Characters

Winston, and Julia.

Setting

Ministry of the Truth , Mr Charrington’s shop

Summary

“His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. Now it was all over, and he could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed”.

This is how Orwell describes Winston at the beginning of the chapter: an exhausted man after a tremendously tiring work. At this point Orwell makes a footstep back (a flash-back), to explain what had previously happened. He tells an event happened in the week of hate, “...after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks… after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces.”

Just then it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it was happening. The description that we have of this place is very cruel and spine-chilling: there is a platform on which an orator of the Inner Party  is shouting, with exaggerated gestures, his speech containing an endless catalogue of atrocities and, so doing, exacerbates the crowd’s stored anger and hate more and more.

 “It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened ...At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats”, and the most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren...The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia!”

So Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs…all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Then, the assignment of the Minister of the truth was not anything else but to cancel every type of document that alluded to the war with Eurasia and to the alliance with Eastasia, in the space of a week. The work was overwhelming. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep.

“It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speak write, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie.” Fortunately the sixth day arrived and everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. When everything ended,  it was impossible for any human being to find documents reporting that there had been a war with Eurasia. Winston finally had the right to rest.

After this flash-back, we return to the point in which Winston, after his huge job, went towards Mr Charrington' s shop. When he arrived, he was not sleepy anymore, and so, he began to read the book that had hidden until then. The inscription on the cover said: “Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.[…] The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...”. Winston stopped reading, to be sure that any screen, any ear or eye at the keyhole could see him and disturb his comfortable reading.

At this point he began reading a different page, in which there was written:  “Chapter III War is Peace”. This chapter states the fundamental points of the history up to that time. It is a kind of reflexive story on the events of the past, in which the author (Emmanuel Goldstein) tries to give some motivations and explanations about that reality, that actually is is out of the reality. Here the three countries, Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia are described as three great super powers. “Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.” In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years.

To understand the nature of the present war (said Goldstein) it should be clear that “…None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination…” The primary aim of modern warfare is to use and eventually destroy the products of the technology so that the general standard of living could not raise: “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in 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…”

Then, the two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.So the word “war” itself had become uncertain, and, in Orwell’s words “… by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist”.  A war that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent peace. This is the true meaning of the slogan:  war is peace.

At this point, Winston stopped reading as he heard some noises from the staircases. He went towards the door to see who it was: it was Julia that threw herself into his arms. They have not met for a week. After half an hour spent in the bed, Winston spoke to her about the book and after a short conversation he started to read the book aloud.  The title on the page was “Chapter I Ignorance is Strength”. Again from the title we can understand the ideological basics on which the party had been founded: ignorance is one of them. So, the secret to stay at the power without being overcome by the revolts that rise during the history is the annihilation of the consciences through the annihilation of knowledge: “ The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed…This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.”

It is by means of DOUBLETHINK that the Party had been able to arrest the course of history, and in the moment in which Winston had almost found out the secret of this ideology he stopped reading, called Julia but uselessly because she was sleeping. So, he closed his eyes, aware not to be crazy because a truth existed, and it was much  clearer now. “He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring ‘Sanity is not statistical,’ with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.”

Personal Comments

Two negative ideologies

Surely this chapter does not introduce many crucial events, even if the event that has happened during the week of the hate can be considered crucial. Nevertheless, it compensates this lack with a long description of this world that up to now was almost unknown. The themes that we find correspond to the two subtitles of the chapters read by Winston during the period of pause after that stressful job.

The two subtitles are: War is peace and Ignorance is Strength. The first one speaks of how they have arrived at such an oppressive, stable, and lasting political system: by means of a neverending war. Everything has happened in this eternal war has a meaning and a purpose different from what we have accustomed to give it. The purpose of the modern war “is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living”: the war is used to maintain social stability. As to the second subtitle, we can say that here the problem is faced more from the psychological point of view, describing therefore also the role of the party in the social and political context of the population. The principle on which the party is founded is the Doublethink (the control of reality). Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The secret that is at the base of this issue is the total control of the consciences . All this is realized through the alteration of the past. In conclusion, the problem is essentially educational. "In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane." This is the world of contradictions!!

An example of all this is surely the name of the head of this government: Big Brother. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the families, while his name is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace is concerned with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. The conclusion is that  “... the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

In this sentence, abrupt  and cruel, it is present the reflection of the author that tries to get into the ideology of this system and give a reasonable justification to such a spine-chilling regime. He says that only reconciling the contradictions we can get power. To this thesis the questions that we can ask are manifold... But the answers? We do not know them, because Winston stopped reading just in that moment. Nevertheless, from these questions we understand the state of mind of those people and, indirectly, the state of mind of the writer. We remember that George Orwell lives in the period in which the totalitarian regimes of Italy, Germany, and Russia dominated Europe. For this reason it is an interesting chapter, because, even if does not present many important events, it has a meaning for what concerns the psychological mood of the writer, therefore his ideas, his opinions, his positions and his relationship with the politics and the dictatorial regimes of his time. It is obvious that this book, could seem a fantastic story to Orwell’s contemporary readers. But what if we compared that reality to our reality? Surely we will not say that the world of 1984 is entirely imaginary. In fact today's reality is not very different from that described by Orwell.

Today we live in the world of the “Globalization”. This condition is culturally an acceptable fact, if we think about the enormous benefits that all the people, especially the poorer ones, could receive: an equitable distribution of all the resources first of all. A sort of world government that can assure satisfactory conditions of life and safety for everybody. Unfortunately, beyond the beautiful statements of this principle, a very different reality exists: the systematic spoliation  of poorest countries carried out by the richest ones. It is not morally correct that only few countries have the possibility to take vital decisions also for other voiceless countries. “To Globalise” cannot mean to give advantagees  to few but it has to mean the beginning of an age of world growth and respect of every people; an age  in which all can enjoy the benefits of this process of  unprecedented “Planetization”.

Today we are living in the “telecommunication society”, always evolving with more and more refined technologies. According to the scientists, with the current rhythm of development, the time is not far in which the machine brain will be the same as human brain, even if this will involve big philosophical and moral problems.

By Luca