From: joe_f@verizon.net
abgo writes:
> The Sunday Times
> However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with
> the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter.
>
> “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from
> which to criticize the political situation at the current time,”
> wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be
> generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”...
Who are "we"? Mr Eliot & MI5? There are other worthwhile things to
do in life, and in literature, than criticize the political situation
at the current time.
Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than
the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the
farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all
without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was
not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
(And then you wake up.)
That, on the other hand, is a sensible comment, and it shows the
fragility of _Animal Farm_ as a satire. Orwell wrote it, of course,
with the explicit political purpose of weaning socialists away from
Stalinism; but he also called it "A fairy tale", and the moral of a
fairy tale is not "the USSR has betrayed socialism" but "That's the
way life is". The attempt to "fuse political purpose and artistic
purpose into one whole" (as he put it in "Why I Write") necessarily
left some ragged internal fissures, but it also made it likely that
the story will survive.
What, I wonder, is the state of criticism of it in the former Soviet
Union?
--
--- Joe Fineman joe_f@verizon.net
||: Children are like waffles: you ought to be allowed to throw :||
||: the first one out. :||
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
