Bestiaries (ii): Llull and Orwell

Although saying so will probably lead to bloody conflict in Europe and intermittent showers in Letchworth, Herts, it seems to me axiomatic in terms of human psychology that mythologies in which zoomorphs and humans mingle socially progressed naturally to bestiaries mirroring human behaviour, from which emerged zany zoologies like Pere Quart’s. Ramon Llull’s Llibre de les Bèsties (Book of the Beasts), dated by Ferran Gadea to the early 1280s, falls into the second category. Llull may have had such a great leap forward in mind when in chapter four he wrote:

This same expository progression from symbiosis to allegory is used in a more recent moral novel, Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which Biblical convention linking human folly and animal agency is scrupulously followed. I think it’s pretty unlikely that Orwell encountered Llull’s beasts, but embassies between the animal and the human kingdoms also form an important and unusual feature of both works. However, where Orwell despairs of the present and fears the future, Llull cheerfully champions the role of proto-Machiavellian guile in the maintenance and marginal improvement of a society that is divinely ordained. Orwell was deeply conservative, but it’s funny to think of him having been more so than a thirteenth century quasi-cleric.

An English translation of Llibre de les Bèsties was published in London in 1927, but I don’t think there’s one available at the moment. Ferran Gadea’s edition was issued in 2002 by Proa. I’ll return to Orwell in the near future because it seems to me that he seriously and deliberately played down anarchist terror here in 1936-7, and that recent biographers like Taylor () and Bowker () have failed to note this.

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Comments

1. Geoff sez:
   18 January 2004 at 6:59 PM

   Ah yes, but Orwell was the worker’s friend…

2. Trevor sez:
   18 January 2004 at 8:34 PM

   Llull bought an Arab slave in order to learn the language and seems to have beaten him up when he took the Lord’s name in vain, but Orwell also beat his servants in Burma.

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