5. One Piece of Nonsense for Another: Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter 4

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

We learn in this part of the novel about how Ingsoc controls the past—how its teams of revisionist clerks obey the will of the ‘directing brains’ (p. 45) who tell them how to tidy and reposition human history. A procedural chapter, in other words; a stretch of narrative devoted to how Winston’s world works and how he works in it. The chapter’s focus is the rewriting of documents—in this case, articles in the Times that have been deemed erroneous, and which must be brought up to date. Some of the articles concern announcements made by Big Brother; others, official proclamations to do with rates of production and the allocation of rations. Where these articles conflict with the present needs and ambitions of the Party they must be amended, thereby ensuring that history, as captured in the official records, at any rate, has always tended in a single, unchallengeable direction. ‘In this way’, we learn, ‘every prediction made by the Party [can] be shown by documentary evidence’ to be and always to have been ‘correct’ (p. 42). Such an effort demands an intricate architecture of ‘cross-referencing’ to ensure that ‘the chosen lie [can] pass into the permanent records and become truth’ (p. 48). Yet clearly Ingsoc has the resources and manpower required for this nigh-on unimaginable labour of corrections on corrections on corrections. The whole effort is made possible by ‘the huge complexity of the Records Department’, with its ‘swarms of workers’, ‘huge printing shops’, ‘tele-programmes section’, ‘armies of reference clerks’, and, most importantly of all, ‘the vast repositories where the corrected documents [are] stored’ (p. 45). There is something of the sublime about the whole affair—something impressive but terrifying about the vast quantity of bureaucratic and administrative effort required to keep such a system going. 

Although it’s been established in previous chapters that Winston is always very careful not to show dissatisfaction with his daily routine, he begins his day at the Ministry of Truth with a ‘deep, unconscious sigh’ (p. 40). Not even the nearness of the telescreen can stop him from exhaling noisily, however dangerous it might be. The action is unwitting and mechanical, automatic—it offers another glimpse into how Oceania’s world of unconscious priorities makes its citizens unthinking. But there are different kinds of unthinking behaviour. There’s the kind of action that’s unthinking because it’s become instinctive, and then there’s the kind of action that’s unthinking because it’s thoughtless, or absent-minded. Winston seems to be both: he’s machine-like, to an extent, but he’s also tired. Yet his work does give him a certain satisfaction. Indeed, his ‘greatest pleasure in life [is] in his work’, much of which is ‘tedious routine’, with some of it involving ‘jobs so difficult and intricate’ that they allow the worker to lose himself ‘in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem’ (p. 46). Winston’s job involves calculations that have all the pleasure and reward of advanced mathematics, and in this sense it involves labour done for its own sake. There is a gruesome connection, in other words, between Winston’s labour and the ‘liquid’ (p. 130) song of the warbling thrush, who sings in the countryside for itself and for itself alone. But whereas the thrush sings for no reason except for its own fulfilment, Winston works so that fulfilment of a very different sort can be said always to have happened in an entirely predictable, always inevitable way: the fulfilment of five-year plans, of labour forecasts, wars, and power. 

The metaphor chosen by Orwell to illuminate Winston’s way of working, the palimpsest, evokes the idea of a writing surface from which markings can be erased, and yet on which the residue of prior inscriptions—earlier textual signs—remains visible. ‘All history [is] a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often was necessary’ (p. 42). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this erasing of the past is imperceptible. Once the deed is done, once the erasure has happened, there simply isn’t documentary evidence of the erasure having happened, and therefore no means with which to prove that it has occurred. Even the guidance assigning the revisions euphemistically defines the act of revision as correction rather than forgery; it’s always articulated as ‘slips, errors, misprints or misquotations’ that must be ‘put right in the interests of accuracy’ (p. 43), as opposed to actually existing things that must be revised in accordance with the ideological whims of the moment. But even this is not strictly the right view of things, simply because of the frequency with which adjustments of the past take place. It is, Winston sees, ‘merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another’ (p. 43). Statistics are ‘just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version’ (p. 43), which makes the relationship between fantasies immeasurable in terms of a greater or lesser relationship to ‘the truth’, which exists nowhere except in human memory. Because memory is fallible and prone to error, the consequence of this continual substitution of illusions for illusions is that the outlines of history fade into an indistinct ‘shadow-world’ in which even the ‘date of the year [has] become uncertain’ (p. 44). 

