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 Free
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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 0 1984
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
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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 1984
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 Free
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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,
darkchinned 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, ineffec-4
1984
tual, 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
teleprogrammes 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
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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 1984
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 Free
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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 8 1984
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 Free
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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 nineteen
he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted
by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twen-0
1984
ty-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-houra-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
authentical-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
ly, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius
Caesar.1984
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