A quote from Orwell in the introduction makes the purpose of both of these books very clear.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism” (p. vii).

However, I may have previously insinuated that, although 1984 was almost certainly intended as a protest against government, it might have had the adverse effect of teaching governments how to achieve an even greater level of control. In fact there’s an extensive section of that book in which the protagonist is allowed to read the guidebook of the government’s inner circle. It’s no cursory outline; it’s practically a working model for the American Empire from the end of WWII right on through the Bush era. What I mean is just that Orwell may have given more ammunition to the governments than to the oppressed citizens. According to Woodhouse, this was the exact opposite of Orwell’s intention.

“This personal enemy was no single individual or government—it was the system of the world capable of producing and using atomic bombs” (p. vi).

Furthermore, Woodhouse argues that Orwell saw the utmost importance in words and language — not an uncommon trait among professional writers. Woodhouse therefore poses this question: was Animal Farm the first instance of the pen being not only mightier than the sword, but even mightier than the bomb?

“The pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have” (p. vii).

I want to return to Henry Miller, but first I’ll discuss this story some more. For those not familiar with it, Animal Farm is a tale of revolution in which farm creatures overthrow the human farmer and set out to govern themselves. The pigs take charge since, unlike the other animals, they can read and write, and at first Napoleon and Snowball lead a sort of democracy together. They scrawl the Seven Commandments on the barn wall:

“1) Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2) Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3) No animal shall wear clothes. 4) No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5) No animal shall drink alcohol. 6) No animal shall kill any other animal. 7) All animals are equal” (p. 33).

And then everything falls apart. The deterioration is well-calculated and many steps are predictable; the supposedly unalterable commandments are, one by one, edited and/or erased, for the benefit of those in power, to the great disadvantage of the other animals. There are traces of every violent, corrupt government that existed in the 20th Century, especially the Soviets. And as Woodhouse points out, “all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling…” (p. xi).

On that subject, Woodhouse spends a large portion of the introduction examining the book’s subtitle, “A Fairy Story.” As he explains,

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit” (p. x).

“Its message (which is by no means a moral) is that of all the great fairy-stories: ‘Life is like that—take it or leave it’” (p. xii).

Now perhaps you can see why I got sensitive about the criticism of Henry Miller. If Orwell’s longest piece of literary criticism claimed that Miller’s greatest fault was being passive and complacent, then how can the point of Animal Farm be, as Benjamin the donkey puts it, “life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly”? What’s the point of writing only against totalitarianism and becoming nearly synonymous with the word “dystopia,” if Orwell couldn’t devise anything better? What’s so wrong about the idea that some kind of utopia is possible, even if it’s just inside the imagination of an individual mind?

That’s one way of describing what Miller was after: a utopia of the mind. Or at least he was seeking perfect expression. It’s very evident throughout Animal Farm that the animals cannot revolt against the powerful pigs because they lack the means to even form rebellious thoughts. Also, because they cannot write, there is no written record of the farm’s history. Napoleon and his propagandist Squealer use this fact to manipulate the farm animals, altering history however it suits their agenda. I don’t think this should be taken lightly. Miller understood that the freedom and pursuit of expression were some of the most important things in life. This leads me to wonder if expression, or “the pen,” is really what will put us back on the track of progress. And there’s also the fact that all history will now be recorded and disseminated over the Internet (that’s a topic I’m currently sculpting into a longer essay).

I’m willing to staunchly defend Miller because—as he himself said of Goethe—he was a beginning, not an end. Miller made himself into a platform to build upon, a bridge spanning the void of modern humanity. Orwell was a terrific writer and his most popular works show us how not to operate the world. But if “how not to operate the world” is the same as “how the world is actually operated,” then what do we have? We have nausea, I suppose—but that’s another story (one I’ve also discussed here).

This was one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written on this blog, and I think that stands as evidence that these are not easy topics to tackle. If it’s still questionable, let me say clearly that I think Orwell was a genius. Instead of a list of quotes from the book itself, I’d simply like to share my favorite passage:

“As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak… Instead—she did not know why—they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. [...] She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. [...] But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled” (p. 85).

