3. Melting into Mist: Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter 3

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

Much of this short chapter is taken up with Winston’s efforts at physical exercise. Part of the morning routine in Oceania for Outer Party members is a series of Physical Jerks, or bodily movements designed to get the blood flowing to the muscles. There is a connection here with Burmese Days (1934), Orwell’s first published novel, in which the character Macgregor occupies himself with ‘Physical Jerks for the Sedentary’. You can see the sort of thing that’s involved in the video, below:

Winston’s lack of fitness and physical health, which we’ve already discussed, is emphasized by the fact that as soon as he wrenches himself out of bed to start his exercise he’s ‘doubled up by a violent coughing fit’ (p. 33)—a common occurrence for him each and every day. His veins swell and his varicose ulcer starts itching. What snaps him back into action and out of the ‘pain of the coughing fit’ (p. 34), as he begins to exercise, is the knowledge that he’s being watched, as ever, by the telescreen. On this occasion, the watcher is an ‘instructress’ (p. 38), a ‘youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes’ (p. 34).

The Michael Radford film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was released in the calendar year of 1984 itself, does a great job with this sequence, as you can see, again, from the following video:

What the film version cannot quite capture, however, is the way that Winston’s mind wanders from thought to thought during his faltering attempts to take part in these state-mandated exertions. As the Jerks proceed, Winston’s mind goes from thinking about the difficulty of remembering the past; to the wartime climate of his youth; to the three-pronged war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia; to the nature of doublethink; and finally to the unreliability of memory in a world where the past has ‘not merely been altered’, but ‘actually destroyed’ (p. 38).

Before I comment on any of this, however, I want to discuss the chapter’s opening. Part I, Chapter 3 begins with an account of Winston ‘dreaming of his mother’ (p. 31), a figure who looms over his life very powerfully, as we come to appreciate later in the story. He remembers her as a ‘tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair’ (p. 31). The detail of her statuesqueness persists in Winston’s recollections of her, as in that later, highly distressing moment when he remembers the ‘close-smelling room’ in which his family lived and ‘his mother’s statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir something at the saucepan’ (p. 169). But whereas all actual statues and monuments in Oceania have been ‘systematically altered’ in order to stop light being thrown ‘upon the past’ (p. 102), Winston’s mother has been erased from history altogether—she has been annihilated, obliterated, vaporized. Like his father, ‘a dark and thin’ man Winston remembers being ‘dressed always in neat dark clothes’ (p. 31)—this detail suggesting some sort of connection, perhaps, with the ‘curiously disarming’ (p. 12) and ‘urbane’ (p. 13) O’Brien—Winston’s mother was ‘swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the ’fifties’ (p. 31). The novel’s chronology indicates that the 1950s were also a time of intense conflict for the world at large, with a nuclear war (p. 197) as one of its most ghastly happenings.

Like the past, which seems always to be melting into mist, Winston’s sister is someone he has a hard time bringing to mind. He remembers her as ‘a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes’ (p. 31), like a kind of grotesque, worn-down monkey. His ‘young sister’, we’re told much later in the novel, was ‘a tiny ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness’ (p. 168). At this earlier stage in the book, Winston can only dream about his sister and mother as if they’re ‘down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave’, in ‘a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water’ (p. 31). I’ll have more to say about this and other instances of water imagery in Nineteen Eighty-Four in the next discussion, which will be the first of several thematic accounts of the novel in this series. For now, I want to highlight two things: first, the echo here of Winston’s earlier sense of himself as a weird ocean-dweller, ‘wandering in the forests of the sea bottom’ (p. 28); and second, the connection between this image of a ‘sinking ship’ and the sinking refugees in the war film Winston sees on the evening of the 3rd of April, 1984. Links of this kind point to an imaginary of loss coded as sinking. They suggest that traumatic loss is expressed through images of immersion and drowning in deep water. The most intense example of this connection comes in the moment immediately after Winston betrays Julia, at the culminating moment of his time in Room 101. Having told O’Brien to torture his beloved Julia in his place, Winston has the sensation of falling through, among other things, ‘the oceans’ (p. 300). If later in the novel the trajectory through water, for Winston, is downwards, here he sees those who have already fallen into water looking back up at him—‘the large eyes of his mother and his sister’ meeting his gaze through ‘green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking’ (p. 32).

It’s worth stressing the strangeness of all this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel known for its enormously sceptical account of totalitarian power, of surveillance culture, of groupthink, and of the state-sanctioned emptying of meaning from language. It’s far less known for images of the kind associated with Winston’s memories, which turn persistently to a trauma he has not yet overcome. The images of deep water attest to depth in a literal sense: this trauma is sunk deep down in his mind. They also suggest that this trauma is impeding his progress in some way, holding him back, not letting him exist in the moment without pain. Above all else, this pain is the pain of a sacrificial guilt. ‘His mother’s memory tore at his heart’, we’re told, ‘because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable’ (p. 32). The tragedy of this sacrifice is, as Winston recognizes, one of the signs of its pastness, of its belonging to a time when the very idea of tragedy was still a thinkable and communicable concept. Tragedy cannot exist in the grey, dulling world of Oceania, which permits its citizens to understand nothing but the continual and always increasing victories of Ingsoc. And the striking images of wateriness add to the effect, associating Winston’s tragic memories with the idea of an unpassable, fluidic divide between his present and the ‘ancient time’ (p. 32) of his past.

