Nineteen Eighty-Four

Chapter1

Chapter 1: Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of a pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plague like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall.

Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument ( the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness if his body merely emphasized by blue overalls which were the uniform if the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by course soap and blunt razor blade and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies if wind were whirling dust and torn papers into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one of the house – front immediately opposite. THE BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s window. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the thought police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about the pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three- Year plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, wound be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field if vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the thought police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceived that they watched everybody at all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live- did live, from habit that became instinct- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the ministry of truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. These, he thought with a sort of vague distaste- this was London, chief city of airstrip one, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth- century, their sides shored up with baulks of Timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all direction? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow- herb strangled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken- houses? But it was no use, he could not remember : nothing remaining of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The ministry of Truth - minitrue, in newspeak ( newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of it’s structure and etymology see appendix.)- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the party.

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS s*****y

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings if similar appearance and size.

So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of victory mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided.

The ministry of truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts. The ministry of peace, which concerned itself with war. The ministry of love, which contained law and order. And the ministry of plenty, which was responsible of economic affairs. Their names, in newspeak: minitrue, minipax, miniluv and Miniplenty.

The ministry of love was really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the ministry of love, nor within half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except an official business. And then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglement, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to it’s outer barriers were roamed by gorilla- faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned around abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quite optimism which was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese-rice spirit.

Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living room and sat down at the small table and stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reasons the telescreen in living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a swallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold book shelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that he suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was peculiarly beautiful book. It’s smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for atleast forty years back. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a flowy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (‘dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought a book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in the briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal,( nothing was illegal, since there were no longer laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced- labour camp.

Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom even used for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserve to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote.

April 4th,1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, he was writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of it’s nature impossible. Either the future could resemble the present, in which case it could not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer the paper the interminable restless monologue that has been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had been dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcers had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page In front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music and the slight booziness caused by the gin.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first it’s capital letters and finally even it’s full stops:

April 4th, 1984 last night to the flicks. all war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopter gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea around him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. Then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. There was a middle-aged woman might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. Little bit screaming with a fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright her self, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in Among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. Then there was wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up upright up into the air a helicopter with a camera in it’s nose must have been followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didn’t oughter of showed it not In front of kids they didn’t it ain’t right not In front of kids it ain’t until the police turned her out I don’t suppose anything happened to her body cares what the proles say typically prole reaction they never.

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what he had made him pour out his stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that While he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he was almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he has suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

It had happened that morning at the ministry, if anything Soo nebulous could be said to happen.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the records department where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the center of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in the preparation for the two minutes hate.

Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but he never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name,but he knew that she worked in fiction department. Presumably -since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands carrying a spanner – she had some mechanical job on one of the novel writing machines. She was a bold – looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movement. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the junior antisex league, was wound several times round the waste of her overall, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because if the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and the community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallower of the slogan, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridors he gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for moment he filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought police. That was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had dear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the inner party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of it’s nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an inner party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a course, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth- century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was because secretly held belief- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope- that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written on his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the records department until the two minutes hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one

’s neck. The hate had started.