‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only
there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of
the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever
be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its
enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or
even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood
existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its
members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and
threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the
voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if
only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.
would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and
shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they
could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or
later it must occur to them to do it? And yet ——!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a
crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices
women’s voices — had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It
was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-oo-o-oh!’ that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His
heart had leapt. It’s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are
breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a
mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a
street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the
general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels.
It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.
They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind
were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given
out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were
trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others
clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a
fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her
hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were
trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they
were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched
them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost
frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred
throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about
anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after
they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from
one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have
liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had
been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved
and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines
(women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact),
children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But
simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party
taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In
reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary
to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their
other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like
cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted
to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of
ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they
went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossomingperiod of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they
were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty.
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels
with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,
filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was
not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always
among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and
eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of
becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate
them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the
proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of
them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to
whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer workinghours or shorter rations. And even when they became
discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere,
because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on
petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their
notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens
in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very
little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drugpeddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all
happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their
ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed
upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted.
For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted
if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They
were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and
animals are free.’
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose
ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came
back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the
Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of
a children’s history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs
Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was
not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty,
miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where
hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet
and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had
to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them
with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but
stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty
there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by
rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them.
These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with
wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You
can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a
frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which
was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no
one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in
the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the
land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone
disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary
person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and
take of his cap and address him as ‘Sir’. The chief of all the
capitalists was called the King, and ——
But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of
the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes,
the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord
Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope’s toe. There
was also something called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would
probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the
law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman
working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT be true
that the average human being was better off now than he had been
before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the
mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the
conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other
time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and
insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the
lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that
the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging
through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a
worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and
glittering — a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines
and terrifying weapons — a nation of warriors and fanatics,
marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all with
the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where
underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up
nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad
lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous,
city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs
Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling
helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night
the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people
today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better
recreations — that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were
bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better
educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could
ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that
today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the
Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The
Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per
thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 — and so
it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It
might very well be that literally every word in the history books,
even the things that one accepted without question, was pure
fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law
as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or any such creature as a capitalist,
or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure
was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had
possessed — AFTER the event: that was what counted — concrete,
unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must
have been — at any rate, it was at about the time when he and
Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or
eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the
great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were
wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except
Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as
traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was
hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed after
spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their
crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these
three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for
a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or
dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate
themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence
with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia),
embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party
members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which
had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of
sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated
in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but
which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles
in ‘The Times’, analysing the reasons for their defection and
promising to make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all
three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the
corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of
the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the
heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle
and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling,
though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry,
that he had known their names years earlier than he had known
that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies,
untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within
a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the
Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting
to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was
not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people.
They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with
cloves which was the speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was
Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston.
Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal
cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during
the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were
appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his
earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always
they were a rehashing of the ancient themes — slum tenements,
starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats — even on
the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats
an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a
monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched
and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have
been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping,
bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now
remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The
place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the
telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless,
never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of
gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the
pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a
minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune
that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed
too. There came into it — but it was something hard to describe. It
was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston
called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at
Rutherford’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.
And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder,
and yet not knowing AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson
and Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they
had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their
release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes
over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed,
and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to
posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the
pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of
paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and
then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its
significance. It was a half-page torn out of ‘The Times’ of about ten
years earlier — the top half of the page, so that it included the date
— and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party
function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in
any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed
that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown
from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in
Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General
Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The
date had stuck in Winston’s memory because it chanced to be
midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in
countless other places as well. There was only one possible
conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time
Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in
the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were
accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the
abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong
stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the
Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the
world and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the
photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with
another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his
chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To
keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your
breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not
control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite
delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten
minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some
accident — a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance
— would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped
the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste
papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled
into ashes.
That was ten — eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would
have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having
held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now,
when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was
only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he
wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer
HAD ONCE existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected
from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence.
Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no
longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of
Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since
then there had been other changes — two, three, he could not
remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been
rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer
had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but
changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge
imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying
the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He
took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he
himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of
one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the
earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is
unalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if
alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not
greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the
portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic
eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were
pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your
skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your
beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your
senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two
made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that
they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their
position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the
very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their
philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what
was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we
know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity
works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the
external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own
accord. The face of O’Brien, not called up by any obvious
association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more
certainty than before, that O’Brien was on his side. He was writing
the diary for O’Brien — TO O’Brien: it was like an interminable
letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a
particular person and took its colour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he
thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with
which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the
subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much
less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he
was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be
defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists,
its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects
unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an
important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that
is granted, all else follows.