6. A Sort of Saving Stupidity: Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter 5

Audio version / edition: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), introd. Julian Symons and ed. Peter Davison (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992)

I’ve already mentioned the setting of this chapter, the canteen in the Ministry of Truth, several times in previous discussions. This is because multiple themes and emphases of relevance to the novel as a whole are brought together in this sequence, among them the dirt and grime of Airstrip One and the development of Newspeak. The setting is itself of note, too. The ‘low-ceilinged canteen, deep under ground’ in which the chapter occurs is very, very noisy—‘deafeningly’ (p. 51) so, in fact. We’ve encountered this emphasis before, too. In Airstrip One, noise controls, regulates, disrupts, and overwhelms. The ‘general uproar of the room’ (p. 53) doesn’t let up. This ‘crowded’ (p. 62) space is raucously suffocating by design, its low ceiling and bustling stream of human traffic as claustrophobic, in its way, as London’s ‘crowded’ (p. 63) tube trains. Winston can’t rest—really rest—at home, and he certainly finds no peace and quiet in the Ministry of Truth’s various interiors. All of them are the settings for quasi-military ‘bombardment[s]’ (p. 63) of noise: speech, clatter, footsteps, and ‘fabulous statistics’ (p. 62). No rest for the wicked. No rest for anyone. The canteen is less a space of recuperation from a morning’s work, and more an intensifying recurrence of Ingsoc’s calculated exhaustions. And the gin with lunch? It’s not even an innocent midday pleasure. Winston has to ‘collect his nerve’ before he gulps ‘the oily-tasting stuff down’, and winks the ‘tears out of his eyes’ (p. 53). 

The central justification for this chapter is the account it offers of Newspeak, the language mentioned on several occasions already in the novel but not really explored in a sustained way until now. The ‘venomously orthodox’ (p. 52) Syme is the conduit for this account. Where Winston is all discontented unhappiness, Syme is an ideal Oceanic subject: 

He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. (p. 58)

Where Winston is content to watch the hanging of prisoners on the cinema screen, Syme insists that watching executions in person is the way to go about it, talking with ‘a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, [and] the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love’ (p. 52). Inverting Winston’s lack of orthodoxy, Syme is everything he isn’t: committed, enthusiastic, fanatical. 

But Winston has an edge over Syme: he knows that to survive in Oceania means concealing one’s intelligence. Too public a display of erudition is likely to raise the alarm, presumably because it means drawing attention to one’s capacity for seeing the Oceanic system for what it is: namely, as a system, as a contrivance, instead of the natural order of things. Syme lacks ‘discretion, aloofness, [and] a sort of saving stupidity’ (p. 58). He doesn’t have the ability to conceal his wit, his ability to think his way round a problem for its own sake. He doesn’t have the wisdom to feign or actually to achieve the state of conscious unconsciousness required of him by doublethink. Zeal, we learn, is not enough to wash away ‘a faint air disreputability’ (p. 58). What’s needed is fanaticism amounting to an unself-conscious commitment to the cause. Syme is, as Winston recognizes, ‘too intelligent’ (p. 56) for his own good. And this elicits a kind of sympathy from Winston in spite of the fact that he knows not only that Syme doesn’t like him, but also that Syme is ‘fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal’ (p. 58) at any moment. The irony, as we eventually come to learn, is that Syme himself is turned in; Winston knows that ‘one day’ (p. 56) he will disappear, and ‘vanish’ (p. 154) he does, one morning a few weeks later. Quite apart from the fact that Syme is too intelligent for his own good, his ‘venomous’ enthusiasm points to a different kind of endangerment. Like the similarly ‘venomous’ (p. 14) Goldstein, Syme is prone to theorize about Ingsoc ideology, rather than swallow it unquestioningly. ‘The Party does not like such people’ (p. 56). 

