by George Orwell (1949)
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century's greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow by the decade. In Winston Smith's desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universal predicament of the indovidual.
Contents: |
Part 1, Chapters:
1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,
7, 8 Part 2, Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Part 3, Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak |
IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to to with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasised by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Nineth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell hin whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willowherb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was starlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on ots white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see the four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned around abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink and a thick quart-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowzy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twewnty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write, which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was a decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally of years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his vericose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopter gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. audience shouting with laughter as he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middleaged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never ---
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realised, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and commmunity hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to fell a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of re-settling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilised. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuff-box. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prizefighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly-held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to, if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wristwatch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubical to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monsterous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the primary figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there mached the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheeplike face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were -- in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, and underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off: the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstacy of vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police; and at such moments the heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hoardes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilisation.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realised why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine-gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobady heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Savior!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! .... B-B! .... B-B!' -- over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second -- a heavy murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as many as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this subhuman chanting of 'B-B! .... B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of re-settling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew -- he knew! -- that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversations, faint scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hands which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals, over and over again, filling half a page --
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of these particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary; but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with his diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He bagan writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i dont care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother -----
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was
might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated.
The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a
drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got
up and moved heavily towards the door.
As he put his hand on the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary
open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it,
in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an
inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realised, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book
while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief
flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair
and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I
heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at
our kitchen sink. It's got blocked up and -----'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was
a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party -- you were supposed to call
everyone 'comrad' -- but with some women one used it instinctively.) She
was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression
that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down
the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.
Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were
falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow,
the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed
down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do
for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable
to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way.
Everything had a battered trampled-on look, as though the place had just
been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey
sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned
inside out -- lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter
of dirty dishes and dog-eared excercise-books. On the walls were scarlet
banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big
Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole
building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which -- one
knew this at first sniff, though it was hard to say how -- was the sweat of
some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb
and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music
which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at
the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course -----'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen
sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt
worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and exemined the angle-joint
of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which
was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.
'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.
At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League,
and before graduating into the Youth league he had managed to stay on in the
Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed
in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the
other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other
committees engaged in organising community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations,
savings campaigns and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you
with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an
appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the
strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even
remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the
angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate.
'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -----'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children
charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let
out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked
up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from
the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in blue shorts, grey shirts and red neckerchiefs
which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his
head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that
it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a
Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt
mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and
'Thought-criminal!', the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which
will soon grow up to be man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity
in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a
consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job
it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parson's eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back
again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that
there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they
couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take
them, and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl,
still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park
that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was
a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it.
He took leave of Mrs Parson and made for the door. But he had not gone six
steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonisingly
painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him.
He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parson dragging her son back into the
doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most
struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the
table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had
stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of
terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and
day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organisations as the Spies
they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet
this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of
the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected
with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling
with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother --
it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned
outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors,
saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty
to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a
week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally
used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to
the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen
half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in
his diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he had dreamed that
he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side
of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually -- a statement, not a
command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the
time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was
only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He
could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that
he had seen O'Brien for the first time; nor could he remember when he had
first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure -- even after this morning's flash
of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure -- whether O'Brien was a
friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a
link of understanding between them, more important than affection or
partisanship. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,'
he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that is some way
or another it would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful,
floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly.
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived
from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious
victory. I am authorised to say that the action we are now reporting may
well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the
newsflash -----'
Bad news was coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the
chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grams to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling.
The telescreen -- perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the
memory of the lost chocolate -- crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'.
You were supposed to stand at attention. However, in his present position
he was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to
the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and
clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at
present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word
INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of
Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutibility of the past. He felt as
though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a
monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past
was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single
human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
domination of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer,
the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back at
him:
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny
clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of
the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on
the wrapping of a cigarette packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching
you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating,
indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was
your own except the few cubic cemtimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,
with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a
fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was
too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not
batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For
the future, for the past -- for an age that might be imaginary. And in front
of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to
ashes and himself as vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what had
been written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory.
How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even
an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be
back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobady would ever hear. But so
long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on
the human herritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are
different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth
exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big
Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now,
when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken
the decisive step. The consequences of each act are included in the act
itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now that he had recognised himself as a dead man it became important to stay
alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.
It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used
an old-fashioned pen, what he had been writing -- and then drop a hint
in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap, which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put his diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence
had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious.
With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish
dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had
disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow
movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles.
The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first
great purges of the 'fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him,
with his younger sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all,
except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large watchful eyes. Both
of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place
-- the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave -- but it was a
place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were
in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening
water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see them and he
them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters
which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in
the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were
down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and
he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in
their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in
order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable
order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in
some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his
own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic
dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which
one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after
one is awake. The thing that suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's
death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that
was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time,
to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the
members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when
he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he
did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty
that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen
today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion,
no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of
his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water,
hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when
the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was
looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he
called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a
foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses
like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was
a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the
willow trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards him across the field. With what
seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them distainfully
aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him,
indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was
admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside.
With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a
whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought
Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of
the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston
woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on
the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting up
time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked,
for a member of the Outer Party received only three thousand clothing coupons
annually, and a suit of pyjamas was six hundred -- and seized a dingy singlet
and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks
would begin in three minutes. The next moment was doubled up by a violent
coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It
emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by
lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled
with the effects of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty
group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image
of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes,
had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me.
One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it!
One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the
impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise
restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his hands back and forth,
wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper
during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into
the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult.
Beyond the late 'fifties everything faded. When there were no external
records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its
sharpness. You remembered huge events which had probably not happened, you
remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture the
atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign
nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries,
and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance,
had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain,
though London, he felt certain, had always been called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been
at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of
peace during his childhood, because one of his earliest memories was of an
air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the
time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the
raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they
hurried down, down into someplace deep in the earth, round and round a spiral
staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs
that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her
slow dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his
baby sister -- or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was
carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally
they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realised to be a
Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people,
packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other.
Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and
near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk.
The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from
very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of
tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of
sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were
pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was suffering under some grief that
was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some
terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be
remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was.
Someone whom the old man loved, a little granddaughter perhaps, had been
killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what
comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave
trusted the buggers'
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now
remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly
speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his
childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of
which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for
exemple, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in
alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever
admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different
lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania
had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was
merely a piece of furtive knowledge, which he happened to possess because
his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of
partners had never happened, Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always
represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement
with him was impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced
his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating
their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for
the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be true.
If the Party could thrust its hands into the past and say of this or that
event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than
mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short
a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his
own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all
others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the
same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who
commands the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls
the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature
alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from
everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was
an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control',
they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim
to it, to believe that democracy was possible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to
the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of
hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink'
involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see
which of us can touch can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right
over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two! ...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from
his heels to his buttocks and often ended up bringing on another coughing
fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he
reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.
For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed
no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had
first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some
time in the 'sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the
Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world
of the 'forties and the 'thirties, when the capitalists in their strange
cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming
motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how
much of this legend was true and how much was invented. Winston could not
even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He
did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was
possible that in its Oldspeak form -- 'English Socialism', that is to say --
it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes indeed,
you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example,
as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented
aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But
you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his
whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the
falsification of a historical fact. And on that occasion --
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W!
Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better that that. You're
not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at
ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face
remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment!
A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say
gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and
tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrade! That's how I want to see you doing it.
Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.'
She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do
it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under
forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the
privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit.
Remember our boys on the Malabar front! and the sailors in the Floating
Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again.
That's better comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly
as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with his
knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen
could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled
the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his
spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of
paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand
side of his desk.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of
the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left,
a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of
Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by wire grating. This last was
for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens
of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short
intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory
holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even
when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action
to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it
would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces
which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon
-- not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words --
which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.
It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last.
The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably
mean some tedious wading through lots of figures.
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the
appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube
after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred
to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought
necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For
example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that
Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South
Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly
be launched in North Africa. As it happened the Eurasian Higher Command had
launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was
therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such
a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually heppened. Or again,
the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official
forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth
quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Nineth Three-Year
Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which
it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong.
Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with
the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple
error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago
as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise ( a 'categorical
pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the
chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate
ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the
present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original
promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration
at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and
pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as
nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and
any notes that he had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be
devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he
did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of
the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the file in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or
ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past
was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party
could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any
item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs
of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a
palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove
that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records
Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply
of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books,
newspapers and other documents which had been superceded and were due for
destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes
in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
been re-written a dozen times still stood on the files bearing it original
date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled
and re-written again and again, and were invariably re-issued without any
admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions
which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had
dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be
committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or
misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of
accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures,
it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of
nonsence for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with
had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of
connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much
a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great
deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For
example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots
for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual
output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in re-writing
the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow
for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. In any case,
sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions. Very
likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how
many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter
astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the
population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of
recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world
in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other
side a small precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working
steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close
to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what
he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up,
and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston's direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on.
People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In
the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless
rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were
quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily
saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two
Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with
sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from
the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore
considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this,
since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And
a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth,
with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions -- definitive texts, they
were called -- of poems which had become ideologically offensive but which
for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this
hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a
single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department.
Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable
multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing shops with their
sub-editors, their typography experts and their elaborately-equipped studios
for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with
its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for
their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks
whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were
due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected
documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies
were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, were the directing
brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy
which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved,
that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays, novels -- with every conceivable kind of
information, instruction or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from
a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling book
to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the
multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at
a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain
of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama
and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers
containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational
five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which
were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope
known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section --
Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak -- engaged in producing the lowest
kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party
member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.
Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working;
but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two
Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his
cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite
to one side, cleaned his spectacles and settled down to his main job of the
morning.
Winston's greatest pleasure in life was his work. Most of it was a tedious
routine, but included in it were also jobs so difficult and intricate that
you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem
-- delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except
your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the
Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing.
On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the
Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak.
He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It read:
In Oldspeak (or Standard English) this might be rendered:
Winston read through the offending article. Brother's Order for the Day,
it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organisation
known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors
in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member
of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a
decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given.
One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but
there had been no report of the matter in the press or on the telescreen.
That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to
be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals
who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed,
were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party
simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the
smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might
not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston,
not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.
Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the
way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite.
He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston
wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself.
It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be
entrusted to a single person: on the other hand, to turn it over to a
committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking
place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away on rival
versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master
brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it
and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and
become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for
corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a
too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been
suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps -- what was likeliest of all
-- the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a
necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in
the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead.
You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were
arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for
as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
re-appearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers,
however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never
existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse
the tendency of Big Brother's speech. It was better to make it deal with
something totally unconnected with the original subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and
thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious; while to invent
a victory at the front, or some triump of over-production in the Nineth
Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed
was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready
made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently
died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big
Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble,
rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was
true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but fewer lines of
print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
Winston thought for a moment, the pulled the speakwrite towards him and
began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military
and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly
answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The
lesson -- which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc --
that,' etc. etc.), easy to imitate.
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a
sub-machine gun and a model helicopter. At six -- a year earlier, by a
special relaxation of the rules -- he had joined the Spies; at nine he had
been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought
Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have
criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organiser of the
Junior Anti-Sex league. At nineteen he had designed a hand grenade which
had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial,
had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he
had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important dispatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine-gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, dispatches and
all -- an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate
without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity
and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer
and a non-smoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no
aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the the hunting-down
of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals and traitors generally.
Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order
of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the
unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.
Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something
seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job
as himself. There was no way of knowing whose version would finally be
adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own.
Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as
curious that you create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who
had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once
the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically,
and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly
forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the
grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin.
On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the
wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research
Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not
have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose
society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts
now ingaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of quilty haste. 'I've tried all over
the place. They don't exist any longer.'
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones
which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past.
At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops
were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning
wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades, You could
only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on
the 'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced
Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the edge
of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the flicks,
I suppose.'
'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed
to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see those
prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox.
He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids
on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the
executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was
largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him,
if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak. Winston turned his head
a lttle aside to avoid the scutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it
when they tie their feet together, I like to see them kicking. And above
all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue -- a quite bright
blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. Onto each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch -- a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey
stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee,
and one saccharine tablet.
'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme.
'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their
way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays onto the metal-topped
table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of
gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting
stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly
discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew,
which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pink stuff which
was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again until they
had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh
gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar
of the room.
'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to
overcome the noise.
'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his
pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese
in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting
the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when
nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you
will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief
job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words
-- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language
down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that
will become obsolete before the year 2050.'
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then
continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had
become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great
wastage is the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that we
can get rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also antonyms.
After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take
"good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there
for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because
it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a
stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of
vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them?
"Plusgood" covers the meaning; or "doubleplusgood" if you want something
stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final
version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality only
one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea
originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of
Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of
enthusiasm.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly.
'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some
of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're
good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.
You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that
Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller
every year?
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not
trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-colored
bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,
because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that
can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and
forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point.
But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead.
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for
committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline,
reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that.
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak
is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical
satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year
2050, at the very least, not a single human being will be alive who could
understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
'Except -----' began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he
checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some
way unorthodox. Syme, however, had devined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050 -- earlier,
probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole
literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chauser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed
into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory
of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change.
Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is
slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate
of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we
understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will
be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too
plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear.
It is written in his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in
his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with
the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who
was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was
listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything he said.
