Reading Orwell's 1984

56: Part 3 of 6

Great to see you, friends! We’re reading George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith is staging a rebellion against an oppressive regime with dangerous thoughts. Thank you to those who’ve stuck with me for parts one and two. Welcome to those who just signed up for this newsletter. I invite everyone to join the discussions at the end of each reading.

Part three will put us roughly halfway through the book.

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Chapters’ Summary

Pages 105-159 (finish chapter 6) or listening from 3:41:17 to 5:38:01 on the audiobook

Winston sees the woman from the Fiction department with her arm in a sling and goes to help her when she falls. Despite their brief run-in days before, he feels empathy for her. She thanks him and shrugs is off, but Winston notices she slipped a note into his hand. Winston spirals with assumptions about what the note says because he cannot think of a safe time or place to read it. When he finally unfurls it at his desk, it says simply: I love you. Winston finds it hard to concentrate but more importantly, hard to keep his face from betraying him.

He tries to keep himself preoccupied and attends Party events after work but only when he’s back home can he think it through. He no longer thinks of her as a spy and instead fantasizes about her. They keep missing opportunities to meet in the cafeteria and he is bombarded by intrusive thoughts. They are finally able to exchange meeting arrangements in between sips of soup.

While in a crowd outside during a procession, she gives directions to a meeting place. They meet in the countryside and she leads him to an hidden clearing. They chat and kiss but Winston has not warmed up to her. He’s spent so long not feeling anything that he cannot get physically aroused.

Her name is Julia. She asks what he thought of her before she slipped the note and while Winston is usually prepared with a lie to tell the patrols, he wants to be honest with her. He tells Julia he hated her and thought she was a spy for the thought police. She’s amused. She offers Winston a piece of real chocolate and casually says it’s from the black market. For Winston the taste is pleasant but also triggers an uncomfortable, foggy memory.

He tells her he hates goodness and virtue, all supposed hallmarks of the Party and the more sexually experienced she is, the better. He also wants to know if she likes the act of sex itself, outside her feelings for him. She does. Their expression of desire through lovemaking is therefore collusion of thought criminals.

It was a blow struck against the party. It was a political act.

Generational divide

Julia was born during the revolution and only ever knew the Party as an immovable force. By all appearances, she is a strict Party member who is energetic and heavily involved in activities, but she only does so as camouflage. Her disguise is so good that she has even been trusted to work in a department producing pornography, which, like everything else, is orchestrated for distribution to proles who think the content is illegal. Julia is clever and stealthy, having found joy where she can. Her rebellion is to askew the thought of death and stay alive as long as possible. Her mind seems untouched by doctrine and she is strong willed when it comes to certain issues.

Julia is presented as a contradiction. She works producing books but does not read them. She knows the lies the Party tells but the details don’t matter. Julia even falls asleep while Winston is talking about Ingsoc or past Ministry frauds. She appears orthodox but does not grasp its meaning. The structure of it all doesn’t matter and she does not agree that “we are the dead” as Winston says. She likes being alive and finds it troubling Winston does not think the same.

Julia appears casually unconcerned and acute where Winston appears naive. Whereas Winston thinks he’s alone in his perception of things, Julia is quite familiar. She has a strong sense of self, her sexuality, and has insightful observations about Party doctrine. There’s a trading off of perspectives where we question whether or not it is possible to evade authority rather than overthrow it. Is it possible to just live? She refuses to believe individuals are powerless.

Winston is dimly aware of a before time when the Party did not exist and has seen the foundations built brick by brick. Struggle and opposition is swiftly punished and his only rebellion has been small acts of thoughtcrime. The danger for him has so short a fuse that he has tread lightly thus far.  In contrast to Julia, the present holds little value to Winston. To him, we are all destined for death at a future time and only manage the interval between now and vaporization. He yearns for evidence of the nation’s true past and for the future, which will only be made free by overthrowing the Party.  Winston does not want furtive disobedience, but liberation.

He regrets some choices he made in the past when he wasn’t as strong, but has changed as a person. He is interested in understanding and exposing the principles of the Party and is hopeful a resistance movement exists to weaken the Party. Every decisive act of rebellion is a blow. Winston is still timid, however, and in the process of teasing out traumatic memories from his past that keep him stuck.

Each has been affected by the Party in different ways but the result appears to work in their favor nonetheless. Julia is a rabid participant maintaining the status quo even if she does disobey the rules. Winston is too fearful to do much beyond torture his own mind and commit small inconsequential acts. Even so, they both exist as tools of the societal machine where each fills a role.

