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Because Animal Farm is a story about a revolution betrayed, and Orwell wants us to feel how terrible this betrayal is, he knows it\'s important for us to begin by feeling the force of the hopes and ideals the Revolution started out with. This is what he tries to convey in the two opening chapters. He also suggests, subtly at first, and then more sharply, what kinds of things will lead to the betrayal of the revolutionary ideal. But the opening isn\'t too serious or heavy-handed; it is here above all that Orwell works with the conciseness, simplicity, and concrete detail that give his story humor and charm. He wants us to know it\'s the beginning of a fable: we can immediately be amused by watching characters who are both animals and people at the same time. It\'s also the beginning of the Revolution, so the atmosphere is mostly hopeful--although we can see dark shadows underneath if we look.
Chapter I describes a revolutionary meeting. This chapter 1. sets the scene: the drunken farmer and all the farm animals; 2. sets up the situation: the revolutionary vision, in Major\'s speech and song, sets the animals on fire; 3. suggests problems for the future.
It\'s easy to imagine an old joke, or cartoon, beginning just about the way Animal Farm does: When Farmer Jones comes home drunk one night... Then the snoring wife, the light out in the bedroom, AND THEN in the semidarkness, the animals gathering to hear a speech. The visual effects of the first paragraph are as clear as a cartoon: \"With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard.\" The character of Farmer Jones himself is like a cartoon character. Soon we\'ll see that his drunkenness and irresponsibility (\"too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes\") will have serious consequences--and a deeper meaning. For now, note the name: \"Farmer Jones\" is not only a stock farmer\'s name in a joke. It is also a way of saying any farmer, the typical farmer.
As is fitting for the only chapter in the book entirely taking place on the farm when it is owned and run by Jones, the first and last paragraphs center on his actions. They provide a neat little frame for the chapter.
Now the focus turns to the animals. From the start Orwell presents them simultaneously as both animals--\"there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings\"--and as characters who talk and react as human beings--\"Word had gone round...\" that Major \"had a strange dream... and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed...\" Their human situation is already one of resistance to a dangerous master--\"they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr. Jones was safely out of the way.\" But they have a \"highly regarded\" leader in Old Major. Since \"everyone was quite ready to lose an hour\'s sleep to hear what he had to say,\" we realize that an important speech is about to be made.
First Orwell introduces us to the speaker and his audience. The leader is already comfortably in place \"on his bed of straw\" (animal again), \"under a lantern which hung from a beam\" (this convincing human detail is a cartoon touch if ever there was one). Then, one by one, as they come into the barn, we are introduced to all the main characters and the rest of the farm animals.
NOTE: Throughout this introduction, there is a pleasant humor in the way the combinations of human and animal traits are described. Even though they\'re about to listen to a speech and have clearly human traits (middle-aged Clover \"had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal,\" Benjamin is known for his cynical remarks, \"foolish pretty\" Mollie hopes to draw attention to her ribbons), each is a different kind of animal, and Orwell never lets us forget it: \"the hens perched themselves on the windowsills, the pigeons fluttered up to the rafters, the sheep and cows lay down... and began to chew the cud.\" And they are true to their nature: \"Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest places, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major\'s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.\"
As we consider all these types and classes of \"people,\" quick and slow, large and small, bright and dumb, we can\'t help thinking of them as a whole society, complete in itself. Before he begins to talk, Major, like any speaker with presence and authority, makes sure all the animals are \"waiting attentively.\" So are we. When he clears his throat and begins, we know we\'re in for the main event.
\"Comrades,\" he begins--and this is the first hint of political allegory in the tale: \"Comrade\" has been the term of address among socialist revolutionaries for almost a century. It still is common in the Soviet Union. So there is already a hint that this story about a farm is really about revolutionary politics. Not that Major is going to talk about politics in the usual American sense of the word. Before telling his dream, he\'s going to speak to them, with all the benefit of his age and experience, about \"the nature of life.\"
Major paints a grim picture of the \"natural\" life of animals. He soon makes them realize, however, that what seems natural isn\'t: animals are miserable, hungry slaves because man enslaves them, profits from their labor, and gives them in return just barely enough to stay alive. In other words, what seems a philosophical question (\"the nature of life\") is really a political problem (who has power over whom? who profits from whom?). Since it\'s a political problem, it has a political solution: get rid of the enslaver, get rid of Man.