From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're
so right. I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful
and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an
instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight,
though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in
the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat
and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because
of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and
presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly
horrible was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth, it
was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught
a phrase -- 'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism' -- jerked out
very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast
solid. For the rest it was just noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet,
though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be
in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and
demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might
be fulminating angainst the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be
praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front -- it made no
difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was
pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw
moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not
a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that
was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him
consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise
uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was
tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table
quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it:
duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words
that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse;
applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought
it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him
and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a
thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something
subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion,
aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was
unorthodox. He believed in the priciples of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information,
which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of
disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been
better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree
Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an
unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was
somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used
to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was
said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate was
not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even
for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would
betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that
matter: but Syme more that most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was
unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool.'
Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading
his way across the room -- a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a
froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at
neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole
appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although
he was wearing the regulation overalls, it almost impossible not to think
of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt and red neckerchief
of the Spies. In visualising him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees
and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably
revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave
him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery 'Hullo,
hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat.
Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating
were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when he
had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had
produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was
studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at him working away on his lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston.
'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too
brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you.
It's that sub you forgot to give me.'
'Which sub is that?' said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About
a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions,
which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know -- the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our
block. We're making an all-out effort -- going to put on a tremendous show.
I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the
biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons
entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly
at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it.
In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.'
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.
'Ah, well -- what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it?
Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness!
All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what
that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out
Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from
the hike and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept
on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got
into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.'
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons
went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent -- might have been dropped
by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you
think put her onto him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a
funny kind of shoes -- said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that
before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper
of seven, eh?'
'What happened to the man?' said Winston.
'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised
if -----' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue
for the explosion.
'Good,' said Syme abstractly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully.
'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen
just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military
victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have
glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now
completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the
standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations whe workers marched out of factories and paraded through the
streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new,
happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some
of the completed figures. Foodstuffs -----'
The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a
favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught
by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort
of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that
they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge
and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the
tobacco ration at a hundred grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a
pipe up to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held
carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he
had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the
remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the
telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank
Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And
only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to
be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could
swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons
swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too -- in some more
complex way, involving doublethink -- Syme swallowed it. Was he, then,
alone in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more
furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more
books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.
Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing
rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier, Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbing in the pale-cloured gravy that dribble across the table,
drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on
the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always
tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded
room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered
metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows
touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grim in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad
coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in
your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated
of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of
anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember,
there had never been quite enough to eat, on never had socks or underclothes
that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread
dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient
-- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course,
it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not
the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and
dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks,
the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes
that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one
feel it to be intolerable unless one had some ancestral memory that things
has once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still
have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than the uniform blue overalls.
On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously
beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting
suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston,
if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up
by the Party as an ideal -- tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens,
blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree -- existed and even predominated.
Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One
were small, dark and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type
proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early
in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscutable
faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best
under the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call
and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the
bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said
with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose
you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?'
'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks
myself.'
'Ah, well -- just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,' said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the
Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some
reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her
wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those
children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would
be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien
would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized.
The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized.
The little beetle-like men who scuttled so nimbly through the labyrinthine
corridors of Ministries -- they, too, would never be vaporized. And the
girl with the dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department -- she would
never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who
would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for
survival, it was not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk.
The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him.
It was the girl with the dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong
way, but with curious intensity. The instant that she caught his eye she
looked away again.
The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror
went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging
uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following
him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been
at that table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday,
at any rate, during the Two Minute Hate, she had sat immediately behind him
when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had
been to listen to him and make sure he was shouting loud enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member
of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the
greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at
him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his
features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to
let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range
of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic,
an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything
that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to
hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look
incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a
punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak:
facecrime, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not
really following him about; perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so
close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it
carefully on the edge of the table. he would finish smoking it after work,
if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next
table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the
cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must
not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in
his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his
pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old
market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster
of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches.
Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard!
That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays -- better
than in my day, even. What d'you think's the latest thing they've served
them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl
brought one home the other night -- tried it out on out sitting-room door,
and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole.
Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?'
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the
signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join
in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of
Winston's cigarette.
Winston was writing in his diary:
It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street
near on of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the
wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face,
painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the
whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never
paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens.
She said two dollars. I -----
For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed
his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept
recurring. he had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of
filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall,
to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot through the window -- to do any
violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was
tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous sytem. At any moment
the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible
symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks
back: a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five or
forty, tallish and thin, carrying a briefcase. They were a few metres apart
when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of
spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only
a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously
habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for.
And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious.
The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way
of guarding against that, so far as he could see.
He drew in his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement
kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned
down very low. She -----
His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously
with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife.
Winston was married -- had been married, at any rate: probably still was
married, for so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe
again and the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined
as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was
inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or
thereabouts. Consorting with a prostitute was forbidden, of course, but it
was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break.
It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with
a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you
had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you
could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women
who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle
of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was
even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which
could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very
much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the woman
of a submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity
between Party members. But -- though this was one of the crimes that the
accused in the great purges invariably confessed to -- it was difficult to
imagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming
loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared
purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as
eroticsm was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages
between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the
purpose, and -- though the principle was never clearly stated -- permission
was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being
physically attracted to each other. The only recognised purpose of marriage
was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was
to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an
enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way
it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were
even organisations such as the Junior Anti-Sex league which advocated for
complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by
artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and
brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant
altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of
the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could
not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this
was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And so far as the women
were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten -- nearly eleven years
since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For
days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married.
They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not
permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there
were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid
movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called
noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing
behind it. Very early in their married life he had decided -- though
perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most
people -- that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty
mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that
was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she
was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.
'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could
have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her
was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that
even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was
simmultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her
muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut
eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting. It was
extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then
he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they would
remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this.
They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance
continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not
impossible. She used even to remind him of it in the morning, as something
which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had
two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to
the Party': yes, she had actually used that phrase. Quite soon he grew to
have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But
luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying,
and soon after they parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of
preliminary, in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up
her skirt. I -----
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs
and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and
resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of
Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party.
Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of
his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real
love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were
all alike. Chastity was as deeply ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By
careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that
was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by
lectures, parades, songs, slogans and martial music, the natural feelings had
been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions,
but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party
intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be
loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in
his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.
Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have
achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:
I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light -----
After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very
bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a
step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully
concious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible
that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might
be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even
doing what he had come here to do -----!
It had to be written down, it had to be confessed. What he had suddenly
seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was
plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like
a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly
dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing
nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years at least.
But I went ahead and did it just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at
last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to
shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as string as ever.
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there,
in in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of
Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party
could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies,
had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if
the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was
inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than
twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the
voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only
they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no
need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a
horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces
tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to do it?
And yet -----!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a
tremendous shout of hundreds of voices -- women's voices -- had burst from
a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger
and despair, a deep loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the
reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started!, he had
thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had
reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding
round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had
been doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general
despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that
one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy
things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the
supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled
by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh
outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming
down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of
one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the
handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a
few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that
about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they
have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might have been a transcription from one of the Party
textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from
bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to
work in coal mines (women still did work in coal mines, as a matter of
fact), children has been sold into the factories at the age of six. But
simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that
the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjugation, like
animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little
was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as
they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without
importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of
Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural
to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the
gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief
blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they
were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy
physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours,
films, football, beer and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizons of
their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the
Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking
down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming
dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of
the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political
feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which
could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer
working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented,
as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without
general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The
larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police
interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality
in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes,
drug-peddlers and racketeers of every description; but since it all heppened
among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of
morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual
puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went
unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship
would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or
wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it:
'Prole and animals are free.'
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his vericose ulser. It
had begun itching again. The thing you inveriably came back to was the
impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been
like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook
which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into
the diary:
In the old days [it ran], before the glorious Revolution, London was
not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable
place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands
of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under.
Children no older than you are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel
masters, who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them
on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among this terrible
poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in
by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These
rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces,
like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is
dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer,
shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the
uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The
capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave.
They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the
money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they
could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person
spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap
and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists was called the
King, and -----
But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops
in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the
stocks, the treadmill, the cat o' nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet and
the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the
jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook
for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to
sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that
the average human being was better off now than he had been before the
Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your
own bones, the instinctive feeling that the condidtions you lived in were
intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply it bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only
to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals
that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a
saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party
was something huge, terrible and glittering -- a world of steel and concrete,
of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and
fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts
and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing,
persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same face. The
reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro
in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of
cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and
ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of
Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly
with a blocked wastepipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens
bruised your ears with statistics proving that the people today had more
food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they lived
longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more
intelligent, better educated than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word
of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed for example, that
today forty per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution,
it was said, the number had only been fifteen per cent. The Party claimed
that the infant mortality rate was now only a hundred and sixty per thousand,
whereas before the Revolution it had been three hundred -- and so it went on.
It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that
literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted
without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have
been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as
a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten,
the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had processed -- after
the event: that was what counted -- concrete, unmistakable evidence of an
act of falsification. he had held it between his fingers for as long as
thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been -- at any rate, it was about the
time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was
seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle 'sixties, the period of the great purges
in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for
all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the
rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a
few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after
spectacular public trials at which they made confessions of their crimes.
Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford.
It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often
happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know
whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to
incriminate themselves in the usual way. They confessed to intelligence
with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of
public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against
the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution
happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of
people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, re-instated
in the Party and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded
important. All three had written long, abject articles in the Times,
analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in
the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination
with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men
far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great
figures left over from the heroic early days of the Party. The glamour of
the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He
had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing
blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that
of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed
with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had
once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.
They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even
to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in silence
before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the specialty of
the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most
impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose
brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the
Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in the
Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and
curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the
ancient themes -- slum tenements, starving children, street battles,
capitalists in top hats -- an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the
past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face
pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been
immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling
away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes,
like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he
had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty.
A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in
their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter
brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside
them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps
a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they
were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came
into it -- but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar,
cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note.
And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first
time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at
what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged
in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second
trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string
of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party
histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973,
Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the
pneumatic tube onto his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had
evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant
he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn
out of the Times of about ten years earlier -- the top half of the
page, so that it included the date -- and it contained a photograph of the
delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of
the group were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them;
in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that
date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield
in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important
military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced
to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless
other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the
confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston
had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had
actually committed the crime that they were accused of. But this was
concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil
bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.
It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been
published to the world and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph
was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper.
Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of
view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair, so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your
heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let
what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear
that some accident -- a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance
-- would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the
photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that
photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers
seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as
well as the event it recorded, was only a memory. Was the Party's hold upon
the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed
no longer had once existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes,
the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he
made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must
have been to the agents of Eurasia that the three dead men had betrayed
their country. Since then there had been other charges -- two, three, he
could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been re-written
and re-written until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest
significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What
most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never quite
understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate
advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive
was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a
lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it
had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes around the sun:
today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in
holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being
a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might actually
be wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big
Brother which formed its frontpiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own.
It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you -- something
that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening
you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your
senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that
claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely
the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was
tacitly denied by their philosphy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know
that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that
the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -- what then?
But no! His courage seemed to stiffen of its own accord. The face of
O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind.
He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side.
He was writing the diary for O'Brien -- to O'Brien: it was like an
interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed
to a particular person and took its colour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was
their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the
enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party
intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he
would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the
right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the
true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid
world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects
unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was
speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee --
real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came floating out into the street.
Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the
half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was
throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an
evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that
the number of your attendences at the Centre was carefully checked. In
principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in
bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating or sleeping he
would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that
suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always
slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife it
was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he
came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him.
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the
long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the
lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable.
On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the
labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself
among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles,'
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a
palpable absurdity. he was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums
to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways
which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes. There were puddles of
flthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of dark doorways,
and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures
shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played
in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.
Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.
Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort
of guarded curiousity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded
across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps
of conversation as he approached.
'"Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says. "But if you'd of
been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to
criticise," I says, "but you ain't got the same problems as what I got."'
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is.'
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile
silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind
of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar
animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you
if you happened to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What
are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way
home? -- and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against
walking home by an unusal route: but it was enough to draw attention to you
if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning
from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits.
A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up
a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it and leapt back
again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side-alley, ran towards Winston, pointing
excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out guv'nor! Bang over'head! Lay down quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket
bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly
always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to
possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rocket supposedly travelled faster
than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered
onto his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments
of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred metres
up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud
of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming round the ruins. There
was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the
middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw
that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump,
the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned
down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of
the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the
streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty
hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs', they
called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors,
endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust
and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting housefront three men were
standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up
newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulders. Even before
he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could
see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious
piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them
when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent
altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending
in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'
'Yes it 'as, then!'
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years
wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock.
An' I tell you, no number ending in seven -----'
'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty well tell you the bleeding
number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February -- second week
in February.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white.
An' I tell you, no number -----'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone
thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The
Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event
to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were
some millions of proles for which the Lottery was the principle if not the
only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their
anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,
even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate
calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men
who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts and lucky amulets.
Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed
by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the Party
was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were
actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.
In the absence of any real inter-communication between one part of Oceania
and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that.
When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at
the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare
not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices.
The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led
down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-looking
vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led
out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away,
was the junk shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary.
And in a small stationer's shop not far away he had bought his penholder and
his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the
alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over
but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but
active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn,
pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching it
occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at least, had already
been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him
were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.
In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been
formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out
in the great purges of the 'fifties and 'sixties, and the few who survived
had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there
was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions
in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the
passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back
into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go
into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question
him. He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now,
or were they worse?
