1984
George Orwell
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.
Continued in the next issue of SCR.
