The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Orwell · a fairy story in ten chapters · about thirty thousand words · Secker and Warburg, London, 17 August 1945 · scored on Orwell’s English as published, with its subtitle, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Beast fable and political allegory; a satire on revolution and terror told in the voice of a fairy story
Mythos
The prophet’s dream and his death; the law on the wall and its corruption; the expelled rival made the devil; the heaven promised by a raven; the faithful labourer made martyr; the liberator become the master, and the metamorphosis of pigs into men
Phase
From the night of Old Major’s dream and the expulsion of Jones to a dinner with the neighbouring farmers some years on, when few of the animals remember the Rebellion
Presentation
Fiction; ten chapters, about thirty thousand words, under the subtitle A Fairy Story; told at the level of the common animals’ understanding, reporting what they are told
Register
A plain fairy-tale voice, deadpan and level, carrying Squealer’s statistics, the sheep’s slogans, a poet’s hymn to the leader and the anthem of the Rebellion
Scale
One farm, its animals and its two neighbours; the state in nearly all its apparatus, held as a model
Governing Proposition
The animals of an English farm, roused by an old boar’s dream, drive out their master and govern themselves under seven commandments painted on the barn wall; the pigs, who can read, take the milk and the apples, then the record, then the farm, until they walk on two legs and sit at cards with the farmers. The wager of the fable is that a revolution is betrayed not by one usurpation but by a sequence of small seizures, the first of them the control of knowledge and of the record; and that the oldest and humblest form in the tradition, told in a children’s register, can carry a purge and a terror without loss to the argument or to the art.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Old Major, the prize boar of Manor Farm, calls the animals to the big barn one night and tells them what their lives are: short and laborious, a matter of “misery and slavery” (chapter I), and the cause of it is Man, who consumes without producing. He tells them a dream of the earth without Man and teaches them an old song, “Beasts of England”. Three nights later he dies in his sleep. The pigs, the cleverest of the animals, work his teaching into a system. When Jones and his men leave the stock unfed and then come at them with whips, the animals rise and drive the men off the farm (chapter II). They burn the whips, rename the place Animal Farm, and paint the Seven Commandments on the end wall of the barn: two legs are enemies, four legs and wings are friends; no animal shall wear clothes, sleep in a bed, drink alcohol or kill another animal; all animals are equal.
Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, while the Soviet Union was Britain’s ally. Victor Gollancz refused it; Jonathan Cape refused it after advice from an official at the Ministry of Information; Faber and Faber refused it, and T. S. Eliot’s letter of refusal survives; at least one American house turned it down. Secker and Warburg published it in London on 17 August 1945, as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, and Harcourt, Brace in New York in 1946. It runs to ten chapters and about thirty thousand words. The first two hold the dream and the Rebellion; the next three, the first harvest, the Battle of the Cowshed and the expulsion of Snowball; the sixth and seventh, the windmill, its fall and the terror; the last three, the timber deal and the battle, the end of Boxer, and the pigs on two legs.
The voice is a fairy tale’s, plain and level, and it stays at the height of the common animals’ understanding. It reports what they see and what they are told, and it does not correct either. The reader learns to supply what the narrator withholds, and the book’s argument lives in that gap. Its first law is set down in the second chapter: the commandments are written on the wall, and only some of the animals can read the wall. The pigs have taught themselves from a spelling book of the Jones children; Boxer never gets far beyond the first letters; the sheep cannot learn the commandments at all. Benjamin, the old donkey, reads as well as any pig, and says nothing of what he reads.
Movement II
The first harvest is the best the farm has known (chapter III). Boxer, the great cart-horse, does the work of three, and meets every setback with the same answer: “I will work harder.” For the animals who cannot learn the commandments, Snowball reduces them to one maxim, “Four legs good, two legs bad”, and the sheep bleat it in the field for hours together. On the first evening the milk had already disappeared; then the windfall apples are ordered to the harness-room for the pigs. Squealer, the pigs’ talker, explains: the pigs are brainworkers, milk and apples are needed for their health, and if the pigs fail in their duty Jones will come back. No animal wants Jones back. The first seizure is made in daylight, with reasons, and the others accept it.
Jones and his neighbours come to retake the farm, and are beaten off in the Battle of the Cowshed (chapter IV). Snowball, who has read Julius Caesar’s campaigns, plans the defence and is wounded leading it; Boxer, believing he has killed a stable-lad, grieves over him. Mollie, the white mare who liked sugar and ribbons, is seen being stroked by a man from a neighbouring farm, and soon leaves for good, between the shafts of a smart dogcart (chapter V). Moses, the tame raven who talks of a country called Sugarcandy Mountain where animals go when they die, has flown off with the Joneses. The farm is left to the pigs and the rest, and the pigs settle the policy.