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the
steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness, of course. As usual,
there was no definite rule against talking to proles, and frequenting their
pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols
appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that
they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell
of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped
to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his
blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the
room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man
whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation
with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms.
A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching
the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his
shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the
'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's name is a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward
with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
''Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why,
a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave
to teach you the A, B, C next.'
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half-litre --
that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.'
'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could'a drawed me off a pint
easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.'
'When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,' said the
barman, with a glance at the other customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston's entry
seemed to disappear. The old man's white-stubbed face had flushed pink.
He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston
caught him gently by the arm.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again.
He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added
aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses
which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink
you could get in prole pubs. The proles were not supposed to drink gin,
though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of
darts was in full swing again, and the know of men at the bar had begun
talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a
moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man
could talk without being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any
rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as
soon as he came in.
''E could'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down
behind his glass. 'A 'alf-litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a
'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston
tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from
the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he
expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young
man, mild beer -- wallop, we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That
was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his
shoulders straightened again. ''Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprising
up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and
came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten
his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You must have been a
grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in the old
days, before the Revolution. People of my age don't realy know anything
about those times. We can only read about them in books, and what it says in
the books may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The history
books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what
it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty --
worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the
people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn't
even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school
at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very
few people, only a few thousands -- the capitalists, they were called --
who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own.
They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about
in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore
top hats -----'
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The same thing came
into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain't seen
a top 'at in years. Gorn right out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one
was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn't give
you the date, but it must's been fifty years ago. Of course it was only
'ired for the occassion, you understand.'
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently.
'The point is, these capitalists -- they and a few lawyers and priests and
so forth who lived on them -- were the lords of the earth. Everything
existed for their benefit. You -- the ordinary people, the workers -- were
their slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you
off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if they
chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat 'o
nine tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every
capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who -----'
The old man brightened again.
'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since ever so long.
Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that does. I recollect -- oh, donkey's
years ago -- I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to
'ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews,
Indians -- all sorts, there was. And there was one bloke -- well, I couldn't
give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker, 'e was. 'E didn't 'alf give
it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "Lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the
Ruling class!" Parasites -- that was another of them. And 'yena -- 'e
def'nitely called 'em 'yena. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party,
you understand.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.
'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you feel that you have
more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a
human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top -----'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'The House of Lords,' if you like. What I am asking is, were these people
able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you were
poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take
off your cap when you passed them?'
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his
beer before answering.
'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em. It showed
respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough.
Had too, as you might say.'
'And was it usual -- I'm only quoting what I've read in history books --
was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the
pavement and into the gutter?'
'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I recollect it as if it was
yesterday. It was Boat Race night -- terrible rowdy they used to get on Boat
Race night -- and I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite
the gent, 'e was -- dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind of
zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im accidental-like.
'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get fresh with me." I says,
"You're drunk. I'll give you in charge in 'alf a minute," I says. An' if
you'll believe me, 'e puts 'is 'and on my chest and gives me a shove as
pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them
days, and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only -----'
A sense of helplesness took hold of Winston. The old man's memory was
nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day
without getting any real information. The Party histories might still be
true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.
'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm trying to say is
this. You have been alive a very long time; you have lived half your life
before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up.
Would you say, from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than
it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or
now?'
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer,
more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant, philosophic
air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect me to say I'd
rather be young again. Most people'd say they'd sooner be young, if you
arst 'em. You got your 'ealth and strength when you're young. When you get
to my time of life you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from my
feet, and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it 'as me
out of bed. On the other 'and there's great advantages in being a old man.
You ain't got the same worries. No truck with women, and that's a great
thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you'd credit it.
Not wanted to, what's more.'
Winston sat back against the window sill. It was no use going on. He was
about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled
rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The extra
half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two
gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out
into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the
huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it is
now?' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it
was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient
world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a
million useless things, a quarrel with a work-mate, a hunt for a lost bicycle
pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a
windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the
range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects
but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were
falsified, -- when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved
the conditions of human life had to be accepted, because there did not exist,
and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked
up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops interspersed
among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his there hung three discoloured
metal balls which looked as though they had once been gilded. He seemed to
know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where he
had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to
buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place
again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet
had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely against
suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening
the diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly
twenty-one hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would
be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped
through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was
trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean
but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a
long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His
hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His
spectacles, his gentle fussy movements and the fact that he was wearing an
aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as
though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His
voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of
the majority of proles.
'I recognised you on the pavement,' he said immediately. 'You're the
gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album. That was a beautiful
bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it used to be called. There's been
no paper like that made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at
Winston over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special
I can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in. I don't want
anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't suppose I could have
satisfied you.' He made an apologetic gesture with his soft-palmed hand.
'You know how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you and me, the
antique trade's just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock
either. Furniture, china, glass -- it's all been broken up by degrees.
And of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't seen
a brass candlestick in years.'
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was
almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floor-space was very
restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty
picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends -- lacquered
snuff-boxes, agate brooches and the like -- which looked as though they
might include something interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table
his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making
almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rain-water, in
both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified
by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it,' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have come from the
Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn't
made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively. 'But there's not
many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed. 'Now, if it so happened that you
wanted to buy it, that'd cost you four dollars. I can remember when a thing
like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was -- well,
I can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about genuine
antiques nowadays -- even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing
into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty
as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from
the present one. The soft, rain-watery glass was not like any glass that
he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent
uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as
a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not
make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for
a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter
anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had grown
noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four dollars. Winston
realised that he would have accepted three or even two.
'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,' he
said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few pieces. We'll do with a light
if we're going upstairs.'
He lit another lamp, and with a bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep
and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on
the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney pots.
Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room
were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a
picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly armchair drawn up to
the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly
a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half apologetically.
'I'm selling the furniture off by little and little. Now that's a beautiful
mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it.
But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.'
He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in
the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted
through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room
for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild,
impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had
awakened in him a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew
exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside
an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob: utterly
alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no
sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive.
And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that's a nice
gate-leg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to put
new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already
gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down
and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the
prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man,
still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood
frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.
'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all -----' he began
delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an
oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There
was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what
appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed
vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I could unscrew it
for you, I dare say.'
'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin now.
It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.'
'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in -- oh, many
years ago. It was a church at one time. St Clement's Dane, its name was.'
He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly
ridiculous, and added: '"Oranges and lemons," say the bells of St Clement's!'
'What's that?' said Winston.
'Oh -- ''Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St Clement's." That was a
rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes I don't remember, but I
do know it ended up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes
comes a chopper to chop off your head." It was kind of a dance. They held
out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a
chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and caught you.
It was just the names of churches. All the London churches were in it --
all the principal ones, that is.'
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always
difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and
impressive, if it reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as
having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of
earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The
centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value.
One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn
it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets
-- anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically
altered.
'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man, 'though they've been
put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I've got it!'
'There, now, that's as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a small
copper coin, looked something like a cent.'
'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.
'St Martin's? That's still standing. It's in Victory Square, alongside the
picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars
in front, and a big flight of steps.'
Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays
of various kinds -- scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses,
wax-work tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Field it used to be called,' supplemented the old man,
'though I don't recollect any fields anywhere in these parts.'
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous
possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless
it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more,
talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks -- as
one might have gathered from the inscription over the shopfront -- but
Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed was a widower aged sixty-three and
had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had been
intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the
point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered
rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and lemons, say the bells
of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martins's!
It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of
actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed
somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple
after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he
could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to
let the old man see him reconnoitering the street before stepping out of the
door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval -- a
month, say -- he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was
perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after
buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop
could be trusted. However -----!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps of
beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement's Dane, take it
out of its frame and carry it home under the jacket of his overalls. He
would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory. Even the
lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his
mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he
stepped out onto the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through
the window. He had even started humming to an improvised tune --
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure
in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was
the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was
failing, but there was no difficulty in recognising her. She looked him
straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the
right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going
in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was
no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have
followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the
Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen
him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against
his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it
away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes
he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon.
But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the
spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several seconds
wondering vaguely what to do, the turned round and began to retrace his
steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him
three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her.
He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then
smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket
would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately,
because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable. He
could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty
and would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community
Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial
alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A deadly lassitude had
taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down
and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights
would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the
kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to
the table in the alcove, sat down and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice
was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the
book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing
was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so.
Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate
courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain
poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment
of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human
body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment whan a special
effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he
had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his
danger he had lost the power to do act. It struck him that in moments of
crisis on is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against
one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly
made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in
all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the
torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are
always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe,
and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life
is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness,
against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman
on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into
his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to think of O'Brien, for
whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking of
the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away.
It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you
expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew
of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the
grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones,
the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it,
since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few
days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody
ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was
certain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did that horror,
which altered nothing, have to be embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of
O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' O'Brien
had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where
there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but
which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice
from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of
thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly
fell out onto his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out
again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of
O'Brien. Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his
pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him,heavy, calm, protecting:
but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache? Like a leaden
knell the words came back at him:
IT WAS the middle of the morning, and Winston had left his cubicle to go to
the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long,
brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with the dark hair. Four days had
gone by since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.
As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls. Probably
she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes
on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'. It was a common accident
in the Fiction Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have
fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen
to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. It front of him was an enemy
who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in
pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started
forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the
bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
'You're hurt?' he said.
'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.'
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned
very pale.
'You haven't broken anything?'
'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'
She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained
some of her colour, and appeared very much better.
'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang.
Thanks, comrade!'
And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going,
as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could
not taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in
one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in
any case they had been standing in front of a telescreen when the thing
happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary
surprise, for in two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl
had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had
done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed
through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with
the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to
get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on
it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets
and read it at once. But that would be shockingly folly, as he well knew.
There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens
were watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually
among the other papers on his desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the
speakwrite towards him. 'Five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at
the very least!' His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.
Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was more routine, the
rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political
meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much
the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just
as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to
deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons.
The thing that was written on the paper must be a threat, a summons, an order
to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder
possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to supress it.
This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but
from some kind of underground organisation. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed
after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd,
but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of
paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other,
more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his
intellect told him that the message probably meant death -- still, that was
not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart
banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling
as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic
tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his
nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap
of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a
large unformed handwriting:
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing
into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger
of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again,
just to make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even
worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the need
to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. He felt as though a fire were
burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was
torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour,
but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him,
the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up
a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly
enthusiastic about the paper-mache model of Big Brother's head, two metres
wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's troop of Spies.
The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly
hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some
fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl,
at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared
not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.
The adternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a
delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and
necessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party who was now under a cloud.
This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two
hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether. Then
the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire
to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new
development out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre.
He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre,
took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', played two games
of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin and sat for half an hour
through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to chess'. His soul writhed
with boredom, but for once he had no impulse to shirk his evening at the
Centre. At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive
had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.
It was not till twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed -- in the
darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you kept
silent -- that he was able to think continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the
girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer the possibility
that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not
so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed hime the note.
Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be.
Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five
nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but
that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he
had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of
them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind
of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white
youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything
else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch
with her quickly. But that physical difficulty of meeting was enormous.
It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.
Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the
possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five
minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over
them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on the table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not be
repeated. If she had worked in the Records Department it might have been
comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the
building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going there.
If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could
have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow
her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the
Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending a letter through
the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even
secret, all letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote
letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there
were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the
ones that were inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl's name,
let alone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the
canteen. If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the
middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient
buzz of conversation all round -- if these conditions endured for, say,
thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words.
For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the next day she
did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having
already blown. Presumably she had changed into a later shift. They passed
each other without a glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen
at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a
telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. His
whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a
sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact,
every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he
could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch the diary
during those days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he
could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He absolutely
had no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could
make. She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she
might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest
of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had a band
of sticking plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her was so great
that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. On the
following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into
the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite
alone. It was early, and the place was not very full. The queue edged
forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was held up for two
minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had not received
his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured
his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually towards her,
his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps
three metres away from him. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice
behind him called, 'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith!' repeated
the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed,
silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him
with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to refuse.
After having been recognised, he could not go and sit at a table with an
unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile.
The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of
himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The girl's table
filled up a few minutes later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take
the hint. The next day he took care to arrive early. Sure enough, she was
at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately
ahead of him in the queue was a small swift-moving, beetle-like man with a
flat face and tiny suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the counter
with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl's
table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further
away, but something in the little man's appearance suggested he would be
sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table.
With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he could get
the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man
was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup
and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a
malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped
him up. But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart,
Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating.
It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a
terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since she had
first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she must have changed
her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such
things did not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from
speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet,
wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down.
In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit
down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in
which to act. Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff
they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a
low murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily they
spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged
the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
Victory Square, near the monument.'
'It's full of telescreens.'
'I doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people.
And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table. They did
not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on
opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another. The
girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to
smoke a cigarette.
Winston was at Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward toward the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian
aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the
Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue
of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At
five minutes past the hour the girl had not appeared. Again the terrible
fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind!
He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of
pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's church, whose bells,
when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.' Then he saw the
girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a
poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her
until some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round
the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of
heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be
running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the
base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran,
he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners
was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square.
Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge
of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the
heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the
way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman,
presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh.
Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive
his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt as though his entrails were
being ground to a pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken
through, sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder
to shoulder, staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine-guns
standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the
trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed
close together. Their sad Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the
trucks, utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a
clang-clang of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load
after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there,
but he saw them only intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her right arm
right down to the elbow, were press against his. Her cheek was almost near
enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken charge of the
situation, just as she had done in the canteen. She began speaking in the
same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur
easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to Paddington
Station -----'
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the
route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside
the station; two kilometres along the road; a gate with the top bar missing;
a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead
tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her head.
Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by another way.
Are you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate
themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people
still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses,
but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and they had stopped
soon. The prevailing emotion was simply curiousity. Foreigners, whether
from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally
never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one
never got more that a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what
became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the
others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round
Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded
and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's,
sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was
drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a
mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him,
as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time
for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd
still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their
hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
He exploited the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm
with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from
feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred
to him that he did not know what colour the girl's eyes were. They were
probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn
his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands
locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared sreadily
in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged
prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of the nests of hair.
Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping
out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the
left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss
one's skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart
of the wood came the droning of ring-doves.
He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about the journey, and
the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he
would normally have been. Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe
place. In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the
country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there
was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be
picked up and recognised; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by
yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than a hundred
kilometers it was necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes
there were patrols hanging about railway stations, who examined the papers
of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions. However,
no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the station he had made sure
by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. The train was
full of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The
wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was filled to overflowing by
a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless great-grandmother to a
month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with the 'in-laws' in the
country, and, as they explained to Winston, to get hold of a little
black-market butter.
The lane was widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told
him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes. He had no
watch, but it could not be fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick
underfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt down and
began picking some, partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea
that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer the girl when they
met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a foot
on twigs. he went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It
might be the girl, or he might have been followed after all. To look round
was to show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly on
his shoulder.
He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as a warning
that he must keep silent, then, parted the bushes and quickly led the way
along the narrow track into the wood. Obviously she had been that way
before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed,
still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as
he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet
sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense
of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely
that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all.
The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him.
Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him feel dirty
and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of Lomdon in the
pores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never
seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the fallen tree that
she had spoken of. The girl hopped over it and forced apart the bushes, in
which there did not seem to be an opening. When Winston followed her, he
found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded
by tall saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and turned.
'Here we are,' she said.
He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he did not dare move
nearer to her.
'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on, 'in case there's
a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's
always the chance of one of those swine recognising your voice. We're all
right here.'
He still had not the courage to approach her. We're all right here?' he
repeated stupidly.
'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small ashes, which at some time had
been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them
thicker than one's wrist. 'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in.
Besides, I've been here before.'
They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to her
now. She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked
faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act.
The bluebells had cascaded onto the ground. They seemed to have fallen of
their own accord. He took her hand.
'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I didn't know what
colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of
brown, with dark lashes. 'Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can
you still bear to look at me?'
'Yes, easily.'
'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of.
I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.'
'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms. At
the beginning he had no feeling except incredulity. The youthful body was
strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and
yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red
mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling,
precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down onto the ground, she was
utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was
that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt
was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had
no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened
him, he was too much used to living without women -- he did not know the
reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair.
She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.
'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole afternoon. Isn't
this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community
hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.'
'What is your name?' said Winston.
'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston -- Winston Smith.'
'How did you find that out?'
'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are, dear.
Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?'
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of
love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you and then murder
you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in
with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had
something to do with the Thought Police.'
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the
excellence of her disguise.
'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'
'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance -- merely
because you're young and fresh and healthy, you understand -- I thought that
probably -----'
'You thought that I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed.
Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes -- all that stuff.
And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a
thought-criminal and get you killed off?'
'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that,
you know.'
'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet sash
of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it onto a bough. Then, as though
touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of
her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half
and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew
by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny,
and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly
stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a
rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the
piece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some
memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.
'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.
'Black market,' she said indifferently. 'Actually I am that sort of girl,
to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do
volunteer work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours
and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always
carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and
I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say.
It's the only way to be safe.'
The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's tongue. The taste
was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round the edges of
his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite
shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye. He pushed it
away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he
would have liked to undo but could not.
'You are very young,' he said. 'You are ten or fifteen years younger than
I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?'
'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a chance. I'm good at
spotting people who don't belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were
against them.'
Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party,
about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel
uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe
anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her
language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself
very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to
mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of
words that you saw chalked up in dripping alleyways. He did not dislike it.
It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways,
and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that
smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering again through
the chequered shade, with their arms round each other's waists whenever it
was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer her waist
seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speak above a
whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to go quietly.
Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood. She stopped him.
'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone watching. We're all
right if we keep behind the boughs.'
They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering
through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out
into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition.
He knew it by sight. An old close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering
across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite
side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and
their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair. Surely
somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools
where dace were swimming?
'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.
'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the next field,
actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them
lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.'
'It's the Golden Country -- almost,' he murmured.
'The Golden Country?'
'It's nothing really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream.'
'Look!' whispered Julia.
A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level
of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in
the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again,
ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the
sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush
the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together,
fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing
variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were
deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few
seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled
breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague
reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival
was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour
its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a
microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had only spoken in low
whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick
up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small
beetle-like man was listening intently -- listening to that. But by
degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was
as though it wae a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got
mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped
thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft
and warm. he pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body
seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding
as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard
kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again
both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter
of wings.
Winston put his lips against her ear. 'Now,' he whispered.
'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-out. It's safer.'
Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back
to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned
and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared
round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant,
then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his
dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes
off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture
by which a whole civilisation seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed
white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes
were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt
down before her and took her hands in his.
'Have you done this before?'
'Of course. Hundreds of times -- well scores of times, anyway.'
'With Party members?'
'Yes, always with Party members.'
'With members of the Inner Party?'
'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that would if they
got half a chance. They're not so holy as they make out.'
His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been
hundreds -- thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him
with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface,
its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
If he could have infected the whole lot with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly
he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled
her down so that they were kneeling face to face.
'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand
that?'
'Yes, perfectly.'
'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere.
I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.'
'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.'
'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?'
'I adore it.'
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one
person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that
was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon
the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty.
Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed,
and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to
have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached for the discarded
overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell
asleep for about half an hour.
Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still
peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth,
you could not call her beautiful. The short dark hair was extraordinarily
thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname
or where she lived.
The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying,
protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the
hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled
the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he
thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and
that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure
lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with
fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory.
It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally safe to use any
hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.'
As soon as she woke up her demeaner had changed. She became alert and
businesslike, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist
and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to
leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston
lacked, and she seemed to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside
round London, stored away from numerous community hikes. The route she gave
him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him
out at a different railway station. 'Never go home the same way as you went
out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She
would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence.
It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open
market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about
among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread.
If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he
approached: otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with
luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of
an hour and arrange another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions.
'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the
Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn't it
bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you. Have I got any twigs in my hair?
Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment
later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with
very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.
However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they would
ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the
month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually
succeeded in making love. That was another hiding-place known to Julia, the
belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an
atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place
when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the
rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening
and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was
usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded
pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried
on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the
beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a
Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes
later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at
the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following
day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which
she called 'talking by instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at
speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly
meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down
a side-street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main
streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the air
darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified.
A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became
aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white, as
white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her
against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was
some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces
were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk
past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the
corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less
dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet.
Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and their
free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often
coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She
spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations,
distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners
for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like
activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If you kept the small
rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage
yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition
work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening
every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together
small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty,
ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the
music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation
were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square
chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of
pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor,
one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through
the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty
other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!' she said
parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing
machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted
chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.
She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with
machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from
the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final
touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the
finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books
were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person
she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution
was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had
been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years
running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in
the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always
borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good
reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the
Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among
the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she
remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in
sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in
a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were
under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots,
but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.
I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough
for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the
heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex
instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater
danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. Girls are
always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member
of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,'
said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.'
Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite
simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop
you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think
it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as
that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said
so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except
where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.
He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had
passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and
refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organised revolt against
the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever
thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered
vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation
people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else,
accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling
against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote
to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction
such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been
got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning
naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she
appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him,
almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body
as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing
him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly
round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things:
Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became
merely a distasteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He told
her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go
through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would
make her stop doing it. She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the
over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years.
I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell;
people are such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back
to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was
capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner
meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex
instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and
which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was
that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could
be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy
and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that.
They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up
and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're
happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the
Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody
rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between
chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and
the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the
right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as
a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party
had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct
of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed,
people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically
turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their
deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought
Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded
night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably
have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too
stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled
her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which
had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of
something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another
sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their
way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the
others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently
found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was
a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was
nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realised that they
were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of
hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to
hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other
direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife
growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two
colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the same root.
He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine
to come and look at it.
'Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom.
Do you see they're two different colours?'
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for
a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was
pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her
waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how
completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a
leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that
there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a
microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour
of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face.
And the thought struck him. ...
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as
I am now. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer
against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her
hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she
still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push
an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're
playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds,
that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted
him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of
nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realised that
she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch
her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was
somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you
chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not
understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory
lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of
declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years, conceivably. I am afraid
of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am.
Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little
difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the
same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't
you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand,
this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel
her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be
pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up
about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the
wood. We've given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a
different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the train
-- but look, I'll draw it out for you.'
And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust,
and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop.
Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a
coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gate-leg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out
of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided
by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil.
He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine
tablets. The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty
really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.
Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least
possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in
the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the
gate-leg table. As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty
about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it
would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing
when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a
love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in
generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he
had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when
they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew
of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out
of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house,
one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the
protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognised as
babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless
similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of
the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any
human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of
her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street,
and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the
room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could
frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the
temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and
near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their
visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings.
Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week.
It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations
that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of
them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed
to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met
briefly in the street. As usual, Winston hardly looked at Julia as they
drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave
her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak.
'Tomorrow, I mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why not?'
'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her
the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had
been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply
an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell
of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have
got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical
necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.
When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was
cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and
their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick
squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that
when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal,
recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her
before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married
couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the
streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear,
talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He
wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together
without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met. It was not
actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the
idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to him. When he suggested
it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that
it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to
their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of
the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined
horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in
future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not
avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and
again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before
it happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the
room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had
sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward
to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly
because she was still holding the tool-bag.
'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've brought.
Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would.
You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here.'
She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners
and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number
of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a
strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of
heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
'It isn't sugar?' he said.
'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread -- proper
white bread, not our bloody stuff -- and a little pot of jam. And here's
a tin of milk -- but look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to
wrap a bit of sacking round it, because ----'
But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was
already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation
from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even
now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here,' she said.
'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have,
nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things,
and -- look, I got a little packet of tea as well.'
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or
something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I want you to turn your
back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed.
Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you.'
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the
red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the
line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated
upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of
happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly
content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers
and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never
heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even
have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to
oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation
level that they had anything to sing about.
'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognise her. What
he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked.
The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that.
She had painted her face.
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought
herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened,
her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something
under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but
Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen
or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement
in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the
right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all,
far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the
effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his
nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a
woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used;
but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
'Scent too!' he said.
'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next?
I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it
instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled
shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed.
It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence.
Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the
varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his
ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and
smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.
'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia. One never saw
a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles. Winston had
occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one
before, so far as she could remember.
Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the
hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because
Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her
make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light
stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray
from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the
fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard
the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in
from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had
been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer
evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose,
talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply
lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could
never have been a time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed
her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up and make some
coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the
lights off at your flats?'
'Twenty-three thirty.'
'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that,
because -- Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'
She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor,
and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly
as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during
the Two Minutes Hate.
'What was it?' he said in surprise.
'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.
There's a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.'
'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as she lay down again.
'We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are
swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In
some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.
It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that
the brutes always -----'
'Don't go on!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do they make you
feel sick?'
'Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!'
She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though
to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes
immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a
nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was
always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness,
and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too
dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of
self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of
darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own
brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke
up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what
Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats, that's all.'
'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here.
I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we
come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.'
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly
ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed,
pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the
saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest
anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even
better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by
the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.
With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other,
Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the book-case,
pointing out the best way of repairing the gate-leg table, plumping herself
down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining
the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought
the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light.
He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rain-watery
appearance of the glass.
'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I don't think it's anything -- I mean, I don't think it was ever put to
any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that
they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if
one knew how to read it.'
'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the engraving on the
opposite wall -- 'would that be a hundred years old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to
discover the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,'
she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. 'What is
this place? I've seen it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its name was.'
The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his
head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of
St Clement's!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends
up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop
off your head!"'
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another
line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of
Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was
vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a
lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind
of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the
fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell
them.'
'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it down
and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were
leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the
lipstick off your face afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening.
He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.
The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the
interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was
almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass
had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere
complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact
he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gate-leg table, and the
clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight
was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed
in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few
thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody
mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the
Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried
a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had
been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had
been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had
ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the
staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organised; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of
novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in
addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through
back files of the Times and altering and embellishing news items which
were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles
roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs
crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were
enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were
wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it
was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the
telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be
called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds
of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles
had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the
still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children played
it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of
toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of
volunteers, organised by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred
metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting
to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along
with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and
represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four
metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous
boots, a sub-machine-gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you
looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening,
seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every
blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother.
The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of
their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonise with the
general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people
than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several
hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood
turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in
effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground
which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to
pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in
effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn
down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the
turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs
by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of
foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.
