4. Water Imagery in Nineteen Eighty-Four 

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

N.B. This text differs slightly from the audio version.

Many different kinds of water and liquidity feature in Nineteen Eighty-Four. At their most basic, these aspects of the novel take the form of idiomatic and metaphorical expressions. Here and there, faces and memories come into Winston’s mind in ways that are distinctively watery. O’Brien’s face floats into Winston’s consciousness (p. 84), for example, just as Big Brother’s swims into it (p. 107). Dreams swim into Winston’s mind (p. 167), too, and a thought, ‘like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water’ (p. 291), bursts into his awareness. Telescreen voices and hopes ‘sink’. A wooden-seated carriage in a train is ‘filled to overflowing’ (p. 124). The rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!’ that closes the Two Minutes Hate is partly ‘a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother’, but it’s also ‘an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise’ (pp. 18-19). Like a floral waterfall, bluebells cascade to the ground in the countryside (p. 125), and when Winston looks at the washed flagstones in the yard just below Mr Charrington’s shop, he has ‘the feeling that the sky [has] been washed too, so fresh and pale [is] the blue between the chimney pots’ (p. 228). The ‘flood of music’ (p. 130) uttered by the thrush that fascinates Winston and Julia noticeably contrasts with the ‘expressionless voice’ that Julia has to use (to avoid being suspected) in the crowds in Victory Square, a voice that is ‘easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks’ (p. 121) driving through it. And in Goldstein’s book, the proles are referred to as ‘submerged masses’ (p. 199). All of which is to say that there’s a distinctive vocabulary of watery similitude and resemblance in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which turns again and again to fluidic comparisons in order to represent the strange realities with which Orwell was concerned. 

These idiomatic accentuations of wateriness are counter-balanced by more literal examples of watery, wet things—first in the idea of water as Oceania’s medium of command, and second through water’s capacity to act as a vector for decay. In the first case, we might consider how Ingsoc seemingly has invested (seemingly has been forced to invest) in sea power. The word Oceania itself conjures up the sea, and Ingsoc’s domination of it, but a more literal indication of Ingsoc’s ruling of the waves is evident in the Floating Fortresses with which it anchors its military authority in and over the depths. Goldstein’s book makes out that Ingsoc is attempting ‘to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing ship’, along with weapons of mass destruction able to produce ‘artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s centre’ (p. 202). If the latter makes Ingsoc out to be a kind of James Bond-esque criminal organization in the making, with Big Brother as its supervillainous Blofeld, then the fact that Goldstein is said to be hiding ‘somewhere beyond the sea’ (p. 14) indicates how carefully Ingsoc has to account for the extent of its oceanic mastery. The right balance is required. Give too great an impression of power, and the fact that Goldstein is always on the run might start to seem just a little, dare I say it, wet. 

Maybe there’s a certain wateriness in the ‘blue’ (p. 4) overalls worn by the Outer Party, too, and a bubbling quality to the ‘babbling’ (p. 4) voice that spills out from the telescreen. Members of the Outer Party are particularly prone to doing things in ‘streams’: Winston writes a ‘stream of rubbish’ (p. 11) in his diary, and Parsons keeps up ‘a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week’ (p. 114). A ‘stream of sound’ pours out from the mouth of the man who attacks the politics of Goldsteinism in the Ministry of Truth’s canteen, this torrent of noise being something like the non-speech of a water-bound creature: ‘the quacking of a duck’ (p. 57). These descriptions make it seem like the members of the Outer Party are themselves ‘as yielding as water’ (p. 130)—a quality assigned to Julia’s body, or at least Julia’s body as Winston perceives it when he’s sexually aroused. Parsons is always exuding sweat as if it’s pouring out from his skin, the dampness of his table-tennis bat handle (p. 59) echoing the dampness of the grave Winston knows has always been there, ‘waiting for him’ (p. 167). The cruel irony is that when Parsons breaks down in captivity, it’s less his sweating that matters and more the ‘almost blubbering’ (p. 244) noises of despair he makes when he realizes that he is, after all he’s done for the Party, a Thought Criminal. Parsons doesn’t quite cry, but Winston is moved to tears on many occasions: when ‘glaring lights’ (p. 253) are shone in his face during his seemingly endless questioning in the Ministry of Love; when he’s interrogated by O’Brien (p. 262); and when he meets Julia following his torture (p. 304). 

