8. Resurrected from the Ashes: Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter 7

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

The diary, again. This chapter begins with Winston writing: ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’ (p. 72). This statement becomes something like a cherished belief in his struggle against the Party. The paragraph that follows sticks very closely to Winston’s point of view, tracking his thoughts as he thinks through the possibility of overthrowing the Party from within. This, he concludes, will never happen. What’s needed is an uprising, a swell of anti-Party sentiment from the ‘swarming disregarded masses’ (p. 72) of the proles, who live outside and beyond the Party’s stated range of interest yet who nevertheless are subject to its control. Winston’s belief in this possibility is fragile but insistent; a utopian dream. Only through an uprising of this kind will the Party be overthrown, because only the proles have the necessary numbers—85% of the population of Oceania—to make it work. The idea that the mysterious Brotherhood might lead Oceania to freedom is a nonsense; its numbers are likely only ever to be a handful of agitators, spread thinly here and there throughout society in pockets and cells. Rebellion, for a Party member, can hardly be more effective. With the Thought Police in operation, rebellion is left as ‘a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word’ (p. 72). The real prize for the hopeful, like Winston, is that the proles might one day spontaneously realize their strength in numbers and rise up against tyranny ‘like a horse shaking off flies’ (p. 73). The unlikeliness of this outcome is emphasized by the way the paragraph breaks off with a sudden ‘And yet’. Grammatically, the paragraph ends with a conjunction: a word used to link ideas and thoughts in or across sentences. What the paragraph is leading to isn’t spelled out. Winston’s thoughts end without connection. Just like the idea of some mass ‘coming together’ (p. 72) among Party members that doesn’t seem possible, the idea that the proles might throw off their shackles is in doubt.  

Winston evidently hasn’t read Animal Farm (1945). One of Orwell’s arguments in the earlier book is that revolution is a very fragile thing indeed. Not only are revolutionary sentiments difficult to draw out from the social body, but they’re always at risk of becoming the very thing against which the revolutionaries originally set themselves. Mr Jones, the cruel oppressor, is overthrown, and Manor Farm is taken over by the beasts. For a while life is good, but in time it starts to decline, until the beasts start to behave in suspiciously beastly ways. The pigs, originally the theorists and intellectuals of the revolution, become tyrants in a new system of authoritarian power. Boxer, the strongest worker on the farm, is slaughtered. Pigs start to look like men, and men like pigs. There is no longer any real difference between the old state of affairs and the new. No wonder the Inner Party members, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are called ‘swine’. The original theorists of the Ingsoc revolution have become its autocrats. The men have become the pigs; the revolution is over. What’s left is a static society, a world tending, in its official announcements, always towards the better, but which in practice is eventless, boring, samey, tedious, deathlike. Everything might have been avoided, in Animal Farm, if Boxer had realized that he was stronger than the pigs, and that he could have run them out of the place if he’d wanted to. Nineteen Eighty-Four gives Winston this same hope, and the same imagery of a horse freeing itself from the parasites who would pick over its corpse, given the chance. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hope that the proles might rise up and throw off their shackles attaches to a consistently deferred outcome. We never learn whether the revolution Winston yearns for actually happens. What we are privy to, by contrast, through Winston’s point of view, is the thought that the proles are so fixated on their own concerns that the broader thought of revolution is unlikely to occur to them for a while yet, if ever. O’Brien certainly thinks it’ll never happen, and Winston isn’t all that far behind, as the next paragraph in this chapter seems to imply. He remembers walking down a crowded street and witnessing a bust-up ‘of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship’ (p. 73). An example of Orwell’s fondness for water comparisons. An example, too, of Orwell’s great interest: the suffering of ordinary people. The women riot with ‘a great formidable cry of anger and despair’ (p. 73). Winston remembers thinking at first that this was the sign of the proletarian revolt, the call of the people coming into their own. His impression is soon corrected. The riot is about saucepans and who gets to have them. Winston watches on, ‘disgustedly’ (p. 73)—a very Orwellian adverb. It’s not entirely clear if Winston is disgusted by the women, and that this is a mark of prejudice against him, or if he’s disgusted by the thought of a lost opportunity. The latter seems more likely. He sees in the women’s cries a hidden power, something that might be drawn out and turned to better purpose. 

