(Continued from previous page)

George Orwell

 1984

 

 Part Two

 

While Part One has described Winston Smith's increasing urge, arising partly from his subconscious, against his society which he intuitively feels (but cannot prove) is rotten to the core, Part Two deals with the progressive acting out of Winston Smith's hostility to the Party and to Big Brother. We already know that the revolt will lead nowhere but to the torture chambers of the Thought Police; everyone who revolts is caught sooner or later, and Winston has already accepted an image of himself as an "unperson" who, if he is fortunate, may at least be able to effect small changes in a future which he will never, personally, see. The form his revolt will take is partly conditioned by the opportunity which presents itself, in this section, when the girl with the black hair suddenly and unexpectedly thrusts into his hand, at work, a crumpled scrap of paper ... and when Winston looks at it, the only words written on it are: "I love you."

 

Comment

 

             The difficulties of simply meeting people in 1984 are highlighted in this section. Since telescreens and hidden microphones are everywhere, people must exercise the greatest caution if they even wish to meet socially, as the presumption of the Party is that a meeting of any kind is suspect until proven innocent. The Party wants to keep people apart. A romantic attachment between Party members is especially dangerous as indicating that the people concerned are more committed to each other than to the advancing of the Party's aims.

 

             Arranging a meeting with the girl is difficult; Winston does not know her name, or where she lives, or even in what part of the Ministry of Truth she works. He does not dare to ask directly. Sending a letter is out of the question; all letters are opened by security agencies, so that most people don't even bother to write letters any more. This section, then, is a further exposition of the effect which a completely totalitarian society has on the individual's everyday existence. Even the kind of revolt contemplated by Winston takes much energy and perseverance. They finally meet in the canteen in the Ministry of Truth, for about thirty seconds, and arrange a further meeting on the "outside" right near a monument dedicated to Big Brother, where there are many telescreens but where crowds of people usually congregate so that recognition by the Thought Police would be difficult. In turn, at this meeting in Victory Square, they take advantage of the 7:00 P.M. rush hour to arrange a further meeting in the country the following Sunday. In the background, on Victory Square, as they make these plans, is a procession of Eurasian war prisoners, bedraggled-looking and chained together - they are on the way either to be executed or to become inmates of forced-labor camps. Thus, Winston and the girl, whose name he still does not know, finally arrange to meet, and though no word has been spoken between them except to arrange the meeting - they do not dare speak - they both know that they have placed themselves in mortal danger.

 

Part Two: Section Two

 

             On a Sunday, Winston and the girl meet; the season is May, and the train has taken them from the smoky and dusty London of the Party to at least a temporary rural freedom. Winston finally discovers the girl's name: Julia. Julia fulfills Winston's dream (see Part One, Section Three, above) doubly - the dream of the Golden Country, and the dream of her throwing off her clothes before him. For the country she has led him to is the Golden Country, and he recognizes it from his dream. The significance of this symbol will be further discussed in a brief consideration of Coming Up for Air; it seems to have a very private and special meaning for George Orwell, as well as for his fictional creations. Julia becomes Winston's mistress. And this is, as Orwell himself says, a political revolt as much as it is a sexual act.

 

Comment

 

             The equating of sexuality and politics here may seem bizarre, but as Orwell has developed the subject in 1984, in Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and in certain of his essays, such as "Raffles and Miss Blandish" (1984), ostensibly, a remarkable criticism of detective literature, but with a purpose, as with most things written by Orwell, in part political. It is his thesis that one of the techniques by which a dictatorship attempts to control its people is by perverting normal sexuality. Orwell was actually conservative in this respect-for him, "middle-class respectability" was actually desirable if it included healthy rather than sterile and perverted and repressed sexuality. Nowhere is this more clear than in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. While it is true that the relationship of Julia and Winston Smith is largely on the physical level, Orwell does not think that such a relationship is necessarily immoral, given the corruption of the society surrounding the lovers. The Party knows well enough that repression of the kind inflicted on its adherents dams up the normal sexual instinct, and issues instead in fanaticism, sadism, and hatred. We learn in this section that Julia is no innocent girl by conventional standards; she has had relations with other men who were Party members. Even a member of the Inner Party, she hints, might have taken her as his mistress if he only thought he could get away with it; they were by no means as orthodox as they make out, according to Julia. But Julia is the physical woman; she is intelligent but not at all intellectual in the sense of leading the examined or self-analytic life. Ideology bores her, even as Winston is fascinated by it. However, the physical revolt of sex she does understand and appreciate. It is significant in Orwell's characterization of her that he never allows her to become other than something of a stereotype. Winston learns that her name is Julia in this section; he never learns her last name. She is not so much a unique human being here as she is a sex object.

