Speaker 1: Section five of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamous recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter five. In the low ceilinged canteen deep underground,
the lunch que jerked slowly forward. The room was already
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, Sime,
who worked in the research department. Perhaps friend was not
exactly 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. Sime was a philologist,
a specialist in news speak. Indeed, he was one of
the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the
eleventh edition of the New Speak Dictionary. He was a
tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant 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 tried all over the place that don't
exist any longer. Every One 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 party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, Sometimes it was shoelacers. 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 have been using the
same blade for six weeks, he added, untruthfully. The cue
gave another jerk forward. As they halted. He turned and
faced sim 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 Sime.
I was working, said Winston, indifferently. I shall see it
on the flicks. I suppose a very inadequate substitute, said Sime.
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, Sime was venomously orthodox.
He would talk with a disagreeable, gloating satisfaction of helicopter
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, if possible, in
the technicalities of news speak, 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 Sime, 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, quite a bright blue.
That's the detail that appeals to me. Next, please, yelled
the white aproned proll. With the ladle, Winston and Sime
pushed their trays beneath the grill on to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch, a metal pannikin of pinkish
gray stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese,
a mug of milkless Victory coffee, and one sacran tablet.
There's a table over there under that telescreen, said Sime.
Let's pick up a gin. On the way, the gin
was served out to them in handle as china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded room and un
packed their trays onto the metal topped table. On one
corner of which some one 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 discovered 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 their pannikins from the table. At
Winston's left, a little behind his back, some one was
talking rapidly and continuously, 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 sim
I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating. He had brightened up
immediately at the mention of news speak. He pushed his
panic and 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 edition won't contain a single
word that will become obsolete before the year twenty fifty.
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking with a sort of pedant'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, the great
wastage is in the verb 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? Unngood will do just as
well better, because it's an exact opposite which the other
is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version
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. Plus good covers the meaning
or double plus good if you want something stronger. Still,
of course we use those forms already, But in the
final version of news 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, Sime immediately detected a
certain lack of enthusiasm. You haven't a real appreciation of
new speak, Winston, he said, almost sadly. Even when you
write it, you're still thinking in old speak. 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 old speak, with all its
vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp
the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know
that news Speaker is the only language in the world
whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Winston did know that,
of course, he smiled sympathetically, he hoped, not trusting himself
to speak. Sime bit off another fragment of the dark
colored bread, chewed it briefly, and went on, don't you
see that the whole aim of news Speaker is to
narrow the range of thought. In the end, we shall
make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express. 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 excuse for committing thought crime. 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 complete when the language is perfect. New speak is ingsok,
and ingsock is news speak. He added, with a sort
of mystical satisfaction. Has it ever occurred to you, Winston,
that by the year twenty fifty, 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 prole
But he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this
remark was not in some way unorthodox. Sime, however, had
divined what he was about to say. The prolls are
not human beings, he said carelessly. By twenty fifty earlier,
probably all real knowledge of old speak will have disappeared.
The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton Byron. They'll exist only in new speak 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 slavery?
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 unconsciousness. One
of these days, thought Winston, with sudden, deep conviction, Sime
will be vaporiz. 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 a 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 remarkers,
I think you're so right. I do so agree with you,
uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But
the other voice never stopped for an instant 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 disks 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 fulminating 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 insock 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
it was not speech in the true sense. It was
a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Sime had fallen silent for a moment, and with the
handle 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 new speak, said Sime. I don't know
whether you know it, duck speak to quack like a duck.
It is one of those interesting words that have two
contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse applied
to some one you agree with, it is praise. Unquestionably,
Sime will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it
with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Sime
despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable
of denancing him as a thought criminal if he saw
any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong
with Sime. There was something that he lacked discretion, aloofness,
a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that
he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of ingsok.
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 Chestnut Tree Cafe. Yet the place was somehow
ill omened. The 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. Sime's fate was not difficult to foresee.
And yet it was a fact that if Sime grasped
even for three seconds the nature of his Winston's secret opinions,
he would betray him instantly to the thought police. So
would anybody else for that matter. But Sime, more than
most zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness. Sime 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 frog like face. At thirty five,
he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck
and waist line. 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 overalls,
it was almost impossible not to think of him as
being dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirt, and red
Neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him, one always I
saw a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back
from pudgy forearms. 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 hallo, and sat down at the table,
giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture
stood out all over his pink face. His powers of
sweating were extraordinary. At the community center, you could always
tell when he had been playing table tennis by the
dampness of the bat handle. Sime 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 Parsons,
nudging Winston. Keenness, Eh, what's such you've got there, old boy?
Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect 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, feeling for money. About a quarter of
one's salary had to be here marked for voluntary subscriptions,
which were so numerous 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 crist and filthy notes, which Parsons
entered in a small note book 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 it was a little upset at not going to
the execution, said Winston. Ah, well, what I mean to say?
That shows the right spirit, doesn't it. Mischievous little beggars
they are, both of them, but talk about keenness. All
they think about is the Spies, the war. Of course,
do you know what that little girl of mine did
last Saturday when her troop was on a hike at
Berkhamstead 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 Amersham handed him over to the patrols. What
did they do that for, said Winston, somewhat taken 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 any one 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 altogether surprised if Parsons made the motion
of aiming a rifle and clicked his tongue for the explosion, good,
said sim abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
Of course, we can't afford to take chances, agreed Winston
dutifully what I mean to say. There is a war
on said Parsons, as though in confirmation of this, a
trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However,
it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time,
but 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 twenty percent over the past year.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible, spontaneous demonstrations
when workers marched out of factories and officers 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 food stuffs. The phrase our new happy life recurred
several times. It had been a favorite of late with
the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, 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 a hundred grams a week,
it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top.
Winston was smoking a Victory cigarette, which he held carefully horizontal.
The new ration did not start till to morrow, 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 grams
a week, and only yesterday, he reflected, it had been
announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty
grads 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 furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize
anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had
been thirty grams. Sime too, in some more complex way,
involving doublethink. Sime swallowed it. Was he then alone, in
the possession of a memory. The fabulous statistics continued to
pour out of the telescreen. As compared with the last year,
there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture,
more cooking 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 Sime had done earlier. Winston
had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the
pale colored gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a
long streak of it out into a pattern. 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 innumerable 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. Always 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 in any time that he could accurately remember.
There had never been quite enough to eat. One had
never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes.
Furniture had always been battered and rickety rooms, underheated, tube trains,
crowded houses falling to pieces bread, dark colored tea, rarity, coffee,
filthy tasting cigarettes, insufficient, nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.
And though of course it grew worse as one's body aged,
was it not a sign that this was not the
natural order of things? If one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness
of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water,
the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the
food with its strange, evil tastes. Why should one feel
it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of
ancestral memory that things had once been different. He looked
round the canteen again. Nearly every one was ugly, and
would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than
in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of
the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously
beetle like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his
little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How
easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look
about you to believe that the physical type set up
by the party as an ideal, tall, muscular youths and
deep bosomed maidens, blond haired, vital, sun burnt, carefree existed
and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge,
the majority of people in airstrip one were small, dark,
and ill favored. It was curious how that beetle like
type proliferated in the ministries, Little dumpy men growing stout
very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements,
and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was
the type that seemed to flourish best under the domination
of the party. The announcements from the Ministry of Plenty
ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons,
stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took
his pipe out of his mouth. The Ministry of Plenty
certainly done a good job this year, he said, with
a knowing shake of his head. By the way, Smith,
old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades.
You can let me have not one, said Winston. I've
been using the same blade for six weeks myself. Ah. Well,
just thought i'd ask you, old boy. Sorry, said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during
the Ministry's announcement, had started up again as loud as ever.
For some reason, Winston suddenly found himself thinking of missus Parsons,
with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases
of her face. Within two years, those children would be
denouncing her to the thought police Missus. Parsons would be vaporized.
Sime would be vaporized, Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would
be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized.
The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized.
The little beetle like men who scuttle so nimbly through
the labyrinthine corridors of ministries, they too, would never be vaporized.
And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the
fiction department, she would never be vaporized either. It seemed
to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and
who would perish, though just what it was that made
for survival it was not easy to say. At this moment.
He was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk.
The girl at the next table had turned partly round
and was looking at him. It was the girl with
dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way,
but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye,
she looked away again. The sweat started out on Winston's backbone.
A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was
gone almost at once, but had left a sort of
nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did
she keep following him about? Unfortunately, he could not remember
whether she had already been at the table when he arrived,
or had come thereafterwards, But yesterday, at any rate, during
the two minutes hate, she had sat immediately behind him
when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite
likely her real object had been to listen to him
and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough. His
earlier thought returned to him. Probably she was not actually
a member of the thought police, But then it was
precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.
He did not know how long she had been looking
at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes,
and it was possible that his features had not been
perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your
thoughts wander when you were in any public place or
within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give
you away a nervous tick, an unconscious look of anxiety,
a habit of muttering to yourself, anything that carried with
it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide
in any case, to wear an improper expression on your face,
to look incredulous when a victory was announced, For example,
was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word
for it in news speak, face crime. It was called
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps,
after all, she was not really following him about. Perhaps
it was coincidence that she had sat so close to
him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and
he laid it carefully on the edge of the table.
He would finish smoking it after work if he could
keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at
the next table was a spy of the thought police,
and quite likely he would be in the cellars of
the Ministry of Love within three days. But a cigarette
end must not be wasted. Sime had folded up his
strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket.
Parsons had begun talking again. Did I ever tell you,
old boy, he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe,
about the time when those two nippers of mine set
fire to the old market woman's skirt because they saw
her wrapping up sausages in a poster of b B.
Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with
a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe
little beggars, eh, But keen as mustard. That's a first
rate training they give them in the spies nowadays, better
than in my day. Even what do you think's the
latest thing? They've served them out with ear trumpets for
listening through key holes. My little girl brought one home
the other night, tried it out on our sitting room
door and reckoned. She could hear twice as much as
with her ear to the hole. Of course, it's only
a toy, mind, You still gives them the right idea, eh.
At this moment, the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.
It was the signal to return to work. All three
men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle
round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of
Winston's cigarette. End of Section five.