Snowball and Napoleon oppose each other at every meeting. Snowball plans a windmill to light and heat the stalls; Napoleon says it is nonsense. On the Sunday the vote is to be taken, Napoleon gives a high whimper, and nine enormous dogs burst into the barn and chase Snowball off the farm (chapter V). They are the puppies Napoleon took from their mothers and raised in secret. He abolishes the Sunday debates; the sheep drown every objection with their maxim; and three weeks later Squealer announces that the windmill will be built after all, since it was Napoleon’s plan from the first and Snowball had stolen it. Boxer takes a second motto to set beside his first: “Napoleon is always right.”
Movement III
All that year the animals work like slaves, and are happy in their work (chapter VI). Sunday labour is voluntary, and the rations of those who stay away are halved. Stone for the windmill is broken in the quarry and dragged up the slope. Napoleon opens trade with the neighbouring farms through a solicitor, Mr Whymper, and the pigs move into the farmhouse and sleep in the beds. When Clover, the old mare, has the fourth commandment read to her, it forbids only beds with sheets, and she supposes she had forgotten. In November a storm throws the half-built windmill down. Napoleon names the culprit, Snowball, and pronounces sentence of death on him.
In the winter there is hunger, hidden from the human world: Whymper is shown bins that seem full of grain and are filled with sand (chapter VII). The hens, ordered to give up their eggs for sale, lay from the rafters so that the eggs smash on the floor; their rations are stopped, and nine of them die. Snowball is now said to come by night and do every harm on the farm, and to have been Jones’s agent from the first. Then Napoleon calls the animals into the yard. Four young pigs confess that they were in league with Snowball, and the dogs tear out their throats. The hens who led the rebellion confess, and a goose, and sheep, and each is slaughtered on the spot, until there is a pile of corpses at Napoleon’s feet.
The survivors creep away and huddle on the knoll. Clover looks down over the farm in the spring evening, and for the only time the narration stays at length inside one animal’s thought: this was not what they had looked forward to on the night of Old Major’s speech; she will remain faithful and work hard and carry out her orders, and still it was not for this. Having no words for it, they sing “Beasts of England”, three times, slowly and mournfully, as they have never sung it before. Squealer comes with the dogs to tell them the song is abolished: the Rebellion is completed, and a song of rebellion is no longer needed. Minimus, the poet among the pigs, writes another in its place.
Movement IV
The sixth commandment, read out to Clover, now forbids killing without cause (chapter VIII). Squealer reads out figures that prove the farm’s production has risen by two, three or five hundred per cent, and the animals see no reason to disbelieve him. Napoleon is seldom seen; he is given titles, and Minimus writes a poem to him that is painted on the barn wall. He sells the timber by turns to Mr Pilkington of Foxwood and to Mr Frederick of Pinchfield, and closes with Frederick, who pays in banknotes that prove to be forgeries. Frederick and his men attack, blow up the finished windmill with blasting powder, and are driven off at great cost. The pigs fire a gun and call it a victory.
That night the pigs find a case of whisky in the farmhouse cellar. In the morning Squealer announces that Napoleon is dying, and that his last act has been to decree death for drinking alcohol; by evening he has recovered, and soon after he has the paddock sown with barley. One night there is a crash in the yard. Under the end wall of the barn, where the commandments are written, lies a broken ladder; beside it Squealer, stunned, with a lantern, a paint-brush and an overturned pot of white paint. The dogs escort him back to the farmhouse. None of the animals can tell what it means, except Benjamin, who nods knowingly and will not say. A few days later the fifth commandment forbids drinking to excess.
Boxer’s split hoof is slow to heal, and he works on the rebuilding of the windmill as before (chapter IX). The rations are readjusted, which Squealer says is not a reduction. Moses comes back and talks of Sugarcandy Mountain again, and the pigs allow him a gill of beer a day. Boxer collapses hauling stone, and is told he will be sent to a hospital. The van comes for him while the animals are at work, and Benjamin, galloping and braying for the first time in memory, reads the lettering on its side aloud: a horse slaughterer and glue boiler. The animals shout to Boxer to get out; his hoofs drum on the back of the van, then fainter; the horses drawing it will not stop. Three days later Squealer tells them Boxer died in the hospital, and that the van had been bought from the knacker and not yet repainted. Soon after, the pigs come by the money for another case of whisky.
Movement V
Years pass, and the last chapter tells them quickly (chapter X). Few of the animals remember the days before the Rebellion; Jones is dead, Clover is old, and Benjamin is much as he was. The farm is richer, but none of the animals is, except the pigs and the dogs, who produce nothing. The windmill is finished at last and is used for milling corn for sale, not for the electric light and the short working week that Snowball had promised. Squealer’s figures still show that everything is getting better; only Benjamin says that things never were, and never will be, much better or much worse.