 

Part Two: Section Three

 

             During May, Winston and Julia meet a number of times in various hiding places. Julia is very experienced at concealment, and she knows that they cannot use a hideout more than twice. She tells Winston something of her past history, but it becomes clear that she is in revolt against the Party on personal and not ideological grounds. Perhaps her consciousness of sexuality has something to do with the Department of the Ministry of Truth in which she is employed; she works in Pornosec, which is concerned with writing, by machine, pornographic novels for distribution among the Proles in order to corrupt them. Winston, in turn, tells Julia of his married life, and of his repressed urge to push his wife, Katharine, over a cliff one day when they were alone. Julia seems more cheerful about life in general than Winston, but it is clear that she is no thinker and that abstract discussion bores her.

 

Comment

 

             This section further develops the character of Julia, and also of Winston; the clear distinction between the minds of the two should be kept before the reader, and also the relative shallowness of Julia's revolt. Later, when they are both arrested by the Thought Police, as they know is inevitable, it will be Julia who will "confess" first, and confess abjectly and completely. Orwell implies that the reason for Julia's recantation - an almost textbook case of the success of Party brainwashing - is that her revolt is almost entirely physical. She has not thought very much about the political implications of the Party's doctrines or activities, and when Winston reads to her from Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Julia goes to sleep, even though it is "the Book" which contains an explanation of the system of 1984.

 

             There is just a suggestion in the book that Winston and Julia are, so to speak, a modern Adam and Eve; that Orwell was using this archetypal concept to portray those who are in an environment basically hostile or foreign to them, and who rather suddenly become self aware. But it is Julia who is, like Eve, "the weaker vessel." And there is no hint in 1984 that either Julia or Winston can ultimately be saved, in any conceivable religious sense of the term salvation. "What happens to you here [in the Ministry of Love] is forever," Winston is told by O'Brien as he undergoes scientific tortures of the most painful variety. Winston and Julia haven't a chance of escaping.

 

Part Two: Section Four

 

             Winston rents the dingy furnished room over Mr. Charrington's antique shop, and arranges to meet Julia there. He knows that it is folly for a Party member to do such a thing, and increases his chances of being found out quickly. But the temptation of having a hiding place where he can meet his mistress more frequently than had been possible is too much for Winston. The two, Winston and Julia, know that they are "intentionally stepping nearer to their graves." At this time, preparations for the Hate Week-a sort of expanded Two Minutes Hate-are going forward and their love affair is interfered with. But they do meet at the room as frequently as they are able to. And they are surrounded by symbols; symbols of an age that has been and symbols of an age that will be, Winston thinks.

 

Comment

 

             Throughout this section there are a number of objects or occurrences which appear to have an import beyond the merely literal: the glass and coral paperweight, the rats, the rhyme "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's," and the song sung by the coarse Prole woman in the yard below the location of Mr. Charrington's shop. These are all to recur throughout the book, building up symbolic meanings.

 

             The glass paperweight: "Frozen" in it permanently is a small piece of pink coral. Winston is fascinated by the paperweight and purchases it from Mr. Charrington's meager stock of antiques. It symbolizes, within the terms of the book, the times which had been and which had been liquidated by the Party. The paperweight seems to be a small, self-contained, and sealed world. It is aesthetically beautiful, not useful; therefore such an object is suspect by the Party, which pretends to value economic efficiency and usefulness only (while at the same time, by the principles of Doublethink, encouraging incredible waste). At the end of Part Two, the paperweight is wantonly smashed by a soldier in the service of the Party's secret police, symbolizing the end of Winston's attempt to enter into a private world away from Party discipline.

