2. Not Death but Annihilation: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part I, Chapter 2

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

We saw in the previous discussion, of the opening chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that much of the beginning of the book is concerned with establishing the details of life’s ‘physical texture’ under the dominion of Ingsoc. Part I, Chapter 2 of Nineteen Eighty-Four continues this emphasis. We learn more in this part of the novel about how Oceania’s citizens live alongside each other and about how children interact with their elders. We also learn about Winston’s dreams, and about the dreamy nature of his thinking about the world. The key thought running through the chapter, though, is Winston’s knowledge that the possession of the diary, and more importantly the act of writing in it, not only makes him ‘already dead’ (p. 30), in the sense that it makes it certain he is going to be found out, captured, tortured, and killed, but also derives from a more basic, more fundamental transgression. The first chapter of the novel concludes with Winston printing the phrase ‘DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER’ (p. 20) repeatedly in his diary. But as Winston recognizes, in a sense the diary is second in importance to the ‘essential crime’ (p. 21) that prompted him to acquire it in the first place: namely, the offence of Thoughtcrime. By acknowledging to himself his treasonous nature, Winston thinks in opposition to the pure spirit of obedience required of him. And this, rather than the mere, albeit significant, act of writing private thoughts in a diary, is his true criminality. In contrast to the ‘imbecile enthusiasms’ (p. 24) of his neighbour, Tom Parsons, Winston is defined by unorthodoxy. And in this attitude lies his doom.

‘Doom’ is the operative word, here, because Winston fears that his doom has arrived when he hears a fateful knock on his door. Going to answer it he realizes that he has left the diary open in his room with the words ‘DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER’ being perfectly legible to whoever it is he’s about to greet. ‘It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done’, we are told. ‘But, he realised, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet’ (p. 22). Little details like this reveal to us how Winston cares about trivial things even when faced with the prospect of his immediate demise—in a sense, how he must care about such trivial things in order to retain something of the humanity that he has to forego on a daily basis in staying safe. To care about the consequence-free act of smudging ink on creamy paper is to care about something consequenceless, and therefore something valuable—as with the refugee woman’s gesture of shielding her child in the novel’s previous chapter—precisely because of its lack of consequences. There is also some very subtle association-building going on here. Winston doesn’t know it yet, but he will in time come to walk down a passage into O’Brien’s apartment that has ‘cream-papered walls’ (p. 175). The false reassurances of writing in the diary are mirrored in the false compensations of walking into O’Brien’s living quarters. Both acts result in death.

But doom hasn’t knocked. It’s only Mrs Parsons, the good-natured woman whose sink is always getting blocked, and who needs Winston’s help. Like the dilapidated world around her, Mrs Parsons is ‘colourless’ and ‘crushed-looking, with wispy hair and a lined face’ (p. 22), the creases of which seem filled with dust. She becomes ‘invertebrate’ (p. 24), or spineless, at Winston’s request for a spanner with which to unblock the sink, a description that aligns her with many other insect-like types in the world of Oceania, as we will see. Her eyes flit nervously about the place as Winston works, before he sees that there actually is dust in the creases of her face (p. 25), a detail that fascinates him. Note again how dust, as in the opening paragraph of the novel, has become visible and important. We usually associate dust with objects—with things that haven’t been moved around all that much, or with surfaces that haven’t been cleaned sufficiently well or often enough. Mrs Parsons is, in this sense, part of the furniture, a thing that has been left in place without due care and attention. She is also one of a type. There are lots of Mrs Parsonses in Orwell’s fiction, and taken all together, as a type, they tell us something about Orwell’s imaginative priorities—about his capacity, which is very often a limited capacity, to envisage women in living, breathing terms. Mrs Parsons is a demoralized soul, but she’s also not given the narrative space to exist as anything more interesting or complex.

This makes for a contrast with the characterization of her husband, Tom, about whom we learn a fair bit in this sequence. A ‘fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity’ (p. 24), Parsons demonstrates exactly the kind of unthinking obedience Oceania expects of its citizens. His most defining characteristic, though—and the novel returns to this point on a good many occasions throughout—is his sweaty stench, which hangs about his and his wife’s apartment like a silent autograph: ‘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’ (p. 24). Parsons’s powers of sweating are extraordinary: ‘At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle’ (p. 59). So formidable are Parsons’s excretions, in fact, that their ‘tang’ almost defeats the ‘tinny smell’ (p. 114) of the disgusting stew served in the Ministry of Truth canteen. There is basically nothing that can stop his ability to stink and perspire, and when he leads a group of volunteers in preparation for Hate Week, Parsons starts wearing shorts and an open shirt, like a kind of overgrown Boy Scout, active and ‘everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply’ (pp. 155-6) of acrid bodily odour.