Squealer takes the sheep away for a week. On an evening soon after, the horses hear a terrified neigh from Clover and run to the yard: a pig is walking on his hind legs. Others follow; Napoleon comes out last, with the dogs around him and a whip in his trotter. The sheep break into a new bleating: “Four legs good, two legs better!” Clover, whose eyes are failing, asks Benjamin to read her the wall, and for once he breaks his rule. There is only one commandment now: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” After that it seems nothing strange that the pigs take in newspapers, carry whips and wear Jones’s clothes.
The neighbouring farmers come to dine in the farmhouse, and the animals creep up to the window to watch. Mr Pilkington praises the farm’s low rations and long hours; Napoleon replies that the name Animal Farm is abolished, and that the farm will be known again as the Manor Farm. The voices rise in a quarrel: two players have laid down an ace of spades at the same time. The book’s last sentence watches from outside: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” The story has come round to where it began, with a master in the farmhouse and the animals in the yard.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and in thirty thousand words it finds almost nothing to take. Each incident carries a stage of the argument and stands where the argument needs it. Old Major’s dream gives the revolution its promise, so that every later betrayal can be measured against it. Mollie, leaving for sugar and ribbons, is the one animal who goes over to the enemy for comfort; Moses, flying off and returning, is religion tolerated when it is useful. The windmill joins labour, technology and propaganda in one object, built, blown down and built again. The hens’ rebellion over their eggs must come before the confessions, since it supplies the first victims; Boxer’s sale must come last before the end. Charged: the timber deal and the forged banknotes are compelled more by the historical key than by the fable’s own need, and chapter X compresses years into summary.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds well beyond its occasion: a revolution is betrayed not by one usurpation but by a sequence of small seizures, and the first of them is control of knowledge and of the record. The pigs learn to read and the others do not; the milk and the apples go to the pigs on the first days, with Squealer’s reasons (chapter III); the commandments are altered at night by a phrase, and the animals, who cannot remember the old wording, conclude that they were mistaken. The scapegoat, the private police raised in secret, the purge by confession, the cult and the loyal worker sold for glue follow from that first seizure. The book showed this to a Western public for whom the Soviet state was an ally. Held below the top: the condition is shown from outside, as a mechanism, and Benjamin’s knowing silence is named more than explored.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The register is a plain fairy-tale voice, comic and level by design, and the book is not built to rise often. It rises in three places. At the end of chapter VII, after the confessions and the killings, the animals huddle on the knoll; the narration enters Clover’s thought at length for the only time, and they sing “Beasts of England” slowly, just before it is banned. In chapter IX Boxer is driven away in the knacker’s van while Benjamin, the one who reads, at last raises his voice, and the animals cannot make Boxer hear in time. The last sentence, “already it was impossible to say which was which”, is a cold height that closes the book on dread. What holds the axis in the high sevens is frequency: between these moments the comedy and the deadpan keep the elevation down.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Myth built, and the built thing is the whole book. The beast fable is the oldest moral form in the tradition, and Orwell makes it carry a modern pattern: the liberator becomes the master he overthrew, and the story ends where it began, with a new Jones. The pattern bears weight at every stage: a prophet’s dream and his death; a law given in seven commandments on a wall, then corrupted; an expelled rival who becomes the devil blamed for every misfortune; Sugarcandy Mountain, a heaven promised by a raven to those who work; a faithful labourer made the martyr of the system he served. It does not depend on the key: readers who know nothing of the history read it whole, and the closing change of pigs into men is a metamorphosis in the oldest sense. Held a step down because each animal is a sign before it is a particular, fixed to a type or to a historical original.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the beast fable from Aesop to La Fontaine, the political animal satire of Swift’s fourth voyage and of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest, and the nursery animal tale of the twentieth century; Orwell owned the debt by calling the book a fairy story. The turn is in what he put into that form, and when: the history of a revolution and its terror told in a children’s register, deadpan, so that the gap between voice and matter becomes the instrument. The stake was at the top of the scale: an attack on an allied state in wartime, refused by several publishers, one on official advice, at the risk of Orwell’s standing on the left that was his public ground. Held below the bar because the fable, the allegory and the plain style were all inherited; the swerve is of application and nerve more than of form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The fable makes the animals’ limits the engine of the plot: those who cannot read cannot check the wall, and those who cannot remember accept that the wording was always so. The narration stays at the level of the common animals’ understanding and reports what they are told, so that the reader meets Squealer’s arguments as the animals do and must supply the truth the narrator withholds. Only the fable can end on its last image: in a realist novel of the Soviet state the rulers cannot turn into their enemies before the reader’s eyes, and here they do. Held below the top on a charge the form brings with it: by mapping class onto species, the fable makes the sheep stupid and the pigs clever by nature, and implies a determinism about the many that the argument does not intend.