Syme isn’t exactly Winston’s friend—you don’t have friends in Oceania, only comrades—but of the comrades ‘whose society [is] pleasanter than that of others’ (p. 51), Syme ranks more highly than most. A philologist, someone who studies the history and nature of language, Syme belongs to the huge team of experts working on the Newspeak Dictionary’s Eleventh Edition. It is in discussion of this work that Syme reveals his true appeal, for Winston at any rate; on ‘the technicalities of Newspeak’, he is ‘authoritative and interesting’ (p. 52). There is something of the Newspeak appendix about him, perhaps, and something of the aesthete, too, as Winston recognizes when he observes that Syme frequents ‘the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters and musicians’ (p. 58). Syme views his philological labours in ‘the destruction of words’ as a ‘beautiful’ enterprise, a project underpinned by the passion of the pedant (p. 54). This would be entirely consistent with the fanatical demands of Ingsoc were it not for the fact that Syme’s enthusiasms lead to a reverence for things in themselves, as opposed to things done purely and selflessly to toe the Party line. There’s less distance than one might think, in this respect, between Syme’s ‘dreamy’ (p. 54) amazement at the beauty of Newspeak’s always-contracting word count, on the one hand, and the thrush in the countryside (in Part II, Chapter 2) who sits ‘at the edge of [a] lonely wood and pour[s] its music into nothingness’ (p. 130). Both do things for their own sake. The implication is that Syme enjoys destroying words less for the glory of Big Brother, and more for his own intellectual satisfaction. And in this way his orthodoxy becomes his undoing. 

The discussion of progress on the Newspeak Dictionary tells us a lot about the priorities of those enabling its refinement. As Syme remarks, Newspeak is ‘the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year’ (p. 55), an ‘achievement’, if that’s the right word for it, made possible in many instances by the elimination of what the Newspeak appendix calls ‘natural pair[s] of opposites’ (p. 315): good and bad, light and dark, cold and warm, that sort of thing. All such doublings can be distilled into variants of a single term: good, ungood, plusgood, plusungood, doubleplusgood, doubleplusungood. And note, in this specific case, that the underlying word chosen as the basis for eliminating the pair, good, frames all of the viable possibilities as a form of implied optimism, one that is, moreover, in line with the Party’s view of Ingsoc’s ‘new, happy life’ (p. 61). All variations of judgement around things being good or bad are ‘in reality’ (p. 54) variations of things being good—and it’s right there in the adaptations of the term. Had ‘bad’ been chosen—bad, unbad, plusbad, etc.—the stress would have fallen on things being less than satisfactory, and this is exactly what a state insisting on its own superlative greatness cannot afford to highlight. By eliminating the word ‘bad’, Newspeak effectively eliminates the possibility of things being thought about in terms that would bring their inadequacies to the fore. It makes badness unthinkable. Everything is good. All views to the contrary are a fault of the mistaken individual, who must therefore be eliminated. 

There is, all the same, a huge amount of badness in Oceania, and here Orwell continues to stress the yawning gap between Ingsoc’s versions of reality and the reality of its citizens’ lives by focusing on how material existence is such a paltry affair of dirt, grime, and filth. The canteen is a focal point for a broader deterioration. The stew served to the workers has a ‘sour metallic smell’ (p. 51); the ‘dented’ (p. 62) metal trays on which the food is served are ‘greasy’ (p. 52); the ‘bad’ (p. 62) coffee is milkless and over-sweetened; the stew itself has the unsettling ‘appearance of vomit’ (p. 53); the bread is ‘dark-coloured’ (p. 55), and presumably rotten; the spoons are ‘bent’ (p. 62) from over-use; and the walls are ‘grimy’ (p. 62). All surfaces are oily and stained, with ‘grime in every crack’ (p. 62). The particularities of the canteen evoke the degeneration of Airstrip One more widely, with its ‘battered and rickety furniture’, hole-spotted socks and clothes, crumbling buildings, and ‘insufficient’ cigarettes (pp. 62-3). Everyone is hungry, despite being seemingly well fed. So deep-seated is this sense of lack and shortage that it appears, from Winston’s point of view, to have made the Party members themselves foul to look at, and foul to consider. ‘Nearly everyone [is] ugly, and would still [be] ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls’ (p. 63). This is where deprivation meets deportment, and lack meets look. For a society in which the ‘standard of living’ (p. 61) is said to have risen—and is presumably always said to be rising—the evidence tells against the rhetoric. 

