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众家言说 | 蒋蓝：文学木马的纵横术
在奥威尔生命的最后阶段，他给一名工人写了一封绝笔信，他再次预言：“我相信，某些与其（指《一九八四》中的情景）相似的事情肯定会在其他地方发生。”实际上也正是如此，面对着复杂的世界复杂的人群，那些自以为掌握着绝对真理的人，至今仍不乏其人。
文学木马的纵横术
蒋蓝
一九四九年六月八日，奥威尔的《一九八四》终于由塞克尔和沃尔伯格公司在伦敦出版，一九四九年六月十三日由哈科特·布雷斯公司在纽约出版，距今已六十年了。它的中文译本于谶语般的“一九八四”一年后一九八五年由花城出版社出版。《一九八四》使得奥威尔的名声到达了顶峰。一九五〇年一月二十一日他因肺病死于伦敦大学附属医院。奥威尔短暂的一生，颠沛流离，疾病缠身，郁郁不得志，而且一直被视为“危险的异端”。而在一个异端成为思想者历史宿命的时代，他的说出与转身，恰恰揭示了异端的底牌：代表真相的形象和揭示权力的独特词句。
一九四四年，乔治·奥威尔的小说《动物庄园》被原本合作的出版商戈朗茨拒绝，只好转投发沷和发沷出版社。时任出版社编辑的大诗人托·斯·艾略特，不但对这部日后被誉为二十世纪后半叶最好的政治讽刺小说不感兴趣，还写信称奥威尔的观点“大致归类为托派，且不具说服力”。
“主啊，请你不要让我尿床”
一九八四年初，为了纪念乔治·奥威尔的小说《一九八四》“盛逢其年”，苹果公司出资上百万美元拍摄了一个一分钟的电视广告。这个广告只播放一次，观众看到了震惊的一幕：在一个巨大的大厅里，一排排身穿制服、神情痴呆的人拘谨地坐着，听一个“老大哥”模样的人对他们大声咆哮。“老大哥”的脸被投射到一个有几层楼高的大屏幕上，他在屏幕中对着“蚁众”怒目而视。突然间，畏缩的下属中间出现了一个反叛精灵，身后还有带着头盔的警察在追赶。这是一个体格剽悍、肌肉结实的靓女，她沿着夹道迅速冲到屏幕前，猛然停步，把一柄大锤掷向屏幕。大锤在空中飞行，当它撞击屏幕时，发出震耳欲聋的声音。屏幕里的“老大哥”被打得粉碎，广告画面在下属们惊愕神态之中渐渐隐去。与此同时，画外音宣布：“一九八四年不会像奥威尔小说中所描写的那样。”这个强有力的形象预示着挑战权威和自我解放。尽管苹果电脑公司想借此宣传一种打破铁幕的黑客精神，但观众似乎可以从中领略到奥威尔锋刃般的语言和火炭似的思想。
一九八四年一月十七日，学者陈之藩有感于此，在香港写下了《欧威尔的〈一九八四〉》。其中有这样一段话：“从前的集权下，还可以揭竿而起；现代的极权下，却是无竿可揭的。从前的集权下，还可以说寡头为患；现在的极权下，是一夫专断的。从前的集权下，还可以有不召之臣；现在的极权下，却是无所逃于天地之间的。”大陆的出版社在此页注释里承认：“此处删去一百零五字”，而此自然段之末竟又被删去四百六十九字！（《一星如月·散步》，黄山书社2009年6月版，80—81页）
这就意味着，这位先知的预言其实是在悄然演变中接近于实现的。虽然历史有着惊人的相似之处，但历史不会简单地重复，正如马克·吐温曾经说过：“历史不会重复，但历史又确实有章可循。”转眼十九年过去了，在奥威尔诞辰一百周年之际，世界各地以各种方式纪念这位预言家，连北京也上演了改编自奥威尔的话剧《动物庄园》，他的生平、传奇性的恋情和作品再次成为传媒的焦点，人们已经习惯抛开他的作品来缅怀这位诅咒极权的怪人。美国奥威尔专家约翰·罗登在其新著中说：“二〇〇三年既是乔治·奥威尔的百年诞辰，也标志着奥威尔世纪的结束。”这显然是一厢情愿的看法，“奥威尔世纪”至少在一定时期是不会退出历史舞台的，尤其是在后极权时代。
奥威尔实际上一直在苦心寻找两个东西：代表真相的形象和揭示权力的独特词句，待这些准备完成后，他的终极目的是提出一个可怕的预言。他使用了一种同辈作家完全陌生的文体吸引着数量惊人的各种读者。正如保罗·伯曼通过一个复句总结的那样：“那位铸造了‘仇恨的一周’、‘故弄玄虚之辞’、‘一些人比其他人更平等’等词语的作者，其《动物庄园》和《一九八四》已经卖掉了四千万册，六十种语言版本，任何一部战后的严肃的或通俗的作品都无法与之相比。”
奥威尔在印度孟买出生，时间是一九〇三年六月二十五日，八岁时考入圣塞浦里安学校读书，这是一所私立学校，刚入学时，他每天祈祷：“主啊，请你不要让我尿床。”在圣塞浦里安，尿床就要挨打。挨打的理由还有许多，都要遭此羞辱。此外，校长的业余爱好就是提醒小奥威尔，你是个穷孩子，你欠我的情。这种来自于童年时代的窘迫与惊恐，是否决定了他对权力体制的憎恨呢？他始终无法消除旁观者和参与者的双重感受。他后来进入了著名的伊顿公学，毕业后前往缅甸当了一名帝国警察。但他丝毫体验不到“白人的优越感”，他甚至必须按照官僚的意愿射杀一头自己不想射杀的大象，这在其随笔《射象》中有着纵深的描绘。他逃离了苦役，当穷困潦倒的撰稿人，还做过厨师助理、书店店员、家庭教师等低微职业。他从中产阶级出走，俯身于平民阶层，穿破烂的衣服，抽劣质卷烟，批判为富不仁和权力之癖，但具有幽默后果的是，他无法拒绝自己的中产阶级读者群。