 

             The rats: Julia sees a rat scurrying out of sight in the room, and casually throws a shoe at it. But when she tells Winston, he nearly faints. Everyone has an absolutely irrational fear the terror of something, as O'Brien will tell Winston later. Winston's great fear is rats; this will be used against him later by the Party in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.

 

 See - Rats: Winston's great fear is rats.

 

             The coarse Prole woman and the cheap popular song is he sings: "It was only an 'opeless fancy. . . ." She symbolizes to Winston at least an affirmation of life; her whole life has been the almost mindless breeding of children and routine housework, yet she can sing. And the song, though it is a perfectly tawdry one, composed by machine in the Music Department of the Ministry of Truth, does symbolize perhaps Winston's dreams of a better world, for it, too, will recur in the novel.

 

             The luxuries (coffee, sugar, etc.) Julia brings to the room: These simply symbolize Julia's revolt against the Party; they are physical things, as Julia's revolt is physical. The Party at least theoretically denies luxuries, for they weaken the commitment of Party members.

 

             The song: "Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's": This, too, like the paperweight, symbolize the faded past; it is an old nursery rhyme describing the sound of the bells of the famous old London churches, which have now either been demolished or been turned into war museums. It, too, will recur.

 

Part Two: Section Five

 

             Julia and Winston continue their clandestine meetings in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop. They talk of various things they might do: disappear, adopt Prole accent, live hidden from the Party. Or they might find Goldstein and the Brotherhood and join them to overthrow the Party. Or they might commit suicide. Only this last solution is feasible, because they know that they will be found out no matter what else they do, such is the Party's conditioning and such is its power. Syme, the editor of the Eleventh Newspeak Dictionary, "disappears" in this section, as Winston had predicted he would; he is an "unperson."

 

Comment

 

             This rather long section represents the further development of Winston's revolt, and further points out the differences intellectually and ideologically between Winston and Julia. She regards the "war" in which the Party is perpectually embroiled as a sham, and in this she is far more perceptive than Winston. Winston thinks of Julia and himself as resembling the bit of coral enclosed in the glass paperweight; he imagines that the furnished room is akin to the glass, and that no harm can come to them as long as they maintain this oasis of sanity in the world of the Party. As it will turn out, he is wrong even in this belief.

 

 

Part Two: Section Six

 

             O'Brien makes an excuse to speak with Winston at work, and refers to the Tenth Newspeak Dictionary and to Winston's friend, Syme, the dictionary editor and enthusiast about Newspeak, although he does not mention Syme directly by name. But Syme is more than dead; he is an "unperson." O'Brien must know this. Therefore, what he has said to Winston is, in effect, that he is a conspirator; further, he invites Winston to visit him at home, on a pretext involving the Dictionary. Winston is sure that O'Brien is a representative of the Brotherhood, and he also knows that sooner or later he will obey this summons to meet O'Brien.

 

 

Comment

 

             The fear and the dehumanization of life in 1984 are further illustrated by the fact that it is very difficult even to find out where people live, unless they tell one directly, as O'Brien does Winston. There are no directories; everyone is, so to speak, anonymous. O'Brien is very careful, as he writes his address on a piece of paper, to give it to Winston right under a telescreen so that the address may be read. But giving his address is not necessarily criminal; mentioning Syme is because of his status in the Party limbo of those who have been vaporized. Winston thus knows the jeopardy in which he is placed; he feels as if he is stepping down into his own grave, even though he had anticipated this. As he had written at the beginning of his revolt: "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: Thoughtcrime is death." Now he knows that he is coming closer to his own downfall and vaporization.

Part Two: Section Seven

 

             This section begins with another of Winston's dreams, in which his heretofore repressed belief that he had "murdered" his mother spills over into his conscious mind. It ends with Winston and Julia discussing how, if at all, it is impossible to keep from the kind of selfishness and corruption by the Party symbolized by the dream.

