1984第1部4-6

Part 1

Chapter 4
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
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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
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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 fifty-seven 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
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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, darkchinned
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, ineffec
tual, 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 printing-shops with their sub-editors,
their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped
studios for the faking of photographs. There was the teleprogrammes
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
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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.