奥威尔说：“从感情上来说，我肯定是左派。”为弱者呼与鼓，是欧洲左派的一贯逻辑。他们更为仇视的，是那种因言论和思想而获罪的铁血制度，坚持个人普遍的权利和特立独行的立场，这就是奥威尔的人格逻辑。他敢于宣布自己是左翼，就展示了奥威尔的胆识和价值立场。这自然不同于红色制度下的左翼，因为后者往往是打了引号的，这个意味深长的引号使得政治功利主义之徒从左翼阵营分离出来，在某个需要随机应变的时代，他们再以右翼的面目现身，并成为廓清局势的主导力量。奥威尔用钉子一般的决绝稳住了自己的身影，远远看去，就像一朵左旋的花。至今，他所表现出的理性精神和怀疑主义立场，也远远未被我们身边那些围绕“后主义”跳着狐步舞的时髦学人所继承。在奥威尔生命的最后阶段，他给一名工人写了一封绝笔信，他再次预言：“我相信，某些与其（指《一九八四》中的情景）相似的事情肯定会在其他地方发生。”实际上也正是如此，面对着复杂的世界复杂的人群，那些自以为掌握着绝对真理的人，至今仍不乏其人。当《动物庄园》里“所有靠两条腿行走的都是仇敌，所有靠四肢行走的，或有翅膀的，都是亲友”的逻辑仍然有市场时，当种种原教旨主义轮番登场给人们描画“美丽新世界”时，我们就该意识到，奥威尔并未远去，倒是具有了宽泛的批判价值和预言价值。如果说《一九八四》是对纳粹主义的批判，那么《动物庄园》则是他对斯大林独裁主义的迎头痛击。一九四四年七月他在一封致《党人评论》的公开信里写道：“对于我们这样一些怀疑苏联有某些严重错误的人来说，我认为是否愿意批评俄罗斯和斯大林是对知识分子诚实与否的一次测验。”
文学，不过是被搬进特洛伊的木马奥威尔的写作天平从来就是不平衡的，他早早地倒向了意识形态托盘的一方。文学，不过是被搬进特洛伊的木马，而躲藏在马肚子里的政治却在深夜突破了文学的肃穆，并一举捣毁了大敌。记得米兰·昆德拉曾经针对这一个案指出：“其小说的恶劣影响在于把一个现实无情地缩减为它的纯政治方面，在于这一方面被缩减到它的典型的消极之中。我拒绝以它有益于反对专制之恶斗争的宣传作为理由而原谅这样的缩减，因为这个恶，恰恰在于把生活缩减为政治，把政治缩减为宣传。所以，奥威尔的小说，且不说它的意图，本身是专制精神，宣传精神之一种，它把一个被憎恨的社会的生活缩小（并教人去缩小）为一个简单的罪行列举。”比如著名的《一九八四》，这是“一部伪装成小说的政治思想；毫无疑问是清醒的，正确的。但是被它的小说的伪装所歪曲，这个伪装使得它不准确，只近乎大概。如果说小说的形式模糊了奥威尔的思想，反之，这个思想是否给了小说一些东西呢？它是否照亮了社会学与政治学都无法进入的神秘之地？没有：境况与人物在其中像一张告示一样平淡。那么它是否至少作为推广好的思想而有一定的理由呢？也不是，因为被做成小说的思想不再作为思想而运行，而恰恰是作为小说，在《一九八四》中，它们是作为差的小说，带有一部分劣质小说所能运用的恶劣影响”。
从独立的文学立场来看，米兰·昆德拉的分析捍卫了文学的尊严。但是事情很清楚，读者读一部著作，他们不可能去着意区分什么是文学性什么是政治性，这是专家干的事。读者能够铭记在他们心灵中留下划痕的文字，铭记那些一直呼啸在天庭的词语风暴。在过去的两千年时间里，几乎所有重要的德国哲学家都同意康德的论述：“真实既不能赋予，也不能揭示，它产生于人的思维。”但奥威尔拒不听从这一纸思想的律令，他乃至绝大多数欧洲人，面对横行的谎言与极权，就知道必须撕碎它们的皮影戏，还真实一个具体的面貌。从这个意义上说，奥威尔的写作圭臬就是真实和良知，别无其他。
因此，我似乎可以这样说，奥威尔一直是以“不纯”的文学，却实现了捍卫真实和正义的伟大使命。在这一个案意义上，非文学的因素彻底战胜了既定的纯文学，这些“不合理的因素”圆满了一流大师的写作，并构成了奥威尔突入文学肌肤的芒刺。那么，谁还能说、谁还配说，奥威尔的写作是政治力量的歪打正着呢？我无法用奥威尔的个案来反诘数千年以来文学的价值范式，但是，这至少提醒了我们：意识形态的对文学的强力加盟，并不一定是一种使文学堕入附庸的手段，对一个强力型的写作人来说，意识形态的纹理既构架了他表达的肌理，又垒立成了文体的骨头。
