We're
cutting the language down to the bone.
cutting the language down to the bone.
Orwell - 1984
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 out-
put, 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 possi-
ble unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and
any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into
1984
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 con-
tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of lit-
erature 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 align-
ment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
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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 instruc-
tions 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 misquota-
tions 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 con-
nexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just
as much a fantasy in their original version as in their recti-
fied version. A great deal of the time you were expected to
make them up out of your head. For example, the Minis-
try 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 near-
er 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
1984
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 Depart-
ment did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long,
windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its end-
less rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Win-
ston 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, sim-
ply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names
of people who had been vaporized and were therefore con-
sidered 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, ineffec-
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tual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy
ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions — defin-
itive 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 imitat-
ing 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 hid-
den furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And
somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the di-
recting 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
1984
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 lit-
erature, 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 sentimen-
tal songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a ver-
sificator. 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 in-
terrupted 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
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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 arti-
cles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled
the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3. 12. 83 reportingbb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be ren-
dered:
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 Broth-
er'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
1984
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 offend-
ers 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 dis-
pleasure 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 Win-
ston, 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 crouch-
ing secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for
a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston won-
dered 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 ad-
mit 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 se-
lect this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion
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the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the per-
manent 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 subordi-
nate. 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 me-
chanics 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 van-
ishing, this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an
UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Win-
ston 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 origi-
nal subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of
traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too ob-
vious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph
of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might
1984
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 Ogil-
vy, 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 exam-
ple 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 speak-
write 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 fundamen-
tal 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 dis-
trict 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 twen-
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ty-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 Com-
rade 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 Com-
rade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he
decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-refer-
encing 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 liv-
ing 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 authentical-
1984
ly, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius
Caesar.
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Chapter 5
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the
lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was al-
ready very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the
counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of
Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small
bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at
ten cents the large nip.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's
back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in
the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exact-
ly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you
had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society
was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous
team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature,
smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuber-
ant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to
search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,'
he said.
'Not one! ' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've
1984
tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer. '
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he
had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There
had been a famine of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article which the Par-
ty shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces;
at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of
them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the
'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added
untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy
metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday? ' said
Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it
on the flicks, I suppose. '
A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know
you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very
well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged. ' In
an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He
would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of he-
licopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions
of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the
Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him,
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 63
if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head
a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently 'I think
it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them
kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right
out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That's the detail that ap-
peals to me. '
'Nex', please! ' yelled the white-aproned prole with the la-
dle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille.
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a
metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one
saccharine tablet.
"There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said
Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded room and un-
packed their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his
nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he
had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discov-
ered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes
of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation
of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied
64 1984
their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and contin-
uously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck,
which pierced the general uproar of the room.
'How is the Dictionary getting on? ' said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.
'Slowly' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinat-
ing. '
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other,
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
'We're getting the language into its final shape— the shape
it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When
we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying
words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.
We're
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edi-
tion won't contain a single word that will become obsolete
before the year 2050. '
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of ped-
ant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 65
the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite
in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like
'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood'
will do just as well — better, because it's an exact opposite,
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger ver-
sion of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all
the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'double-
plusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already, but in the final version of New-
speak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words —
in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B. B. 's idea originally, of course,' he added
as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,'
he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still
thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that
you write in 'The Times' occasionally. They're good enough,
but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of
1984
words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? '
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympa-
thetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark- coloured bread, chewed it
briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the process will still be
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or ex-
cuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question
of self-discipline, reality- control. But in the end there won't
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be com-
plete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and
Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satis-
faction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
are having now? '
'Except ' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the
proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that
Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com 67
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, how-
ever, had divined what he was about to say
"The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By
2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak
will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will
have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, By-
ron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely
changed into something different, but actually changed
into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even
the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will
change. How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slav-
ery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The
whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will
be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means
not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is uncon-
sciousness. '
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep
conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He
sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not
like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in
his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned
a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At
the table on his left the man with the strident voice was
still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was
perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly
agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time
Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right,
1984
I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly
feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an in-
stant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the
man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that
he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He
was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a
large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles
caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs
instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from
the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was
almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once
Winston caught a phrase — complete and final elimination
of Goldsteinism' — jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed,
all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it
was just a noise, a quack- quack- quacking. And yet, though
you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you
could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might
be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures
against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be ful-
minating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he
might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar
front — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could
be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure
Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving
rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that
this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It
was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 69
it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in
unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the han-
dle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew.
The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily
audible in spite of the surrounding din.