Goldstein’s book is alert to this contradiction. In relation to Oceania’s permanent war footing, it speaks of how the ‘primary aim’ of modern war is ‘to use up the products’ of the machine economy on which it rests ‘without raising the general standard of living’ (p. 196). What the Party says and what the Party does, in other words, are different things. So people in Oceania feel their lives dwindling away, even though the Party announces on a daily basis that they ought to feel their lives becoming more and more satisfying and secure. This tension is particularly evident in the fact that people are less like people, here in the Ministry of Truth canteen (and not just there, of course), and more like dolls and marionettes. From the lunch queue that ‘jerk[s]’ slowly forward’ (pp. 51, 52); to the way Winston and Syme ‘thread’ (p. 53) their way to a table, as if they’re puppets momentarily uncoupled from their strings; to the way Parsons moves in on them ‘like a little boy grown large’ (p. 59), as if he’s a kind of monstrous Pinocchio; to Winston’s ‘violent jerk’ (p. 64) out of his reverie, when he notices Julia staring at him; to the ‘man with the strident voice’ (p. 56) who speaks of the ‘complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’, not in the manner of ‘a real human being’, but as if he’s ‘some kind of dummy’ (p. 57), the emphasis throughout falls on how these people have been reduced through their living conditions to pale shadows of what humans are meant to be. Like the chocolate ration, which has been reduced even as it’s announced to have been increased (pp. 61-2), ordinary Party members have been lessened into imitation bodies even as their masters announce their supposed betterment and better-offness. 

Orwell’s interest in all of this lies partly with the material consequences of physical and psychological deprivation, and partly with the effects of language, or non-language, on the nature of the self. The man with the strident voice gives Orwell his example of the second of these emphases. ‘Strident’ is a well-chosen adjective, evoking an image of something ‘striding’ forth without stopping, either for breath or for thought. And this is exactly what the man does, ‘talking remorselessly away’ (p. 56) while the ‘stream of sound’ (p. 57) pours out of his mouth. We only have glimpses of exactly what he talks about, but we know from these snatched bits of evidence that he is a pure ideologue, a man completely in support of Ingsoc principles. A kind of machine, whose voice ‘starts up’ (p. 64) like an engine after being interrupted by a telescreen announcement, this Party man talks the talk because talking the talk is what his particular manifestation of ideology compels him to do. The man’s brain doesn’t speak so much as his larynx speaks, the sounds it emits having the guise not of ‘speech in the true sense’ but of ‘a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck’ (p. 57). The sight of him prompts Syme to reflect on the Newspeak word duckspeak, which can be applied either as abuse or as praise. It’s not clear, in the moment, and where the Party man is concerned, which way Syme’s sympathies lie. 

We do know which way Orwell’s sympathies lay, however. The tone of this passage in the novel makes it clear that the strident-voiced man’s duckspeak is hardly something to be valued. But there is also a link, here, with one of Orwell’s most famous essays, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). In the midst of discussing what he called the ‘sheer humbug’ of political language, Orwell comments: 

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity. 

The closeness between this account and the depiction of the strident-voiced man is obvious, down to the detail of the noise-generating larynx and the light-reflecting spectacles, which echo the novel’s emphasis on the ‘two blank discs’ he has ‘instead of eyes’ (p. 57). Speech in Oceania, of the kind uttered in defence of the Party, has become automatic, repetitive, boring, and in that lies its danger, because those unable to tell apart good from bad, true from false, are likely to accept the automatic, repetitive, and boring as the spontaneous, innovative, and true. A moment like this helps us to see yet again how Nineteen Eighty-Four functions as a work of satire—it isn’t concerned merely with caricaturing a world, but with criticizing one. 