当人们都为《一九八四》《动物庄园》的尖锐犀利而震惊时，我们忘了甚至不知道另一种语境下人们对奥威尔的小说《上来透口气》的关注。在这个利欲熏心的时代，在这一点上我们和《上来透口气》里面那些做着发财梦、中产阶级梦的可怜虫没有什么本质的区别。这很好地回击了那些认为他写不出一流纯文学作品的指责。在奥威尔看来，写作从来就不曾“纯”过，这是否暗示了他笔下的人物往往都是扁平的气球？如果不是被权力压扁，就是被极权吹胀，直到爆炸。他直截了当地说：“我在过去十年中一直最想做的事，就是使政治写作成为一种艺术。我的出发点总是一种党派感，一种对非正义的意识。当我坐下来写一本书时，我并不会对自己说：我要写一部艺术之作。我写，是因为我要揭露某个谎言，我要人们注意某种事实，我最关心的是获得听众。但如果这不同时也是一次审美经历的话，我就写不出这本书来，甚至连一篇杂志长文都写不出来。”我想，这番话即使到今天仍然有它的具体意义，很可以让我们周围那些追求纯写作、赞美纯诗的高蹈者借以自照。
威根码头的奥威尔酒吧回想起一九三七年在西班牙参加保卫共和国的国际志愿军部队，以及同佛朗哥的法西斯军队的作战，回想起那些长眠于西班牙的朋友，奥威尔曾为他们写诗：
在阴影和鬼魂之间，
在白色和红色之间，
在子弹和谎言之间，
你的脑袋躲在哪里？
哪里是曼纽埃尔·贡萨尔斯？
哪里是彼得罗·阿基拉尔？
哪里是拉蒙·芬尼洛萨？
只有蚯蚓知道他们在哪里。
这些缺乏飞翔姿态的文字是下坠的，有铁一样的质地，他没有倾向于天空，而是俯身于大地，他密切关注掌握着无辜者头颅宰制权的权力，如何以精心布局的谎言，以革命的名义，去实现权力的欲望。在西班牙的半年是他生命中极为重要的一段经历，对他的政治观、写作都产生了很大影响。在他宣言式的文章《我为何写作》（一九四六）中，他写道：“西班牙战争和一九三六年一九三七年间发生的事改变了态势，此后我就知道我的立场如何了。一九三六年以来，我所写的每一行严肃作品都是直接或间接反对极权主义，而拥护我所理解的民主社会主义的。在我们所处的这个时代，那种以为可以回避写这些题材的想法在我看来是胡说八道。”面对文学与政治的关系，他一针见血地指出：一旦极权主义在全世界得手，那么这种文学便宣告完蛋。因此，即使是“政治写作”，他要使之成为艺术。不是政治化艺术，而是艺术化政治。我认为，奥威尔的文字正在演变为一种自恰的思想体系，是一种可供后世推演发微的学术。学问的最大目的是发展一般或曰抽象的理论，它的终极效果是希望人们以此来反观自身，促进人与现实的和谐与发展。从这种理论出发，人们可以推出对某一具体事件的解释和预测。同时，检验一个理论的最终标准是：预测与实际一致。如果用这个标准来看待奥威尔，我们还会发现他独特的历史观。就是说，“历史不能假设”，所以有人说，假设历史毫无意义。但这种论者忽略了人在具体事件中的作用。我们所感兴趣的所有事件，都是人所创造的或参与的，虽然我们对已经成为历史的事件不能假设，但我们对它的参与者，却是能够假设和假定的。利用这个假定和一些初始条件，我们能够解释很多社会现象，也能作出一些较好的预测。在这个向度上，一些人认为《一九八四》是指涉纳粹，一些人认为是指涉斯大林时代，现在还有学者竟然认为“老大哥”可以与布什总统“印合”，但不管如何，这种指涉的意义均不在此，而是在于提示一种可能的、对人类命运造成威胁的极权制度。
奥威尔的影响是多方面的，无论是文学、历史，还是政治，即使在英国人的下午茶问题上，他发表的见解现在已成为箴言。在二〇〇三年六月二十五日奥威尔生日那天，英国皇家化学学会就曾向公众征求关于泡茶方法的意见。他们在威根码头（奥威尔有一本名为《通往威根码头之路》的小说）的招待会上公布他们总结出的理想制茶方法，以此来向奥威尔先生早年有关泡茶的理念致敬。
威根码头一座高大的仓房上，用大字标着“威根码头奥威尔酒吧”，奥威尔的半身画像镶嵌其间。人们不会忘记奥威尔，即便是在喝酒之余，偶尔瞥见奥氏忧郁的眼神，想想他曾经在此徘徊的身影，酒客们的声音自然也小下去了。
不管人们以什么形式纪念这位只活了四十六岁的预言家，人们都是在纪念自己心目中的奥威尔，但对他最好的纪念是阅读他的作品，在不同的语境下体会一种真正的“冬季良心”。生活在“历史的终结”时代的一大好处是，当人们在纪念奥威尔时，不仅仅想到“老大哥”、“双重思想”，或是“思想警察”，还会想起他写过的《泡一杯好茶》或是《为英国式烹调辩》。俗人不可能拥有奥威尔那种良知，但至少能知道这种良知的高贵和不可战胜，而且不会被所谓的纯文学遮蔽，这，也许就是一种幸福了。
重床叠架的时间在得知出版社接纳《一九八四》之后，奥威尔陷入了持续的肺病危机。经过医生特许，一九四九年十月十三日奥威尔在伦敦大学附属医院的病房举行了婚礼。这是奥威尔的第二次婚姻，新娘是比他小十六岁的漂亮的《地平线》杂志编辑索尼娅·布朗内尔小姐。他们相识已经好几年了，但有一大堆情人围着她的石榴裙转。新婚与其说使奥威尔的精神焕发，不如说这样的冲刺让他濒临回光返照的境地，他的身体迅速恶化。与此同时，他和新婚妻子的关系也在急转直下。一九五〇年一月二十一日凌晨，与情人卢西安·弗洛伊德在夜总会欢度良宵的索尼娅接到电话：奥威尔终因肺部大出血死亡。
奥威尔被安葬在牛津郡万圣教堂的墓地中。马格里奇在日记中写道，奥威尔去世这天正巧是列宁的生日，而又是由跟他关系很大的《观察家报》阿斯特家族安排安葬的，“在我看来，这些因素包含了他的全部人生”。
