It is a matter of vindication and self-assurance the reason that led V. to suggest me the reading of Animal Farm. This happened, I would say, in the face of certain personal or "professional" events that have been taking place lately. As a matter of fact, I have been able to find close parallelisms between recent situations and those narrated in the novel. As I mentioned here a couple of days ago, Animal Farm is more the lack of individual expression and the give-away of personal exploration and overcoming for the benefit of the group rather than any left-biased claim against dictatorship in abstract and fashionable ways. Naturally, something of the sort was at the beginning. The purpose of Orwell in writing the novel was to shout the silent cry of those betrayed by the usurpers of the Soviet Revolution, and such specific aim banned the publication of the novel by at least one of the four publishers who rejected it. George Orwell himself told the story: a general denounce against dictatorship would have simply done it.
Orwell had a neat and tidy style. His writing is complete and concise, and words seem to be precisely chosen for the job, without pomposity or vane fluorishment. The very beginning of Animal Farm I saw once written on the walls of the Metro in Madrid: "Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring". The amount of imaging of this opening paragraph is staggering. Sometimes (like that good woman from New York told me it is said over there), I say to myself: "Self, you gotta start reading novels by images rather than by symbols or sounds". Shall I ever learn?
Apart from a few interesting details, the most juicy taste of the novel has come to me, once again, from its outskirts. I bought a nice hard-cover edition, with an appealing letter style and an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. This is something a kindle will never give to you and why, if I have some petty cash to spend, I prefer more expensive editions. The edition I bought with the remnant money of a birthday voucher brings, happily, the preface that Orwell himself wrote for the novel and that never appeare: the document has been a fantastic discovery. For sure, Hitchens, who spends time talking in the introduction about the ups and downs of the novel in China, Burma, Zimbabwe and the Islamic World, and who even pointed at the stupidity of The Dial Press and the malevolence of the American right-wing and the CIA for using the novel for propaganda purposes, has not read what Orwell had to say in his Freedom of the Press. Amazingly, as Bernard Crick says in his 1982 study, it was "a blast against self-censorship" and, clearly to me, a description of the British press or the so-called English intelligentsia.
Orwell distinguishes between two types of censorship in the English literary intelligentsia: the one that is "voluntarily imposed upon themselves", and the censorship that "can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups". I have been hypnotically attracted to the first type, as it is the one that provides a fitting explanation to my personal, recent experience in this country, despite the fact that has nothing to do with the literary universe or the press world. Listen to this:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news (..) being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact (...). The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady". And Orwell finishes the paragraph: "Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing , either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals".
Oh! It can be said louder but hardly clearer. Perhaps, it is just an irony of destiny that Animal Farm, beyond its clear portrait of the Russian Soviets, with their Stalin but without their Trotsky, with Napoleon but without Snowball, does reflect to the minimum detail the overwhelming pains and cold of the independent actor in the crowded and warmer stage of the accepted.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
Orwell had a neat and tidy style. His writing is complete and concise, and words seem to be precisely chosen for the job, without pomposity or vane fluorishment. The very beginning of Animal Farm I saw once written on the walls of the Metro in Madrid: "Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring". The amount of imaging of this opening paragraph is staggering. Sometimes (like that good woman from New York told me it is said over there), I say to myself: "Self, you gotta start reading novels by images rather than by symbols or sounds". Shall I ever learn?
Apart from a few interesting details, the most juicy taste of the novel has come to me, once again, from its outskirts. I bought a nice hard-cover edition, with an appealing letter style and an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. This is something a kindle will never give to you and why, if I have some petty cash to spend, I prefer more expensive editions. The edition I bought with the remnant money of a birthday voucher brings, happily, the preface that Orwell himself wrote for the novel and that never appeare: the document has been a fantastic discovery. For sure, Hitchens, who spends time talking in the introduction about the ups and downs of the novel in China, Burma, Zimbabwe and the Islamic World, and who even pointed at the stupidity of The Dial Press and the malevolence of the American right-wing and the CIA for using the novel for propaganda purposes, has not read what Orwell had to say in his Freedom of the Press. Amazingly, as Bernard Crick says in his 1982 study, it was "a blast against self-censorship" and, clearly to me, a description of the British press or the so-called English intelligentsia.
Orwell distinguishes between two types of censorship in the English literary intelligentsia: the one that is "voluntarily imposed upon themselves", and the censorship that "can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups". I have been hypnotically attracted to the first type, as it is the one that provides a fitting explanation to my personal, recent experience in this country, despite the fact that has nothing to do with the literary universe or the press world. Listen to this:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news (..) being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact (...). The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady". And Orwell finishes the paragraph: "Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing , either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals".
Oh! It can be said louder but hardly clearer. Perhaps, it is just an irony of destiny that Animal Farm, beyond its clear portrait of the Russian Soviets, with their Stalin but without their Trotsky, with Napoleon but without Snowball, does reflect to the minimum detail the overwhelming pains and cold of the independent actor in the crowded and warmer stage of the accepted.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
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