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 do 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
emphasized 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
blackmoustachio'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 Ninth 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 scrutinized.
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 him 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 willow-herb 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(1) — was startlingly different from any other object in
sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete,
soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its 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 all 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
round 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 on to 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, quarto-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 there 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 that 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 frowsy 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 twenty-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 the 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 for years. At this moment, however,
even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose 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 helicopters 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 when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged 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 in 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
realized, 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 carrying 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 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 community 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 gave 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 feel 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
resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming — in some
indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman
offering his snuffbox. 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
prize-fighter'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
wrist-watch, 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 cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with
dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a
hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous 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 on to 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 principal 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 sheep-like 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 marched 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 sheep-like
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, an 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, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated 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, on the
contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any
pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, 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 an 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 his
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 hordes 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 civilization.
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 realized 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. Nobody 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 Saviour!’ 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!...’ — 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 much 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 sub-human 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 of 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 resettling 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 — yes, 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
conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls — once, even, when two
strangers met, a small movement of the hand 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.
He could not help
feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those 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 the 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: vapourized
was the usual word.
For a moment he
was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't 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 as
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.
____
1) Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix. [back]
As he put his hand to 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 realized, 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 ‘comrade’ —
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
exercise-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 the 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 examined 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 on 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
organizing 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 the 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 into
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. Parsons” 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 his leave
of Mrs. Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the
passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It
was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in
time to see Mrs. Parsons 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
lceland and the Faroe lslands.
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 organizations 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 its 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 the 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 in 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 authorized
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 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 grammes 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
to 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 mutability 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 dominion 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 to 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
wrappings 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 centimetres 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 to vapour. Only
the Thought Police would read what he had 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 nobody 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 heritage. 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 every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had
recognized 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 the 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 young 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 him 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 now 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 very 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 them across the field. With what seemed a single
movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully 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 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of
pyjamas was 600 — 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 he 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 effort 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! 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 arms 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 quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without
being able to recapture their 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 fairly 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 early 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, down into some
place 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 realized 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 also 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 example, 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
hand 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 controls 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
impossible 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
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 by 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 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 an 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 than 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,
comrades! 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 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 a 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:
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
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 lists 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 happened. 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 Ninth
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 himself 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 files 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
reinscribed 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
on 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 superseded 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 rewritten a dozen times still stood on the
files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.
Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably
reissued 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 nonsense for another.
Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything
in the real world, not even the kind of connexion 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 145 million pairs. The actual
output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the
forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for
the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two
millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145
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, there 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 in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but
included in it there 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 ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
Winston read
through the offending article. Big Brother's Order for the Day, it seemed, had
been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization 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 reappearance
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
its 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
triumph of over-production in the Ninth 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 a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him
into existence.
Winston thought
for a moment, then 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 early, 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 organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nine teen 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 despatches, he had weighted his
body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water,
despatches 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 nonsmoker, 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 hunting-down of spies, saboteurs,
thoughtcriminals, 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 job 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 could 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 engaged 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 guilty 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 end 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, and
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, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his
head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny 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. On to 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 on to 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 pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
Neither of them spoke again till 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 in
the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid
of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the 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-coloured 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 latest, not a single human being will be alive who
could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
‘Except—’
began Winston doubtfully, and he 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 divined 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. Chaucer, 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 that 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 a 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 against 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 principles 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 Café, haunt of painters and
musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the
Chestnut Tree Café, 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 than 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 was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the
blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing 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 in the 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 on to 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 abstractedly, 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
when workers marched out of factories and offices 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 100 grammes a week it was
seldom possible to fill a pipe 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 dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled 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, grime 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, one had 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 kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round
the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly
even if dressed otherwise than in 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 inscrutable 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 scuttle so nimbly
through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they,
too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with 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 dark hair.
She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The
instant 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 the table when he arrived, or had
come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes 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 whether he
was shouting loudly 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 our 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 one 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 system. 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 to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a
brief-case. 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 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 he still was married, so far as he knew his
wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe again 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 prostitutes 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 women 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 eroticism 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 one
another. The only recognized 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 organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex
League, which advocated 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 as 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 her
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 simultaneously pushing
him away with all her strength. The rigidlty 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 should 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 regulariy,
whenever it was not impossible. She even used 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 afterwards 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 deep 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
feeling 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 conscious 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 got to be
written down, it had got 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 old 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 strong 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 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 inflexion 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 them 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 the 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 almost 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 the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of
fact), children had 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
subjection, 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 horizon 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 happened 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: ‘Proles and animals are free.’
Winston reached
down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again.
The thing you invariably 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 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 all 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 them 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 conditions 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 its
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 waste-pipe.
He reached down
and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears
with statistics proving that 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 40 per cent of adult
proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only
been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only
160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 — 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 possessed — 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 at 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 confession 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 had 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, reinstated 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
Café. 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 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 speciality of the café. 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 — even on the
barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their 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
café 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 half 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:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
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 on to 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 crimes
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 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 Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then
there had been other changes — two, three, he could not remember how many. Very
likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten 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 clearly 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 round the sun; today, to believe that the past
is inalterable. 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 also be wrong.
