Chronotope of Utopia: A Bakhtinian Reading in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945)

Abstract

This article uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and carnivalesque to offer a reading of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The aim of this article is to explore the shared context that influenced the two writers and yielded ways of approaching the Soviet Union and its politics. Circumventing the state censorious practices and contesting the Stalinist regime rather in an indirect engagement, Bakhtin studied the satiric genres and identified the subversive power of the medieval carnivals in which a temporary suspension of temporal hierarchies is enacted in attempt to use history to discretely entice revolutionary sentiments in the Soviets. Similarly, not only to avoid the precarious repercussions of a direct engagement with British foreign diplomacy, Orwell’s chose the beast fable, which is intended to be satirical but also, as this article argues, in alignment with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. It is not only employed in the form of the fable genre, but in the exercise of carnival rituals by the farm animals that take on the role of the humans to manage their affairs in a Marxist manner. Furthermore, this article examines the concept of chronotope to allow for creating an intricate relationship between space and time in a given reality and define a historical moment in the reality of the barn. It initially and satirically becomes a chronotope of utopia which does not last long to turn into a dystopian spatiality in which the fair and equitable society that has been earlier promised gets replaced by an authoritarian rule. This shows that Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and carnivalesque in Animal Farm move the dialects of capitalism and socialism to a satiric genre meant to transcend its value of universality.