So if the link with the palimpsest means that history itself, in Oceania, is the thing being erased from the ‘surface’ of documentary records, to be replaced with whatever version of history Ingsoc requires, where do the signs of prior inscriptions materialize if the mechanics of revision are so perfect? The obvious answer is in memory. Winston’s memories of the past help him understand the nature of what he and his fellow workers in the Ministry of Truth do to history, and his failure to conform to the expectations of doublethink is what enables him to retain the memory of remembering. Because he knows that he and numerous others are changing history, and because he can remember this process after the fact, he’s a poor practitioner of consciously inducing unconsciousness, as the novel puts it at an earlier point. The memory that troubles Winston most relevantly in this respect is his memory of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, which I’ll discuss in a future commentary. For now, the point to keep in view is the precariousness of truth in a world intent on taking apart all mechanisms of testimony. As O’Brien later emphasizes to Winston, if the past ‘exists’ in records and in human memories, and if the Party controls all records and all memories, as it pretty much seems to, then it controls the past (p. 260). The novel implicitly asks: Can such a situation be overcome? 

Nineteen Eighty-Four does not seem to be especially confident or optimistic in relation to this question, not least because, in Oceania, memory itself has become a kind of joke. There are several places in the novel where this comes across, each with its particular brand of dark humour. One example is the moment when O’Brien first approaches Winston in the Ministry of Truth, and claims not to be able to remember the name of a ‘friend’ of Winston’s who is an expert in Newspeak. This is a coded reference to Syme, who by this point in the story has been ‘abolished’ (p. 164). Any open admission of his existence, therefore, is an implicit admission of something that cannot be acknowledged: namely, the fact not only that he was once alive, and is now dead, but that his very existence has been expunged from the historical record, and that, moreover, a memory of this expungement has not been eradicated through the work of doublethink. Winston interprets the gesture as a ‘signal’ (p. 165) of what he assumes is O’Brien’s secret antipathy towards Ingsoc. But it’s also an economical instance of just how layered the ironies are in this text. As we come to discover, O’Brien is in fact a truly loyal agent of the state. His gesture of ‘sharing a small act of thoughtcrime’ (p. 165) with Winston is a trap designed to put Winston at ease, to lull him into a false sense of security. O’Brien’s inability to remember Syme’s name, which is really a feigned inability, suspends memory even as it points to its presence. Without the memory of Syme, the idea that Syme should not be remembered would not be meaningful. So memory is a joke here in the sense that everybody knows it exists, and works, but cannot openly acknowledge its existence, or workings. Irony at its finest, and most terrifying.

A slightly different kind of irony attached to the idea of memory resides in the so-called ‘memory hole’—the ‘large oblong slit protected by a wire grating’ (p. 40) that sits in the side wall of Winston’s workplace cubicle.

When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. (p. 40)

So memory holes are part of the systematic processes of erasure upon which Ingsoc relies. They facilitate the annihilation of documents that have been superseded by ‘the needs of the moment’ (p. 42), and they catch all stray bits and pieces of paper upon which inconsistent text and images might be imprinted. Memory holes do away with order and chance, in other words. They are one of the everyday catch-alls used by Ingsoc to make sure that as many incongruous traces of history as possible are obliterated. The joke is that no one can remember why memory holes are, in fact, called memory holes. Memory itself has been memory-holed. 