 

Comment

 

             The corruption of the individual by the Party is nowhere better illustrated in Part Two than in the dream or fantasy about his childhood which Winston undergoes at this point. The chocolate incident, in which Winston remembers snatching a bit of chocolate from his starving baby sister aged two or three, is unbearably pathetic, and had obviously scarred him with deep guilt feelings. Winston's mother, he realizes now, had been sure that she would "disappear" just as Winston's father had disappeared. But she did not tell him; what good would telling him have done? Winston believes that he had killed his mother in some way by taking the chocolate; of course this is pure fantasy, but his guilt feelings are the important thing here. In turn, his dream of murdering his mother is related to the earlier dream he had had about seeing his mother and sister sinking deeper and deeper into green sea water. Here Julia, who reassures him, and Winston conclude that the only way you can beat "them" is by feeling that one must stay human - this is related to the important point that Winston has that the Proles are human because they still have regard for human feelings, while he, Julia, and the Party have lost their humanity, and at best can provide a basis for a humanization some time in the future.

 

Part Two: Section Eight

 

             Winston and Julia visit O'Brien in his private apartment where, as a member of the Inner Party, he has the privilege of turning off his telescreen, as he tells them. Actually, as will be made clear later, this is a trap, and everything Winston and Julia say is recorded and they are photographed. O'Brien offers a toast to his "Leader" - the leader of the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein,. He tells them of the work of the Brotherhood, and says that he will provide Winston with a copy of the Book: Goldstein's books that outlines the present system of society and how to change it. Julia and Winston swear loyalty to the Brotherhood and vow that what they learn of it will remain secret even under torture.

 

 See - Visit O'Brien: Winston and Julia visit O'Brien in his private apartment.

 

Comment

 

             An elaborate deception is staged here for Winston and Julia. Though they do not know it, this is evidently the culmination of a long-standing plot against them by the Party. Winston, especially, has been watched for years, as it appears from the pattern of incidents in his life, the dreams he has had (perhaps involving hypnotic suggestion by the Party), and the way in which O'Brien has taken an interest in him. Probably Winston was under suspicion ever since his father and mother were arrested and no doubt vaporized.

 

             O'Brien greets him with grave courtesy. He offers the pair some wine, which is generally a luxury forbidden to any who are not in the Inner Party. He asks Winston and Julia if they are prepared to commit acts of murder, sabotage, treason, forgery, blackmail, and indeed anything at all the Brotherhood orders. They agree; this, too, will be used against them by the Thought Police to show that they are not even ethically superior to the Party, because they have agreed to use the same methods as the Party uses in order to attain and maintain power. All that Winston and Julia can accomplish with their revolt is to effect a change at some indefinite time in the future; this is all that O'Brien promises them. Winston significantly drinks a toast to "the past"; this should be considered symbolically in the light of the Party slogan, ". . . who controls the Past controls the Future." Also, it should be remembered that Winston's work in the Ministry of Truth consists of systematically falsifying the Past "We shall meet again . . . in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien gravely repeats to Winston. They both recognize the allusion; probably the phrase has been repeated to Winston by Party agents or psychologists while he has slept. As the section is concluded, Winston is looking forward to receiving the Book which will tell him "why" - why the world is the way it is, and what he can do to change it.

 

Part Two, Section Nine

 

             In this section, Winston's enlightenment begins. He receives the Book, and begins to read it in Mr. Charrington's room above the shop. It is The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein. The portions of the Book which Winston reads, part aloud to Julia, are vitally important in understanding Orwell's conception of the society of 1984 and his technique of projecting tendencies of the present into the future. While it may be dull reading, it provides a key; rightly understood, the ideas contained in it are literally dynamite.

 

Comment

 

             "The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living."This is one of the key descriptions of what Goldstein's Book calls "the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism." The Party's object is to nominate its successors and thereby remain in power forever. The theory of the Party is analyzed separately in an essay below in connection with a discussion of Orwell's views on James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. But one point which has not been made sufficiently clear in previous analyses of 1984 is that there is "hidden evidence" throughout Parts One and Two suggesting that Winston has been the victim of a fiendishly elaborate long-term plot by the Party-in which he would be tempted and entrapped into Thoughtcrime so that he would provide one more example and opportunity for the exercise of naked power which the Party desires for its own sake, as is explained in Goldstein's book-which was almost certainly written by a member or members of the Inner Party - and as O'Brien explains the Party's objectives to Winston in Part Three.