"There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know
whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It
is one of those interesting words that have two contradic-
tory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied
to someone you agree with, it is praise. '
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston
thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, al-
though well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly
disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as
a thought- criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There
was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was some-
thing that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving
stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He be-
lieved in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother,
he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness
of information, which the ordinary Party member did not
approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to
him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he
had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree
Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law,
not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chest-
nut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The
1984
old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather
there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it
was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades
ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was
a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the na-
ture of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him
instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room —
a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.
At thirty- five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck
and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish.
His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so
much so that although he was wearing the regulation over-
alls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being
dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief
of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture
of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy fore-
arms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when
a community hike or any other physical activity gave him
an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery
'Hullo, hullo! ' and sat down at the table, giving off an in-
tense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over
his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary.
At the Community Centre you could always tell when he
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had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat
handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an
ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Par-
sons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've
got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I ex-
pect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's
that sub you forgot to give me. '
'Which sub is that? ' said Winston, automatically feel-
ing for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be
earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so nu-
merous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund.
I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort —
going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my
fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me. '
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the
neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of
mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
catapult away if he does it again. '
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,'
said Winston.
'Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit,
doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them,
1984
but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies,
and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of
mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out
Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her,
slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon
following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours,
right through the woods, and then, when they got into Am-
ersham, handed him over to the patrols. '
'What did they do that for? ' said Winston, somewhat tak-
en aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent —
might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But
here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to
him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny
kind of shoes — said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes
like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner.
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? '
'What happened to the man? ' said Winston.
Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be alto-
gether surprised if ' Parsons made the motion of aiming
a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from
his strip of paper.
'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Win-
ston dutifully.
'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call float-
ed from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it
was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but
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merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades! ' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the
battle for production! Returns now completed of the output
of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard
of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past
year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible
spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of
factories and offices and paraded through the streets with
banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new,
happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs '
The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It
had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Par-
sons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening
with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.
He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they
were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out
a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred
tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it
was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was
smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully hori-
zontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he
had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his
ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had
even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising
the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only
yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ra-
1984
tion was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it
possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily,
with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the
other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a fu-
rious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone
who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty
grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involv-
ing doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the tele-
screen. As compared with last year there was more food,
more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cook-
ing-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more
books, more babies — more of everything except disease,
crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute,
everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled
across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pat-
tern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of
life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted
like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged,
crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innu-
merable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed
so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad
gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Al-
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ways in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of
protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something
that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories
of anything greatly different.
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 out-
put, 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 possi-
ble unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and
any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into
1984
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 con-
tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of lit-
erature 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 align-
ment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
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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 instruc-
tions 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 misquota-
tions 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 con-
nexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just
as much a fantasy in their original version as in their recti-
fied version. A great deal of the time you were expected to
make them up out of your head. For example, the Minis-
try 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 near-
er 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
1984
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 Depart-
ment did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long,
windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its end-
less rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Win-
ston 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, sim-
ply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names
of people who had been vaporized and were therefore con-
sidered 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, ineffec-
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tual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy
ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions — defin-
itive 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 imitat-
ing 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 hid-
den furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And
somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the di-
recting 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
1984
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 lit-
erature, 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 sentimen-
tal songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a ver-
sificator. 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 in-
terrupted 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
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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 arti-
cles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled
the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3. 12. 83 reportingbb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be ren-
dered:
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 Broth-
er'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
1984
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 offend-
ers 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 dis-
pleasure 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 Win-
ston, 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 crouch-
ing secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for
a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston won-
dered 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 ad-
mit 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 se-
lect this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion
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the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the per-
manent 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 subordi-
nate. 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 me-
chanics 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 van-
ishing, this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an
UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Win-
ston 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 origi-
nal subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of
traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too ob-
vious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph
of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might
1984
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 Ogil-
vy, 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 exam-
ple 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 speak-
write 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 fundamen-
tal 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 dis-
trict 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 twen-
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ty-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 Com-
rade 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 Com-
rade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he
decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-refer-
encing 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 liv-
ing 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 authentical-
1984
ly, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius
Caesar.
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Chapter 5
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the
lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was al-
ready very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the
counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of
Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small
bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at
ten cents the large nip.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's
back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in
the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exact-
ly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you
had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society
was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous
team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature,
smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuber-
ant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to
search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,'
he said.
'Not one! ' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've
1984
tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer. '
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he
had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There
had been a famine of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article which the Par-
ty shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces;
at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of
them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the
'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added
untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy
metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday? ' said
Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it
on the flicks, I suppose. '
A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know
you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very
well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged. ' In
an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He
would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of he-
licopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions
of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the
Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him,
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 63
if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head
a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently 'I think
it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them
kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right
out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That's the detail that ap-
peals to me. '
'Nex', please! ' yelled the white-aproned prole with the la-
dle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille.
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a
metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one
saccharine tablet.
"There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said
Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded room and un-
packed their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his
nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he
had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discov-
ered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes
of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation
of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied
64 1984
their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and contin-
uously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck,
which pierced the general uproar of the room.
'How is the Dictionary getting on? ' said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.
'Slowly' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinat-
ing. '
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other,
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said.
'We're getting the language into its final shape— the shape
it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When
we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying
words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.
We're
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edi-
tion won't contain a single word that will become obsolete
before the year 2050. '
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of ped-
ant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 65
the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite
in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like
'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood'
will do just as well — better, because it's an exact opposite,
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger ver-
sion of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all
the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'double-
plusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already, but in the final version of New-
speak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words —
in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B. B. 's idea originally, of course,' he added
as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,'
he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still
thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that
you write in 'The Times' occasionally. They're good enough,
but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of
1984
words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? '
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympa-
thetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark- coloured bread, chewed it
briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the process will still be
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or ex-
cuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question
of self-discipline, reality- control. But in the end there won't
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be com-
plete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and
Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satis-
faction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
are having now? '
'Except ' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the
proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that
Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com 67
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, how-
ever, had divined what he was about to say
"The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By
2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak
will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will
have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, By-
ron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely
changed into something different, but actually changed
into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even
the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will
change. How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slav-
ery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The
whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will
be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means
not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is uncon-
sciousness. '
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep
conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He
sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not
like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in
his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned
a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At
the table on his left the man with the strident voice was
still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was
perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly
agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time
Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right,
1984
I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly
feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an in-
stant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the
man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that
he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He
was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a
large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles
caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs
instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from
the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was
almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once
Winston caught a phrase — complete and final elimination
of Goldsteinism' — jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed,
all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it
was just a noise, a quack- quack- quacking. And yet, though
you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you
could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might
be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures
against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be ful-
minating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he
might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar
front — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could
be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure
Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving
rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that
this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It
was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 69
it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in
unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the han-
dle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew.
The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily
audible in spite of the surrounding din.
"There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know
whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It
is one of those interesting words that have two contradic-
tory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied
to someone you agree with, it is praise. '
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston
thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, al-
though well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly
disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as
a thought- criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There
was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was some-
thing that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving
stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He be-
lieved in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother,
he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness
of information, which the ordinary Party member did not
approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to
him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he
had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree
Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law,
not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chest-
nut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The
1984
old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather
there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it
was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades
ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was
a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the na-
ture of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him
instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room —
a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.
At thirty- five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck
and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish.
His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so
much so that although he was wearing the regulation over-
alls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being
dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief
of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture
of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy fore-
arms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when
a community hike or any other physical activity gave him
an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery
'Hullo, hullo! ' and sat down at the table, giving off an in-
tense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over
his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary.
At the Community Centre you could always tell when he
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had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat
handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an
ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Par-
sons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've
got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I ex-
pect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's
that sub you forgot to give me. '
'Which sub is that? ' said Winston, automatically feel-
ing for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be
earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so nu-
merous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund.
I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort —
going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my
fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me. '
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the
neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of
mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
catapult away if he does it again. '
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,'
said Winston.
'Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit,
doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them,
1984
but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies,
and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of
mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out
Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her,
slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon
following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours,
right through the woods, and then, when they got into Am-
ersham, handed him over to the patrols. '
'What did they do that for? ' said Winston, somewhat tak-
en aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent —
might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But
here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to
him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny
kind of shoes — said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes
like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner.
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? '
'What happened to the man? ' said Winston.
Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be alto-
gether surprised if ' Parsons made the motion of aiming
a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from
his strip of paper.
'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Win-
ston dutifully.
'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call float-
ed from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it
was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but
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merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades! ' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the
battle for production! Returns now completed of the output
of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard
of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past
year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible
spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of
factories and offices and paraded through the streets with
banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new,
happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs '
The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It
had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Par-
sons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening
with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.
He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they
were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out
a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred
tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it
was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was
smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully hori-
zontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he
had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his
ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had
even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising
the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only
yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ra-
1984
tion was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it
possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily,
with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the
other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a fu-
rious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone
who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty
grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involv-
ing doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the tele-
screen. As compared with last year there was more food,
more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cook-
ing-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more
books, more babies — more of everything except disease,
crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute,
everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled
across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pat-
tern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of
life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted
like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged,
crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innu-
merable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed
so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad
gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Al-
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ways in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of
protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something
that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories
of anything greatly different.
