1. The Physical Texture of Life: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part I, Chapter 1

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

The opening chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four introduces us to what is called, a little later in the novel, ‘the physical texture of life’ (p. 62) in Oceania—specifically in Airstrip One, which used to be called England or Britain, and ‘the third most populous’ of Oceania’s ‘provinces’, and more specifically still in London, Oceania’s ‘chief city’ (p. 5). This chapter also alerts us to several of the main characters: we learn about Winston Smith, the book’s doomed protagonist; the woman who becomes his lover, Julia (although she is not named at this point); and O’Brien, Winston’s torturer, even if at this early stage O’Brien gives a rather more civilized sense of himself. (I’ll say more about Winston, Julia, and O’Brien in future commentaries.) The chapter’s other main purpose is to signal the novel’s essential organizing concepts, institutions, and personalities, in the following order: Hate Week; Big Brother; the telescreens; the Party (with its division between Inner and Outer sections); the ideology of Ingsoc (or English Socialism); the Thought Police; the four Ministries (of Truth, Love, Peace, and Plenty); Newspeak; the Oceanic slogans; doublethink; the Two Minutes Hate; the Junior Anti-Sex League; Emmanuel Goldstein (the supposed enemy of Ingsoc); the continually shifting war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia; the secret Brotherhood that is rumoured to support Goldstein in his unrelenting war against Big Brother; and Goldstein’s book (some of which Winston reads in a later chapter). All of this is achieved in just twenty pages. It’s a highly economical establishing not only of a world, but also of that world’s grain and fabric, of its hues and colours, of its most immediately evident, most memorable characteristics. The question I want to begin with here, is: How is this all done?

Let’s begin at the beginning. The novel’s opening paragraph captures a lot more than perhaps first strikes the eye:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. (p. 3)

One of the things we might notice here is Orwell’s fondness for starting his novels with a reference to time, either by mentioning a time of day, or by mentioning a month—or, as here, by mentioning both. The reference to clocks ‘striking’ thirteen is quietly jarring: clocks don’t strike thirteen, they strike one through twelve—so although this is simply an instance of the twenty-four-hour clock, as later instances in the book demonstrate, there is just enough oddness here to set one’s narrative teeth on edge, as it were. Something, already, is amiss in this world. One of its dimensions, time, is subtly out of joint.

Less obviously meaningful, but no less significant, is the dust that follows Winston into Victory Mansions. It might seem odd to dwell on such a tiny detail, but bear with me for a moment. The dust that accompanies Winston into his home is at one level simply a way for Orwell to indicate the squalid particularity of the environment in which Winston lives. This is not a clean world, but a filthy, grime-strewn landscape—a point that is underscored when Winston and Julia meet for the first time in the countryside, where the May sunshine and ‘the greenness of the leaves’ make Winston feel like ‘a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin’ (p. 125). Yet first-time readers of the novel’s opening paragraph will not know that dust plays a major role in this novel, not only as a marker of social and economic disrepair, but also as a sign of death. The dust that follows Winston into his apartment building is, in a sense, the dust that he (and certain other objects in the book) will in time become; that is, in dying and returning to the figurative dust from which he was created. As the famous wording in the burial service recorded in The Book of Common Prayer has it: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. When Winston eventually states that he and Julia are ‘the dead’, what he really means is that they are bound to become the ash-like, dusty remnants of a failed revolution.

