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 subsection, 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 printing-shops 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 overproduction 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,
rank-and-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 nineteen
he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the
Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one
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, thought-criminals, 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.