Some Pig
Animals get the last word
In every great book, there are the images, scenes or lines that barnacle to you for life. For me, from 1954’s Lord of the Flies (read in my early teens I presume sometime in the late ‘80s), there was the pervading feeling of doom signaled so indelibly by a rotten boar’s head impaled on a stake buzzing with bugs. I vaguely remember how some of those bad boy characters unleashed on a tropical island died/killed, and how one of them (the one with the conch?) was named Piggy.
Watching the new series on Netflix, which is riveting, reminded me of the other plot points I had forgotten, here so vividly rendered in eerie clarity by the BBC, and brought up so many topics to write about that I don’t even know where to begin—how fine the line between order and chaos, man and monster, allies and enemies, life and death, beauty and beast. You can’t help but compare girls’ camp to boys’ between the amazing series Yellowjackets where girls go a little cannibalistic and here where the (younger) boys who seem even more menacing luckily don’t.
I guess the difference is merely environmental and not innate: the boys seem to have an abundance of fruits and pigs to keep them busy and distracted from eating—if not from killing—humans.
Pigs are a recurring animal for me lately, triggered by a new pulp classic, the time not so long ago when Trump told a female reporter, “quiet, piggy.” And I just can’t stop thinking that line anytime he does anything now, how desperately I want this beast to shut up and go away.
But first, let’s more fully visit the great pigs of literature, starting again with the lovely Charlotte’s Web, and sponsored by a spider.
Charlotte A. Cavatica, secret selfless star of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (1952), is a writer but this doesn’t become known until later. At first, she seems vicious.
It begins with a kind and literary “Salutations” (a big word the pig doesn’t recognize) coming from a “large grey spider…about the size of a gumdrop,” waving one of its legs at Wilbur and saying this elaborate sort of hello.
Wilbur thinks she’s beautiful. She says, I wish I could see you better too, but I’m near-sighted. Suddenly she is distracted by a fly tangled in her “sticky threads…beating its wings furiously, trying to break loose and free itself.”
She narrates to Wilbur as she attacks, and eats. “First, I dive at him. Next I wrap him up.”
Wilbur watched in horror. He could hardly believe what he was seeing, and although he detested flies, he was sorry for this one.
“There! Now I knock him out, so he’ll be more comfortable.” She bites the fly. “He can’t feel a thing now,” she remarks. “He’ll make a perfect breakfast for me.”
He’s shocked she eats flies. Sure, she says, also “bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midges, daddy longlegs, centipedes, mosquitos, crickets—anything careless enough to get caught in my web. I have to live, don’t I?”
But also, they are “delicious. Of course, I don’t really eat them. I drink them—drink their blood. I love blood.”
He’s demoralized by her “bloodthirsty” ways.
It’s cruel.
What a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How I can learn to like her, even though she is pretty, and of course, clever?
But their friendship grows and she proves to him how loyal she is, generous and kind. She proves it through her words and deeds, which come at once entwined in the form of messages rendered in a web.
First: “SOME PIG”
Then: “TERRIFIC”
The rat helps pull in ads from old magazines from the dump for further contestants. Rejects: Crunchy, Pre-Shrunk; and next winner for the web: “RADIANT”
We witness here the true power of language—not only the fact that these words appearing in webs seems miraculous and launches the pig and his farm into fame, but also that the words could be inspired from the pig or more often inspire him:
Wilbur was now the center of attraction on the farm. Good food and regular hours were showing results: Wilbur was a pig any man would be proud of. One day more than a hundred people came to stand at his yard and admire him. Charlotte had written the word RADIANT, and Wilbur really looked radiant as he stood in the golden sunlight. Ever since the spider had befriended him, he had done his best to live up to his reputation. When Charlotte’s web said SOME PIG, Wilbur had tried hard to look like some pig. When Charlotte’s web said TERRIFIC, Wilbur had tried to look terrific. And now that web said RADIANT, he did everything possible to make himself glow.