All of which is to say that dust isn’t just dust, here. On the contrary, here dust works to anticipate one of the novel’s key themes: that of a circular homecoming. Winston comes from dust, and to dust he will return. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll return to dust later in these discussions when I comment on future chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. What makes dust interesting, for now, is that it begins an almost constant process of reference to the dirtiness and griminess of Winston’s world, whose page-by-page, reiterated texture is the texture of dust, mess, grime, filth, and decay. Consider what we are told across the novel’s first few paragraphs. The hallway of Victory Mansions stinks of ‘boiled cabbage and old rag mats’ (p. 3), and the lift doesn’t work; the Ingsoc posters in the streets of London are damaged and torn; London itself is a ‘grimy landscape’, with ‘vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses’ (p. 5); the state-sanctioned gin that Winston drinks gives off ‘a sickly, oily smell’ (p. 7); and the cigarettes he smokes empty themselves of their tobacco on the floor before he can enjoy them. There is ‘no colour in anything’ (p. 4), a detail which anticipates Winston’s eventual transformation, deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, into a ‘grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing’, whose body has gone ‘grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt’ (p. 284). But long before we get to this part of the novel, we know that Winston is old before his time. Although he’s only thirty-nine, he has a ‘varicose ulcer above his right ankle’ (p. 3), and cuts ‘a smallish, frail figure’, the ‘meagreness of his body’ emphasized by the uniform he wears, the ‘blue overalls’ (p. 4) of the Outer Party.

These details serve to establish the physical texture of life in Oceania in the sense that they reiterate, through repetition, the drabness and dinginess of its citizens and architectures. Standing in contrast to all of it are the four Ministries—of Truth, Love, Peace, and Plenty—which loom over London’s skyline as ‘enormous pyramidal structure[s] of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air’ (pp. 5-6). Dorian Lynskey has drawn attention to the importance of the word ‘glittering’ in Orwell’s writing, stressing its importance, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the case of the Ministries in particular. It’s a well-chosen word. We speak of glittering things in the sense that they are shiny and in some way reflect light (such as a ‘glittering’ stream), but we also speak of glittering things that are in some way superficial (such as the ‘glitz’ and ‘glitter’ of showbusiness). So while these Ministries are the real embodiments of real power, they are also the embodiments of an artificial authority—a fake power built not on respect, but on fear. That fear is real enough, and the power from which it derives has real material consequences for those who resist it (including Winston). But for all that, Ingsoc’s authority is nevertheless based on creating a certain sort of glamorous impression, on convincing those whom it enslaves that all existence under its dominion is anything but the reality of ‘decaying, dingy cities’ where underfed people shuffle about ‘in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that [smell] always of cabbage and bad lavatories’ (p. 77).

The Ministries divide between them ‘the entire apparatus of government’ (p. 6), and they provide the fourfold infrastructure within which the supposed fifth column of Goldstein’s, and Winston’s, failing and failed revolutions transpire. What interests me here is the way these institutions are introduced, narratively speaking. Note how the Ministry of Truth is first mentioned:

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. (p. 5)

The description gives us the familiar emphasis on dirt, but it also gives us something entirely new and peculiar in a matter-of-fact way. The explanatory text clarifying what the Ministry of Truth is and does is pushed down to the next paragraph. At first encounter, we ourselves, we readers, have to make sense of what ‘the Ministry of Truth’ could be. In that brief delay of understanding lies the means, common to science fiction and to literary dystopias, with which Orwell generates the seeming reality of his imagined world.

The phrase narrative theorists and literary historians have used for this technique, so-called ‘cognitive estrangement’, refers to the way science-fiction writers across the centuries have given their stories an air of plausibility by locating strangeness and difference in an internally consistent structure of conceptual relationships. That is to say, they’ve made their stories believable by presenting their imagined worlds with a straight face—by presenting strange things in strange worlds as belonging there; by making the new seem new by contrast with our world, but seem perfectly fitting in the context of the imagined world in which these strange things exist. Imagine, for example, telling someone about a visit to London. You, the teller, are familiar with London and its landmarks, but the person you are talking to is not. In telling this person about your visit you might mention Big Ben, or the Houses of Parliament, or Buckingham Palace, or the London Eye, or the Natural History Museum, but might only stop to explain what these buildings are and what they do if specifically requested to do so. Otherwise, you might assume that the person listening to you knows what these buildings are about, or at least that this same person has the shared points of reference to take an educated guess. Applying this idea to Nineteen Eighty-Four, and imagining Orwell’s narrator as the teller and we readers as the listeners, then we can see something quite similar going on. The estranged qualities of the London of Orwell’s imagination—and I mean principally its new institutions, languages, and politics—are presented to us with few pauses for explanation. We understand what these strange things are—we cognize them, in other words—because we are willing to accept that they belong to an already established and already lived-in reality with its own internal and consistent logic of associations. So the matter-of-factness I mentioned just a moment ago, the way Orwell introduces such strange things as Big Brother, Ingsoc, and the Ministry of Truth without really stopping, at this point in the novel, to explain what they are, serves an important narrative point. Even the simple act of mentioning as such works to deepen the credibility of the strange world that from the novel’s outset we are implicitly requested to acknowledge, accept, and understand.

