1984第1部7-8

Chapter 7
‘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-o-o-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 transcripFree
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tion 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 blossoming-
period 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 working-hours 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,
drug-peddlers, 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:
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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 off 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
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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 whatcounted—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, abFree
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ject 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.