Animal Farm: Take 1/4

By Jess D'Amico in Arts & Entertainment on May 11, 2007 3:30PM

Today's letter is F. And today's word is Forward. It's been a week and a day since we announced Animal Farm as this month's take for Convince Us, which means that everybody should be a fourth of the way through the book. It also means if you haven't gotten into it yet but want to, you still can.

We're a little behind because we got caught up reading the preface by Russell Baker and forward by C.M. Woodhouse. We started reading forwards back in high school because even if the actual book wasn't terribly thrilling, the forward was usually boring enough to make the novel that much more interesting. Of course we're older and wiser now and realize that forwards can be informative and not totally boring if done correctly. The version we bought to take with us on the train (our Steadman version was too pretty to take out of our apartment) is the Signet Classic, lightweight and small.

Baker spoke a lot about Orwell's life and experiences as a socialist. Woodhouse, however, likened Animal Farm to the bombing of Hiroshima. Sometimes a little dense, Woodhouse's forward, originally published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1954, gave a weight to Animal Farm and explored not only its success, but more so the failure of the book to rouse a nation as did Uncle Tom's Cabin. He also wrote about the bleak futureisms imagined through Orwell as a fairy-story. At the end, Woodhouse left us feeling as though distopias with a "that's the way life is" attitude; there really are no morals to learn, only a harsh reality. Far from depressing, it was a relief to the idea of "love will prevail" and other things where we have to fight for something: in Animal Farm we can simply watch a world unfold.

We were taken in and wanted to research and read every literary reference in Woodhouse's writing, but thankfully we were on the train, so we underlined them instead to go back to. That having taken up a portion of our time, in the actual book, we finished Part I with a rousing song by Major.

Did you read forwards to your editions? How did they make you feel/affect your attitude toward the book?

Image via margaretlyons.