In the first paragraph, Major begins skillfully setting up this solution by at first using passive forms to show the misery of the animal condition without saying who is responsible: \"we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies,\" \"[we] are forced to work to the last atom of our strength.\" A born orator, he drives home his point with repetition and short, simple, generalizing phrases: \"No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.\"
NOTE: There is a little joke in Major\'s portrait of the animal condition. When he calls their lives \"miserable, laborious and short,\" he echoes the 17th-century thinker Thomas Hobbes\' famous description of Man\'s life in a state of nature: \"nasty, brutish, and short.\" Since Major is talking of animal life in a given political situation--subjection to Man--the phrase comes out as comical parody. You\'ll see that there\'s much more parody in Major\'s speech.
In the next paragraph he shows that it doesn\'t have to be this way; it is not \"part of the order of nature\"; the land is more than rich enough to feed everybody plentifully. Then, and only then, does Major name the cause of the animals\' misery: Man.
Man takes everything from the animals and gives them back next to nothing. Using a powerful oratorical trick, Major then addresses members of his audience directly:
\"You cows that I see before me, how many thousands of gallons of milk have you given during this last year? And what has happened to that milk which should have been breeding up sturdy calves? Every drop of it has gone down the throats of our enemies. And you hens, how many eggs have you laid this last year, and how many of those eggs ever hatched into chickens?... And you, Clover, where are those four foals you bore, who should have been the support and pleasure of your old age? Each was sold at a year old...\"
And as soon as Man can take nothing more from them, they are \"slaughtered with hideous cruelty,\" as he said at the start of his speech. Now Major makes each of them feel it:
\"You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. To that horror we all must come--cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone... You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds.\"
Major accuses Man of exploitation and cruelty. In his view there is only one way out: \"get rid of Man\"--and only one way to do it: \"Rebellion!\" Only when the Rebellion occurs--and it may not come for generations, he says--will the animals \"become rich and free.\" As a matter of fact, the Rebellion will triumph in the very next chapter. We\'ll see what becomes of the two themes of exploitation and cruelty when Man is removed and the animals run the farm by themselves. Keep your eyes particularly on Major\'s last example: the fate of Boxer.
For now, Major tells them, they must unite against the common enemy: \"All animals are comrades.\" Unfortunately, he is interrupted at this very moment by the uproar of the dogs chasing the rats, who barely escape with their lives. Major sees the problem:
\"Comrades,\" he said, \"here is a point that must be settled. The wild creatures, such as rats and rabbits--are they our friends or our enemies? Let us put it to the vote. I propose this question to the meeting: Are rats comrades?\"
They vote rats as comrades, with only four dissenters: \"the three dogs, and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.\"
Now at this point, most of us will be grinning from ear to ear, if we\'re not laughing out loud. What had seemed a moving speech has turned into comedy. The joke comes from the contradiction of Major\'s ideal pronouncement \"All animals are comrades\" with animal reality: dogs and cats kill rats. The animals\' majority vote--the democratic ideal--is not about to change that. We\'ll come back to this question of ideal vision versus real nature later.
The other source of humor here is Major\'s utterly human political vocabulary (\"put it to the vote,\" \"propose this question to the meeting\"). We realize, if we haven\'t done so earlier, that we can\'t quite listen to Major\'s speech as an animal\'s denunciation of human cruelty to animals. It is also a human speech about man\'s cruelty to man. The fable is also an allegory: it stands for another story, which deepens its meaning.
And this allegorical speech is also a parody, which amuses us once we realize what it refers to: just as Major is--humorously--both pig and human, his speech is--again, humorously--both his and that of a human revolutionary idealist: Karl Marx.
Major\'s speech is a summary, in animal terms, of the socialist view of the human condition, particularly as described by Marx. Workers and peasants (the proletariat) labor for the profit of the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie). From the work of the proletariat, the owners gain wealth and money for investment (capital); in return, Marx said, they give the workers back just enough money to stay alive, in the form of wages. (Remember, Marx was writing in the middle of the 19th century, when wages were very low and working hours very long. But Orwell, too, had seen terrible working-class conditions in the English mining country.)