And then at the county fair, under the gold letters that said ZUCKERMAN’S FAMOUS PIG, the last word on the web, as collected by the rat Templeton from a newspaper clipping, has to the best one of all because it will be Charlotte’s last in life, and secondary to her greatest achievement, which is the creation of her egg sac of 514 babies.
HUMBLE, “has two meanings. It means ‘not proud’ and it means ‘near the ground.’ That’s Wilbur all over. He’s not proud and he’s near the ground.”
Wilbur is a Bronze medal winner (sadly he can’t compete with “big”).
After the fair, Charlotte quietly dies. “Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.”
But the humble pig knows and remembers that the show was never about him.
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
So Charlotte’s Web is less a story about a pig than a writer spider who abuses flies to survive, and Animal Farm features a farm taken over by its pigs, who with increasing power come to more closely resemble humans in the worst possible ways.
In the perceived hierarchy of animals on the Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945), pigs are highest for their intelligence, next dogs.
Major is something of a founding pig, father of over 400 children, who on the farther reaches of his life has a vision of a new world order for the farm animals. His key words, were Charlotte around to web them, might be “majestic”, “wise,” “benevolent.”
He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut.
But also you could use words like “revolutionary,” “rebel.” His sermon: the nature of life is work, misery, and you die. He wants to break the cycle. The underlying element to extricate: Man.
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. A1most overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion!
Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
Major dies and next-in-line pigs Snowball and Napoleon pick up the cause vs. Mr. Jones the farm owner. They teach themselves to read and write, the chain of command measured by education.
The work of teaching and organising the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals. Pre-eminent among the pigs were two young boars named Snowball and Napoleon, whom Mr. Jones was breeding up for sale. Napoleon was a large, rather fierce-looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way. Snowball was a more vivacious pig than Napoleon, quicker in speech and more inventive, but was not considered to have the same depth of character.
They develop a system of thought called Animalism, Manor Farm becomes Animal Farm, and they follow these new
SEVEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal
Their song is “Beasts of England” and their and mantra “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.”
In time, classes emerge of workers and bosses.
The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.
They build windmills nonstop (see: Chasing Windmills) and blame Snowball (see: Scapegoat) for the first destruction (by storm!) of the plans that Napoleon had once urinated on. It takes two years to build the next windmill attempt (which dies by explosion). The third attempt at windmill kills Boxer horse from the effort.
Another built at last, and they want for more.
Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer-except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work, after their fashion. There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the supervision and organisation of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand. For example, Squealer told them that the pigs had to expend enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called “files,” “reports,” “minutes,” and “memoranda.” These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace. This was of the highest importance for the welfare of the farm, Squealer said. But still, neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour; and there were very many of them, and their appetites were always good.
The work of the management, the dreadful paperwork, and before you know it:
It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
A new expression is born, “Four legs good, two legs better.”
And the commandments morph as needed, or fall away altogether.
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
In the end you have the former oppressor humans and pigs their former slaves, together at the table, playing cards, bickering like siblings.
But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. 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.
Nature can be ugly, man can be uglier. When our inner beast comes out and runs amok on an island, it’s very troubling to say the least.
“Kill the pig,” writes Jack in the sand, the one who becomes the most vicious little human of the Lord of the Flies series.
But it’s the pig who knows better, who knows the heart of darkness lies within and connects them all. It’s the rotten boar’s head in Lord of the Flies (the titular character actually), who speaks the subtext out loud (or loud enough for intuitive “batty” Simon to hear). The head says in the book version:
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?
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My mother read "Charlotte's Web" to me nearly 70 years ago. It was one of the first books I read by myself and I still return to it every few years. The Garth Williams illustrations are indelible. (I love the woman who remarks that "Some Pig" could be "Some Spider.")
Oh Wilbur, my favorite literary pig. I can’t bring myself to watch the Lord of the flies reboot. I’m just too averse to children as killers terror lol. Same goes for hunger games. And those deadly Yellowjackets. But I like reading your thoughts on the matter especially on a gray cold rainy day.