时光顺流而下，让那些隐喻总是在呼救的声浪里与遥远的出发地相遇。
一九八一年十二月十八日晚八时，阿尔巴尼亚通讯社向全世界发出了一条爆炸性新闻：阿尔巴尼亚政府总理谢胡自杀。次日，《地拉那日报》仅在头版下方四分之一处，在“讣告”的标题下，刊登了劳动党中央、人民议会和部长会议的联合公告：“十二月十八日，阿尔巴尼亚劳动党中央政治局委员、阿尔巴尼亚社会主义人民共和国部长会议主席穆罕默德·谢胡同志在神经错乱情况下自杀。”自此，霍查亲自下令立即对“阿奸”谢胡全家采取“革命行动”：逮捕谢胡遗孀及三个儿子，逮捕谢胡在党内、政府内的同伙，将他们扫地出门，绳之以法。
这种采用“奸细”的名义消除异己的策略，奥威尔早就写到了。
而在追剿“叛徒、内奸、工贼”刘少奇的案件中，历史学家翦伯赞也被网了进来。翦伯赞与刘少奇，两个湖南人在长期的社会活动中，有过多次的交往和共事。但是，他怎么也回忆不起刘少奇哪一次有过叛变行为。由于拒绝证明专案组的指控，翦伯赞自从搬进北大燕南园，到一九六八年的十二月十八日，在一个月时间里，他被审问八次，应付催索“交代”材料两次，接受外调十五次……为达到目的，专案组成员无休止地威胁恐吓，进行人身侮辱，致使翦伯赞的夫人戴淑婉精神恍惚，翦伯赞多次晕倒，自杀的念头一天比一天强烈。他以失眠为由多次向管理人员要安眠药。十二月十八日夜，翦伯赞拿出笔来，要在纸上写字，但挤了好几下，钢笔里面一点墨水都没有了。翦伯赞叹了一口气，对旁边的人说：“笔都不出水了，我也该完了。”他和夫人双双服毒自尽，以生命捍卫了正义……
在《一九八四》中，“思想警察”头目奥伯兰这样对温斯顿说：“一个异端烧死了，千百个异端站起来。为什么会这样？因为宗教法庭公开杀死敌人，杀死的时候他们还没有悔悟：其实，杀死他们，就是因为他们不悔悟……这里所有的坦白交代全是真的。我们要它们是真的！况且，我们绝不允许死人站起来反对我们。别指望后世会为你辩护，温斯顿，后世根本不知有你这个人。历史长河里，你早被擦得干干净净。我们会把你变成气儿，把你注入到太空里。你什么全都留不下；档案里没有名，记忆里没有影。在过去，在未来，你都给消灭个干净。你将从来没有存在过！”
温斯顿意志最后土崩瓦解，他把能出卖的都出卖了，包括意志、良知、尊严、女友，心里充满的只是对“老大哥”由衷的感激和爱。某一天，他终于迎来了比爱情更让他渴望的子弹，他成了幸福的人。
反过来看看奥威尔自己吧。一九九〇年代，随着英国档案局一批档案的解密，一九九六年七月十一日，伦敦《卫报》以《奥威尔曾向反苏宣传部门提供作者黑名单》为题，率先报道了奥威尔在去世前的一九四九年三月，曾向英国外交部属下负责反苏反共宣传的情报研究处提供了一份记者及作家名单，这些人在他看来，“是共产党的秘密支持者、同路人或倾向如此，不应被委以宣传之任”。这就暗示了奥威尔具有出卖朋友的道德污渍。他也是告密的内奸。
奥威尔的研究者和传记作者、左派知识分子伯纳德·克里克根本不同意如此栽赃。他说奥威尔“并非揭露这些人是颠覆者，他是揭露他们不合适为反情报机构工作而已”。美国作家杰弗里·迈耶斯在《奥威尔传》中，用一节的篇幅记述这一“名单风波”，为奥威尔辩护。有一个例证是不可忽略的，一九四八年，英国政府计划清理政府队伍中的共产党员时，奥威尔从维护公民权利的角度出发表示过抗议，他认为政府此举是破坏民主的行为。
而事情还在进一步复杂化。根据二〇〇七年九月四日英国国家档案馆解密的资料，因被怀疑是共产主义者的关系，奥威尔被军情五处和苏格兰场特别科自一九二九年起一直严密监视至一九五〇年逝世。
那些耿耿于《一九八四》的人，为何总有芒刺在背之感？我想，他们是注定不会放过奥威尔的。一如被亵渎的鲁迅，那些“奸细”的指控总是与他们形影相随……作者简介
蒋蓝，散文家，作家。朱白清散文奖、人民文学奖、四川文学奖得主，中国作家协会会员，中国作家协会散文委员会委员，四川省作协委员，四川省作家协会副主席，成都文学院终身特约作家。己出版《豹典》《媚骨之书》《成都笔记》《蜀地笔记》《踪迹史》《黄虎张献忠》等。
原载于《世界文学》2013年第1期，责任编辑：高兴。
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1984By George OrwellChapter 1It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even
at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the
lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was
one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about
when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface
of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument
(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding
corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's
windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police
mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of
Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official
language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see
Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It
was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring
up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in
elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above
ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London
there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So
completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof
of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They
were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself
with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of
Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which
maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv,
and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows
in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor
within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even
the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced
guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing
the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful,
nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The
stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the
sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The
next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world
began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet
marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the
tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful.