The condition of the animals under Man, in Major\'s speech, is the condition of the proletariat under the bourgeoisie as the socialists traditionally saw it. And the solution is the same. As Marx and Engels wrote in the famous closing lines of the Communist Manifesto: \"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!\"
NOTE: You can read Major\'s speech without thinking of Marx, just as you can read the rest of Animal Farm without thinking of the Soviet Union. But would it still be funny? Perhaps it would still have the humor of a fable--the very fact of a revolutionary speaker addressing members of the crowd as \"You hens...\" is enough to raise a smile. Knowing Marx--in other words, making the Animal Meeting an allegory and Major\'s speech a parody--makes the story both deeper and funnier. Deeper, because we may feel, as the socialist Orwell certainly did, the passion for justice that stirs the animals. Funnier, because it\'s amusing to discover Marx\'s ideas in the animal\'s complaints.
Major goes on to summarize the animals\' \"duty of enmity towards Man\":
\"Whatever goes upon two legs, is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him.\"
From this basic principle, Major draws his essential commandments:
\"No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade.\"
\"And, above all,\" he says, the doctrine of animal solidarity and equality should characterize the struggle and the new society after the Revolution:
\"...no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.\"
NOTE: You may take Major\'s whole speech as a mocking parody. Some readers feel that Orwell is laughing at inflammatory revolutionists and their gullible audience. But other readers are amused and moved by Major\'s speech. Parody, they feel, can be serious and funny at the same time. In the last analysis, how you react to Major\'s speech, and for that matter to the \"revolution\" that follows, may depend on your own political feelings. Or, perhaps, those feelings will be changed by this book.
When Major comes to his indescribable dream, \"a dream of the earth as it will be when Man has vanished\" (in human terms, the dream of a society in which social classes have disappeared), and the song that came back to him in that dream, Orwell again introduces unmistakably humorous elements. The song is \"a stirring tune,\" the narrator says, and then adds, \"something between \'Clementine\' and \'La Cucaracha.\'\" (And in fact the song can be sung to either of these tunes.)
In the excitement it has for the animals, in its revolutionary function, \"Beasts of England\" resembles songs that have actually played a role in worker uprisings around the world. And its vision--an end to inequality, cruelty, and exploitation, a victorious struggle to bring forth \"the golden future time\"--was Orwell\'s own vision when he saw revolutionary Barcelona in 1937. The writer Arthur Koestler, who knew Orwell, thought the song--particularly the last stanza--expressed Orwell\'s own hopes and ideals. This is all true. But just try to sing those words to the tune of \"Clementine\" or \"La Cucaracha\" without laughing!
And just in case we\'ve forgotten that it\'s an animal fable, Orwell reminds us when the animals sing the song: \"The cows lowed it, the dogs whined it, the sheep bleated it, the horses whinnied it, the ducks quacked it.\"
Then Mr. Jones\'s drunken shot in the dark silences the animals, and Orwell ends the first chapter with the tone of a bedtime fable: \"The birds jumped on to their perches, the animals settled down in the straw, and the whole farm was asleep in a moment.\"
NOTE: We\'ve already seen that there may be some problems for the animal solidarity and equality of dogs and rats, even in \"the golden future time.\" If we look back at Orwell\'s presentation of Major\'s audience--the characters in the book--we can see that they form a kind of society in miniature, with its own distinctions, and perhaps hierarchy. For example, we may wonder why the pigs settle down \"immediately in front of the platform.\" Boxer is \"not of first rate intelligence,\" and he seems to work harder than the others. Mollie and the cat are not interested in Major\'s speech at all, although for different reasons. Whatever Orwell\'s intentions, the very fact that this is a fable, with the animals\' role and personality defined once and for all by their kind, suggests that there is a natural order, a natural hierarchy--and natural antagonisms, too. How can revolution change that?
We do see brotherly, protective behavior on the part of the animals, though. Boxer and Clover come in \"together, walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw.\" Then, when the motherless ducklings wander around the barn to find a safe place, \"Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings nestled down inside it.\" They perform these comradely actions before Major\'s speech about hatred to Man and comradeship among animals. Orwell seems to be suggesting that there is some instinctive decency in the working class.
Major\'s idealistic vision may be doomed by certain realities of nature: hierarchy and antagonism. Or will the society created by the Rebellion encourage the natural decency of animals like Boxer and Clover? If we look carefully, we see that Orwell has hinted at problems for the Rebellion from the very start.
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