At the post office in my village, the large portrait of Queen Elizabeth that adorned the entrance has long since disappeared. My grandfather, at the end of his life, nevertheless maintained, resolutely, that the painting in question had not moved, that it was there, where it had always been. No doubt he was right against my eye, insofar as the crowned head continues to free the mail. Now, it is true, this sovereign sometimes disguises herself as the Canadian flag, but we recognize her nonetheless. Among the jagged productions of Her Majesty’s Posts, some are nevertheless more cheerful. Including this tribute, a few months ago, to Margaret Atwood.
The Canadian writer, one of the best known today, knows the power of words. The Scarlet Maid, his book powered by a television series, continues to arouse passions. So it is not surprising to see, among our disunited neighbors, his tonic prose being put on the index, like many other books that displease the neoconservatives. This at the very moment when the right to abortion has gone overboard and the right to bear arms or to pollute the planet with impunity is being brandished high.
For some provincial do-gooders, these would be matters that do not concern us. These questions would be, to believe them, pure products of imports without the slightest impact here. Yet isn’t it true that, on all sides, Canadian society is becoming more American than ever? Either way, it’s hard to believe that the abortion disaster in the United States shouldn’t cause concern on this side of the border. Need we remind you that one-third of the Conservative MPs in Ottawa — the party for which Prime Minister Legault was inviting people to vote — are opposed to abortion? This federal party, a Jean Charest aspires to lead it by the end of the summer.
I come back to Margaret Atwood. We seem to forget that her bona fide feminism is not the only axis through which this fiery, tousled writer approaches the world and asks that we consider it alongside her.
Atwood recounts, in a text, his meeting with George Orwell. She was 9 years old when she came across a copy of animal farm. The book made a strong impression on him. “To say this book horrified me would be an understatement,” she wrote. The fate of the farm animals seemed to him so dark, the dictating pigs so wicked, dishonest and deceitful before a people of stupid sheep, that his sense of justice was stimulated for good.
Men exploit animals in much the same way as the wealthy exploit working people, Orwell thought. In the preface to the Ukrainian edition of this famous book, Orwell notes how easy it is for totalitarian propaganda to control the opinion of educated people in democratic countries. He observed, from his native England, sensible people, fine observers of the news, swallowing fabulist stories to justify the exclusion of each other, in the name of conspiracies, betrayals, fabulist sabotages and of prefabricated sights. The hierarchical society was not transformed with the Soviet revolution, notes Orwell. Because there as elsewhere, the rulers have no more reason to relinquish power than any other ruling class.
Orwell’s critical gaze was directed not only towards the illusions of this false egalitarian society promulgated in the name of the hammer and sickle of which Vladimir Putin turns out to be the unlikely heir. If the Soviet myth had to be destroyed, Orwell believed, it was also so that the one that shaped our societies could not continue to grow in all innocence.
Orwell aspired to an egalitarian society. However, the society in which he was dying after the war already showed “enormous disparities between rich and poor”. For a new society to live, it was necessary to denounce the illusions which lead to the maintenance of power and which maintain such inequalities.
Never has there been more misuse of Orwell than in recent years. Many far-right thurifers now claim to count 1984, his most famous work, as their bedside book. They wave it around as a foil for what they call “political correctness.” They use it to affirm that they can no longer say anything, that their words are bullied in the midst of their opulence, that they are stifled although they are the masters of this world, that they are muzzled while ‘we hear them at heart of the day, on all the stands, in this single tone.
How did we come to divert Orwell to such an extent from his aims? Doubtless by being careful not to read his considerations on exploitation in animal farm, on social inequalities in his writings on the poverty of the slums of Paris or London, on the misery of the Spanish republicans in the face of the soldiery. And no doubt along the way we also forgot his unequivocal condemnations of imperialism.
That morning, the weather seemed to be sunny forever. I was reading Margaret Atwood. She was telling me about Orwell while a slender cat was coming up through the fields. Where did he come from? The animal had a lacerated ear. He had been abused. At the door, he lay down next to him and slipped between my reading and the silence. He didn’t move from there. Instantly, it was decided to baptize him Orwell.
Does the story, just like the cats, always end up falling on its feet? I wouldn’t swear to it, looking at this animal. In his eyes, in any case, I think I read that we have not finished undergoing many speeches from crazy people dedicated to obliterating the future.