In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia
and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked
for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs had
multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle
everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes,
and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that
the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month of June. Winston
had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost
the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided,
leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing
in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be
intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen
or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure
hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could
only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered
was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was
there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world,
a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington,
thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk
with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man
seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have
almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark
shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which
contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an
enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about
among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his
bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being
a collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he
would finger this scrap of rubbish or that -- a china bottle-stopper, the
painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand of
some long-dead baby's hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it,
merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the
tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of
his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about
four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled horn,
and another about the death of poor Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you
might be interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever
he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines
of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew -- in a way, it was never out of their minds that what
was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of
impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would
cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul
grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five
minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion
not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in
this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was
difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when
Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that
it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside
it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of
escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their
intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives.
Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would
succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or
they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak
with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives
undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew.
In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day
and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed
an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next
breath so long as there is air available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the
Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the
fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of
finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed,
or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he
sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was
the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not
strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people
by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe
O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes.
Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly
hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so.
But she refused to believe that widespread, organised opposition existed or
could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said,
were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its own
purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number,
at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top
of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and
in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials
were happening she had taken her place in the detachments from the Youth
League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals
'Death to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all
others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea
of who Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent.
She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the
ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an
independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case
the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the
same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by
isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible
to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the
war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion
the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were
probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people
frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.
She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two
Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But
she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched
upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology,
simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem
important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school,
that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston
remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party
claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school,
it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be
claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been
in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact
struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had
invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered
from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years
ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true
that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even
noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been
at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The
invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up.
He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he
succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one
time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck
her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one
bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent
forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify
her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought
of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between
his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed,
she failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they
were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before
the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the
time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It wasn't
just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realise that the past,
starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives
anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like
that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about
the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every
date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute
by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present
in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the
past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even
when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence
ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know
with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in
that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence
after the event -- years after it.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the
same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only
for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you
have done with it even if you had kept it?'
'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few
doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody.
I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one
can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there -- small
groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and
even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry
on where we leave off.'
'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in
us.'
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.
In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest.
Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the
mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use
Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so
why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo,
and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects,
she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those
people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her,
he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while
having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view
of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of
understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was
demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to
notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.
They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm,
because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.
It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life,
it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost at
the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware
that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The person,
whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking.
Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to
run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of
speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement,
laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of
them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said.
'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times the other
day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'
Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,'
he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had
anything to do with the actual construction of the language.'
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is not only my own
opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an
expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this
was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead,
he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended
as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had
turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll
slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious,
disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture
he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you
had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become so
very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still
using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe.
But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself.
It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the
number of verbs -- that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let
me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am afraid
I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at
my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address.'
They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absent-mindedly
O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered
notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in
such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the
instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.
'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my servant will
give you the dictionary.'
He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time
there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorised what was
written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along
with a mass of other papers.
They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most.
There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had
been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was
necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover
where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. 'If you ever
want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien had been
saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere
in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy
that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.
He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. Perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay -- he was not certain. What was
happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago.
The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been
the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from
words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the
Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the
beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a
foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was
speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly
shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation
of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better
because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt -----' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put
into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected
with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream.
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out
before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all
occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the
dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft
light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had
also been comprehended by -- indeed, in some sense it had consisted in --
a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later
by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the
small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered
my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within
a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all
come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his
consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could
not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could
not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube
stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour,
the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire
in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.
He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round
dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato
peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully
scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks
which travelled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed,
and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes
spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any
violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have
become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was
waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that
was needed -- cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece -- always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous
motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large
shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a
time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister,
a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian
by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and
press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that
seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring
in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside
there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered
his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something
in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the
fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She
took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion;
but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal
she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out
with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan
and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate.
He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he
even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly
seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for
weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about
ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud
booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him
not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny
sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey,
sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end
his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston,
giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold of it and
looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching
her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece
of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your
sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on
his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what
it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having
been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her
arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in
the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down
the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt
somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours,
until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared.
This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the
room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, not
even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty
that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely
been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been
removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children
(Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of
the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with
his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting
gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His
mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so
she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper
every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her
eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said
indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story -----'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again.
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered
from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When
the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her
arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate,
it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her
to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy
with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of
paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that
mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the
grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained
from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished,
and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted
clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were
not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties
which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships,
and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a
dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to
him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a
country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in
his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert
force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The
proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held
on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious
effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance,
how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and
had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said,
'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here
before it's too late, and never see each other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to
do it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young.
You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you
might stay alive for another fifty years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be
too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive.'
'We may be together for another six months -- a year -- there's no knowing.
At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realise how utterly alone we
shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally
nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll
shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same.
Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off
your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know
whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power
of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray
one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough.
Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do
doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving
you -- that would be the real betrayal.'
She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one
thing they can't do. They can make you say anything -- anything --
but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't
get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while,
even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy
upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit
them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of
finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less
true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,
delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual
wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by
enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object
was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately
make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not
alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the
utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner
heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The
telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet
gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room
O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of
papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the
servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be
able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could
think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive
together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only
met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an
effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside
the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter
of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of
flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of
good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up
and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro -- everything was
intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted
at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear
from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out.
O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur.
He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped,
completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese.
The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered
walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was
intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway
whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying
it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of
the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty
seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards
him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the
soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen
away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than
usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary
embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a
stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any
kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single
equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on
a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to
borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible
to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike
him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was
a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst
of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them,
and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting,
somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was
quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he
had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen
the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With
difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then
suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings
of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his
spectacles on his nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because -----'
He paused, realising for the first time the vagueness of his own motives.
Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien,
it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that
what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret
organisation working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.
We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We
disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are
also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your
mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are
ready.'
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had
opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without
knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and
glasses.
'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring the drinks over
here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then
we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself,
Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten
minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like
air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of
the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's whole life was playing
a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality
even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the
glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of
something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding -- a vast bottle composed of
electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into
a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the
decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia
pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read
about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am
afraid.' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it
is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To
Emmanuel Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he
had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's
half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the
olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason
he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that
of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he
came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was
that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the
empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.'
'And the conspiracy -- the organisation? Is it real? It is not simply an
invention of the Thought Police?'
'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much
more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it.
I will come back to that presently.' He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is
unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for
more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and
you will have to leave separately. You, comrade' -- he bowed his head to
Julia -- 'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal.
You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions.
In general terms, what are you prepared to do?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing
Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that
Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his
eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as
though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers
were known to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of
innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases -- to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralisation and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric
acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life
as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another
again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a
moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His
tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word,
then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not
know which word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary for us to know
everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more
expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different
person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his
movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair -- even his voice
would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person.
Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary.
Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'
Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's
Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned
a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien
boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather
absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself,
then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think
better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed,
with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at his wrist-watch
again.
'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said. 'I shall switch
on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces
before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.'
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes
flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his
manner. He was memorising their appearance, but he felt no interest in
them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic
face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking
or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door
silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the
pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.
'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark. You
will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them,
without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will
learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which
we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members
of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for
and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell
you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a
hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never
be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three
or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear.
As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive
orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate
with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will
confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess,
other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a
handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me.
By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person,
with a different face.'
He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the
bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It
came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or
manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression
of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in
earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to
a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated
limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage. 'This is
unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do,
unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth
living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from
Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure
of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his
blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilised, it was impossible to
believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not
equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to be
impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently.
O'Brien went on:
'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt
you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge
underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages
on walls, recognising one another by codewords or by special movements of
the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have
no way of recognising one another, and it is impossible for any one member
to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself,
if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a
complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a
complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out
because it is not an organisation in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds
it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have
anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and
no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help.
We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that
someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor
blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without
results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught,
you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that
you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will
happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in
the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of
bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might
be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the
area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only
spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation
after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.
'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to Julia. 'Wait.
The decanter is still half full.'
He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same faint suggestion
of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big
Brother? To humanity? To the future?'
'To the past,' said Winston.
'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.
They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go.
O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat
white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important,
he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very
observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget
her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that you have a
hiding-place of some kind?'
Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop.
'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you.
It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall
send you a copy of the book' -- even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed
to pronounce the words as though they were in italics -- 'Goldstein's book,
you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get
hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The
Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can
produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible.
If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word.
Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One day in the fairly near future
-- I cannot give a date -- one of the messages among your morning's work
will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On
the following day you will go to work without your brief-case. At some time
during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say "I
think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives you will contain
a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within fourteen days.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien.
'We shall meet again -- if we do meet again -----'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no darkness?'
he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there
is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognised the allusion. 'And
in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave?
Any message? Any question?.'
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he
wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding
generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the
Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room
over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel
engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons,
say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:
'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go.
But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.'
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed
the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien
seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting
with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him
Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was
closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back
at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It
had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the
weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his
hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and
lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving
only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed
to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled
his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made
his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in
the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no
Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six
hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in
mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction
of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but
irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone
interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped
against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down
the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his
possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the
shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks,
the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet,
the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes,
the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into
such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000
Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of
the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at
just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at
war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely
it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that
Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a
demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it
happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over
which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little
Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony
arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians,
lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost
impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened.
At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the
speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably
from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes
when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped
into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his
speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what
he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said,
a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with
Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners
and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half
of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of
Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.
The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops
and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two
or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of
the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the
air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral
roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued
exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had
switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only
without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment
he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder
while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not
see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've
dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without
speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to
look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went
straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly
twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise.
The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their
posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with
Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now
completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books,
pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that
the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference
to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in
existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because
the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names.
Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four,
with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the
cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches
and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.
Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to
leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed
and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered
the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to
the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough
pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was
by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute
one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care
and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in
transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping
every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task,
something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember
it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the
speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was
as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be
perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed
down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one
more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work
was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the
Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been
achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary
evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it
was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till
tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the
book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his
body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in
his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above
Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened
the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for
coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book.
He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the
cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at
the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through
many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:
Winston began reading:
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable.... The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire
by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only
emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.
The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary,
and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general
they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern
part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering
Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the
British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia,
smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises
China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large
but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at
war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no
longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early
decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause
for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.
This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing
attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.
On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries,
and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction
of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which
extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal,
and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy,
meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of
people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague
frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round
the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes.
In the centres of civilisation war means no more than a continuous shortage
of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may
cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character.
More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their
order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small
extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become
dominant and are consciously recognised and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping
which occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realise
in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the
three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in
combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are
too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by
the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and
industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a
material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared
to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous
wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer
a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is
so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within
its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose,
it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states,
and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough
quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong
Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth.
It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the
northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling.
In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area.
Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of
seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that
dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them
yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates
it is necessary to synthesise by comparatively expensive methods. But
above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies
of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of
slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like
so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more
territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to
capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that
the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.
The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo
and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian
Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and
Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to
enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory
which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not
really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth
of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and
the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which
to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo
of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the
structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself,
would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognised and not recognised
by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end
of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of
consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when
few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes
of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and
still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of
a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient --
a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete --
was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science
and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural
to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it
was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various
devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage,
have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped,
and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been
fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still
there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was
clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore
to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine
were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy,
and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact,
without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process
-- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute
-- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being
very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the
destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical
society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to
eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed
a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most
important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once
became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no
doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal
possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such
a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were
enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally
stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for
themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep
it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of
doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency
towards mechanisation which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost
the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially
backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by
restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during
the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy
of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation,
capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were
prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this,
too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were
obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how
to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth
of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.
And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but
of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or
pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials
which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence,
in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually
destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour
power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress,
for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred
cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought
any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another
Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so
planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare
needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always
underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the
necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate
policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship,
because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small
privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner
Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few
luxuries that he does enjoy -- his large, well-appointed flat, the better
texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco,
his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in
a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the
Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses
whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city,
where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between
wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war,
and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small
caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but
accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would
be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building
temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a
hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses,
whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work,
but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is
expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant
fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic
triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality
appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is
actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not
matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that
a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the
Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an
atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one
goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that
war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an
administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know
that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware
that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being
waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge
is easily neutralised by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile
no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that
the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with
Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article
of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more
territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by
the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new
weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining
activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any
outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has
almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'.
The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements
of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of
Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can
in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful
arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are
cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in
matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage
-- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The
two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to
extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There
are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve.
One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is
thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in
a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific
research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of
today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with
real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and
tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock
therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist,
or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as
are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the
Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian
forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic,
the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply
with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger
rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more
impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases,
or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to
destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs
immunised against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle
that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or
an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore
even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses
suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial
earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realisation, and none of
the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What
is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic
bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches
are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit,
claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as
the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years
later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial
centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America.
The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few
more atomic bombs would mean the end of organised society, and hence of
their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made
or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue
to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity
which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of
war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters
are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely
superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship
has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise
there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo,
the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the
telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of
thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have
never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves
the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is
usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three
powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following,
is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and
well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely
encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of
friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years
as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic
bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all
be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation
impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the
remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it
is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realisation.
Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the
Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken.
This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the
super-states are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other
hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine
or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on
all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were
to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it
would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great
physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred
million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on
the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states.
It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no
contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners
and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always
regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average
citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or
Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he
were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are
creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the
fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realised on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must
never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and
acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states
are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called
Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not
allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but
he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and
common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable,
and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of
semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous
warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer
one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary,
so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three
sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are
simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are
dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that
the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the
fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial
of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of
thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that
by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or
later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the
past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies
were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried
to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not
afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency.
