Education and skepticism do seem to go hand in hand; “critical thinking” is what most of us say we want schools to teach kids. At the same age that Lewis was wondering why Jehovah got more respect than Jupiter, I was learning that a story is not always what it appears to be. Some books carry messages — not just morals, those pat lessons offered by books like Elsie Dinsmore, but a new, submerged level of meaning, accessible only to the initiated.
Finding that level of meaning is a skill most readers have to be taught, and American children of my generation learned how to do it by reading books like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace for school. This is a peculiar species of novel, as awkward and uncongenial as early adolescence itself. I wonder: Does any adult ever return with pleasure to the assigned reading of sixth grade? To Kill a Mockingbird may be the only exception. (I put The Catcher in the Rye in a different category. For years, and for all the obvious reasons, J. D. Salinger’s paean to youthful rebellion wasn’t included among the “serious” novels officially sanctioned by grammar school teachers. You can date the moment at which reading became officially considered endangered to the year when they got desperate enough to start assigning it.)
Animal Farm, the ur-book of this type, comes closer to a true allegory, really, than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the fate of the farm animals who rebel against their human oppressors mirrors the rise and moral decay of the Soviet Union more closely than Lewis’s book follows the New Testament. Orwell’s fable is, like Lord of the Flies (another parable of ineradicable violence), deeply sunk in misanthropic gloom. That’s part of its allure for the kind of young reader who yearns to demonstrate his or her maturity; any book this depressing has to be very grown-up. At least, that’s what I thought.
Our teacher explained to us that Animal Farm was really about politics — about communist Russia, no less! — and I and the other bookish students discussed its deeper meanings with the thrilling awareness that we were being initiated into a province of adulthood. Maybe we didn’t fully understand what communism was, but anyone could recognize the way that power and hierarchy crept into Orwell’s ostensibly egalitarian animal society. By age twelve, almost every child has some experience of “fair” situations that are actually unjust; it’s not such a great leap from that to the idea that some animals are more equal than others.
Not long ago, while writing a piece about the fiction routinely assigned to grammar school students, I reread Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. The experience was claustrophobic, and at first I blamed this on my foreknowledge that most of the sympathetic characters in each book are doomed. But so, too, are the main characters in King Lear and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and rereading either of those has never felt grim or dutiful to me. I decided, finally, that Animal Farm and its fictional cousins feel constricted for the same reason that they’re useful to teachers; their purposes are simple, and so are their meanings.
If literary writing has any distinguishing characteristic, it’s that the more you look at it the more you see, and the more you see the more you want to go on looking. It invites a plurality of interpretation. “A genuine work of art must mean many things,” wrote George MacDonald, the Scottish writer whom Lewis regarded as his master. “The truer its art, the more things it will mean.” The meaning of Animal Farm is fairly obvious, but what’s the meaning of King Lear? The question doesn’t even make sense, really; it’s like asking what I mean, or what you mean. Works of art, like human beings, are irreducible. This is why contemporary readers dismiss allegory, because it appears to lack the density of significance we associate with art. The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
I don’t mean to suggest that Animal Farm isn’t moving. Even as an adult, I found the novel terribly sad. I pitied poor Boxer the draft horse, who dies serving a regime that he can’t even see has betrayed him. I pitied him so much that I almost wept. But pity always contains a seed of superiority and therefore contempt. We pity those we regard as less than ourselves: animals or simpletons. As maddening as Lear and Hamlet can be, I don’t pity them. I’m too smart to make Boxer’s mistake, but Shakespeare’s tragic heroes err in ways that I can all too uncomfortably imagine succumbing to myself (if not in so grand a manner).
Nevertheless, to get to the point of being able to read — really read — King Lear, you must first serve an apprenticeship with more manageable books, like Animal Farm. So direct and clear-cut are Orwell’s intentions that the book can be used as a kind of primer for thematic analysis. A double meaning is far easier to recognize than an infinite one. There are better books for younger readers that couldn’t serve this purpose nearly as well. Where the Wild Things Are and Harriet the Spy are both better than Animal Farm, I’d say, and most of us could reread either one of them again and again with a gladness that Animal Farm will never invoke. But Animal Farm is nevertheless a good enough book, and, more important, it’s a fine book on which to cut your critical teeth.
It was with Animal Farm that my classmates and I learned to read fiction with a critic’s detachment. Up to that point, we experienced stories as truth, if not always as fact. It’s not that we believed that the events in, say, The House at Pooh Corner had actually occurred; rather, our limber imaginations let us occupy a world where made-up stories had the same legitimacy as reality. Like real events and real human beings, the characters and events in those stories didn’t stand for something else. They were what they were, and it’s only with great effort and fairly late in the game that a child can understand them as created rather than simply existing the way that the people and objects in the world around us do. If we love a story enough, as I loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we might decide that it has to be real, that a place like Narnia is so necessary that it must be out there somewhere, as palpable as California or Boston (the fabled city my mother came from).
Novels like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are usually given to children with a specific, if unspoken agenda: Animal Farm was meant to inoculate us against communism, and Lord of the Flies, I’ve always been convinced, was intended to warn us off the naive Rousseauian idealism then running rampant in the counterculture. But above all, these books were supposed to teach us how books work, to show us how what seems to be a story can actually be an argument about ideas or beliefs or the best way to run a country. Stories can be enlisted to serve a rational cause, such as a political ideology, and this, we are led to believe, elevates the fiction, making it useful and worthy in a way that a mere pastime or diversion could never be. According to this formula, Animal Farm, which takes up the weighty responsibility of critiquing totalitarianism, is naturally a more substantial and worthy book than Harold and the Purple Crayon, even if we don’t enjoy it as much.