An emphasis on ancient things persists throughout the novel. The word ‘ancient’ is associated with time, place, gramophones, cyclicality, and, as ever, dirt. But perhaps its most important connection is with the sense of a preserved ancient past signalled through the idea of the Golden Country, which Winston visualizes in the wake of his dreams about his mother and sister. Compare this phrase with ‘Golden Age’, which is often used colloquially to mean a time of peace and prosperity. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this concept is altered to a condition aligned with a specific place:

an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees. (p. 33) 

Winston’s dreaming of this golden landscape anticipates the ‘old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there’ (p. 129) that he really and actually encounters with Julia. He dreams about this place so often that he’s ‘never fully certain’ whether or not he has ‘seen it in the real world’ (p. 33), and at this point in the novel there is the possibility that this mythic place, gilded by ‘the slanting rays of the sun’ (p. 32), is the ‘place where there is no darkness’ Winston has already dreamt about and feels certain he will one day find. Winston’s visualizing of the Golden Country so exactly in terms of the real landscape he encounters with Julia implies that he may have been there before, in some ancient time. But here we can also think about fate, and about how Winston’s life is put on a predictable track from the moment he commits the thoughtcrime-laden act of deciding to write in a diary. From that moment on, his life has one way to end, just as his dreams of a Golden Country are, we suspect, certain to be realized. 

Lost in a rural idyll, Winston dreams of Julia, once more not yet named, as she walks to him across the pasture and tears off her clothes in a ‘single movement’ that seems, with its ‘grace and carelessness’, to destroy Ingsoc itself, to ‘annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police would all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm’ (p. 33). Take note: another emphasis on an arm as an instrument of power. There is the refugee woman, who shields her child fruitlessly but poignantly (and, indeed, powerfully) from being gunned down, and now there is Julia, seemingly able to wave away a climate of fear and pain in a single stroke. Later on in the book there is Winston, incarcerated in the Ministry of Love, ‘clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm’ (p. 251) after a guard smashes it with his truncheon. This little arc of limbs in power and pain, admittedly not the most obvious route to trace through Orwell’s text, nevertheless speaks of a powerful imaginary in Nineteen Eighty-Four that stages the body as an instrument of resistance. In principle the body can resist. In practice, it’s vulnerable. 

The body can also speak to its owner’s preoccupations. Having dreamt about Julia, naked in the Golden Country, Winston wakes up ‘with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (p. 33). Why does he do this? One possibility is that Orwell, an author thoroughly invested in Shakespeare’s cultural value, chose Winston Smith’s name on the grounds that his initials, W. S., evoke an icon of not only cultural but also national authority. Winston wakes with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips, perhaps, because the narrative needs him to—because it needs him to speak for a touchstone of cultural value, Shakespeare, who otherwise cannot really figure in the story. An outlandish possibility, maybe, but the gesture, as depicted in the novel, is obscurely motivated, and invites outlandish interpretation. It’s simply not clear why Winston wakes up saying ‘Shakespeare’. There is something bordering on the ridiculous about it. We might also wonder about how dangerous it would have been for Winston to say something so conspicuously incriminating out loud, within earshot of the telescreen. What would his overlords think? Surely nothing sympathetic. But, again, we’re not told what those watching him through the telescreen may or may not have made of the utterance. There is a pleasing mystification about it—a gratuitousness that suggests something is trying to break through from ‘the ancient time’ when ‘there was still privacy, love and friendship’ (p. 32), and, indeed, literature, as we know it. 

I noted at the end of my discussion of Part I, Chapter 2 of Nineteen Eighty-Four that, from one point of view, Winston’s willingness to trust in a future time of free thought is called into question throughout the ensuing chapter (i.e. the one currently under examination). This little matter of waking with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips cuts against this ever so slightly, because it implies that Winston’s mind is not fully his own in his dreams and in his waking (as nobody’s is, of course). But the more obvious challenge to Winston’s socio-political dreaming, to his imagining of a time when thought is free, comes through very clearly in Part I, Chapter 3 by means of its emphasis on the difficulty of remembering and thereby acting in accordance with the values of the past. Winston is unable to remember with precision a good many things, among them the year in which he ‘first heard mention of Big Brother’ (p. 38); the ‘names of countries, and their shapes on the map’ (p. 34) before the emergence of Ingsoc; and the proper nature, with all its swapping and changing military allegiances, of the ‘literally continuous’ period of war during his youth, whose history it is ‘impossible’ to trace because ‘no written record, and no spoken word, ever [makes] mention of any other alignment than the existing one’ (p. 36). This puts the hopeful rebel, such as Winston, in a difficult spot, because it disorientates his mind. In making it nigh-on impossible to know where he’s come from, it makes it nigh-on impossible to know where he’s going—a predicament captured in the novel’s reference to ‘the labyrinthine world of doublethink’ (p. 37), which keeps the whole set of circumstances turning in an endless loop of puzzling ahistorical uncertainty. 