So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result
generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be
serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion,
or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was
designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations
were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was
inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be
able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of
what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course,
always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised
today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and
so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most
important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling
class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.
When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.
Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or
disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific
are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a
kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.
Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is
efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three
super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within
which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality
only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life -- the need to
eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or
stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death,
and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a
distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world,
and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.
The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving
to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged
to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but
once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape
they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is
merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant
animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of
hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless.
It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the
special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will
be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups
of all countries, although they might recognise their common interest and
therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not
fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group
against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or
prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably
be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic
Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by
something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three
super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in
perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that
case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the
sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent
would be the same as a permanent war. This -- although the vast majority
of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner
meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace. Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket
bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden
book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety
were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body,
the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window
that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it
reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was
part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been
possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product
of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic,
less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you
what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I when he heard
Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her.
She dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms.
It was more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've got the book,' he said as they disentangled themselves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and almost
immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an
hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up
the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singing and the
scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston
had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There
seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro
between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes
pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her side
and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for
the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood
have to read it.'
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's the
best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours
ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading:
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other. 'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He continued reading: The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the
High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places
with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an
abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery
to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily
lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all
men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same
in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High
seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a
moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to
govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who
enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting
for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective,
the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and
themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from
one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins
over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily
successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say
that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even
today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better
off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening
of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a
millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change
has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become
obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who
interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that
inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course,
had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put
forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a
hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High.
It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers,
and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been
softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of
such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept
of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in
positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past
the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had
established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new
Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a
theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link
in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity,
was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each
variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of
establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.
The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc
in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly
called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom
and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old
ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology.
But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history
at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more,
and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle,
who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy,
the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical
knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed
before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now
intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was
alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the
beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically
possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native
talents and that functions had to be specialised in ways that favoured some
individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class
distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class
distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was
the price of civilisation. With the development of machine production,
however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human
beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them
to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point
of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human
equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be
averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in
fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an
earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood,
without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination
for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the
groups who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of the
French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own
phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law,
and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them
to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the
main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise
had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable.
Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to
hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that
set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some
cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war
prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions,
the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations -- not only
became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who
considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and
counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals
emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been
foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which
had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world
which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What
kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new
aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists,
technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists,
teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the
working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world
of monopoly industry and centralised government. As compared with their
opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by
luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what
they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last
difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the
tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups
were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to
leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason
for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its
citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however,
made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio
carried the process further. With the development of television, and
the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every
citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching,
could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police
and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of
communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete
obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion
on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped
itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group,
unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was
needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realised that the only
secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most
easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition
of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century
meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than
before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead
of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns
anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns
everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the
products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was
able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the
whole process was represented as an act of collectivisation. It had always
been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must
follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories,
mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them:
and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that
they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier
Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out
the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and
intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this.
There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power.
Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that
the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented
Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and
willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule
all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could
guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately
the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality
disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in
fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow
demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert.
The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt
of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.
Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison,
they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic
crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to
happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without
having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can
become articulate. As for the problem of over-production, which has been
latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is
solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also
useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of
view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the
splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people,
and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem,
that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding
the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive
group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs
only to be influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already,
the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes
Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success,
every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge,
all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his
leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face
on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that
he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when
he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit
itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love,
fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an
individual than towards an organisation. Below Big Brother comes the Inner
Party. Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per
cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer
Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may
be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we
habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the
population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the
Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly
from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the
structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child
of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission
to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen.
Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one
province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood
are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators
of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part
of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial
population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its
titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that
English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language,
it is not centralised in any way. Its rulers are not held together by
blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our
society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight
appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement
between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the
pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there is a
certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that
weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of
the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians,
in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted
among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply
marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs
is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is
not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting
power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of
keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to
recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the
crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great
deal to neutralise opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been
trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that
what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the
continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect
that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive
organisations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds
or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son
inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way
of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling
group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned
with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields
power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains
always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
characterise our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of
the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being
perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion,
is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared.
Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and
from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any
impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be
other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance
of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly;
but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the
level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses
hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can
be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party
member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on
the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.
Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he
may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can
be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected.
Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his
behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he
is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of
his body, are all jealously scrutinised. Not only any actual misdemeanour,
but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous
mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is
certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction
whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any
clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts
and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally
forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and
vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually
been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps
commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to
have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the
beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could
not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc.
If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker),
he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true
belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental
training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak
words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes
him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from
enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of
foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and
self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents
produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards
and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations
which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in
advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest
stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is
called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty
of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous
thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if
they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train
of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is
not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control
over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over
his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother
is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big
Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for
an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The
keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word
has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means
the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of
the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness
to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it
means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to
know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed
the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made
possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest,
and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is
subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that
the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions
partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from
the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is
necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and
that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by
far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the
need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that
speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought
up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in
all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political
alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's
policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia
(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always
have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must
be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day
falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as
necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it
is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records
and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories
agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in
equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past
is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the
past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For
when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then
this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have
existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to
be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all
times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute
can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the
control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make
sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is
merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that
events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange
one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to
forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned
like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party
members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox.
In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak
it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much
else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs
in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party
intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he
therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise
of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.
The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with
sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring
with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at
the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use
conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with
complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them,
to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes
necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is
needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably
necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the
truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has
been able -- and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of
years -- to arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or
because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to
adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they
became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used
force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either
through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement
of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions
can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the
dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue
ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret
of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the
power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink
are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system
of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of
what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as
it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion;
the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the
fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social
scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the
subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is
simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like
a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to
them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they
will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the
same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we
call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is
necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when
left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the
war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the
Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is
believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar
linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with
fanaticism -- is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society.
The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no
practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every
principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses
to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working
class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform
which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that
reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it
calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of
family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are
governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the
facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of
Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of
Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do
they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in
doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that
power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient
cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the
High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then
the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored.
It is; why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the
mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive
for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular
moment of time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the
Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink.
But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct
that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink,
the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary
paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists....
Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound.
It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past.
She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek
pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes.
Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
'Julia.'
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor,
lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood
how; he did not understand why. Chapter I, like Chapter III,
had not actually told him anything that he did not know, it had merely
systematised the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it
he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even
a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was
untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you
were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the
window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face
and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy,
confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep
murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark
contained in it a profound wisdom.
When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time,
but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only
twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then the usual deep-lunged
singing struck up from the yard below:
The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard
it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the
sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee. Damn! The stove's
gone out and the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it.
'There's no oil in it.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes
on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window.
The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the
yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been
washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh
and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman
marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered
whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty
or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they
gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he
looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him
for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to
him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the
grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block
of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body
of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held
inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to
the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever
come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth,
from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had
no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He
wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be
fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose
beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown
hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing,
darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering,
first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years.
At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt
for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky,
stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was
curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or
Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very
much the same -- everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands
of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's
existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly
the same -- people who had never learned to think but who were storing up
in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day
overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without
having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be
Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could
he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not
be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes,
because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality
there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change
into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when
you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening
would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years,
they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body
to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day,
at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself.
Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the
world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious,
forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin,
in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and
Japan -- everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous
by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that
future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed
on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.
He could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had
turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone
stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you are.
Make no movement until you are ordered.'
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except
stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of
the house before it was too late -- no such thought occurred to them.
Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap
as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass.
The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
'Now we can see you,' said the voice. 'Stand out in the middle of the
room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not
touch one another.'
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's
body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could
just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control.
There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside.
The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the
stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long,
rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard,
and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say
good-bye,' she said.
'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then another quite
different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression
of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the
subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to
chop off your head"!'
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder
had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was
climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs.
The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on
their feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved.
One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them
an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which
the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon
meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The
feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face
and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip
of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and
then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass
paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a
cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it
always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a
violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of
the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like
a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath.
Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her
livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his terror
it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain
which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath.
He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain which was there all
the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was
necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by
knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston
had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes
shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last
he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their
own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind.
He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had
done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate,
and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours
ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning
twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading
at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he
and Julia had mistaken the time -- had slept the clock round and thought it
was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following
morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.
There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came into
the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more
subdued. Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance.
His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly
realised whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the
telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but
his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not
wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though
verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was
still recognisable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body
had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone
only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation.
The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines
of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was
the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to
Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge,
at a member of the Thought Police.
HE DID NOT KNOW where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love,
but there was no way of making certain.
He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white
porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low,
steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air
supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall,
broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan
with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever since they
had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away. But he was also
hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four
hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know,
probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on
his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected
movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But the craving for food
was growing upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.
He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
overalls. It was even possible -- he thought this because from time to time
something seemed to tickle his leg -- that there might be a sizeable bit
of crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear;
he slipped a hand into his pocket.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Hands out of
pockets in the cells!'
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being brought
here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary
prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how
long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no
daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling
place. They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in,
but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people.
The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political
prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much
interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference
in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party
prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals
seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards,
fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene
words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious
hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when
it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on
good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle
cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the
common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which
most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the
camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes.
There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled
from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common
criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort
of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description:
drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes.
Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine to
suppress them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great
tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her
struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold
of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which she had
been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost
breaking his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself upright and followed
them out with a yell of 'F------ bastards!' Then, noticing that she was
sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.
'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers
put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?' She paused, patted
her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.'
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes. 'Never keep it
down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.'
She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately
to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him
towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.
'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.
'Smith,' said Winston.
'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith too. Why,' she
added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!'
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and
physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty
years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary
criminals ignored the Party prisoners. 'The polits,' they called
them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party prisoners seemed
terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another.
Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together
on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered
words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one',
which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here. The dull
pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes
worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When it grew
worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food. When
it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw
the things that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart
galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on his
elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself grovelling on the
floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia.
He could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her;
but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt
no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her.
He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know
that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to
save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would send the razor
blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before the guard
could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a sort of
burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone.
Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the
smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even
if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment,
accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was
torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the
walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost count at
some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what time
of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight
outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness.
In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out.
It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to
recognise the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows.
His cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall;
it might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself
mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his
body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened with
a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He motioned
to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The poet
Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut again.
Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side to side, as though
having some idea that there was another door to go out of, and then began to
wander up and down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's presence.
His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above the level
of Winston's head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out
of the holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a shave.
A scrubby beard covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of
ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous movements.
Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy. He must speak
to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was even
conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
'Ampleforth,' he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled.
His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!'
'What are you in for?'
'To tell you the truth -----' He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite
Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there not?' he said.
'And have you committed it?'
'Apparently I have.'
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment,
as though trying to remember something.
'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recall one
instance -- a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly.
We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed
the word "God" to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!' he
added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It was
impossible to change the line. The rhyme was "rod". Do you realise that
there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language? For days
I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.'
The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for
a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy
of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt
and scrubby hair.
'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English
poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks
rhymes?'
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston. Nor, in the
circumstances, did it strike him as very important or interesting.
'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said.
Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought about it.
They arrested me -- it could be two days ago -- perhaps three.' His eyes
flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window
somewhere. 'There is no difference between night and day in this place.
I do not see how one can calculate the time.'
They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without apparent reason,
a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent. Winston sat quietly, his
hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench,
fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one knee,
then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time
passed. Twenty minutes, an hour -- it was difficult to judge. Once more
there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's entrails contracted. Soon,
very soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots would
mean that his own turn had come.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell.
With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
'Room 101,' he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely
perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's belly had
revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball
falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had only six
thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the
screaming; O'Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his
entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave
of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons
walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
You here!' he said.
Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor
surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently
unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was
apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look,
as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the
middle distance.
'What are you in for?' said Winston.
'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice
implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous
horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite
Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot
me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done
anything -- only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a
fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't
they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way.
Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party,
didn't I? I'll get off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten
years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp.
They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?'
'Are you guilty?' said Winston.
'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the
telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man,
do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly
sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,'
he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without
your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep!
Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit --
never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started
talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to
utter an obscenity.
'"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again,
it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went
any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before
the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me
before it was too late."'
'Who denounced you?' said Winston.
'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride.
'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to
the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?
I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows
I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.'
He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times, casting a
longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts.
'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's the waiting.'
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his
face with his hands.
'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Uncover
your face. No faces covered in the cells.'
Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and
abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and the
cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went, mysteriously. One, a
woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel
and turn a different colour when she heard the words. A time came when,
if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or
if it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six
prisoners in the cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston
there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large,
harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that
it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked
away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and
turned quickly away again when he caught anyone's eye.
The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent
a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man
who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was
startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of
its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the
eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or
something.
The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston. Winston
did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as
vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes.
Suddenly he realised what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation.
The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the
cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench.
The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man,
then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible
attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up,
waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls,
and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced
man.
There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man
jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands
behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused
the gift.
'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of
bread!'
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the door.
Make no movement.'
The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering
uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and
stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with
enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless man,
and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with
all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth.
The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body
was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory
seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from
his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed
unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself
unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the
two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees.
The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his
face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless
cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of it.
From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his overalls.
His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever,
as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised him for
his humiliation.
The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the
skull-faced man.
'Room 101,' he said.
