Chapter Four.
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
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.
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.
