The two pigs Napoleon and Snowball may make us think of Stalin and Trotsky, but Orwell is not really playing roman б clef games. He is questioning the whole notion of the ordered state, perhaps questioning the value of any revolution that sets the ordered state as its goal. Funny as Animal Farm often is, it is also full of dismaying insights into the venality and hypocrisy of ali power-obsessed natures. One of these insights has entered the language: Ali animais are equal, but some animais are more equal than others.
In an article headed "Why I Write" Orwell made his pur- pose clear: "Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.,>
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only his finest work but one of the most influential books of our time. You might want to compare it with Br ave New World [117] to feel how much blacker the world became during the seventeen years, 1932 to 1949, separating these two exercises in dystopian thought.
To avoid despair we must interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four as warning rather than prophecy. We are still some distance away from the picture of the future imagined by 0'Brien, the book's most important character: "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." But Stalin^ ruthlessness and the Nazi mechanized techniques of mass torture and murder, not to mention the Cambodian, Iranian, and other horrors, have to some degree changed Nineteen Eighty-Four from a cautionary tale to a bleak commentary on our era. Newspeak, the art of the Big Lie, may have been developed by the Russians and the Germans, but it has been adopted by many quick-study leaders of the Free World. To Huxley's vision of a dehumanized future Orwell adds new dimensions of terror and torture; and of course terror and torture are now prominent features of our world's political landscape.
As a novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly ranks with the greats. Yet some of its scenes—for example, the keystone Smith-CKBrien dialogue—are almost as telling as similar ones in Dostoyevsky [87]. The episode in which Winston Smith actually does begin to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 is a remarkable translation into imaginative terms of the terrifying power of propaganda backed by force.
Burmese Days is considered by many to be the most devas- tating fictional account we have of the evils of colonialism.
In addition to the three recommended books, you will find some of OrwelPs essays worth reading. One realizes, viewing his work as a whole, that the style is truly the man. It is plain, honest, without a hint of striving for effect. Now that we can survey his whole career, Orwell himself seems an admirable example of the nonconformist temperament at its best, inte- grated and unfoolable.
More than that of any other writer of his generation, his reputation has steadily risen since his death. It is often said that the engaged writer must pay for his engagement by becoming outmoded. In OrwelPs case this does not appear to be true.
C.F.
124
R.K. NARAYAN
1906-
The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets
It is easy to overlook the fact that нndia is one of the workTs largest and most important English-speaking countries; after ali, it is famous for its numerous mutually unintelligible lan- guages, and English is not native to the subcontinent. But a consequence of three centuries of British commercial domina- tion and colonial rule was to create an English-speaking Indian elite, educated in English-style schools and conditioned to think of England as, in some sense, their true mother country. Cultural and political loyalties have changed in postindepen- dence нndia, of course, but English lives on—in part because it provides a prestigious and culturally neutral way of bridging the country's inherent linguistic chasms as a second language for everyone. (Most Tamil-speakers, for example, would rather converse with a Hindi-speaker in English than in Hindi.)
A further consequence is that the family tree of English literature has grown a branch of works written in нndia in the English language. Indian English is as distinctive a dialect as American, or Australian, or West Indian; and Indian English literature has tended to take advantage of the distinctiveness of its linguistic voice to explore questions of identity and intercul- turality. Of the older generation of Indian English novelists, the grandest old man is R.K. Narayan, a patriarch who has paved the way for a vocal and highly talented younger generation of writers like Vikram Seth and Bharati Mukerjee.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan was born in Madras, the lively and cosmopolitan capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and received a thoroughly bicultural education in Tamil and English literature. He worked briefly as a teacher but always saw himself as destined to be a writer. In his first novel, Swami and Friends, published in 1935, he created the fictional milieu that was to sustain his literary career for the next sixty years.
Swami and Friends, like virtually ali of Narayan's novйis and stories, is set in the imaginary small south Indian city of Malgudi, which has taken on, in the minds of Narayan's readers, a reality of its own. Narayan is as identified with Malgudi as Faulkner [118] is with his fictional Yoknapatawpha County; but Narayan's imaginary landscape is altogether a more genial and pleasant place than Faulkner s—a closer parallel might be with Lake Wobegone in Garrison Keillors Prairie Home Companion radio programs, though with much greater sub- tlety and depth.
Narayan's method, in his numerous Malgudi novйis and stories, is to look with a gently ironic eye at one or another of his fictional town's citizens, someone who finds himself in a position of difficulty and who needs to muddle through with a little help from his friends. We see grand schemes yielding less than grand results through ineptitude and sloth; personal pref- erences thwarted by the overwhelming weight of family pres- sures; pride and pomposity punctured by demotic wit and pas- sive resistance to anything that smacks of grandiosity. Nothing in Malgudi turns out quite as well as people would want it to, but nothing ever turns out too badly either.
Narayan's work has been criticized as being too slight, or for lacking gravity and seriousness. Certainly one cannot find in it many of the hallmarks of modernist fiction; one looks in vain in his books for alienation, or anomie, or dysfunctional sexuality, or doomed antiheroes. Narayan's fiction is gentle, good- natured, subtle, ironic, simple, and graceful; he is not uncritical of his subjects, but his criticism is delivered with a smile, not with a bludgeon. He is perhaps not profound; he is merely delightful.
Of Narayan's many novйis, my personal favorites are The English Teacher and The Vendor of Stveets; you might want to start with those, and I suspect you will go on to read many others. Followers of this Plan will also be interested in Narayan's very good prose abridged versions of the Ramayana [15] and the Mahabharata [16].
J.S.M.
125
SAMUEL BECKETT
1906-1989
Waitingfor Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape
In Waitingfor Godot Estragon remarks to his pai Vladimir, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?" Perhaps Becketfs entire lifework is the "something" designed to give his audience and himself the impression that they exist. However absurd or painful life may be, art somehow ratifies or vindicates it. Of his own motivation he has said, "With nothing to express, no desire to express, but with the artisfs need to express."