Inner Party members, by contrast, are pillars of strength and solidity. Where the Outer Party is watery and yielding, those who lord it over them, like O’Brien, tower up through oceans of uncertainty and unrest. During the Two Minutes Hate, the mouth of the sandy-haired woman behind him ‘opening and shutting like that of a landed fish’, O’Brien’s ‘powerful’ chest swells and quivers ‘as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave’ (p. 16). In much the same way, Winston imagines Big Brother standing ‘like a rock against the hordes of Asia’ (p. 17), a description that further dehumanizes an already barely delineated foreignness. This same emphasis returns much later in the novel, when Winston and Julia visit O’Brien’s apartment. O’Brien’s quiet authority elicits from Winston a ‘wave of admiration, almost of worship’ (p. 182). This is a much more intense emotion than the ‘warm wave of relief’ (p. 22) that flows through Winston when he realizes it’s only Mrs Parsons knocking on his door, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Part I, just as it’s different from the ‘wave of synthetic violets’ (p. 149) that floods his nostrils when he embraces Julia in the room above Charrington’s shop. More than anything else, this is a cruel double meaning, the wave of admiration Winston feels being turned on its head when he’s subjected to ‘wave[s] of pain’ (p. 257) in the Ministry of Love. 

So far I’ve been discussing how water imagery structures Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of metaphors and similes—how certain people, things, and processes are said to be watery or fluidic, or to have aqueous properties. Nineteen Eighty-Four develops these emphases by showing how different kinds of water and watery resemblance are associated with danger, on the one hand, and with hope, on the other. It’s clear that the ocean, and specifically the Mediterranean, is a place of death in Winston’s account of the ‘war films’ he watches on the evening of the 3rd of April 1984. Water is effectively the medium of death, in Winston’s account, with refugees sinking and being blown apart by helicopters and bombs in the sea. There’s not as much distance as one might think from this set of circumstances to the ‘war hysteria’ that leads to ‘raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive’ (p. 193). In both cases, water has become the ghastly means with which war hysteria is expressed. This emphasis persists into the torture sequence in the Ministry of Love, during which Winston has vivid hallucinations of a disembodied pair of eyes. As the eyes grow ‘larger and more luminous’, he seems to float out of his seat and dive into them, as they swallow him up (p. 255). When Winston finds himself in Room 101, O’Brien emphasizes not only that drowning would be the worst thing in the world for a good many people (p. 296), but also that the mind’s collapse in the face of the worst thing in the world is no more cowardly than coming up ‘from deep water’ and filling your lungs with air, both acts being primal instincts that cannot be disobeyed (p. 297). The watery dimensions of Winston’s defeat, in this sense, are universal. They’re also particular to him insofar as they’re like a long fall ‘through the floor, through the walls of [the Ministry of Love], through the earth, through the oceans’ (p. 300, emphasis added). We can see, in these instances, how water imagery is aligned with the workings of tyranny—as instrument, as concept, and as fantasy. 

