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| m k harikumar |
In an age of media explosions, even writers no longer make an effort to understand literary trends, ideas, or thoughts clearly. They have no time for it. Are books meant to be read? If so, they must be read. But what is reading? Should it not be discerning reading? Should we not reject what deserves to be rejected?
If we keep shining light again and again on places that are already illuminated, will we discover anything new? We must identify dark regions and spread light there. What is essential for this is to discover the dark corners of the world, as well as those of the human mind. You must enter those places and discover what lies within them. You must give a voice to places and experiences that have remained silent until now. You must bring into the conversation those whom the world has kept in darkness. You must become their voice.
Surely, what they have to say will be something new. No one has listened to them before. If their experiences are expressed in a way that makes them communicable to others, they can be understood emotionally. Your feelings will be able to resonate with theirs.
This is how beauty must be created. Let the new world speak—the lives that have been imprisoned and prevented from even moving their lips until now. If we can identify emotionally with the human world through their voices, that is beauty. It raises the experiential value of this world by one level.
All Animals Are Equal
George Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1945) celebrates a revolution led by pigs through the medium of satire. The story takes place on a pig farm in England. Under the management of Jones, a drunkard and an inefficient administrator, the pigs on the farm grow increasingly restless. Among them is a powerful pig called Old Major, who convenes a meeting and advises the other animals to rise up against the manager.
Although Major dies before his vision can be realised, two younger pigs—Snowball and Napoleon—emerge as leaders. Through a revolution, they overthrow Jones, the farm's manager, and subsequently take charge of its administration.
However, disagreements arise between the two, and Napoleon turns against Snowball. He unleashes his dogs and drives Snowball away. What follows is a regime under Napoleon that creates conditions in which the other animals can barely survive.
Animal Farm was written in response to the consequences of the Russian Revolution. The implication is that when the Tsar was overthrown, another ruler emerged in his place.
What happens after a revolution? To preserve the government that comes to power as a result of the revolution, falsehoods are propagated. The entire population is subjected to intellectual manipulation. No one is allowed to think in ways that contradict the regime. Anyone who does so is portrayed as a suspect, a traitor, or an enemy.
Power cuts through everything, eliminating all opposition, to the point where neither evidence nor truth is considered necessary.
Drawing upon the lives of pigs, Orwell created beauty. He wrote about what had remained unknown until then, about things no one had dared to write about. Orwell was a writer who understood that freedom was the only thing human beings had to lose.
It was a new kind of excavation. While everyone else goes with the current, people like Orwell dig deep within themselves. They investigate the depths of political problems and realities. Those who row against the current also subject themselves to suffering. The burden upon them continues to grow. They do not fight for profit but for truth.
To recognise when a system of government is turning into a dictatorship, one must step away from the crowd and think independently.
The Boot of Power
One of the most famous sentences in Animal Farm is this:
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
This points to the way dictators emerge. Orwell is not an advocate of any particular ideology. Consequently, he can quickly recognise the face towards which the boot of power is rushing.
Orwell is putting humanity itself on trial. His qualification for doing so is simply that he is a human being.
"The only creature that consumes without producing is man. He does not give milk; he does not lay eggs. He is too weak to pull the plough. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He makes them work, then gives them back only the minimum food necessary to keep them from starving to death. He keeps the rest for himself."
These words written by Orwell contain the seeds of human authoritarianism. At the heart of this attitude lies the fundamental belief that human beings can hunt down, plunder, destroy, and appropriate everything for their own benefit.
There is nothing surprising about human cruelty, for human beings are themselves cruel animals.
The pigs in Animal Farm proceed from the conviction that all creatures who walk on two legs are evil. Rejecting human beings, they establish Seven Commandments.
Perhaps this is why, in the early days, it was difficult to find anyone in England willing to publish the novel. Conventional imagination, the pleasure of submission, the normalisation of intellectual bankruptcy, and the gradual erosion of principles through compromise are all generally accepted by society.
As a result, scrutiny and questioning disappear from the creative sphere.
Milan Kundera observes that Franz Kafka transformed the denial of a job promised to an ordinary man, along with the corrupt instincts of bureaucracy, into poetry in his novel The Castle. Moreover, Kafka turns it into a myth, an epic, and a work of beauty.
This is how a novelist must create the unfamiliar out of the familiar.
Truth Is Alive
Today, most people write simply to prove that they are good and well-behaved. Even when no one asks them to submit, they voluntarily demonstrate their willingness to do so.
Orwell says that the most frightening thing in England is that writers voluntarily take care not to say anything unpleasant. It had become a comfortable custom. Everyone believes in falsehoods. Everyone wants to be pleased, flattered, and gently patted on the back.
Gradually, intelligence begins to drain away.
This is where a novelist becomes a rebel. Writing a novel is itself an act of rebellion.
Will anyone believe this? Most people think it is enough to write a novel, get it published, and earn royalties and fame. They write novels so that they can sit for interviews at literary festivals. If someone suggests that novel-writing might have a purpose beyond all this, even the participants at today's literary camps would be bewildered.
Once a novelist has finished writing a novel, the implicit message seems to be that the novelist, too, has voluntarily become domesticated. What better way is there to announce to the world that one has become obedient and intellectually stunted?
In Animal Farm, the pigs express the view that if one were to point to a good human being, it would have to be a dead one.
This is how artistic expression transforms itself into protest. Such truth may carry little weight in the media or in public discourse. Yet beneath all of that, the truth remains alive—like a cat standing with every hair on its body raised in fear.
Novelists readily help suppress unpleasant events. No one even needs to ask them to do so.
And yet, a novel like O. V. Vijayan's Dharmapuranam has not appeared again. Today, even the smallest criticism or expression of disagreement is missing. Instead, what we get here are stories about Bengal's history and similar subjects.
Should a novelist not leave some mark to proclaim that they truly lived in their own times?
Isn't resisting the filthy and grotesque obsessions and greed of one's age one of the noblest signs of being human—as George Orwell demonstrated?
*m k harikumar writes, m k harikumar , article, george orwel,
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