George Orwell's 1984 - Chapter 3
Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic
purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers
political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian,
bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find
individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of
modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the
language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of
hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks
among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
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.
[ to be continued with Chapter 4 ]
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