 

Part Two: Section Ten

 

             In this final section, Winston, having been enlightened to the point where part of his question, the "why" of the Party, is answered, apparently sleeps around the clock in his cheap furnished room, with Julia by his side. Without having finished the Book, he knows that Goldstein's final message must be that if there is hope, it must be in the Proles. But in the very moment when he reaches even this level of enlightenment, he and Julia are arrested, in their room, by the Thought Police, and Mr. Charrington, whose disguise has been removed, turns out to have been an agent of the Thought Police.

 

Comment

 

             Obviously, the Party has gone to fantastic lengths to trap Winston and Julia. They have been given some insight into the workings of the Party, only to make the downfall more painful to them. The hidden room of Mr. Charrington turns out to have been as private as a fishbowl, with a telescreen behind a picture and Mr. Charrington, a highly trained and quite professional agent of the Thought Police, apparently devoting all of his time just to Winston's case. For Winston is clearly the person the Party is after; Julia is not nearly as important to the Party, because her revolt is not intellectual or ideological, but largely physical. For good reason, then, Winston is more dangerous to the Party. As Part Two ends, the glass paper weight with the bit of pink coral is callously shattered to pieces by a policeman; this symbolizes the breaking of the charmed circle - the end of the temporarily separate and secure existence, safe in their own ideas of each other, of Winston and Julia.

 

Part Two: Summary

 

             In Part Two, Winston briefly discovers the Golden Country which he has dreamed of in Part One. In the discussion of Orwell's lesser-known novel, Coming Up for Air, this never-never land, this Golden Country, is much in the thoughts of the protagonist, George Bowling, who is himself (somewhat like Winston Smith) representative of "the common man" while simultaneously being a most uncommon man in the depth of his social perceptions But George Bowling's mind is often on the times before the War (the First World War, that is), when he was a boy growing up. For him, the Golden Country includes a hidden pool of large fish set in a rural scene; a place George had visited as a boy and was always looking to return to. But when he finally finds the pool, and this as a rather chubby red-faced man of forty-five with two children, a shrewish wife, and a salesman's job which he neither likes nor hates, the Golden Country is changed. In fact, it is no more; the pool is there, but the fish have gone, and the trees have been chopped down, and olf rusty pieces of junked automobiles, tin cans, and worn-out tires have been thrown into the pool to pollute it thoroughly. "You can't go home again," George Bowling finds-you can't return to Lower Binfield, his boyhood home before the War, and find it as it was. The state of innocence, relatively speaking, before 1914, in Orwell's reading of history, has been succeeded by a state of corrupt experience and by the "streamlined men from Eastern Europe," who think in slogans and speak in bullets, and whose means of persuasion are the machine gun, the rubber truncheon, and the concentration camp. George Bowling's experience is, on a different, more allegorical level, Winston Smith's.

 

             Another symbol in Part Two is the glass paperweight. Winston and Julia are temporarily insulated from the grim reality of the Party's world, just as if they were preserved under glass.. The smashing of the paperweight signals the end of their dream of escape.

 

             It is essential to the Party's plan for Winston that he should not be arrested until he has read the Book by Goldstein. He must understand what is being done to him, and why. If the suggestion is not too bizarre (of course, everything in Winston's world is bizarre), it may be observed that Winston's reading of the Book is like a student's preparation for a series of classes by the reading of an assigned textbook. The Book is almost certainly, as has been said, a product of the Party itself; the Brotherhood and Goldstein probably do not exist, except as artificial creations of the Party.

 

             The classes for which Winston is preparing, however, are no ordinary classes. His College will be the Ministry of Truth, his classrooms will be the rooms in the subbasement from which few or none emerge really alive, his teacher will be O'Brien, and the method of instruction will be argumentation and the dialectical process validated by torture and by sheer physical force. This is to be the content of Part Three: the re-education of Winston Smith not in objective truth but in Party truth.

 

(CONTINUED)