real world figures and classes associated with Russia during the rise of the USSR, effectively turning a book that sounds like a fantasy story for children into a political satire for adults.
- Intertextual Codes
Using intertextual codes such as Hermeneutic, Proairetic, Semic and Symbolic codes, Orwell’s meaning behind his writing became much more apparent as the book went on.
Cause and effect from the Proairetic Code show a noticeable change in the story and the emotional effect it leaves on the character, as well as the reader in some cases. An example of this is when Clover the horse finds out that Napoleon sleeps in a bed in the farmhouse. She vaguely remembered there was a rule against this established in Animal Farm’s Seven Commandments. Muriel the goat reads the commandment painted on the barn, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” and Clover believes she’s mistaken since Napoleon was not using sheets, so it was okay. The code here should have made the reader expect either a rebellious response from Clover after learning this clear break of the Commandments or a submissive one, as we saw many other animals do. At some points, it became a little irritating to be able to correctly predict what was going to happen.
The Hermeneutic Code proposes, maintains through numerous delays, and ultimately resolves enigmas. It’s a code with many steps but is seen several times throughout the book itself. One example of this is mentioned above. When Clover asks Muriel to read the commandments to her to make sure if there was something about sleeping in a bed, this introduced an enigma. With every time that Napoleon altered a commandment, it supplied a snare that catches the mystery, and as such continued to play into this code. Despite this mystery that was set up, the characters grew so predictable, that there really didn’t feel like there was such a huge mystery to be absorbed by. Yes, the mystery was revealed in the end when the pigs were truly behaving exactly like humans, but because how noticeable the changes to the commandments were, the enigma didn’t entice me as much as it should have.
Semes such as the phrase “Surely, comrades, you don’t want *blank* back?”, uttered by Squealer, as well as his swishing tail and other phrases that made his character a lot more trustful to the animals, litter the book to help cause fear in the characters. As for symbolic codes, the parallels between the situation at Animal Farm and the rise/corruption of the Soviet Union and Communism are far from subtle. Napoleon and Snowball are parallels to Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union as a harsh dictator, and Trotsky, a revolutionary who followed the teachings of his late mentor Lenin(who has the parallel of Old Major in the book). Their personalities match their real world counterparts’ beliefs and what they fought for can be mirrored to beliefs of the characters in the story.
- Narrator/ Addressee
Orwell wasn’t trying to show the downside to communism through this story, but rather used it as a platform to speak to his ideal audience: readers open to the idea of communism. There are characters in the story that could be seen as representations of different kinds of readers. One example of this is Boxer, who completely submits to everything that is told to him, including his two favorite maxims, ‘I will work harder, ’ and ‘Comrade Napoleon is always right.’ This is an example of a submissive reader, one who accepts the reality laid out before them and sits as the audience that the author was trying to reach, or the Authorial Audience. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are Mollie the Horse and Benjamin the Donkey. Both are opposite to Boxer’s submissive reader in two different ways. In the case of Mollie, she can’t find herself drawn into the mimetic register, while Benjamin finds himself, going against the laid out ‘text,’ and refuses to change to become the audience that the author wants. Each of these characters can also be compared to those in the real world when it comes to communism. From those who ultimately believe that what the leader is doing is right(Boxer), those who defected from the U.S.S.R.(Mollie) and finally the one who rebels, even if submissively(Benjamin).
5. Final Reflection
As I look back on how I started before I read this book, I was expecting to be blown away by the messages that Orwell was trying to tell us. I was hoping to be challenged in some way as I was in Autobiography of a Face. Sadly, the fact remains that with the more simplistic writing, making it a ‘fairy story,’ it wasn’t much of a challenge to analyze critically. The story itself was good, but for a challenge for the techniques we learned in the class, it was child’s play. That being said, do I think my time was wasted reading this book? Not entirely. In a way, this was a good practice for books I’ll be reading in the future. While going through the two books that followed, I was able to separate myself from the mimetic register, something I failed to do before entering this class. While writing this last entry to our blog, it made me think back to how I now could look past the words on the page and find a deeper meaning. Whether it be obvious like in Animal Farm or something that required a lot more critical thinking such as The Trial. Each of these books themes tried their best to reach a kind of audience in me, where I could submit and accept what was given to me. Because of the lessons I learned, I didn’t submit and saw the strings the authors were using. In a way, I felt like Neo at the end of the first Matrix movie(which the class watched together at the beginning of the year), when he becomes the one. Like Neo, I see what makes the ‘reality’ and can no longer be manipulated by it.
I leave this class with this new outlook on books, and just like the Animals at the beginning of my book, I refuse to be oppressed(in my case, by the mimetic register) anymore.
Jody’s Other Posts:
Autobiography of a Face:
Animal Farm:
The Bell Jar:
The Trial:
How Writers Read... 