Reference books

The three reference books—One Thousand Useful Things to Do About the House, Every Man His Own Bricklayer, and Electricity for Beginners—had once belonged to Mr. Jones and were discovered by Snowball after the Rebellion. Snowball, the most intellectually ambitious pig, closeted himself for hours in the former incubator shed, holding the books open with a stone and gripping a piece of chalk between the knuckles of his trotter. He drew rapidly across the smooth wooden floor, line after line, uttering little whimpers of excitement, until the plans for the windmill grew into a complicated mass of cranks and cog-wheels covering more than half the floor. Though the other animals found the drawings completely unintelligible, they were deeply impressed; even the hens and ducks came to look, taking care not to tread on the chalk marks. The books supplied the mechanical details that made the windmill project plausible, and Snowball's solitary, absorbed study of them embodied the hope that knowledge could liberate the animals from endless labor.

But the power of written knowledge proved fragile. After Snowball's expulsion, the same pigs who had once relied on those reference books began to manipulate the written record to serve their own authority. Squealer produced "documents" purporting to prove that Snowball had been in league with Jones from the start, and the animals' memory of Snowball's heroism at the Battle of the Cowshed was gradually overwritten. The Seven Commandments themselves were quietly amended: the Sixth Commandment gained the phrase "without cause," the Fifth Commandment acquired "to excess," and the Fourth Commandment was reinterpreted to forbid only sheets. In time, the animals who had known the original Rebellion grew old and died, leaving only a few who remembered the old days. The written reference books, once tools of enlightenment, were replaced by a regime of official lies and altered texts. Benjamin's cryptic observation that "things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse" captured the despair of a community whose only reliable knowledge had been corrupted.