He picked up the
children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed
its frontispiece. 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 philosophy. 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 suddenly 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 attendances 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-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the
pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles
of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark
doorways, and down narrow alley-ways 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
curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across thelr
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
criticize,” 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 a street like this. Indeed, it was
unwise to be seen 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 unusual 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'ead! 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 rockets 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 on to 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 200 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 around 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 house-front 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 shoulder. 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 near 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
whom the Lottery was the principal 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 intercommunication 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 the 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 any one 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 whitestubbled 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 supposed not 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
knot 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 fear of 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 a
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 surprisingly rapid 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 really 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 come 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'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired for the
occasion, 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 'yenas — 'e definitely called 'em 'yenas.
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
to, 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 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 — terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night — and
I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Quite a 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, “Why can't you look where you're going?” 'e says. I say, “Ju think you've bought the bleeding
pavement?” '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
helplessness 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 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 philosophical air, as though the
beer had mellowed him.
‘I know
what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me to say as I'd sooner 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. Nor 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 workmate, 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 got 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 head there hung three discoloured metal balls which
looked as if 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
recognized 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 softpalmed hand. ‘You see 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 floorspace 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 snuffboxes, 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 rainwater, 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, rainwatery 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 realized 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 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 arm-chair 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 holdlng 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 nostalgia, 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 arm-chair 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 gateleg
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 Danes, 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 on I don't remember, but I do know it
ended up, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here
comes a chopper to chop off your head.” It was a 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
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
was 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!
‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St. Clement's,
‘You owe me three farthings,’ say the bells of St. Martin's —
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, waxwork tableaux
illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
‘St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ supplemented the old man, ‘though
I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those 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 shop-front — 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. Martin'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 reconnoitring 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 Danes, take it out of its frame, and
carry it home concealed 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 on to the
pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had
even started humming to an improvised tune —
‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St. Clement's,
‘You owe me three farthings,’ say the —
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 recognizing 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, then 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 when 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 act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one 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 lie 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 on to 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
the 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 dark hair. Four days had gone past
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 noticeable 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. In 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
have 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 straight in front of a telescreen when the thing
happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary
surprise, for in the 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 shocking 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 the 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 mere
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 might 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 suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police
at all, but from some kind of underground organization. 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.
e 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:
I love you.
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 a papier-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.
he afternoon 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 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 him 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 the 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 a 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 Departrnent 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 been changed on to 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 had absolutely 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 recognized, 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. Next day he took care to arrive early. Surely
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, swiftly-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
that 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.’
‘It 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 in 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 towards 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 still 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 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, both 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
clank-clank 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
arm right down to the elbow, were pressed 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 post, 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 had soon
stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. 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 than 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 Mogol 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 explored 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 steadily in front of them, and
instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully
at Winston out of 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 recognized;
besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting
attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to
get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the
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
‘in-laws’ in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold
of a little blackmarket butter.
The lane 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 to 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 London 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 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 recognizing 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 on to 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 his arms. At
the beginning he had no feeling except sheer 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 on to 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 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 on to 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 voluntary 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 Iook 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 alley-ways. 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, closebitten 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 spoken only 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 were 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
hideout. 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
civilization 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 of them 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 out for the discarded overalls and pulled
them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept 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. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you
looked closely. 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 demeanour had changed. She became alert and
business-like, 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 also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round
London, stored away from innumerable 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 could 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 in another hidlng-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 organized 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 realized 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 realized 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 gateleg 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
gateleg 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 recognized as babies” diapers. Whenever
her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
contralto:
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!
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:
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!
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 recognize 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 bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the
gateleg 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, rainwatery 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's
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:
‘You owe me three farthings,’ say the bells of St. Martin's,
‘When will you pay me?’ say the bells of Old Bailey —
‘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 gateleg 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
organized; 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, organized 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 submachine 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 harmonize
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, organized 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 realize 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 realized 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 absentmindedly
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 memorized 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 whitequilted 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 notloyal 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 realize 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:
‘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.’
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, realizing 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 organization 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 organization? 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 demoralization 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 memorizing 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 immedi ate 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 civilized, 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, recognizing 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 recognizing 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 organization 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 recognized 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:
‘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.
‘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,
halfburying 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:
THE THEORY AND
PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Winston began reading:
Chapter I.
Ignorance is Strength.
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...
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 etemity.
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:
Chapter III.
War is Peace.
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 civilization 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 centuury have now become dominant and are
consciously recognized 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
realize 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 indus triousness 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 synthesize 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 unihabited 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 recognized and not recognized 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 humand 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 realize 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
mechanization 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
neutralized 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 immunized 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 realization, 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 organized
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 realization. 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 superstates 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 realized 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 recognize 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:
Chapter I.
Ignorance is Strength.
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 equilibnum, 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 specialized 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 civilization.
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 realizable. 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 organizers,
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 centralized 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 twentyfour
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 realized 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 collectivization. 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 organization. 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 centralized 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 neutralize 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 organizations 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
characterize 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 scrutinized. 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
systematized 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:
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!
The driveling 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:
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!
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 fertilized 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 ws 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
realized 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 recognizable,
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 recognize 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
hirnself 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 realize 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 realized 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 realize 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
hirnself 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
organization 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 materialized 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 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 Inquisitlon. 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 recognized 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
recognize 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 how: 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?’
‘A 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 recognize 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 realize 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
realize 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 is 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 civilizations
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 realize 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 civilization 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 recognized 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 recognizable 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:
Then almost
without a pause he wrote beneath it:
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:
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 realized, 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 familiarize 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 café.
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 visualized
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 98 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 symbolize 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 tinking 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 comunications
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:
‘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, cauterized 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 Café, 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 halfhearted 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 recognizable 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:
Under the
spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me —
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’Il 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 café. 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 realize
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 demoralization — 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 longhoped-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.
1949