Possibly worse than Parsons’s ‘reek of sweat’ (p. 23), though, at least for Winston, is the cause of the pipe-blockage in the Parsonses’ flat: a clot of human hair. Winston removes the clot from the sink system ‘disgustedly’ (p. 24) before trying, as best he can, to clean his fingers. Again, this is another small but important detail. For while Nineteen Eighty-Four is most obviously a novel about surveillance culture, and about the terrible power of totalitarian systems, it’s also a novel obsessed with forms of loathing. We’ve already seen this in the form of state-sanctioned mass enragement (i.e. the Two Minutes Hate), but it’s no less clearly there in the form of everyday revulsion and repugnance. Not for nothing, after all, does Orwell so tirelessly reiterate the unsettling character of horrible smells, not only in Nineteen Eighty-Four but also throughout his work—a habit that has recently led to a smell-focused biography of Orwell, in fact: John Sutherland’s book Orwell’s Nose, from 2016. The first sentence of the second paragraph of Nineteen Eighty-Four draws our attention to how the hallway of Victory Mansions smells ‘of boiled cabbage and old rag mats’ (p. 3), and this same smell penetrates into every nook and cranny of the architecture. The Parsonses’ flat is marked by ‘the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building’ (p. 23), and if you’ve ever had to unblock a pipe you’ll know that a built-up clog of hair and filth can be remarkably stinky and stomach-turning.

Details like these help us appreciate just how carefully Orwell laces into his prose certain kinds of integrating descriptive emphases. It would be possible, in fact, to draw out a thread of smell-images and smell-metaphors running throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as it would be possible to identify many other kinds of unifying strands that go into the tapestry of the novel as a whole. One such strand is the strand of ghostliness. After Winston leaves the Parsonses’ flat, and while sitting in his own as the telescreen strikes 14:00 hours, pondering what next to write in his diary, he seems to have the character of ‘a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear’ (p. 30). He’s already ‘dead’, so we’ve been told, and in this respect his ghostliness is unsurprising—Winston is ghostly because the system he resists turns him into a shadow (or should that be foreshadow?) of his own, inevitable destruction. But he’s also ghostly in the sense that he exists not only on the fringes of acceptability, in this strange and terrible world, but also on the edge of knowledge: Winston’s faltering attempts to articulate his frustrations with the way things are put him in a kind of limbo-state, in a place between realities in much the same manner that ghosts hover between death and life. When, later in the book, his longing for Julia puts him out of sorts, the same emphasis returns:

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. (p. 117)

Here the cause of ghostliness, of a sort, is infatuation. Winston feels transparent because his longing for Julia empties his body of its normal solidness. Yet there is also the possibility here that this reiterated accentuation of ghostly translucence is part of a wider descriptive tactic—one that, as we will see in future discussions, and in relation to Mr Charrington in particular, incorporates rebels as much as rulers.

The question of who lords it over whom looms large in this chapter because of how the Parsonses’ children rule the roost. Their flat smells, yes, and smells terribly, but it also looks like an explosion has torn through it: 

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. (p. 23)

So people still play sports, in 1984. As a matter of fact, it’s exactly this—the sporty nature of Oceania—that prompts Winston’s distrust of Julia, who in Winston’s view carries about with her an ‘atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness’ (p. 12). Here, though, the distrust is bound up with how children act and speak, and with how they behave animalistically. As the Parsons children play, Winston finds their scrabbling ‘somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters’ (p. 25).

Children in Oceania have never known anything different from the dog-eat-dog world that, for someone like Winston, is so alarming. For them, an evening’s entertainment means going to see prisoners hanged in public, and a good day’s play involves not only sports but also songs, processions, banners, hiking, drilling with dummy rifles, slogan-yelling, and the worship of Big Brother, all of it—a ‘glorious game’, as it’s called—calculated to transform them into pliable, enthusiastic agents of Ingsoc. Not even their own parents are safe, as Tom Parsons eventually finds out. The main instrument of surveillance in Oceania is the telescreen, but children have become another monitoring means with which to keep the population in line. Mrs Parsons, Winston sees, must ‘lead a life of terror’ in the company of her children, who are on the verge of ‘watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy’ (p. 26). Oceania’s citizens are watched by the state, but they’re also watched by their offspring, thereby undermining traditional models of the nuclear family. ‘It was almost normal’, we’re told, ‘for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ (pp. 26-7). You can imagine the Parsons children reciting the Ingsoc slogans in the manner of nursery rhymes: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