In the fantastical space of the so-called Golden Country, water functions as an image of false security. The landscape Winston sees in his dreams, with its ‘clear, slow-moving stream’ with ‘dace swimming in the pools under the willow trees’ (p. 33), is genuine, as Julia confirms (p. 129), and it brings Winston feelings of safety and security. But this landscape turns out to be an image of something Winston can never have, or never have for long. The ‘pools of gold’ (p. 123) created by the sunlight as he works his way to his secret meeting-place with Julia are the illusory ends of rainbows—the ever-receding sites of fullness to which his yearnings drive him, but which he can never find. And even in memory the watery spaces of the Golden Country are not to be trusted. In the latter stages of his ‘rectification’, Winston imagines himself to be walking ‘across the old rabbit-cropped pasture’ in the countryside, feeling ‘the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face’ (p. 292), the stream with dace lying ‘in the green pools under the willows’ (p. 293) somewhere just out of sight. The memory prompts him to call out for Julia, and in doing so to reveal a lingering resistance to O’Brien’s authority. A comparable moment when Winston remembers a day with his mother and sister—‘a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane and the light indoors was too dull to read by’ (p. 309)—suggests that wateriness has a special place in Winston’s imaginative formulations. A special place, though, that is dangerous to focus on. Shortly after recalling the rainy day with his family, and at this point having endured the terrible psychological violence of Room 101, he pushes the image aside as ‘a false memory’ (p. 309). 

Winston’s experiences in the Ministry of Love make it clear that resisting Ingsoc is like ‘swimming against a current’ that sweeps you backwards however hard you struggle, ‘and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it’ (p. 290). Gin becomes the element Winston swims in (p. 307), but he’s always swimming in something—always swimming, as it were, in the choppy waters of stubborn non-compliance. And nowhere is Winston more prone to images of liquidic submersion than in his dreams, in which he imagines his mother and sister in ‘the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water’ (p. 31). Here, Winston’s dreams evoke feelings and processes of repression and of being cast down. His painful feelings take the form of something buried, submerged, abysmal but not quite forgotten. The image of his mother and sister ‘hundreds of fathoms down’ beneath him, ‘and still sinking’ (p. 32), functions in a doubled way: it signifies his family’s disappearance, during one of the great Ingsoc purges, and it conveys his attempts to stifle his memory of this very same disappearance. When the memory recurs, it’s bound up with Winston’s sense of arms protecting, or trying to protect, children, and of the futility of such gestures in a world unsympathetic to humane values: ‘Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water’ (p. 171). 

These references to sinking ships inevitably evoke the refugee vessel that is bombed in the Mediterranean, as Winston witnesses it in the war film he describes in his diary. Winston is, that’s to say, haunted by the memory of his mother and, indivisibly, by the memory of the refugees, both being entwined in the resonant symbol of a fast-plummeting seacraft. And this image has still other uses. Consider, for example, the moment when Winston reflects on the human fight-or-flight reflex: 

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. […] And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. (p. 106, emphasis added) 

Here, the weighting falls on the sinking ship as a site of human danger, and on the body’s capacity to endure it. Elsewhere in the novel, though, the sinking ship motif functions as a marker of the distance between Winston and those he hopes will save the day (i.e. the Proles). We’re told that Winston, on a day he thought he saw a riot start in a crowded street, encounters ‘a mob 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). The tone is ambiguous. Are these faces tragic because they really do evoke a sense of doom-laden chaos? Or are they tragic because of the enormous gap in significance between drowning on a sinking ship and trying vainly to buy a saucepan? Whichever way we read the passage, what’s certain is that it participates in the imagery of watery loss with which Nineteen Eighty-Four repeatedly emphasizes unpleasant memories and ideas. 

An early instance of this strategy is that moment when Winston, trying to think his way through the complexities of Ingsoc’s supposedly ‘sacred principles’, Newspeak, doublethink, and the ‘mutability of the past’, feels as though he’s ‘wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself [is] the monster’ (p. 28). This sense that he himself is the grotesque source of monstrosity in a world that has systematically done monstrous harm to its citizens hints at the true extent of Winston’s trauma. He imagines himself as monstrous because his imagination has itself become monstrous. The topsy-turviness of his existence is emphasized again, much later in the novel, when he has ‘the impression of swimming up’ into O’Brien’s torture chamber ‘from some quite different world, a sort of under-water world far beneath it’ (p. 252). Where the imagined Comrade Ogilvy is thought to sacrifice himself for the Party by jumping into ‘deep water’ (p. 50), Winston, the originator of this very same fantasy, is sacrificed by the Party through a long sequence of oppressively liquidic assaults. Like the ‘Asiatic faces’ who swim up to the surface of the big telescreen during the Two Minutes Hate and then vanish, ‘to be replaced by others exactly similar’ (p. 15), Winston, although he belongs to the imperial centre from which those same ‘Asiatic’ people are excluded, is destined to swim up into view, confess his crimes, and then disappear into the sky. Not for nothing, after all, is the process of annihilation that lies in wait for him called vaporization. 