The diary, again. ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious’ (p. 74). Winston sees the predicament of the proles as a contradiction. Outcome B depends on cause A, but cause A can only be a cause once outcome B has happened. Winston chides himself for thinking, and sounding, in the jargonese of the texts issued by the Party—the textbooks of dystopia. Animal Farm comes back into mind when Winston observes that these documents teach children in Oceania to imagine the proles as ‘natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals’ (p. 74): 

So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. […] They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’ (pp. 74-5) 

The ‘style of life’ referred to here includes manual labour, home life, arguments, ‘films, football, beer and, above all, gambling’—activities that fill up ‘the horizons of their minds’ (p. 74). Agents of the Thought Police keep an eye on the proles, just to be sure of their servitude, but for the most part the proles live a kind of life that leaves them with no room even to contemplate revolution, let alone to pursue it.[1] ‘The larger evils invariably escaped their notice’ (p. 75). No life of the mind, and no revolution of the mind, for these poor souls. 

A lot of this material is presented to us as coming from within the scope of Winston’s view of things. Although the account of the proles that I’ve just been sketching is the view of the proles put forward by Oceania’s educational propaganda machine, it’s also to some extent generated by Winston’s perspective, too. When Winston thinks that the proles need ‘only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies’, the narrative makes it clear that he’s used to thinking in the terms of the ‘children’s history textbook[s]’ (p. 75) that he knows, in another part of his mind, to be so manipulative. Winston’s mocking response to one of these textbooks is the same response offered in Orwell’s earlier novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), whose protagonist, Dorothy Hare, works for a time as a schoolteacher, and has to use comparably biased and jingoistic teaching materials. A more interesting aspect of Winston’s knowledge of such documents is his recognition that they allow no understanding of ‘what life before the Revolution’—the Oceanian revolution—‘had really been like’ (p. 75). He has no dependable grasp of the pre-revolutionary moment. Instead, he has to make do with a ‘mute protest in [his] bones’, an ‘instinctive feeling’ that the conditions he lives in are ‘intolerable’, and that ‘at some other time they must have been different’ (pp. 76-7). Separating Winston and the proles is the fact that Winston recognizes his imprisonment for what it is. Yet this puts him in no better position of revolt. His protest is ‘mute’, a matter of silent watching and learning without the prospect of anything changing for the better. 

Much of this chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four is taken up with developing the reader’s sense of what life in Oceania is like. Winston knows what he knows about history because he’s read about it in the Party’s historical literature. This makes Winston’s knowledge of things, and our access to the history of which he is an inheritor, unstable. But there is always the evidence of Winston’s eyes. He knows that the ‘ideal set up by the Party [is] something huge, terrible and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity’ (p. 77). This is very different from the reality Winston has to face every day: ‘decaying, dingy cities’ filled with ‘underfed people’ and ‘patched-up nineteenth-century houses’ (p. 77). Every time he reflects on such things he finds that his ankle is itching; a kind of bodily reminder of the intellectual ulceration by which he and everyone else in this world is plagued. The Party’s telescreens continually announce the betterment and improvement of society, while everywhere signs exist that things are getting worse, and worse, and worse. The process of confusion and conceptual disalignment is so effective that memory becomes misty; the past is erased, the erasure forgotten, the lie becomes truth (p. 78). Much later on in the novel, when Winston is reading from Goldstein’s Book, he’s authorized in his knowledge that Oceania’s newspapers and history books outstrip their pre-revolutionary equivalents in ‘falsification’ (p. 206) by several orders of magnitude. Real history, for Winston, is a matter of holding something in your hands and knowing it to have come genuinely from the past. 

Goldstein’s Book, in a sense, is one such object, although it turns out to be a lie. The coral paperweight that Winston buys in Charrington’s shop is another, although this too turns out to be, if not a lie, then something lying in wait. Once Winston buys it, his fate really is sealed. The only physical object that Winston has ever had in his hands that in itself provides ‘concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification’ (p. 78) is a photograph, of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, three of the ‘original leaders of the Revolution’ who subsequently fell foul of Big Brother’s machinations. Arrested in 1965, they were put through the normal processes of torture and confession (pp. 78-9), before being released into society. Winston remembers having seen them in the Chestnut Tree Café, these ‘relics of the ancient world’ who are little more than ‘corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave’ (p. 79). They play chess, as Winston does after his own torture—as all Ingsoc dissidents do. Soon afterwards, Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are re-arrested and executed. Five years later, Winston saw a photograph from something like 1963. It showed them at a Party function in New York. This leads to an epiphany: 

The point was that at [their] trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston’s memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies. (p. 81) 

Like ‘a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory’ (p. 82)—like the paperweight, in short—the photograph is enough to annihilate an ideology, in thought if not in practice. Winston can hardly believe his eyes, but he destroys the photograph before his facial expression gives him away. Ten or eleven years later, in 1984, he probably would have kept the photograph. He wonders if the Party’s hold on existence is as strong as it seems, given that it cannot destroy the fact that something once existed, even if, now, it no longer exists. 

