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
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 one-hundred-and-forty-five
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 one-hundred-and-forty-five
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:
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. To-day 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 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 non-smoker,
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, thought-criminals, 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.