Two aspects of the memory hole connect up with other aspects of the text. The first is their  oblong shape. The second is the way they resemble an ‘orifice’ (p. 40). The oblongness of the memory hole recalls the ‘oblong metal plaque’ (p. 3) of the telescreens, which is in turn echoed by the ‘oblong slip of newspaper’ that appears ‘between O’Brien’s fingers’ (p. 259) in the Ministry of Love, and by the oblong shape (p. 296) of the cage in which the rats are contained in Room 101. (Did Orwell have a thing for oblongs? Or is this meant to convey some point about the geometrical preferences of Ingsoc design?) There is in the etymology of the word oblong—a length that goes against or is somehow in the way of itself—a very subtle suggestion of something not quite being right. And the same is true of the fact that the memory hole is a kind of orifice or slit. Its mouth-like quality is reinforced by the way the paper thrown into it is ‘devoured by the flames’ (p. 42, emphasis added) of the furnaces to which the memory holes lead. And this would be inconsequential were it not for the fact that Winston finds orifices and mouths unnerving, as we discover when he remembers his encounter with the prostitute (in Part I, Chapter 6). Speech itself seems to have something of the disgusting, for Winston, as in that moment when he observes the ‘horrible […] stream of sound’ (p. 57) pouring out of the mouth of the man with the strident voice in the Ministry of Truth canteen. These negative associations culminate in Winston’s transformation, under torture and in the wake of endless beatings, into a ‘mouth’ (p. 254) that simply utters automatically, instead of speaking with character and purpose. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about different kinds of vocal utterance, among them speech, screams, and song. Talk is plentiful in Oceania, but it’s also often noisy in the sense that it’s little more than a clamouring, unignorable accompaniment. A good example of this, again, is the man quacking like a duck in the canteen. He doesn’t speak so much as he drones on, thereby emphasizing the fact that the Ministry of Truth is a gigantic hive filled with ‘swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs’ (p. 45). The soundscape of the Records Department must also be ear-splitting. All those pneumatic tubes carrying records and instructions about the place will be loud, and the ventilating currents of the Memory Holes will also presumably contribute to a ceaseless hubbub of mechanically constituted toing-and-froing. Orwell himself listed big towns, noise, motor cars, and the radio among the things he disliked, and it’s interesting that Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the terms of this set of prejudices. Unrelenting noise deprives Winston, along with his fellow citizens, of psychological legroom; it makes ‘unplugging’ from the daily grind impossible. Work spaces are noisier than living spaces in Airstrip One, but both nevertheless are structured to prevent the solitude of rest embodied in quietness.  

Consider, for example, Orwell’s representation of the political implications of sound. Oceania, or at least Airstrip One, is filled with din and clatter. Because he cannot turn off his telescreen, Winston Smith is forced to live in an apartment marked by a continual babbling of speeches, proclamations, and announcements. His place of work, the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, is characterized by an ‘endless rustle of papers and hum of voices’ (p. 44), just as the Ministry’s canteen is ‘hot, crowded, [and] noise-filled’ (p. 114)—a space of continuous ‘uproar’ (p. 53). Trumpet calls and tinny music can be played on the telescreens at any moment. Speakers can grab microphones and pour out ‘endless catalogue[s] of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, [and] broken treaties’ (p. 188). Hate Week, the festival organized to rouse citizens into an orgiastic state of xenophobic rage, is among other things a calculated form of social control, one that makes Winston ‘gelatinous with fatigue’ (p. 186) not only because he’s overworked, but also because he’s worn down by unrelenting auditory stimuli, by ‘the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, [and] the booming of guns’ (p. 187). And to be gelatinous is to be weak, pliable. Sound in Oceania is not politically neutral: it’s just one of many mechanisms through which rulers keep the ruled in line. 