Winston has yet to experience the full horror of doublethink; he’s yet to feel the power of O’Brien holding the photograph in his hands, in the Ministry of Love, and confidently announcing that he doesn’t remember it, having destroyed it for what impossibly appears to be a second time (see pp. 258-60). What bears down on Winston in this moment is the sublime terror of not knowing why such a massive infrastructure of falsification has been put in place to begin with. The diary, again. As he puts it, more simply: ‘I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY’ (p. 83). He will spend much of the rest of his short life trying, and being forced to try, to understand the ‘why’ of Oceania—why history went the way it did; why O’Brien takes such an interest in him; why Julia loves him, against all the odds; why the proles will probably never rise up, as he hopes, and smash the system to pieces. Mulling over these different thoughts, Winston reflects that the Party’s unfailing attempts to change the course of history, to falsify, misdirect, undermine, and contradict, to turn black into white, and vice versa, will eventually result in the announcement that two plus two equals five. Because Party philosophy denies not merely ‘the validity of experience’ but also ‘the very existence of external reality’ (p. 83), the logic of its own position demands that this claim will be made. And so it is, as Winston learns in the Ministry of Love, to his great cost. Winston feels better at the thought of O’Brien, to whom his diary seems to be addressed—a friend, an ally, a co-conspirator, the man he knows with ‘certainty’ (p. 84), a misplaced certainty, is on his side. For Winston, friendship might just blow a hole in tyranny. 

It doesn’t. We know this, as repeat readers, and we suspect it, as first-time readers. O’Brien isn’t what he seems. There’s even a clue in the final paragraph of the chapter: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears’ (p. 84). A reliable bit of advice from the Powers That Be, for once. Winston could have heeded this, and not trusted to the thought that O’Brien was actually on his side. Why would someone like him take an interest in Winston? It really is too good to be true. The scene ends with Winston holding on to the slim possibility that his ‘instinctive’ knowledge about the truth of the world will see him through. The solid world is solid, whatever the Party might say. Water is wet; fire burns; snow melts; the sun sets. Maybe the sun rises, too. Maybe not. Objects unsupported ‘fall towards the earth’s centre’ (p. 84), except when the very idea of this scientific inevitability is denied by those in charge, and those who resist them no longer have the strength to resist their intellectual violence. The chapter concludes with Winston going back to the diary, in which he writes: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows’ (p. 84). But what if such freedom isn’t granted? And what if freedom doesn’t reside in mathematical logic, but in, as the Party would have it, letting go of the supposed tyranny of facts, truth, certainties, and agreed-upon values? 

This chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, then, is partly about giving us information, and partly about setting up beliefs and assumptions that will gradually be eroded and called into question as the novel unfolds. Part of the point here is that the novel itself, as a novel, exemplifies the very liberty that the Oceanian state seeks so ruthlessly to expunge, or at least to redefine. Orwell wrote in his proposed preface to Animal Farm, later published in 1972 as an essay in The Times Literary Supplement under the title ‘The Freedom of the Press’, about how ‘intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.’[2] The novel, as a form, safeguards this ‘deep-rooted tradition’ through its own workings. In telling stories, in imagining, in being fantastical, novels point to the value and availability of ‘intellectual freedom’ in everything they do and depict. But poor old Winston doesn’t have the luxury of knowing that he’s inside a novel. He might have felt better if he did. He has to face the world of Insgoc on its terms, and with little hope of success. The diary form with which this chapter opens and closes suggests that writing, and the worlds we imagine through putting pen to paper, might represent some privileged, unassailable space in which to act out a kind of resistance. But Winston’s thought that the diary is addressed to O’Brien, whose treachery he has yet to experience, shows how easily even this possibility can be corrupted. Winston knows how Oceania works, but he doesn’t know everything—and he certainly doesn’t know just how far the machinery of Oceania can go in keeping him trampled down, forever. 

[1] A foretaste of Mr Charrington, who keeps his eye on Winston.

[2] George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Julian Symons (New York and London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), p. 106.