The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [147]
Orwell’s novel does supply some ironic closure, in the return of Animal Farm to its previous name, the Manor Farm, and the effective erasure of the entire rebellion and the brief-lived animal utopia. For an adult reader returning to this short novel so frequently taught to children, the untrustworthiness of writing is as disconcerting and as convincing as the untrustworthiness of man. (And since the novel is itself written and read—or misread—as a children’s story, it provides an instance of the very process that it holds up to critique.)
Animal Farm was published in 1946. Six years later, there appeared another book about writing and unwriting on an animal farm, this time with a distinctly uplifting tone: E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Written by a major contributor to The New Yorker, this “children’s book” offered the story of a spider who labored to write messages in her web in order to save her friend Wilbur the pig from slaughter. From “Some Pig” to “Terrific” to “Radiant” and “Humble,” the words that “magically” appeared in the web caught the attention of farmers, fairgoers, and the national media. “Right spang in the middle of the web there were the words ‘Some Pig,’ ” Farmer Zuckerman tells his wife.
“A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Zuckerman, “it seems to me you’re a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”
“Oh, no,” said Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.”29
It’s not necessary to see Charlotte’s Web as a deliberate response to Animal Farm in order to note the several connections between them: mysterious writing, a clueless pig hero rather than a manipulative pig tyrant and villain, a team of animals of various kinds working together, a frame story involving thoughtful rather than scheming humans. Both texts, to be sure, have formal closure: in Orwell’s powerful satire, the pigs and men become visually indistinguishable (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which”),30 while in White’s book, despite the heroic death of Charlotte, her spider offspring live on, and so does Wilbur. “Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.”31 In Orwell, animals become more like men, to their detriment; in White, men become more like animals, to their benefit. What remains “open” rather than “closed” however, is not only the ambivalent power of writing but also the question of interpretation. Political satire? Children’s story? Moral fable? Through the presence in both novels of the manifest theme of writing, reading, and interpretation, each becomes itself an allegory of the dangerous activity it describes and enacts.
This Möbius-strip structure—the shape of a surface with only one side that can be formed into a continuous loop—is a familiar image from modernist art and sculpture. It was a favorite, for example, of M. C. Escher, as well as a recurring presence in science fiction and time-travel narratives. This image goes back to ancient times, when it was associated, as we’ve seen, with the ouroboros, the serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. Is this a figure of closure, or of its impossibility?