There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side. The man had actually
flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.
'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place!
Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know?
There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and
I'll confess straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it -- anything!
Not room 101!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have
believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.
'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me for weeks. Finish
it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five
years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is
and I'll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do
to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six
years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in
front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with
some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes
settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He flung out a lean arm.
'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!' he shouted. 'You didn't
hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and
I'll tell you every word of it. He's the one that's against the
Party, not me.' The guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a
shriek. 'You didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wrong with
the telescreen. He's the one you want. Take him, not me!'
The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just at
this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one
of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordless
howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose,
but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds
they were hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on
their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the
man had no breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a
different kind of cry. A kick from a guard's boot had broken the fingers
of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his
crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was
taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was
alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow
bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the
telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had
dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it,
but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and
evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a
sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. He would get up
because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit
down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of
staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under
control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of
O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might
arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought
of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he.
She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He thought: 'If I could
save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that
was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought
to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything,
except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you
were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain
should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in.
Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all
caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the
presence of the telescreen.
'They've got you too!' he cried.
'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful
irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested
guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
'You know this, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive yourself.
You did know it -- you have always known it.'
Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of
that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might
fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on
the elbow -----
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the
stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow
light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!
The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him.
The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was
answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase
of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain
there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed
on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.
He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was
higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he
could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his
face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently.
At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic
syringe.
Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually.
He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite
different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he
had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested
him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not
continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of
consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again
after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks
or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was
to realise that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine
interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a
long range of crimes -- espionage, sabotage, and the like -- to which
everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a
formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten,
how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there
were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes
it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods,
sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor,
as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless,
hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more
kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin,
in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times
when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed
to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not
force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so
forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began,
when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him
pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other
times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every
word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times
when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: 'I will confess,
but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more
kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.' Sometimes
he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes
on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and
then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery.
He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor.
He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the
wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes
coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop
his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his
pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers
over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to
make him sleep.
The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror
to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were
unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms
but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and
flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted
-- he thought, he could not be sure -- ten or twelve hours at a stretch.
These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but
it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung
his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to
urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water;
but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of
arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning
that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for
him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of
lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as
from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a
single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened
at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes
they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in
the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even
now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo
the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears.
In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots
and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that
signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out
what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the
bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party
members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public
funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that
he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968.
He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism,
and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although
he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive.
He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and
had been a member of an underground organisation which had included almost
every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything
and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true
that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there
was no distinction between the thought and the deed.
There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind
disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.
He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he
could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of
instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and
more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes,
and was swallowed up.
He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights.
A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy
boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in,
followed by two guards.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston
either; he was looking only at the dials.
He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious,
golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the
top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had
succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire
history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the
guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia,
Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with
laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had
somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right,
there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare,
understood, forgiven.
He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had
heard O'Brien's voice. All through his interrogation, although he had
never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just
out of sight. It was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who
set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him.
It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should
have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the
drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and
suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was
the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once -- Winston could not remember
whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment
of wakefulness -- a voice murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you
are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the
turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.'
He was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice; but it was the same
voice that had said to him, 'We shall meet in the place where there
is no darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago.
He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of
blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually
materialised round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move.
His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head
was gripped in some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and
rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with
pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than
Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under his
hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.
'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would be here.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of
pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see
what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being
done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening, or
whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched
out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain
had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear
that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard
through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his face, 'that in another moment
something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your
backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart
and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking,
is it not, Winston?'
Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial.
The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.
'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the numbers on this dial
run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation,
that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to
whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate
in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will
cry out with pain, instantly. Do you understand that?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles
thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice
was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a
priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because you are worth
trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have
known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are
mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to
remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events
which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured
yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of
the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are
clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we
will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?'
'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.'
'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,
has it not?'
Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not
speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.
'The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think
you remember.'
'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at
war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was
against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that -----'
O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion
indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford -- men who were executed for treachery and
sabotage after making the fullest possible confession -- were not guilty of
the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen
unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were
false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination.
You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a
photograph something like this.'
An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For
perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was
a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the
photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon
eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before
his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably
he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half
of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any
direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted
was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
'It exists!' he cried.
'No,' said O'Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall.
O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling
away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame.
O'Brien turned away from the wall.
'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist.
It never existed.'
'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it.
You remember it.'
'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly
helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it
would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien
had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have
forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting.
How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic
dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that
defeated him.
O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the
air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said.
'Repeat it, if you please.'
'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.
'"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his
head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has
real existence?'
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted
towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the
answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he
believed to be the true one.
O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said.
'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence.
I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space?
Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the
past is still happening?'
'No.'
'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'
'In records. It is written down.'
'In records. And -----?'
'In the mind. In human memories.'
'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records,
and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'
'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again
momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside
oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'
O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not controlled it. That is
what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility,
in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the
price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only
the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is
something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe
that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into
thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the
same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual
mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the
mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party
holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except
by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have
got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort
of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.'
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to
sink in.
'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb
hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to
fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore
into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his
teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still
extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly
eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy,
stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up
before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate,
but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are
four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had
perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his
body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably,
his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a
moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy
arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector,
that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source,
and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front
of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not
easy to become sane.'
He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but
the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely
weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat,
who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white
coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid
an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O'Brien.
'Again,' said O'Brien.
The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy,
seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers
were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay
alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was
crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien
had drawn back the lever.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could.
I am trying to see five.'
'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?'
'Really to see them.'
'Again,' said O'Brien.
Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not intermittently
remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a
forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and
out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying
to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was
impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious
identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened
his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing.
Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in
either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again.
Four, five, six -- in all honesty I don't know.'
'Better,' said O'Brien.
A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful,
healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already
half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien.
At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart
seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out
a hand and laid it on O'Brien's arm. He had never loved him so deeply as
at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old
feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend
or an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien
had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was
certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some
sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or
other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place
where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looking down at him with an
expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind.
When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.
'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his
face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to
extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have
brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand,
Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have
committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is
all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
Do you understand what I mean by that?'
He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its
nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it
was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston's
heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into
the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of
sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took
a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no
martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In
the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out
to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it
burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because
the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while
they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were
unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true
beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame
to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there
were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis
and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly
than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned
from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not
make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they
deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down
by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with
abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again.
The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten.
Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that
they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes
of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make
them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us.
You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.
Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the
stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the
stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not
a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well
as in the future. You will never have existed.'
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness.
O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud.
His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly,
so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference -- in
that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is
what you were thinking, was it not?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are
a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are
different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with
negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally
you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy
the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy
him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn
all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in
appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves
before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should
exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even
in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the
heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting
in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked
up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But
we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old
despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou
shalt". Our command is "Thou art". No one whom we bring to this
place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those
three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed -- Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them down. I took part in
their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering,
grovelling, weeping -- and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only
with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the
shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they
had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved
him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their
minds were still clean.'
His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm,
was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a
hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet
graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision.
O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that
he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known,
examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But
in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he,
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice
had grown stern again.
'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely
you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And
even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still
you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from
which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you
could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be
capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living,
or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow.
We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of
some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head.
O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a
level with Winston's.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in the
white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against
Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain.
O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an
explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There
was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only
prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing
happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that
position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something
had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he
remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognised the face that
was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch
of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is
Oceania at war with?'
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was
a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was
at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there
was any war.
'I don't remember.'
'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?'
'Yes.'
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your
life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history,
the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you
remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been
condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece
of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed.
You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the
very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers.
Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind
changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything
was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came
crowding back again. But there had been a moment -- he did not know how
long, thirty seconds, perhaps -- of luminous certainty, when each new
suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become
absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as
five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O'Brien had
dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember
it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when
one was in effect a different person.
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the
man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a
syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner
he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it did not matter
whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who
understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking
to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that
you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can
ask me a few questions, if you choose.'
'Any question I like?'
'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
'It is switched off. What is your first question?'
'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately --
unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly.
You would hardly recognise her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness,
her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness -- everything has been
burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.'
'You tortured her?'
O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.
'Does Big Brother exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of
the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?'
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could
imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were
nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, 'You do
not exist', contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so?
His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with
which O'Brien would demolish him.
'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity.
I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular
point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point
simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?'
'It is of no importance. He exists.'
'Will Big Brother ever die?'
'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'
'Does the Brotherhood exist?'
'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when
we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still
you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No.
As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.'
Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had
not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got
to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There
was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to
wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what
I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:
'What is in Room 101?'
The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drily:
'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in
Room 101.'
He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was
at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly
into deep sleep.
'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is
learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for
you to enter upon the second stage.'
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were
looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a
little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from
the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could
evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through
a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many
sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a
long, indefinite time -- weeks, possibly -- and the intervals between the
sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered -- you have even
asked me -- why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble
on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially
the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived
in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary,
"I understand : I do not understand why"? It was when
you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read
the book, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell
you anything that you did not know already?'
'You have read it?' said Winston.
'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is
produced individually, as you know.'
'Is it true, what it says?'
'As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret
accumulation of knowledge -- a gradual spread of enlightenment -- ultimately
a proletarian rebellion -- the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself
that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will
never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not
have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished
any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way
in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever.
Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'
He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get
back to the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough
how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why
we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?
Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of
weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come
back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That
the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of
the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail,
cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and
must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger
than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and
happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect
doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of
others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that
when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face.
O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what
the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings
lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had
understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was
justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston,
against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe
that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore -----'
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body.
O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than
to say a thing like that.'
He pulled the lever back and continued:
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party
seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good
of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long
life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will
understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who
resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the
Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never
had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps
they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited
time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings
would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means,
it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a
revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of
O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of
intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself
helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin
sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
the worn face nearer.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are
thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the
decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual
is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
Do you die when you cut your fingernails?'
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand
in his pocket.
'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present
power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to
gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is
that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he
ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery".
Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom.
Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because
every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his
identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the
Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to
realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body -- but,
above all, over the mind. Power over matter -- external reality, as you
would call it -- is not important. Already our control over matter is
absolute.'
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise
himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his
body painfully.
'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the
climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death -----'
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because
we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees,
Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation
-- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to.
I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of
those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws
of Nature.'
'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about
Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania
is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny -- helpless!
How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was
uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older?
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century
biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he
could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'
'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them
are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'
'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire
a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could
blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it.'
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say
anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is
beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near
or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was
in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind --
surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it
not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it,
which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's
mouth as he looked down at him.
'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point.
The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken.
This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a
different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,'
he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight
for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused,
and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a
promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his
own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world
will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they
were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
Everything else we shall destroy -- everything. Already we are breaking
down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.
We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man,
and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend
any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from
a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual
formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.
Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except
loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over
a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When
we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be
no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will
be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing
subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything.
His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so
that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you
have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue,
and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of
terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the
less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at
every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and
yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you
during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after
generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here
at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end
utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.
That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after
victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing,
pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realise
what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than
understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said
weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described.
It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty.
It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit
suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting
than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we
quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what
difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he
was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist
the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror
of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will
defeat you. Life will defeat you.'
'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there
is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and
will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely
malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the
proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of
your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party.
The others are outside -- irrelevant.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will
see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it
should?'
'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something
in the universe -- I don't know, some spirit, some principle -- that you
will never overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct;
we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone?
You are outside history, you are non-existent.' His manner changed and he
said more harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with
our lies and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment
Winston recognised one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the
conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled
himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien
made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration
was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor
and stood up unsteadily.
'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human
spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip
fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember
whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at
one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish
rags, just recognisable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them
to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of
the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had
broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall
see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured,
skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was
frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved
closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of
its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running
back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones
above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the
mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to
him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it
registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially
bald. For the first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well,
but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle
of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here
and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the
ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling
off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body.
The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had
shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what
O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine
was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a
cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the
weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of
a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.
'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face -- the face of a
member of the Inner Party -- looks old and worn. What do you think of your
own face?'
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime all
over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting
running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably
you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can
make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck
like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since
you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls.
Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open
your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came
to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!'
He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb
and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had
wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.
'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces. What are you?
A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you
see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that
is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.'
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had
not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in
his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.
Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity
for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had
collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears.
He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy
underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop
himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you
choose. Everything depends on yourself.'
'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'
'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when
you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first
act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.'
He paused, and then went on:
'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what
your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there
can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and
insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in
your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has
not happened to you?'
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his
eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is
perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.'
The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy,
flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent!
Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on
earth would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia. For
what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture?
He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her character,
her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that
had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him,
their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against
the Party -- everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the
word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings
towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what he meant without
the need for explanation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case.
But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end
we shall shoot you.'
He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it
was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell
was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a
pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had
given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently
in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given
him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his
varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants
of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep
count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so,
since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was
getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he
wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food
was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even
a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard
who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to
smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for
a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner.
At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely
torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without
stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which
it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to
sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference,
except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all
through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden
Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his
mother, with Julia, with O'Brien -- not doing anything, merely sitting in
the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had when he was
awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of
intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was
not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be
alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be
clean all over, was completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse
to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength
gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there, trying to
make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder
and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was
growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees.
After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly.