People simply disappear, always during the night. Just as Winston knows his diary will be ‘reduced to ashes and himself to vapour’ (p. 29), he too will eventually be ‘abolished, annihilated’ (p. 21)—turned into watery remnants. Everything fades ‘into mist’ (p. 78) in this brave new world: history becomes hard to grasp, truth hard to locate, the memory of the workings of doublethink impossible, by definition, to account for. All of these processes are misty in the sense that they’re conceptually foggy and mystifying, in contrast to the actual turning-into-vapour reserved for enemies of the state. O’Brien’s account of this process is suitably atmospheric, in both senses of the word: 

we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. (p. 266) 

Winston seems to know something of this rhetoric. During a conversation with Julia, the phrase ‘lifted clean out of the stream of history’ (p. 172) appears in a third-person passage focalized from his point of view. And the ensuing declaration appears in Goldstein’s book: ‘War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent’ (pp. 198-9). Two for one: here we have vaporization and drowning all at once, waterinesses combined. An implication of this moment in particular is that O’Brien’s speech patterns may in fact shape the wording of Goldstein’s book, which he subsequently claims to have written with a team of accomplices (p. 274). The wording reinforces just how fundamentally ideas of liquidity inflect the patterns of Winston’s life, world, and suffering. 

There are still more watery dimensions of Oceania and Ingsoc to explore, not least the ways in which human tears are political; how they carry meanings out of the bodies from which they stream. We could also look at how faulty pipe systems and leaking roofs define the Airstrip One environment, which, in contrast to Ingsoc propaganda, is all ramshackle decay and collapse. Winston’s body often seems on the verge of watery disintegration, such as when his heart seems to ‘turn to ice and his bowels to water’ (p. 104) when he spots Julia apparently following him down a street. The possibility of bodies being full to the brim with water is reinforced through references to bellies (p. 115) and hearts (p. 118) freezing into ice, an emphasis that more probably signals the brittleness of resistance in a world built on frosty logics of paranoia, hatred, and lies—on Ingsoc’s ability ‘to arrest progress and freeze history at [any] chosen moment’ (p. 212). In an inversion of this principle, there’s ‘a peculiar softness, as of rain-water, in both the colour and the texture’ (p. 99) of the glass paperweight that Winston buys in Charrington’s shop. But the paperweight, too, is a brittle thing, and comes to be shattered. Although Winston holds true to the laws of nature that make stones hard and water wet (p. 84), he’s undone by Ingsoc’s demand that such principles are nonsense (p. 291). 

So where do all these watery evocations get us? What I’ve tried to draw out here is a sense that wateriness is not simply an incidental feature of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but rather that it’s one of the organizing emphases through which the narrative is articulated. Winston’s thoughts and feelings are expressed so frequently in relation to watery metaphor and simile that the novel can plausibly be interpreted in terms of liquidic equivalence: how Ingsoc’s rhetoric depends on liquidic motifs; how Winston’s mind seems drawn to watery processing; and how Orwell himself seems compelled to use wateriness as a principle of narrative figuration—that is, how he seems attracted to watery resemblances in the very act of storytelling. These are not superficial dimensions of the novel. They take us right into its unsettling, worrying depths. If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel of power and pain, it’s also a novel that stresses the watery uncertainties of the way things are, or appear to be; that emphasizes how even the most apparently solid of principles can be reduced to fluidic intangibility. Winston may or may not carry other people’s water, as it were, but the narrative itself is to a large extent carried by water. It’s a novel of floating and drowning, a tale of who survives, and who doesn’t, when the waters get troubled.