'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more
genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his
lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world
of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of
complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,
to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out,
knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,
to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying
claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that
the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it
was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again
at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the
process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even
to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of
doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And
now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said
enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
One-two! One- two! . . .'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by
bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality
went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not
merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how
could you establish even the most obvious fact when there
existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember
in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He
thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it
was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of
course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the
Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been
gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended
into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when
the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode
through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or
horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much
of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could
not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into
existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc
before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak
form-'English Socialism', that is to say -- it had been current
earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you
could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for
example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the
Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since
his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was
never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in
his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification
of an historical fact. And on that occasion
'Smith !' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
'6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do
better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please!
That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole
squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body.
His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay!
Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give
you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her
arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but
with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked
the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see
you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four
children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees
aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as
she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty- five is
perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the
privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can
all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the
sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they
have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade,
that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston,
with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees
unbent, for the first time in several years.
x x x
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.
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