Return to Animal Farm
As the World Trade Center massacre was happening, all New Yorkers probably formed ideas about who was responsible. But I suspect John Reed was the only one who blamed George Orwell. n Reed usually writes historical novels; his first, A Still Small Voice, was published in 2000. He's 33, the son of artists; he grew up in Tribeca and remembers playing under the Twin Towers. The day before the WTC attacks, "I was walking with my wife on Lafayette St. and I had an idea for a title, Snowball's Chance. Didn't know what it had to do with anything. Then the next morning she woke me up to tell me this thing had happened," he recalls. "I got up and we watched it on tv. We watched tv for the next two days, tracked down our families and people important to us. Then all of a sudden I thought of that title. For some reason, I felt like blaming Orwell" for the attacks. "At the time I didn't really understand it. Having been a public school kid, I read Orwell so many times. It was engrained in me. And it occurred to me that maybe this title was about Snowball coming back and?I hate to say bringing capitalism back to the farm. I'm all for capitalism. I'm just not sure we have it. And that was the idea. Then I worked like a maniac, day and night. I wrote it in about 12 or 14 days."
To Reed, Animal Farm represents "an outdated, hyperbolic allegory that, as of the Twin Towers, is referring to a different period in history. Right at the end of World War II, Orwell weighed in on interpreting the first half of the century." Reed believes that Orwell's vision of the Stalinist Soviet threat to the West expressed in the book was very influential on the Cold War mindset. In a real sense, Reed says, 9/11 marks the very end of that Cold War epoch; the realities, and enemies, have irrevocably shifted, rendering Orwell's vision irrelevant and obsolete.
Snowball's Chance is a pretty vicious parody of Animal Farm (Roof Books, 168 pages, $20). "My intention is to blast Orwell," Reed says. "I'm really doing my best to annihilate him." He not only shanghais Orwell's story, but amps up and mocks the writer's famously flat, didactic style?that fairytailish simplicity that has ensured Animal Farm a place in high school English classes for the last 50 years. Snowball's Chance was supposed to be out by the first anniversary of Sept. 11, but certain legal ditherings?basically, fear that Orwell's estate might sue?have put the publication off until Nov. 1.
Reed's updated version of the story reflects badly not only on Orwell, but on contemporary American (and specifically New York City) culture. You'll recall that in Animal Farm, Orwell's allegorical dis of Stalin and the Soviet Union, Snowball the pig was the Trotsky character, the intellectual and idealist who becomes a menace to, and is eventually driven away by, the Stalin-like ruling pig Napoleon.
In Snowball's Chance, Snowball returns to Animal Farm as a convert to 21st-century-style corporate capitalism, and quickly sets out to bring Napoleon's proto-Soviet farm in line with his own vision of a New Farm Order. On Orwell's farm the saying was that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others; in Snowball's Chance it becomes the very Republican-sounding "All animals are born equal?what they become is their own affair." Or, as the animals put it later, "The scope of what we can have is only limited by the scope of what we can want!"
Instead of the one windmill Orwell had the animals build, Reed has them build two?the, um, Twin Mills. They also install air conditioning, they all take to wearing clothes and walking on two legs, and they even learn how to launch lawsuits at the neighbors. They acclimatize themselves to working with humans as well. ("And as the days wore on, it was generally accepted that the best way to deal with a human was to treat it like a pig. They too appreciated a little toadyism.") Animal Farm expands its borders, taking over neighboring farms from their human owners. The bustle and bright lights of all this busy-ness attract numerous new species of animals from all over the place?creating the equivalent of racial tensions between the haughty pigs and newcomers like the ostriches.
