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 Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words -- which was used in the Ministry for
internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints
verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
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 dialled '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 a 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 1983, 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' 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 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 copy
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 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
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 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 connexion 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
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 nearer the truth than fiftyseven
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 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 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 speakwrites, there were
quite a dozen people whom Winston 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 metres, 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 Records
Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers
engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the
huge printingshops 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 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 primary job was
not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of
Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen
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 literature,
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 sentimental songs which were composed
entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope
known as a versificator. 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 interrupted 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
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 articles, which were
written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he
had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
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 Brother'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 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 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 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 across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching
secretively over his speakwrite. 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 '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 vanishing, this time for ever. 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 over-production 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, rankand-file Party member whose life
and death he held up as an example 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 speakwrite
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 fundamental 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 district
organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nine teen he had
designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry
of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirtyone
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
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 Comrade 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 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
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 living 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 authentically, and upon the
same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
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