The effectiveness of these slogans derive in part from their simplicity, and in part from their multiplying of the rule of three: a trio of slogans, each structured as simple, three-point declarations. Such slogans make complexity seem simple, and allow plainly untrue statements to have a degree of reasonableness. There is, even so, a kind of truth in them. War is peace, in Oceania, simply because war is a permanent condition of existence. Freedom is slavery, in the terms of Ingsoc, because most of its believers have been convinced that a circumstance of mass addiction to alcohol and intoxication by ideology is, in some sense, liberty. Ignorance is strength, because to be aware of the true nature of things, as Winston and Julia find out, is to be vulnerable in body, mind, and spirit. For the Parsons children these slogans are just a bit of fun—catchphrases that tell truths, rather than hide falsehoods in plain sight. For Winston, their rhetorical simplicity is of a piece with the physical massiveness of the Ministry of Truth whose ‘white face’ they decorate. The slogans are as monumental as the ‘enormous pyramidal shape’ (p. 29) of the Ministry itself, whose hugeness seems to counter all thoughts of rebellion in the population simply by virtue of its disproportionate immensity. And at the other extreme is the face of Big Brother, imprinted on coins, stamps, books, banners, posters, and cigarette packets, ‘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’ (p. 29).

Winston’s means of escape is his diary, at least in the short term, but he knows that there is little certainty in objects and activities that are leading nowhere: 

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? (p. 29) 

Dust, again—in the form of ashes and vapour—but also the uncertainty of address to a future in which the past no longer has any meaningful existence. How, Winston sees, can structures of resistance take shape if there is no shared and reliably accessible material basis—such as writing—upon which to build them? It’s a tormenting thought. As he has already wondered:  

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. (p. 9) 

Taken all together, these anxieties speak to a deep terror in Winston’s mind about the likelihood that Ingsoc will never be overthrown. Not because of Oceania’s dirtiness and dinginess, or because of the way its rulers turn children into spies, but because Ingsoc systematically annihilates all means of connection between timeframes, between past and future, thereby making it impossible for messages of resistance to pass down the ages, for people to become martyrs and to inspire new generations of hopeful malcontents.

There is much else in this short chapter, of course: the use of ‘Goldstein’ as a term of abuse (p. 26); the descriptions of production, armaments, and military encounters announced through the telescreens; and the casual mention of the regular bombing of London by rocket bombs (p. 28), which will come back later in the text. But I want to finish by briefly considering how we see here the ways in which O’Brien has started to take shape in Winston’s mind. In this chapter we learn of Winston’s recurrent dream of an unidentified voice letting him know that he and the voice’s owner will ‘meet in the place where there is no darkness’ (p. 27). This ‘place’, we come to learn, is the Ministry of Love, whose lights are never switched off, not some golden place of free thought and unrestrained life, as Winston seems at certain moments to suspect, and yearn for. Here, though, the emphasis falls on uncertainty (he doesn’t know if this ‘place of no darkness’ is a good or bad thing), and on Winston’s conviction that O’Brien is the owner of the voice in question. What matters, at this point in the novel, is Winston’s lack of certainty as to whether O’Brien is ‘a friend or an enemy’ (p. 27). This matters because it sets up a dramatic irony that is not resolved until the final third of the book. First-time readers are being set up for a fall.

Not that there aren’t signs of what’s to come. During the Two Minutes Hate sequence, it’s repeatedly insinuated that O’Brien is rather less honourable than his appearance lets on. In spite of the ‘trick of re-settling his spectacles on his nose’ that gives him a ‘curiously disarming’ and ‘in some indefinable way, curiously civilised’ manner, O’Brien is also ‘a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face’ (p. 12; emphasis added). And this impression of brutality is extended by the contrast between his ‘urbane manner and his prizefighter’s physique’ (p. 13), a detail that, although we don’t know it at this stage, aligns O’Brien with the soldier ‘with a smooth prizefighter’s jowl’ (p. 232) who breaks into the room above Mr Charrington’s shop, thereby interrupting and ending Winston’s and Julia’s vulnerable solitude. Winston wants O’Brien to be something different, of course, and he persistently reads his ambiguous gestures as signs of solidarity (see p. 19). But dreams have a way of making us see the world around us in terms other than what they are—indeed, they force us to see things in radically new ways. One consequence of Winston’s dreaming is that he’s willing to trust in O’Brien’s brutal countenance as something different from what it turns out to be. Yet he goes ahead and trusts in him all the same, writing in his diary of possible times when thought is free. Just how far away from him such a time really is, from one point of view, is the subject of the novel’s next chapter.