Everything, we read, ‘melt[s] into mist’ (p. 38). An echo of The Communist Manifesto, with its emphasis on the rapidity of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionizing of the instruments of production, and the socio-political and socio-cultural consequences of such change, this line speaks to the disorientating effects of a radically changed world. Much of the importance of this chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four comes from how it furthers our understanding of the means with which Ingsoc dominates its citizens. There are obvious methods: police, telescreens, the Thought Police, the fear of capture, the threat of torture, and all the rest of it. But the more terrible forms of power Winston faces, and which make his longed-for world of free thought seem increasingly distant, are those which systematically take away firm grounds of knowledge in a world hell-bent not only on destroying all forms of ‘documentary proof’ (p. 39) about the past, but also on rewriting the past so often as to make the past whatever it needs to be in order to serve the whims of the moment. Those in Oceania who remember the past differently from official records are trained to re-remember the past, as it were, to submit themselves to the distortions of ‘Reality control’ (p. 37). But without the certainties of records, archives, documents, and other approved forms of evidentiary materials—in short, without the reliability of objective, collectively agreed-upon facts—the problem is how to ‘establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory’ (p. 38). 

Winston can remember the climate of war which marked ‘the dim period of his early childhood’ (p. 34), during which his father took him down into a Tube station during an air raid. Winston remembers this event very precisely: he notes the ringing of the spiral staircase under his feet as he descends underground; the noise of the crowded station; the stone-flagged floor; the old man who reeks of gin (p. 35). These details evoke the memory’s truth, its origins in an event that actually occurred. And as an event that actually happened, irrespective of whether it is collectively acknowledged, it has the status of something that is ‘true from everlasting to everlasting’ (p. 37). But what use is such truth in a world in which real facts cannot be verified, or, indeed, shared? While such knowledge as the memory of going down into the Tube station exists in ‘his own consciousness’ (p. 37), its absence from a public, generally accessible bank of information means that Winston cannot prove its truth except by saying that he truly remembers it. And if he dies, as he knows he will, then that memory will disappear, and yet another hook back into the past will have been unstitched from the fabric of trustworthy collective reminiscence. As Winston reflects, the truly frightening outcome of this systematic process of erosion is not that the reality of the past is made unverifiable, but that the reality of the past becomes whatever the Party says it should be: ‘If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?’ (p. 37). 

We’ll return to these ideas as we progress through Nineteen Eighty-Four—this is not the only part of the book in which they’re emphasized. Other things we might note about this chapter include the image of Winston, along with all the other members of ‘thirty to forty group’ (p. 34), doing their Physical Jerks and bending down to touch their toes, which implies deference without respect, but deference—necessary and enforced deference—all the same. Or we might note ‘the look of grim enjoyment’ (p. 34) Winston has to wear on his face during his morning exercise, a look that recalls the ‘expression of quiet optimism’ he knows it’s ‘advisable to wear when facing the telescreen’ (p. 6), so as not to give yourself away by seeming unhappy. ‘Never show dismay’, the narrative emphasizes, focalizing into Winston’s viewpoint: ‘Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away’ (p. 39). We could think about how the records of Big Brother’s various exploits and achievements have been continually changed so as to make it impossible to know how much is true and how much is invented (p. 38). We could consider the outlining of doublethink, with its conscious induction of unconsciousness, and its use of ‘logic against logic’ (p. 37). We could discuss Winston’s knowledge of the fact that Oceania’s war with Eurasia and its alliance with Eastasia is only a temporary arrangement of always changing alignments (p. 36). I want to end, though, by focusing on an aspect of the chapter’s form. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four is very good, as a novel, at dramatizing interruptions in thought. We’ll see this at work in a slightly different way in the chapter during which Winston reads Goldstein’s book. But here we get a sense of how difficult it is, by the way action is depicted on the page, to sustain thought in a world built on principles of constant noise, interruption, and restlessness. The Physical Jerks force those participating in them to concentrate on the task at hand. But when the mind wanders, as Winston’s does, it starts to affect the enthusiasm with which the task is performed. And so Winston is challenged on exactly this score, just as his mind is about to go further into the epistemology, the logic of knowledge, upon which life under the power of Ingsoc is fashioned. It’s a simple point, but an important one. People in Oceania are kept busy. Their lives are noisy, busy, energetic. There is precious little time to sit and think, and what time there is presumably is taken up simply with resting after a day’s occupations. The perennially ‘babbling’ (p. 4) voice of the telescreen is more than just some kind of irritant—it’s a very carefully calibrated strategy of unrest, of making minds unable to find the peace required for sustained thought, and possibly also of making them fear the absence of sound, thereby holding them even tighter in its grip. Winston is an oddity, in this respect, because he’s found the means to keep such thoughts in view, even when interrupted. But do the rest of Oceania’s citizens seem likely to follow his example? Not really. They’re too busy trying (that is, being told) to touch their toes.