George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 4
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
Chapter 4
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 showpieces 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment