Speaker 1: Section four of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamois recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter four. With the deep unconscious sigh, which
not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him
from uttering. When his day's work started, Winston pulled the
Speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and
put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together
four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out
of the pneumatic tube on the right hand side of
his desk. In the walls of the cubicle, there were
three orifices. To the right of the Speakwrite, a small
pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger
one for newspapers, And in the side wall, within easy
reach of Winston's arm, a large, oblong slit protected by
a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of
waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of
thousands throughout the building, not only in every room, but
at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason, they
were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document
was due for destruction, or even when one saw a
scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole
and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away
on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces
which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled.
Each contained a message of only one or two lines
in the abbreviated jargon, not actually news speak, but consisting
largely of new speak words, which was used in the
Ministry for internal purposes. There ran Times seventeen three eighty four,
b B Speech Mal Reported Africa, Rectify Times nineteen twelve
eighty three, Forecasts three YP fourth quarter eighty three, misprints Verify,
Current Issue Times fourteen two eighty five, four many plenty
mal quoted Chocolate, Rectify Times three twelve eighty three reporting
b B day order double plus ungood refs one persons
rewrite full wise up sub anti filing. With a faint
feeling of satisfaction, Winston laid the fourth message aside. It
was an intricate and responsible job and had better be
dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though
the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through
lists of figures. Winston dialed back numbers on the telescreen
and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which
slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few
minutes delay. The messages he had received referred to articles
or news items which, for one reason or another, it
was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase
had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the
Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in
his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the
South Indian front would remain quiet, but that the Eurasian
offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened,
the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South
India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary
to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech in such
a way as to make him predict the thing that
had actually happened. Or again. The Times of the nineteenth
of December had published the official forecasts of the output
of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter
of nineteen eighty three, which was also the sixth quarter
of the ninth three year plan. Today's issue contained a
statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that
the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job
was to rectify the original figures by making them agree
with the later ones. As for the third message, it
referred to a very simple error which could be set
right in a couple of minutes. As short a time
ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise,
a categorical pledge with the official words that there would
be no reduction of the chocolate ration during nineteen eighty four. Actually,
as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be
reduced from thirty grams 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 speek written corrections to the appropriate copy
of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then,
with a movement which was nearly as possible unconscious, he
crumpled up the original message and any notes that he
himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole,
to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the
unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led he did
not know in detail, but he did know in general terms.
As soon as all the corrections which happened to be
necessary in any particular number of the Times had been
assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original
copy destroyed, and the corrected cop be placed on the
files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was
applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound tracks, cartoons, photographs, to every kind of literature or
documentation which might conceive a behold 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
Record's department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,
consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track
down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other
documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.
A number of the times, which might, because of changes
in political alignment or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother,
have been rewritten A dozen times still stood on the
files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed
to contradict it. Books also were recalled and rewritten again
and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that
any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which
Winston received and which he invariably got rid of as
soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or
implied that an act of forgery was to be committed.
Always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations,
which it was necessary to put right in the interests
of accuracy. But actually he thought as he readjusted 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 connection with anything in the real world, not even
the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.
Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original
version as in their rectified version. A great deal of
the time you were expected to make them up out
of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast
had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at
one hundred forty five 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 over fulfilled. In any case, sixty two millions was
no nearer the truth than fifty seven millions, more than
one hundred and forty five millions. Very likely no boots
had been produced at all. Likely, as still, nobody knew
how many had been produced, much less cared. All one
knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were
produced on paper, while perhaps half off 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 speak write.
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 started a hostile flash in
Winston's direction. Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea
what work he was employed on. People in the records
department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the
long windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and
its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring
into speak writes, there were quite a dozen people whom
Winston and did not even know by name, though he
daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors,
or gesticulating in the two minutes hate. He knew that
in the cubicle next to him, the little woman with
sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking
down and deleting from the press the names of people
who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to
have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since
her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier,
and a few cubicles away, a mild ineffectual, dreamy creature
named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and meters, was engaged in producing
garbled versions definitive texts. They were called of poems which
had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another,
were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall,
with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub section,
a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity
of the record's 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 teleprogram's section, with its engineers,
its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for
their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of
reference clerks, whose job was simply to draw up lists
of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There
were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored,
and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed,
And somewhere or other quite anonymous. There were the directing
brains who co ordinated the whole effort and laid down
the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified
and the other rubbed out of existence. And the Records Department,
after all, was itself only a single branch of the
Ministry of Truth, whose prime job was not to reconstruct
the past, but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programs, 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 New Speak dictionary. And the Ministry
had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party,
but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower
level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a
whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama,
and entertainment. Generally, here were produced rubbish newspapers containing almost
nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five cent novelettes,
film z oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were
composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of
kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole
subsection pornosecond was called in New Speak, engaged in producing
the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in
sealed packets, and which no Party member other than those
who worked on it was permitted to look at. Three
messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston
was working, but they were simple matters, and he had
disposed of them before the two minutes hate interrupted him.
When the hate was over, he returned to his cubicle,
took the New Speak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the
Speak right to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled
down to his main job of the morning. Winston's greatest
pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it
was a tedious routine, but included in it there were
also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose
yourself in them, as in the depths of a mathematical problem,
delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to
guide you except your knowledge of the principles of INGSOK
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 our articles, which were written entirely in New Speak.
He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier.
It ran Times three twelve eighty three, reporting b B
day order double plus angood ref's n persons rewrite full
wise up sub anti filing. In Old Speak or Standard English,
this might be rendered the reporting of Big Brother's Order
for the day. In the Times of December the third
nineteen eighty three is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to
non existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your
draft to higher authority before filing. Winston read through the
offending article. Big Brother's Order for the day, it seemed
had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an
organization known as f f c C, 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,
f f c C had suddenly been dissolved, with no
reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates
were now in disgrace, but there had been no report
of the matter in the press or on the telescreen.
That was to be expected, since it was unusual for
political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced.
The Great Purgers involving thousands of people with public trials
of traitors and thought criminals who made abject confession of
their crimes and were afterwards executed were special show pieces,
not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.
More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the
party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One
never had the smallest clue as to what had happened
to them. In some cases, they might not even be dead.
Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents,
had disappeared at one time or another. Winston stroked his
nose gently with a paper clip in the cubicle cross
the way. Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his
speak right, he raised his head for a moment again
the hostile spectacle flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was
engaged on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible.
So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted
to a single person. On the other hand, to turn
it over to a committee would be to admit openly
that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very likely,
as many as a dozen people were now working away
on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said,
and presently some master brain in the inner party would
select this version or that would re edit it and
set in motion the complex processes of cross referencing that
would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass
into the permanent records and become truth. Winston did not
know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for
corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid
of a too popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close
to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps,
what was likeliest of all, the thing had simply happened
because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the
mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in the
words ref's on persons, which indicated that Withers was already dead.
You could not invariably assume this to be the case
when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed
to remain at liberty for as much as a year
or two years before being executed. Very occasionally, some person
whom you had believed dead long since would make a
ghostly reappearance at some public trial, where he would implicate
hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing. This time forever. Withers, however,
was already an unperson. He did not exist, he had
never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough
simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech. It
was better to make it deal with something totally unconnected
with its original subject. He might turn the speech into
the usual denunciation of traitors and thought criminals, but that
was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory
at the front or some triumph of overproduction in the
ninth three year Plan might complicate the records too much.
What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly
there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were,
the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently
died in battle in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when
Big Brother devoted his order for the day to commemorating
some humble rank and file party member whose life and
death he held up as an example worthy to be followed.
To day 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 right 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 answer answering them, what lessons
do we learn from this fact? Comrades the lesson which
is also one of the fundamental principles of ingsock, that
et cetera, et cetera easy to imitate. At the age
of three, Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum,
a submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At six, a
year early by a special relaxation of the rules, he
had joined the Spies. At nine, he had been a
troop leader. At eleven, he had denounced his uncle to
the thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to
him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been
a district organizer of the Junior Antisex 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 twenty three, he had perished in action pursued by
enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with
important despatches. He had weighted his body with his machine
gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water despatches.
And all an end, said a big brother, which it
was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big brother
added a few remarks on the purity and singlemindedness of
Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a
non smoker, 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 the twenty four hour a day devotion to duty.
He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of ingsock,
and no aim in life except the defeat of the
Eurasian enemy and the hunting down of spies, saboteurs, thought criminals,
and traitors generally. Winston debated with himself whether to award
Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit. In the end
he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross referencing
that it would entail once again. He glanced at his
rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him
with certainty that till And was busy on the same
job as himself. There was no way of knowing whose
job would finally be adopted, but he felt a profound
conviction that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined
an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him
as curious that you could create dead men but not
living ones. Comrade Ogilvie, who had never existed in the present,
now existed in the past, and when once the act
of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically
and upon the same evidence as charlamagnu or Julius Caesar.
End of Section four