He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a
penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a
red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual
position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where
it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the
window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well
back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so
far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed
in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual
geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now
about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of
the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper,
a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for
at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much
older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He
had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside
and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious
of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising
possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing
by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything
into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present
purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a
second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To
begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary?
For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the
doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the
Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had
undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It
was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had
changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks
past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed
his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing
would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable
restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover
his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it,
because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking
by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what
he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and
down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its
full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as
suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with
laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been
a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in
her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her
breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright
herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought
her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20
kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.
then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up
into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it
up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in
the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting
they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint
right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her
out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles
say typical prole reaction they never----
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did
not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident
that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could
be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often
passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she
worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably--since he had sometimes seen
her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job
on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of
about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic
movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked
nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression
of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even
crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That,
it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever
she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people
round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member
approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a
certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on
his nose which was curiously disarming--in some indefinable way, curiously
civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such
terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his
snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued
by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's
physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps
not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a
person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and
get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was
between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine
running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.
It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the
back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had
flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the
audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and
disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned
to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes
of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in
which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor,
the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a
sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less
level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all
this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally
use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam
up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others
exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the
background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia
or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was
generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the
general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this,
his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs
acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.
He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its
name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a
title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew
of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor
THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if
there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that
by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one
wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind.
He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked
to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before,
moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her. He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual
sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep.
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the
hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big
Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood
out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the
screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was
too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung
herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms
towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent
that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the
stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as
thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in
moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could
not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of
'B-B!...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the
rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to
control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive
reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was
exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened--if, indeed,
it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken
off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with
his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when
their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he
KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable
message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am
with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you
are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust.
But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence
was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such
incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him
the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the
Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after
all--perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite
of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the
Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days
not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all
guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his
cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their
momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two
seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of
the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in
which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin
was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly
musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was
no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals--
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the
writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial
act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the
spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he
wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made
no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go
on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the
same. He had committed--would still have committed, even if he had never
set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be
concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for
years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights
glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast
majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at
the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was
might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated.
The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a
drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got
up and moved heavily towards the door.
Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the
diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it,
in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an
inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book
while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief
flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair
and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I
heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at
our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and----'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was
a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party--you were supposed to call
everyone 'comrade'--but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression
that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down
the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.
Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were
falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different
way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the
place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and
a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper
reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance
at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course----'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen
sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt
worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint
of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.
'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every
evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the
angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't
know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children----'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the
children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner.
Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair
that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in
the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red
neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands
above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's
demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a
Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt
mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and
'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every
movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of
tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of
calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back
again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest
that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they
couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take
them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little
girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the
Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month,
and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see
it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not
gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an
agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed
into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son
back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most
struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the
table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had
stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of
terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night
and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were
horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and
everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their
ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against
foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal
for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen
half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write
in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago--how long was it? Seven years it must be--he had dreamed that he
was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of
him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually--a statement, not a
command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the
time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was
only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He
could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that
he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had
first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure--even after this morning's flash
of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend
or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of
understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said.
Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it
would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful,
floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived
from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious
victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may
well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the
newsflash----'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling.
The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the
memory of the lost chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You
were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he
was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to
the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and
clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at
present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the
word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles
of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as
though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a
monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past
was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single
human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three
slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny
clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of
the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on
the wrappings of a cigarette packet--everywhere. Always the eyes watching
you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating,
indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape. Nothing was your
own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,
with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a
fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter
it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the
future, for the past--for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of
him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to
ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had
written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could
you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an
anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be
back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so
long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on
the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men
are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth
exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of
Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now,
when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken
the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act
itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay
alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.
It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint
in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had
been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
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世界多变而恒永
文学孤独却自由
编辑：由鹿
配图：由鹿
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终审：言叶
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