In a little while he could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the
cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more
elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things
he could not do. He could not move out of a walk, he could not hold his
stool out at arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling
over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that with agonizing pains
in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He
lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was
hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a few more
days -- a few more mealtimes -- even that feat was accomplished. A time
came when he could do it six times running. He began to grow actually
proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also
was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his
bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back
at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against
the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the
task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had
been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the
moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love -- and yes, even during those
minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the
telescreen told them what to do -- he had grasped the frivolity, the
shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the
Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him
like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word
spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had
not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his
diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him,
shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself.
Yes, even. ... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides,
the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal,
collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check
its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of
learning to think as they thought. Only -----!
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down
the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy
capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from
something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came
next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it,
it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come
of its own accord. He wrote:
GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been
altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war
with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes
they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved
their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered
remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of
self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else
followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards
however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and
go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except
your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly
knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except -----!
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The
law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could
float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he
thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think
I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged
wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind:
'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed
the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that
somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real'
things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have
we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind.
Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger
of succumbing to it. He realised, nevertheless, that it ought never to
have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a
dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with
propositions -- 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that
ice is heavier than water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy.
It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical
problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make
five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of
athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use
of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would
shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he
knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer.
It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years
in solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might
release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible
that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation
would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death
never came at an expected moment. The tradition -- the unspoken tradition:
somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said -- was that they shot
you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you
walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day -- but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it
was in the middle of the night: once -- he fell into a strange, blissful
reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew
that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed
out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more
pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily,
with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was
not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had
seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden
Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture.
He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine
on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring,
and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green
pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his
backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence.
She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though
she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her
far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he
knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done?
How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not
let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not
known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them.
He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had
hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had
retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped
to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but
he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that -- O'Brien would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand
over his face, trying to familiarise himself with the new shape. There were
deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened.
Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete
new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did
not know what your face looked like. In any case, mere control of the
features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want
to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the
while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge
into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now
onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right.
And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball
of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of
him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would
happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It
was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be
enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the
changing of a line in his face -- suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an
enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the
bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in
their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual
discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself.
He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most
horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous
face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it
as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that
followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord.
What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung
open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were
the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his
strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That was stupid.
Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.'
He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you.
It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me,
Winston -- and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect
a lie -- tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?'
'I hate him.'
'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step.
You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.'
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
'Room 101,' he said.
At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know,
whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight
differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him
were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien
was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep
down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed
his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables
straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a
metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was
strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not
even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to
look straight in front of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in.
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that
you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in
Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire,
a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table.
Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could
not see what the thing was.
'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to
individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning,
or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is
some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the
thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for
carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a
fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four
metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into
two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They
were rats.
'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be
rats.'
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed
through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at
this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly
sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't,
you couldn't! It's impossible.'
'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur
in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a
roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side
of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it
into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'
'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice.
'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'
O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish
manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the
distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind
Winston's back.
'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when
a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.
But for everyone there is something unendurable -- something that cannot be
contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling
from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up
from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is
merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats.
For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot
withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.'
'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?'
O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table.
He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood
singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness.
He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with
sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him. They were
enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and
fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have
heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some
streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five
minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they
will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They
show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston
from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each
other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair.
That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it.
There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself
loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head,
was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a
metre from Winston's face.
'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the
construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no
exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever
seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they
burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of
shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head.
But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with
a split second left -- to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty
odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of
nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone
black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out
of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save
himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another
human being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of
anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face.
The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down,
the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink
hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see
the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him.
He was blind, helpless, mindless.
'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as
didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then
-- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late,
perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world
there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment
-- one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.
And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you
do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia!
Not me!'
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was
still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through
the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through
the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars -- always
away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien
was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire
against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard
another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and
not open.
The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through
a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen.
A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and
again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came
and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from
another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured
with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.
Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming
out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be
a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African
front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying
about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at
terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite
area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a
battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did
not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a
question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war,
the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated
excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about
the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for
more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at
a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The
stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough
in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was
worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day,
was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those -----
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible
he never visualised them. They were something that he was half-aware of,
hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin
rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they
released him, and had regained his old colour -- indeed, more than regained
it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely
red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden,
brought the chessboard and the current issue of the Times, with the
page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass
was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to
give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for
him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he
had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him.
He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they
presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but
he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made
no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of
money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his
old job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised
his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a
brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter,
it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by ninety-eight per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky
ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two
moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always
mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without
exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of
the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying
triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm
power. White always mates.
The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much
graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at
fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance.
Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinkling music struck up
again.
Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct
told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts
of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and
out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming
across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa
like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in
some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in
his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board.
There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing
southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in
their rear, cutting their communications by land and sea. He felt that by
willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was
necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of
Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut
Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision
of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath.
An extraordinary medley of feeling -- but it was not a medley, exactly;
rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say
which layer was undermost -- struggled inside him.
The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the
moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem.
His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his
finger in the dust on the table:
2 + 2 = 5
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.
'What happens to you here is for ever,' O'Brien had said. That was
a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never
recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterised out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it.
He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his
doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them
had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the
Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all
the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses
which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He was
hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten
metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in some
ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then he
turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger,
nobody would take any interest in him. She did not speak. She walked
obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then
seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in
among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or
as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind
whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking
crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides,
they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have
lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His
flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever
to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew
now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long
scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that
was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a
surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and
had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by
its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone
than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture
of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back
across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It
was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered
whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it
was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept
squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side
but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She
moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig.
Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't
stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me,
do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend,
afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them
stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it
happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself,
and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to
happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All
you care about is yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any
longer.'
'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'
There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their
thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing
to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said
something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
'We must meet again,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.'
He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her.
They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but
walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her.
He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube
station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed
pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to
get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had
never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision
of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the
ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment,
not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from
her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up,
then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he
had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but
already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures
might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer
recognisable from behind.
At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean it.' He had
meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished
that she and not he should be delivered over to the -----
Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen.
A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then
-- perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking
on the semblance of sound -- a voice was singing:
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass
was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more
horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he
swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that
sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.
When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery
mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible
even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and
teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat
with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From
fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared
what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him.
Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking
office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called
work. He had been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which
had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with minor
difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the
Newspeak Dictionary. They were engaged in producing something called an
Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never
definitely found out. It was something to do with the question of whether
commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others
on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. There were days
when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to
one another that there was not really anything to be done. But there were
other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a
tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda
which were never finished -- when the argument as to what they were
supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with
subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels -- threats,
even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go
out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with
extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again.
The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map
of Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram:
a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally
eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked
up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the
second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up
the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently
not the right move, because -----
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a
vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on
the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was
sitting opposite him and also laughing.
It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of
reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his
earlier affection for her had temporarily revived. He remembered the day
well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane
and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two
children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined
and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulling
everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours
banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the
end his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'll buy you a toy. A lovely
toy -- you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little
general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with
a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still
remember the smell of the damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit.
The board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and
without interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat
down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with
laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then
came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point.
They played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster,
laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had
all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was
troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as
one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not
happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight
again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a
clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory!
It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of
electric drill ran through the cafe. Even the waiters had started and
pricked up their ears.
The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an
excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started
it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had
run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was
issuing from the telescreen to realise that it had all happened, as he had
foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in
the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black.
Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din:
'Vast strategic manoeuvre -- perfect co-ordination -- utter rout -- half
a million prisoners -- complete demoralisation -- control of the whole of
Africa -- bring the war within measurable distance of its end -- victory
-- greatest victory in human history -- victory, victory, victory!'
Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements. He had not
stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running,
he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again
at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world!
The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He
thought how ten minutes ago -- yes, only ten minutes -- there had still
been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the
front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army
that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the
Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never
happened, until this moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners
and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little.
The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with
the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention
as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer.
He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul
white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything,
implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor,
with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back.
The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
NEWSPEAK was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet
the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984
there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of
communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the
Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which
could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak
would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should
call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all
Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions
more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary,
that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for
the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to
make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when
Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a
heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of
Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is
dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and
often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could
properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly
by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable
words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and
so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single
example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only
be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field
is free from weeds'. It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically
free' or 'intellectually free' since political and intellectual freedom no
longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction
of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be
dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend
but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly
assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though
many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words,
would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak
words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary,
the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.
It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical
peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to
the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
The A vocabulary: The A vocabulary consisted of the
words needed for the business of everyday life -- for such things as eating,
drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs,
riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed
almost entirely of words that we already possess words like hit,
run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field
-- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number
was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined.
All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far
as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato
sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been
quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for
political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express
simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical
actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of
these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of
speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very
abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as
verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when
they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of
itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word
thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken
by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological
principle was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was
chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb
of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them
was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as
cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb
knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to
the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus for example,
speedful meant 'rapid' and speedwise meant 'quickly'.
Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong,
big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number
was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival
meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of
the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending
in -wise: the -wise termination was invariable. The word
well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.
In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in
the language -- could be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could
be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis,
doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant 'warm', while
pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, 'very cold'
and 'superlatively cold'. It was also possible, as in present-day English,
to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as
ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods
it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary.
Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word
as bad, since the required meaning was equally well -- indeed,
better-expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case
where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of
them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by
unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity.
Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions
followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past
participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of
steal was stealed, the preterite of think was
thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as
swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc.,
being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -S or -ES
as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life,
were man, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives
was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good,
gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more,
most formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly
were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the
auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that
whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall,
should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by
will and would. There were also certain irregularities in
word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word
which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was
held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally therefore, for the
sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic
formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in
connection with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was
attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
The B vocabulary: The B vocabulary consisted of words
which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that
is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were
intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.
Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult
to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into
Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually
demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones.
The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of
ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible
than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words. [Compound words such as
speakwrite, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these
were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour.]
They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together
in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a
noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single
example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or,
if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'.
This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past
participle, goodthinked; present participle, good-thinking;
adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun,
goodthinker.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of
which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in
any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while
indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime),
for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol
(Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had
lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing
euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in
the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue,
Minipax, and Miniluv, were, respectively, Minitruthful,
Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful,
-paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce.
In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in
exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilised meanings, barely intelligible to
anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example,
such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers
unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this
in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution
cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English
Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in
order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one
would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in
addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the
full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink,
which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence.
But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink
was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These
words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until
they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they
were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be
scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of
the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented
them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what
ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which
had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of
convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them.
Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality,
internationalism, democracy, science, and
religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered
them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves
round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in
the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round
the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single
word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What
was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient
Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his
own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were
called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he
knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the
commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names
or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party
member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague,
generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.
His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak
words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity).
Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered
fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and,
in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no
need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable,
and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which
consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give
specialised names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen
had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex -- that is
to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of
begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman:
all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow
a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical:
beyond that point the necessary words were non-existent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were
euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp)
or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the
exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand,
displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of
Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy
entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.
Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when
applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in addition
there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere
abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their
meaning, but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political
significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every
organisation, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or
public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is,
a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that
would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for
example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called
Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the
Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was
not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades
of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the
characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed
that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in
totalitarian countries and totalitarian organisations. Examples were such
words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecor,
Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were
instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was
perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered
its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise
cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call
up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades,
Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other
hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organisation and a well-defined body of
doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognised, and as limited
in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be
uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International
is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In
the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are
fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth.
This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible,
but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word
easily pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude
of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it
seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for
political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which
could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the
speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from
the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably
these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed,
seccrime, loycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel,
thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or three
syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable
and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at
once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The
intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not
ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to
make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the
correct opinions as automatically as a machine-gun spraying forth bullets.
His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost
foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound
and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of
Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our
own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were
constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other
languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year.
Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller
the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate
speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at
all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak,
meaning 'to quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B
vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the
opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but
praise, and when 'The Times' referred to one of the orators of the Party
as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued
compliment.
The C vocabulary: The C vocabulary supplementary to
the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These
resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the
same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip
them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as
the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any
currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific
worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted
to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words
occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all
lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as
a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular
branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it
could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word
Ingsoc.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression
of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.
It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species
of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say Big
Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely
conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned
argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to
Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be
named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups
of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use
Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the
words back into Oldspeak. For example, all mans are equal was a
possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which all men
are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a
grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth -- i.e. that all men
are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality
no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal
means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using
Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it
was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to
avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility
of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as
his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the
secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant
'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of
chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen
and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be
beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore
unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the
distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more
pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more
rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the
past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but
fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly
censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was
possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced
to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible
to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred
to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already
orthodox (goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency.
In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could
be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be
subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well
as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration
of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That,
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ...
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while
keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to
doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word
crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological
translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric
on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being
transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to
preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time
bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc.
Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and
some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had
been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of
the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were
a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would
be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.
There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature --
indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated
in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary
work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed
for so late a date as 2050.
II
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
III
IV
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints
verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood
refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood
refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
The reporting for Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of
December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to
non-existent persons. Re-write it in full and submit your draft to higher
authority before filing.
V
VI
VII
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
VIII
'Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St Clement's,
'You owe me three farthings,' say the bells of St Martins's -----
'Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St Clement's,
'You owe me three farthings,' say the -----
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
PART II
I
II
III
IV
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -----'
V
VI
VII
VIII
Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained
item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed
constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop
end message.
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'
IX
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Ignorance is Strength
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he
was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no
ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover
the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room
itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled
deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss,
it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at
a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:
War is Peace
Ignorance is Strength
X
'It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
'They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
PART III
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me -----'
THE END
Appendix
THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK