In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch
queue 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 Syme, 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. 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, 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. 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 Party 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 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 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
appeals to me.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the
ladle.
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 unpacked
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 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, someone 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 Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's
fascinating.'
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 Edition
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 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 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
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? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "
doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already. but in the final version of
Newspeak 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 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,
sympathetically 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 excuse 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 complete when the language is
perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added
with a sort of mystical satisfaction. '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
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, 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, Byron --
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 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, 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, 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 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 quackquack-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 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 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 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 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 contradictory
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, although 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 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 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 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. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet
it was a fact that if Syme 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 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 overalls, 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 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, hullo!' 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 Centre you could always tell
when he 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
Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that 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 earmarked
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 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 dressingdown 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,
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 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 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
altogether 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
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 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.
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 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 horizontal.
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 ration 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 furious 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, involving doublethink, Syme 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 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 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 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- coloured, tea a 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 everyone 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, sunburnt,
carefree -- existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as
he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were
small, dark, and ill-favoured. 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
dominion of the Party.
The announcement 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's 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 Mrs 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. Mrs
Parsons would be vaporized. Syme 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 it 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 there
afterwards. 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 tic, 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 offence. There was even a
word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, 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. Syme 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 d'you think's the
latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for
listening through keyholes ! 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 'em 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.
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