The philosopher Michel Serres has argued that a scenario of this kind shows how noise can dominate mind and matter. As Serres writes in his philosophical text The Parasite (1982), ‘the one who has power is the one who has the source and emission of sound. The one who has the strongest and loudest voice is always right. The stentor who deafens with his commands takes their place. And the one who has the trumpets is followed by the artillery.’ Here Serres is discussing the upkeep of power through sheer assertion. He who speaks loudest in a conversation ends the conversation by becoming, in effect, the only one who speaks, no matter how many dissenting voices are raised unsuccessfully against him. But this single instance of noise as power represents a more general kind of force. As Serres asks: ‘Who has the power? The one who has the sound, the noise, and who makes others be quiet.’ There is authority in loud speaking, but there is also authority in the workings of sound itself. If, as Serres insists, power ‘is nothing but the occupation of space’, then there is power in the space-occupying extensions of all-intrusive sound. ‘Power’, Serres concludes, ‘is only a variety of din.’[1] And in Oceania, din is everywhere. 

The Records Department sequence implies that din is everywhere in the form of meaningless talk and in the guise of noisy mechanical operations. The ‘babbling’ telescreen suggests as much, and indeed combines the two emphases. But the fact that Winston and his co-workers are all engaged in a process of substituting nonsense for nonsense by speaking insinuates that the ‘murmuring’ background of the Ministry of Truth is a murmuring of pure, meaningless sound. The alterations that Winston and all the others pursue in their jobs are activated by announcing the corrections to be done into speakwrites (p. 40)—early, mechanical instances of the dictation software with which we’re familiar today. The sound made by speaking into these contraptions has real consequences in the sense that it leads to the long process of alteration and re-alteration for which the Ministry is responsible. Yet this same sound is also meaningless inasmuch as it simply keeps in circulation a process of endless adjustments that, in time, will lead to more adjustments, and then again in time to more, and to more, without any sign of ending. The hubbub of the Records Department is the hubbub of labour—as in the saying ‘a hive of activity’—and the noise of nothing. Although it may not be a place of fury, it is a place of sound, and that sound signifies very little indeed, just as the songs and pornography produced in the Ministry for the proles on so-called ‘versificator[s]’ (p. 46) are negations, in the novel’s terms, of meaningful culture. 

As with culture, as with people. Winston’s fourth and most satisfying task is to annihilate from history the unperson (that is, the dead person) Withers, and to put in his place a person more in keeping with Oceanic expectations. Again, ironies proliferate here. In the face of all this fake creativity of producing ‘rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs’ (p. 46), the most creative act we witness in the Records Department is Winston’s almost spontaneous invention of Comrade Ogilvy.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar. (p. 50)

This act of creation is a travesty of the kind of imaginative activity responsible for the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. Yet there is an easter egg, of sorts, contained within it: the name Ogilvy may be an allusion to the astronomer Ogilvy, in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), who is one of the first people to be incinerated by the Martians after they land on Earth. Incineration for Wells’s Ogilvy, and invention for Orwell’s, in a reversal of the immolating blasts of the memory-hole furnaces. Capping it off is the fact that the etymology of the Ogilvy name, which is likely to mean ‘high place’, stands in contrast to the low fakery through which it materializes. 

So much effort, this constant reformulation of the past, for what might seem like so little reward. But this is entirely the point of the whole enterprise. Oceania has a vested interest in keeping its citizens occupied—in keeping them chained to a practice of historical revisionism that makes the past inaccessible (and therefore the future unthinkable); that prevents them from getting a handle on the nature of their enslavement, and thereby from seeking to escape it; and that encourages them to take a kind of pride in the work through which their enslavement is itself brought into being, turning them into accomplices of and agents for the very system they might otherwise resist. Those who see through the system, and who are known to have seen through it, simply disappear, and are never heard of again. ‘One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead’ (p. 47). It has been suggested that the very form of the book cuts against this—that it is its own testament to the individuals who have been ‘disappeared’, and in that sense a protest against any politics that would seek to eradicate the genuinely creative imaginative spirit. Nineteen Eighty-Four the novel, as a creative act, might be its own answer to the situation it depicts. Quite how effective that gesture is, however, is up for debate. It can be hard to hold out such faith in the power of literature in the face of agencies committed to annihilating truth, knowledge, and resistance. That is the obstacle detailed here. It is the obstacle we face in so many new and disastrous ways today.

[1] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 141-2.