There are exceptions to this principle. Newspeak, for instance, is explained as soon as it’s mentioned, and interestingly, in this case, by means of a footnote. This has the effect of suspending the reader’s immersion in the story. I don’t want to say any more about this footnote until I discuss the Newspeak Appendix, in a future discussion, but suffice it to say for now that this footnote has a very odd, very particular role in the book—a role that may even suggest that the book isn’t quite what it seems. For the most part, the way Orwell’s narrator presents the details of this strange new world to us in a simple, direct manner intensifies, rather than diminishes, its trustworthiness. We are inclined to believe these things are the way they are, no matter how odd or unlikely they might seem at first appearance, precisely because the calm, reasonable voice telling us about them is so calm and reasonable. There is no sensationalism here, no excess in the telling, because such excessive things as the Ministry of Love, with its ‘maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests’ (p. 6), have become the new normal. This is an interesting quality for a narrative to possess when that narrative is itself so thoroughly and entirely concerned with the gap between lies and truth; or, more precisely, with a state of affairs in which any such gap no longer has any meaning.

Within the terms of such telling, we learn a huge amount about this world, as I have said, in a very small amount of narrative space. We learn that Oceania’s citizens are constantly observed by devices called telescreens, whose perpetual stream of announcements can be ‘dimmed’ (p. 4) but never fully switched off; that although police units patrol the streets, the agency or institution one really has to worry about is the Thought Police; that many everyday commodities, especially those in short supply, such as razor blades, have to be obtained behind closed doors; that the concepts of things being legal and illegal have fallen away, because there are no longer any laws (p. 8); that Winston cannot be sure of the date, although he believes it to be the 4th of April 1984; and that the writing of his date in the diary he has bought from ‘a frowzy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter’ (p. 8) of London will, if discovered, be enough to be punishable by death, or by a twenty-five year spell in a forced-labour camp. These things pale in comparison with what Winston writes about in his diary, however: the brutal gunning-down of a ‘ship full of refugees’, ‘somewhere in the Mediterranean’ (p. 10). Reading the novel in this day and age—in 2020—it is impossible not to think of recent history, here. As Lyndsey Stonebridge has pointed out, many readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four remember its depiction of rats, but few people remember its depiction of refugees. The importance of this diary entry, and the violence it depicts, should not be underestimated. As Stonebridge notes, everything ‘squeezed out by totalitarianism is captured in the refugee woman’s embrace’ of the little three-year-old boy in her arms. It is a ‘completely helpless gesture’ that ‘could have value in itself’ (p. 172).

The detail that the refugee woman in the boat ‘might have been a jewess’ (p. 10), to use the novel’s wording, is not accidental. It is entirely in keeping with the political commitments of the Oceanic state that a Jewish person should be hunted down and killed. The most prominent Jewish individual in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, the supposed ‘Enemy of the People’ (p. 13) who always figures in the daily Two Minutes Hate as the despised alien onto whom those attending can project their state-encouraged disgust, fear, and hatred. Goldstein’s ‘lean Jewish face’ is presented, in Party propaganda, as having a ‘sheeplike quality’ (p. 14). Those who sympathize with him become part of a herd that must, according to the politics of intolerance upon which Oceania depends, be uncovered and destroyed. By ‘advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, [and] freedom of thought’ (p. 14), Goldstein speaks on behalf of liberal principles that the Party has successfully repositioned, through a systematic tradition of lying and distrust, as things that must be ‘refuted, smashed, [and] ridiculed’ (p. 15). Goldstein has become Oceania’s scapegoat, the key person who is blamed for all historic, existing, and potential wrongdoings, and who, in being scapegoated, enables the shape and purpose of Oceania continually to resettle and reinforce itself. Always on the brink of being discovered, yet always just beyond the reach of the Party’s power, he is a necessary rival—an enemy, the enemy, who must exist forever so that the worst excesses of Oceanic power can forever be seen not merely as tolerable, as things that can be put up with, but as inevitable: as things that must be put up with.