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over eighty years, and the evidence is mixed. The book has been reread in every political setting since 1945: as anti-Stalinist allegory, as a fable of revolution as such, as a warning about language and the record, as an argument about the complicity of the sceptic. Its open questions are real: whether the betrayal is a property of all revolutions or of this one; whether Benjamin, who knows and says nothing until too late, is the book’s true target; whether the quarrel at cards that ends it is a reconciliation or the start of a new war. Held at 8.0 because the book is lucid by design and much of it is understood on a first reading: its allegory can be decoded and set aside, and a return confirms more than it discovers. The depth is concentrated in the mechanism of the record, not spread across the form.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is fiction in English of the 1940s, with political writing across the European languages around it. The force: the book fused a political argument and a work of art without loss to either, and showed that the oldest and humblest literary form could be the decisive intervention on the most consequential question of its decade. It moved the political imagination more than the art of fiction, and the beast fable did not become a living form again after it; its imitators are few, and none is its equal, which holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it changed how much of the Western left read the Soviet state; it was translated, smuggled and read in the countries it described; its phrases entered the political language of English and of other languages; and with Nineteen Eighty-Four it fixed the terms in which the century imagined totalitarian power.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Eighty-one years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole as Orwell published it, and it has been in print without a break since 1945. Presence is as wide as a book of its span can show: read and taught in schools across the English-speaking world and beyond, translated very widely, animated by Halas and Batchelor in 1954, staged, and quoted daily in political speech; fame and schooling are presence, not proof. The axis charges a surface fixed to its moment, and this is a topical satire, built on a key of named events from 1917 to 1943; that charge takes back what the width of its presence earns. Against it stands the evidence that matters: the book has outlived the state it satirised by more than thirty years and is read by those who do not know the key.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a plain style held without a lapse: short declarative sentences, a narrator who reports without comment, and a deadpan that makes horror the more exact for being understated. The comic timing is precise, as when the animals find Squealer sprawled beside a broken ladder under the wall with a pot of paint, and do not understand it (chapter VIII). The alterations of the commandments are spaced across the book so that each lands as a small shock and the last as the sum of them. The parodies are exact: Squealer’s statistics, Minimus’s poem to Napoleon, the sheep’s slogan revised. Charged on range: the instrument is a single plain register, chosen well; characters other than Boxer and Clover are drawn in one stroke; and chapter X tells in summary what the earlier chapters showed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Mollie admiring herself in a ribbon (chapter II) and the pile of corpses at Napoleon’s feet (chapter VII). They obey one law: on this farm every appetite and every fear is an opening for whoever controls what the others know. Mollie trades freedom for sugar; the animals trade truth for the promise that Jones will not come back. The pigs’ hangover after the whisky and the terror of the dogs come from the same physics. The law runs unbroken from Old Major’s dream to the last sentence, and the end returns the book to its beginning by its own logic. Charged: the range is narrow, one farm and its neighbours, and narrowness is not coherence; and in the forged banknotes and the farmers’ trade the historical key bends the fable’s world, so that the farm behaves as a state because history requires it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a short fable holds. The state is present in nearly all its apparatus: police, propaganda, law, foreign policy, war, planning and the cult of the leader. Labour is in the harvest, the quarry and the windmill; class appears as species; religion in Moses and Sugarcandy Mountain; literacy as the root of power; history and its falsification; the natural order in the seasons and the animals’ bodies, Boxer’s split hoof and failing lungs. They are integrated, not listed: the windmill alone binds labour, technology, propaganda and war. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is scale and vantage: the orders are held as a model rather than lived, consciousness is drawn from outside, the family appears only as the puppies taken from their mothers, and no single life is given its full inward weight. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Unconcealment at 8.9. A text that survives whole, in print without a break since 1945 and read by those who never knew the state it described; and a disclosure that holds well beyond its occasion: a revolution betrayed by a sequence of small seizures, the first of them the control of knowledge and of the record.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7, held by scale and vantage: the orders of a state are held as a model rather than lived, consciousness is drawn from outside, and no single life is given its full inward weight; a low mark on a small form describes the form. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.8: the book rises three times, on the knoll, at the knacker’s van and in its last sentence, and between them the comedy and the deadpan keep the elevation down. The Swerve at 8.4 is the axis that closes the summit: the turn is of application and nerve, not of form.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.5, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, scored as the novella published by Secker and Warburg in London on 17 August 1945, in ten chapters and about thirty thousand words, with its subtitle; the first American edition followed from Harcourt, Brace in 1946. Orwell wrote it between November 1943 and February 1944. His preface “The Freedom of the Press”, written for the first edition and not printed with it (it was first published in 1972), and his preface to the Ukrainian edition of 1947 are named as context and are not scored. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; the altered commandments are given in paraphrase. The number of languages into which the book has been translated could not be verified and is not given. Citations are by chapter, numbered I to X.