vignette

animal farm on endless loop

reminded by bad tweets of the strange circumstances under which I read Animal Farm at least ten times in a row—

pretty sure it was in fourth or fifth grade? that seems young, but then that teacher’s plans were not great on any number of levels. new hire that year, only lasted a year, for the Louisiana SPARK program, which in general had saved my life by bussing us from catholic school over to public school once a week from first to eighth grade.

sixth grade? anyway, this teacher came up with the great plan for us to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a book that lives in my memory as a satire about the russian revolution (which I have just looked up to make triply sure I am not misremembering), a situation about which I certainly had no opinion on at the time.

was this pedagogical choice intended as a subtle anti-communist move? unclear. one can only assume.

the plan was for the class to read it chapter by chapter in class, one chapter at a time while we were all sitting at the table together, and then discuss. of course I finished the book by the time the class was on the third or fourth chapter, and then what did this brilliant pedagogue do? he told me to read it again.

flipping back to the first page of animal farm: extremely vivid memory. I had do this many times. the class’s reading lasted at least six weeks. this teacher literally had no other plan. I finished the book again, then again, and so on. it is perhaps for me a model of studious perseverance. my knowledge of the text made me a terror in subsequent discussions. I had my revenge.

perhaps this is why brave new world was assigned as take-home reading? and is this when I first read slaughter house five? what was this teacher thinking. the last line of animal farm is something like: and then it became apparent that everyone looked like pigs.

anyway, the bad tweet saying we should all read 1984 and really take it in reminded me of this moment, because I think the idea behind this train wreck of a class must have been something similar. why have fairly small children read dystopia, again and again, other than you think that the point, such as it is, is obvious.

it’s also its own sort of utopian thinking alas: read a dystopia, understand politics, the politics of not-that. it’s what makes the flattened dystopic readings of the Republic so annoying too: not that! one would never.

I am still nostalgic for this brief moment of literary-political certainty, however, goofy as it is. read lowis lowry’s the giver. don’t be a nazi. easy. scoff at bringing up hitler as an example. these days are gone. important to see that they’re gone, as I was writing about here.

it is also pretty childish, though I’m not entirely sure why. is it that bad dystopias are moralism without a morality? the ever-expanding number of equally bad things you could do in addition to the one you identify? the fact that the plot hinges on you the reader knowing for certain that author wants you to see these specific good intentions are doomed to flip over into evil in this specific way?

what do I miss when I miss this? partly the childish certainty in the fixity of moral laws, like Beauvoir writes about in the opening of the second chapter of Ethics of Ambiguity. possibly it’s something like: this, plus the accidental overlay of the childishness of the age’s pedagogical plan with my own childishness; together, we were a child. and the sense, possibly, that there was a moral consensus on evil that one simply had to learn enough about to avoid—Socratic!

I will probably always miss it.