An orgy of terror and loathing, the Hate amounts to a ‘hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer’ (p. 16), seeming to flow through everyone who participates in it. It is one of Orwell’s most well-known ideas, and certainly a major set-piece of the book. In Orwell’s imagined world of Oceania, members of the Party, Inner and Outer alike, are encouraged on a daily basis to project outwards and away from themselves the energy stored inside their bodies which has no other outlet. As we learn later in the novel, the Party’s sexual puritanism, its deliberate policing and repression of the sex-instinct, has induced a kind of ‘hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.’ As Julia puts it, the Party wants its members ‘to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot’ (p. 139)? There is even the suggestion that the Hate is itself analogous to a sexual act: it is marked by the ‘dull rhythmic tramp’ (p. 15) of soldiers marching on a screen; it has a ‘climax’ (p. 17); and ends in a collective ‘deep sigh of relief’ (p. 18). Not for nothing is Hate Week, a perverse reframing of the seven days of creation told in Genesis as sustained physical and rhetorical violence, characterized as a ‘great orgasm’ (p. 187) of revulsion.

I want to finish by drawing your attention to two aspects of the Hate: first, the way it prompts Winston to imagine horrible images of violence; and second, the way its effects linger in his body long after the Hate itself has finished. Just before the Hate reaches its so-called ‘climax’, Winston switches the hatred that he cannot help but express towards the face of Emmanuel Goldstein onto Julia. Winston has supposedly ‘beautiful hallucinations’ of flogging Julia to death with a rubber truncheon, of ravishing her and cutting her throat at the moment of climax (p. 17). These terrible images demonstrate how the Hate warps individual psychology. If the Hate is a form of perverted sexuality, a redirecting of the sexual drive into paranoia and xenophobia, then it is also a means with which the Party works to ensure that those who take part in the Hate are unable to imagine sexual encounters except as acts of grotesque fierceness, thereby annihilating their capacity for intimacy (and, through intimacy, for resistance). Nineteen Eighty-Four returns to this side of Winston’s desires on multiple occasions, but for now it’s simply worth emphasizing that his brutal yearnings are likely to have been generated by his own brutalization at the hands of the Oceanic state. He thinks in violent terms because violence has been done to his mind, to his very capacity for thinking. The violence he wants to do to Julia is another instrument of state control.

There is a primitivism to the Hate. We learn that the rhythmical chant of ‘B-B’ with which it ends amounts to ‘a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms’ (p. 18). An ambivalence emerges here: it’s not clear whether this ‘curiously savage’ rhythm is imagined in these terms because this is how those participating in the Hate think about and hear it, or because this wording is Orwell’s limitation—his inability to imagine rhythmic chanting of this kind as anything other than a supposedly ‘barbaric’ primitivism, in contrast to a supposedly more advanced, non-primitive Western culture. Whichever way we decide on this point, what isn’t in doubt is that the effects of the Hate linger on in Winston’s body long after the Hate itself has ended. Just before the chapter ends, and in the midst of his hurried scrawling in his diary, he hears a knock on his apartment door. Fate has arrived. And in his panic, his heart ‘thump[s] like a drum’ (p. 22). The difference, here, is that whereas in the Hate consciousness is suspended ‘by means of rhythmic noise’ (p. 19), in this moment of blind panic Winston’s consciousness is fully activated. Who is knocking on the door, and why he fears the knocking, will become clear in the next chapter.