George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 6
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
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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.
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