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Part
One
Chapter
7
If
there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only
there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population
of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it
had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying
one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just
possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever
assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant
a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional
whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become
conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.
They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking
off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow
morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?
And yet-!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street
when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices --
had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great
formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!'
that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart
had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are
breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see
a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of
a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the
doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general
despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared
that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were
wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always
difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The
successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to
make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round
the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having
more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst
of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down,
had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out
of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and
then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And
yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded
in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they
could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until
they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they
have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That,
he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of
the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated
the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously
oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged,
women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did
work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been
sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true
to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles
were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals,
by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little
was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So
long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities
were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned
loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style
of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral
pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went
to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period
of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged
at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical
work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours,
films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon
of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few
agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading
false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals
who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was
made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was
not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could
be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer
working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented,
as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being
without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific
grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The
great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their
homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There
was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world
of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers
of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals
they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism
of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished,
divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would
have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing
or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan
put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer.
It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to
was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution
had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's
history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began
copying a passage into the diary:
In
the old days [it ran], before the glorious Revolution,
London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a
dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to
eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots
on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no
older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters
who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed
them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among
all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful
houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty
servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists.
They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the
picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in
a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer,
shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat.
This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed
to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and
everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the
houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed
them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his
job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke
to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off
his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists
was called the King, and --
But
he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes,
the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the
Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe.
There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which
would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was
the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any
woman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true
that the average human being was better off now than he had been
before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the
mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the
conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other
time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity,
but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life,
if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies
that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that
the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through
dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out
sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal
set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering
-- a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying
weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in
perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same
slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting
-- three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality
was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and
fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision
of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed
up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face
and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people
today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations
-- that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier,
stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people
of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult
proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number
had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality
rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution
it had been 300 -- and so it went on. It was like a single equation
with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word
in the history books, even the things that one accepted without
question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have
been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature
as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was
forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed
-- after the event: that was what counted -- concrete, unmistakable
evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his
fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been
-- at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had
parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the
great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were
wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except
Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed
as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and
was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular
public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among
the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As
often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one
did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly
been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They
had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too,
the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder
of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership
of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened,
and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands
of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned,
reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures
but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject
articles in the Times, analysing the reasons for their defection
and promising to make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three
of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified
fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of
his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient
world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days
of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil
war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already
at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known
their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother.
But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute
certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once
fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the
end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not
wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were
sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves
which was the speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford
whose appearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once
been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to
inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now,
at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in the Times.
They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously
lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient
themes -- slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists
in top hats -- even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed
to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back
into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey
hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one
time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was
sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed
to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember
how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was
almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens.
The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking.
Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was
a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but
no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something
happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed,
and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it -- but
it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying,
jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then
a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under
the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The
three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the
first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not
knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford
had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they
had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their
release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes
over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed,
and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to
posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling
a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube
on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently
been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant
he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page
torn out of the Times of about ten years earlier -- the top
half of the page, so that it included the date -- and it contained
a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York.
Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the
caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that
on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from
a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia,
and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to
whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had
stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day;
but the whole story must be on record in countless other places
as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions
were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time
Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the
purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused
of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished
past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and
destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to
atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world
and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph
was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet
of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down
from the point of view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair
so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep
your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing
could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the
beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough
to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented
all the while by the fear that some accident -- a sudden draught
blowing across his desk, for instance -- would betray him. Then,
without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the
memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another
minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have
kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held
it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when
the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only
memory. Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered,
because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once
existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its
ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the
time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with
Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the
three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had
been other changes -- two, three, he could not remember how many.
Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until
the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance.
The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted
him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood
why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages
of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was
mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand
HOW: I do not understand WHY. He wondered, as he had many
times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps
a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been
a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun;
to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone
in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought
of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that
he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait
of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes
gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing
down upon you -- something that penetrated inside your skull, battering
against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading
you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the
Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have
to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim
sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely
the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality,
was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was
common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill
you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after
all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force
of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the
past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind
itself is controllable what then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord.
The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had
floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before,
that O'Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien
-- to O'Brien: it was like an interminable letter which no
one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person
and took its colour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he
thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with
which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the
subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much
less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he
was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.
Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws
do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported
fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking
to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
he wrote:
.....Freedom
is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is
granted, all else follows.
 .. .... ..
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