Pigs get a bad rap sometimes. They pose as greedy, gluttonous animals, covered in dirt and sometimes their own feces. To humans, being called a pig or pig is something rude and demeaning, meant to make one feel ashamed or inferior.
This is how we generally view pigs: a dirty, greedy inferior species that taste absolutely delicious in a BLT sandwich. and sausage. Also, pork chops. Oh, and hot dogs!
Excuse our indomitable appetite. We are such pigs, really (hardy-har-har). Anyway, back to our scheduled programming.
Yet both George Orwell and William Golding do not see these cloven-legged pigs as examples of walking, squealing abhorrence; they look like symbolic extensions of humanity.
The comparison is unflattering, of course, but that is precisely the intention of the authors. The classic novels by British authors, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, respectively, deal with the dark or even evil abilities and tendencies of humans, essentially. In fact, both novels read like allegories commenting on power, the greedy, dirty jerks human beings can sometimes be.
Take Golding’s classic about a group of British children stranded on an isolated tropical island without adult supervision. History is already turning towards chaos. We mean, have you ever seen a group of children without an adult to control them? Clearly, Golding intended to invoke this sentiment toward naturally boisterous pre-adolescent children by penning a novel that focused not only on the evil of humans but also on the order and structure of society. Since children have to fend for themselves, they logically try to establish some kind of system or order to manage themselves. They are divided on what is more important: maintaining a constant signal fire to alert passing ships or violently hunting down the poor little piggies. Naturally, two headstrong boys leading each respective cause, Ralph and Jack, disagree, and the battle for power on the island begins.
Interestingly, that setting is similar to Orwell’s Animal Farm. In that allegorical tale of animals, pigs are the intelligent beings in charge after the farm animals rebel against their negligent farmer, Mr. Jones. After their wise old leader, Major, dies, the animals are left in the hands of two leaders who compete to see who comes out on top. There’s Napoleon, the tyrannically inclined, aptly named pig who wants to stand on top and look down on the smaller, lower animals. You could consider him the Jack of this scenario (although Jack ends up killing a bunch of pigs, but that’s not the point). Then there’s Snowball, the softest pig who wants to teach the other animals and build a windmill.
Orwell’s act of putting pigs in power is not lost on us. Snowball is not as sweet as his name suggests; after all, he reduced the Seven Commandments to the line “four good legs, two bad legs.” While the pigs are largely said to resemble or replace certain prominent figures of the Russian communist revolution, they can be interpreted as speaking of the atrocities humans are capable of when they have too much power and dominance over others. Often used to instruct CASHEE students due to their vocabulary and seeming simplicity, these books could actually be very valuable to AP Psychology students in understanding the human psyche in times of harshness and power.
Which brings us back to Golding. One of the key quotes from Lord of the Flies sums up what both Orwell and Golding are trying to convey by incorporating a kind of symbolic biology into their novels. The real “Lord of the Flies” has cut off the head of a pig, which to you is a pig, which begins to talk to one of the children, the innocent Simon. The pig’s head was the result of a violent attack and graphic murder of the mother pig by Jack and his crew, with the head kept as an offering to the imaginary “beast” they believe is lurking somewhere on Earth. island (although the evidence for this is pretty nil, but you know what the imagination of young people is like).
Poor little Simon, who is arguably a symbol of human goodness as he suggests that the beast is “only us”, is the recipient of the pig-head’s only conversation: “Imagine thinking that the Beast was something you could hunt and kill… You knew, didn’t you, am I a part of you?
By juxtaposing these two novels together, you can begin to see why pigs are not held in the highest regard. For Orwell, they are the natural substitute for power-hungry human politicians or revolutionaries and for Golding, they are the symbolic equivalent of the “bestial” side of humanity. Well, at least the pigs taste delicious.