“his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, written in 1940 on Henry Miller; and he called it ‘Inside the Whale’ to illustrate this same point that Miller had failed in his duty to protest, had ‘performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting” (p. viii)

I stopped reading the introduction around this point, with the intention of returning later, because Woodhouse had begun — as many book introduction writers do — to give away too many elements of Animal Farm that I preferred to learn on my own by reading the book. However, I have already read 1984, and I know how Orwell felt about modern governments and their leanings, especially in the early-20th Century, towards totalitarianism.

And Orwell was far from alone in espousing that sentiment. Hermann Hesse’s great work Steppenwolf comes to mind, in which protagonist Harry Haller learns to shape his life into one of constant and unending revolt against the world. The Beats were a definite incarnation of this mentality in America in the ’50s and ’60s. But this idea of constant rebellion, with recurring attempts at revolution, reminds me of two recent posts on this blog: one about David Foster Wallace and his discussion of institutionalized irony; one about Adam Curtis and his documentary The Trap, which addressed the problems of a Western world that has rejected positive liberty for the safer, more stable negative liberty.

I don’t need to double back on those previous posts; I only hope to bring up the point that successful revolution against any vast power in this post Y2K world seems impossible. As The Trap states, negative liberty allows institutions to imprison people, though the people remain under the impression that they are free. Likewise, government and society in the West has become more static and difficult to change.

Curtis concludes by stating that the world is no longer run by ideologies. This makes sense, considering how exhausting it is for a modern individual to remain idealistic for longer than a few years. Anyone can begin a lifestyle of constant revolt against tyranny, but all who do will eventually feel like a shadowboxer, fighting against ghosts and making insignificant progress. And naturally that leads to the classic novel Don Quixote, and the resulting adjective quixotic. Wikipedia (via the Google define tool) defines it as “a person or an act that is caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality.”

Of course this probably deserves a deeper analysis of the types of revolt, ranging from internal (i.e. – individual psychology) to a governmental coup. However, this still relates to a question a Spanish friend asked in the fall, regarding the fact that Americans should be protesting constantly in the street, when in reality they never do. The first conclusion would be that they’re busy watching TV and playing video games, but I think it goes deeper than that (thanks to Curtis for clarifying the situation). Americans can sense that there is no effective target for their revolt. For example, even if Bush had been impeached, Cheney would have taken over and the situation probably would have gotten even worse. But I digress…

I don’t think that Miller’s style of writing — or of living, for that matter — can be written off as anything but brilliant. I would even go so far as to suggest that Miller’s first two books, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, would more appropriately have been called How to Live a Sane Life in a World That Has Gone Mad, parts I and II. Either that, or How to Live in a World Where Successful Revolution Has Become an Impossibility.

Yes, Miller spent more of his adult life in France than in his native country of America, where he probably could have done a lot of good. But he valued freedom of expression above all else, and he recognized that America was about 30 years behind the curve in that area (Cancer was published in Paris in 1934, but, because of obscenity laws, wasn’t published in America until 1961). Yes, Miller seemed to preach passivity and indifference over constant worrying and revolt. But no, this should not be interpreted through Orwell’s method.

Miller did speak of floating down the river of life and taking things as they came, but this was simply his way of making peace with the terrifying nature of life and the world, following the acknowledgment that one person can only change so much, especially through direct physical action. Miller did do more than his share of protesting, but he only did it on his own terms — in a way that would echo through time in an invincible manner. As a result, Miller’s works are almost more useful than Orwell’s, because Orwell wrote from a stance that could be manipulated by governments and institutions. Anyone who has read 1984 wouldn’t doubt that the scariest governments in the world today — including the American government — have probably used the same tactics that Orwell warned against.

Miller called his first attempts at writing “a phantom struggle”:

“It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let go” (p. 283, Tropic of Capricorn).

If you want revolt, Miller provided it by the ton:

“Any primitive man would have understood me…only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. [...] The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life was indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? [...] No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. [...] Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer” (pp. 287-288).

I’ve pulled these quotes almost at random, but one further down the page seems key:

“Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. [...] Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. [...] By the very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example” (pp. 288-289).

Keep in mind that this was first published in 1938, thus preceding not only the U.S. atom bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but also this whole post-war mess that America has seen over the last 50 or 60 years. Seen from this angle, I would argue that Miller’s duty to protest has been more successfully fulfilled than Orwell’s.