The novel’s status as a work of literature cuts against this reduction of language to a sequence of lifeless phrases. Its own imaginativeness, that is to say, opposes the meagre patterning of expressive possibilities encompassed not only by Newspeak’s always dwindling vocabulary, but also by the dwindling vocabularies of the political languages of the wartime 1940s. And yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four is also alert to how literature as such will almost certainly have its days numbered in an autocratic, authoritarian state. Syme leads us to this idea when he states to Winston that by 2050 the literature of the past ‘will have been destroyed’ (p. 56), with Newspeak translations put in their place. Why not destroy this material altogether? Well, as the Newspeak appendix informs us, considerations of ‘prestige’ are to blame, with the Party being keen ‘to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc’ (p. 325). Syme mentions Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, to which the appendix adds Swift and Dickens, two of Orwell’s favourite writers and, not coincidentally, two significant influences on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. We also know that Kipling is another of these ‘prestige’-laden figures. Ampleforth, the ‘mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature’ (p. 44) who works with Winston in the Records Department, is producing a ‘definitive’ edition of Kipling’s poetry when he is captured and incarcerated in the Ministry of Love. His crime? To have rhymed ‘God’ with ‘rod’, an inexcusable oversight in the irreligious ideology of Ingsoc. 

Despite his ‘surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres’ (pp. 44-5), Ampleforth is unable to work his way round the linguistic limitations of the task in front of him, to his unfortunate demise. He doesn’t have the saving stupidity required to live through the Party’s intolerances, but then again perhaps no one does. Winston certainly doesn’t, as we come to know. And neither does Syme. The one person who might, but who is caught out for very different reasons, is Parsons, so named because presumably he is meant to evoke the image and idea of a parson, or supposedly obedient member of the clergy. Like O’Brien, who is later described as among other things a ‘priest’ (p. 257), Parsons is in this sense an ironic embodiment of the quasi-religious workings of Oceania’s secular society. This ‘tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face’ (p. 58) is the ideal Party man: happy, tractable, satisfied. Taking pride in the state-encouraged paranoia of his children, who help to turn in a man they believed to be a ‘foreigner’ on the basis of his ‘funny’ shoes’ (p. 60), he isn’t to know that he himself will receive exactly the same treatment, and be betrayed by his offspring. All that’s in the future for now, though. Here, Parsons is simply carrying on as he always does, inconvenienced by the scarcity of everyday objects, yet glad when the state steps in and supposedly transforms things. Winston’s habit of hoarding razor blades (pp. 51-2) suggests that he can see this for what it is: a form of manufactured scarcity. Parsons doesn’t view the world around him so perceptively. 

So what this chapter gives us is yet another perspective on the distance between Winston and those around him. Winston can see the Oceanic reality for what it is: a conspiracy, one that requires willed ignorance and the stupidity of its subjected citizens to endure. Similarly, those most likely to survive its deprivations are those who can cultivate in themselves an idiocy that will stop them from asking the wrong (really the right) kinds of question. Winston treads a fine line here between thinking and acting. He can hide his disreputable scepticism from someone like Syme, but what he doesn’t bargain for is the fact that his very capacity for thought, and for hiding certain thoughts from his oppressors, is what will eventually get him into hot water. Winston knows that he will eventually be caught, of course, but all the same an adulthood spent cultivating a precisely crafted illusion of conformity—his ‘vapid eagerness’ (p. 54)—will no doubt make one hope for the best, even in the worst of worlds. And this is one of the reasons why, I think, Winston is so alarmed by the prospect that the girl (Julia) watching him from the next table ‘with curious intensity’ (p. 64) might be the one to turn him in:

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (p. 65)

Winston’s paranoia stems from the fear that he’ll be found out and hounded into an early grave, even though he knows that he has, by writing in his diary, already committed the essential crime that contains all others: thoughtcrime. This tension between the hope of staying unobserved, and the knowledge that all spaces of privacy, including the mind, have already been compromised, is what gives Nineteen Eighty-Four a good deal of its peculiar horror. Here, it takes the shape of barely concealed panic under scrutiny. But in a sense that’s always what Winston is dealing with: when he’s talking with Parsons, when he’s sparring with Syme, and even when the tobacco falls out of his cigarette. To be disappointed, under these conditions, would be to admit that things go wrong in a reality where everything is meant, under pain of torture and death, to be wonderful.