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.
x x x
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.
next