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.
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