Snowball convinces everyone to participate in a bold project to transform Animal Farm into a giant carnival called "Animal Fair"?a theme-parking scheme painfully reminiscent of the transformation of Manhattan and every other major American city into a Disney spinoff. This requires a restructured?and politically correct?bureaucracy on the farm. "A sheep was given the 'Innovative Design' position. A bat and a mole, jointly, were appointed to the 'Scenic Vistas' position. And, rather startlingly, a woodpecker was appointed to the 'Structural Engineering' position." The farm's economy booms. There's liquor and meat and hot showers for everyone, and the carnival's always there to distract them from the accompanying bills and hangovers.
Meanwhile, out in the neighboring woods, the beavers are becoming...well, religious fundamentalists. They despise what Animal Farm has become. From the trees, they stare balefully at the Twin Mills. And you know the rest.
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Parody is one of literature's great and oldest traditions, yet there have been a number of recent attempts to legislate and litigate it out of existence, often under the aegis of copyright or product infringement. Originally, copyright law was intended to protect a living author from theft of his intellectual property. But over the years, Congress has kept extending the length of copyright protection?most recently in the 1998 "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act"?so that a book like Animal Farm?or Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Gone with the Wind, focus of a parody lawsuit last year?which would have passed into public domain by now and become fair game for parody, remains under copyright protection now for 70 years after the author dies. (Orwell died in 1950.) Obviously, the whole point of the law has shifted from protecting the rights of a living author to ensuring the royalties that may accrue to that author's estate, his children and children's children. Corporate entities, somehow not surprisingly, get to hold the rights to "work for hire" for even longer?95 years. And those entities, especially in Hollywood, can guard those rights even more jealously than authors' offspring do. Try publishing a parody of a Disney product and see how long it takes till you hear from their lawyers.
As Congress has altered the terms of the law, federal courts have been left to deal with the consequences. Last year, Margaret Mitchell's estate lost its case against The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's rewrite of Gone with the Wind. Ironically, Randall's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, holder of the Curious George franchise, was simultaneously pursuing its case against the punk band Furious George. It's also curious that Martin Garbus, one of the country's foremost First Amendment lawyers, fought on the estate's side in seeking an injunction to prevent Randall's book from ever seeing the light of day.
Reed says that when he showed his manuscript to his literary agency, they were "excited about it at first. Then they talked to their lawyer," who argued that in the current climate it was possible that the Orwell estate would sue, and even if it lost, "the cost of a lawsuit would be prohibitive... So my agency said it was too big a drag to deal with." Reed then showed the manuscript to his friend James Sherry at the small press Roof Books, who consulted with his own lawyers. A copy of the manuscript was sent to the Orwell estate, which, naturally, expressed its displeasure.
The estate appears not to be against all spinoffs of Orwell's work, just those in which it doesn't have a financial stake. In recent years, it has licensed a movie remake of 1984, and a related computer game.
Then again, those weren't anti-Orwell parodies. Reed believes it unlikely that the estate would actually seek a Wind Done Gone-style injunction against a small press publication of Snowball's Chance. But, like any author in his position, he'd welcome the free publicity such a lawsuit would bring.
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Reed is hardly the only writer reassessing Orwell's legacy. The intellectual left has been sharply divided over Orwell, especially since the revelation that just after World War II he gave the British government a list of potential Commie sympathizers.
To Alexander Cockburn, who wrote a preface for Snowball's Chance, the list is patent proof that Orwell was a snitch, a secret fascist, a hypocritical opportunist, a traitor to the left. Cockburn's perennial nemesis Christopher Hitchens seeks to defend Orwell against these charges in a new book, Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 208 pages, $24). Noting the "sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion" of the anti-Orwell left, Hitchens argues that Orwell was really an enemy of Stalin and of naive Stalinist sympathizers on the British left (among whom the Hitchens crowd, rather wickedly, counts Claud Cockburn, Alexander's journalist-activist dad). To Hitchens, Orwell simply despised totalitarianism, whether it dressed to the left or the right.
No doubt the two of them will continue to duke it out over Orwell?though probably not in the pages of The Nation anymore, given last week's news that Hitchens is quitting the magazine.