Family was not abolished, but became an extension of the thought police. Strong bonds could never form because a vindictive or careless child could spell the end. Being their parent could not spare you from being vaporized. Children were sentimental objects. In the previous reading, we heard about artsem (artificial insemination), but this use of the family is a stopgap until the point where the structure can be dismantled.

Winston knows it’s probable that he’ll die. The thought of being in the Ministry of Love being tortured until confession drifts into his mind from time to time. Nevertheless, he has strong feelings for Julia and that pushes him to rent Mr. Charington’s room, a safe place they could be open with affections with no fear of being seen by a telescreen or picked up by mics. Every act of disobedience is a step toward death but he only postpones the inevitable.

At their first meeting, Julia brings a treasure trove of food items like real sugar, coffee, jam, and other items. She even surprises Winston by donning makeup and perfume. The room above the shop becomes their hideaway where they exist freely.

Don’t you enjoy being alive?!

- Julia

Winston returns to work and learns that Syme, his comrade the Newspeak expert, has been vaporized. After chatter about his absence on day one, by day three his name is removed from a posted chess team pamphlet and no one speaks of him again.

Hate Week is approaching and all departments are busy with preparations. There is mass production of propaganda which includes posters, spreading rumors, and releasing songs. Winston is busy rectifying old issues of the Times. There is increased violence and suspicion among proles with homes set ablaze and general social unrest. There are also a ubiquitous Eurasian soldier poster plastered all over London which seems to coincide with more rockets hitting, casualties including children, and more property damage than usual. People are inspired to blind patriotism. Julia muses that the war is faked and that Oceania is bombing its own citizens.

Winston gains weight, his coughing fits stop, and his ulcer resolves. Eating better food and being in a relationship have provided an outlet for his frustrations. Mr. Charington seems to have no other customers and shares other childhood rhymes and bits of history. He seems an antique himself, busying himself among the hoards of old things.

O’Brien stops Winston in the same hallway where Julia slipped him the note and O’Brien compliments Winston on a piece he wrote in the Times. He advises on the use of some outdated words and offers to give him an advanced copy of the 10th edition of Newspeak. O’Brien writes down his address and gives it to Winston. Winston is sure O’Brien is a friend and believes the entire interaction to be a show for the telescreen. He thinks O’Brien is speaking in code. Winston is excited about the prospect of seeing O’Brien at his home, but is sure that death is near. He has progressed from thought, to word, and now deed and was doomed.

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My thoughts:

They have surveillance in the bathrooms?! Lol! I guess it tracks because there can be no sacred places, no places to safely congregate for any reason. Can you imagine how that was rolled out?

If Julia is that good at reading people and knowing who is a silent rebel, how good is Winston’s disguise? Can the Party see it too?

I like the generational contrast between Winston and Julia. I wondered which one of them had the right idea. I can appreciate that it’s hard to overthrow such an ingrained system, that the rebellion could be kept alive in acts of disobedience. However, I was not entirely comfortable with Julia’s Party activities. She was furthering the reach of the Party, but on the other hand, what choice was there? If you’re in an all girl’s Catholic school, you can try to remove the nuns as teachers and principal, or just sneak out for cigarettes or sex. Maybe the latter has the right idea. I’m not sure how coordinated a rebellion can be, only the potency of the belief weakened over time.

What makes an effective resistance? It’s not one or the other, but consistent acts brought to a crescendo. No one can do it alone and no one person holds the key. Releasing the power in all of us is how we move the needle. Keeping people hungry, broke, and distracted is how the resistance dies. I wonder if people will one day recognize the veil and tear it off.

It’s very interesting to see the luxuries are natural foods, which I’ve seen in other dystopian stories. It takes me to two places:

1. V for Vendetta is not like 1984 but is a very restrictive society. Evey gets to taste real butter when V makes her breakfast. It was taken off a truck destined for the chancellor. In Mad Max Fury Road, Immortan Joe dispenses water to the masses from atop a plateau palace. They’re in a desert and at his mercy. In the movie Equilibrium, restriction on art or color are absent in leadership penthouses.

Through media and in life, we see the upper class hoard more resources than they can ever use and all the pleasantries denied everyone else comes to them in abundance. People are fed a myth of scarcity to influence the value of goods and constantly kept on edge.

We are told there are too many people, never too many cars. Never too many marble countertops or too large a pantry for their estates. Why can’t all of us share? It’s a question I come back to in dystopian fiction and the answer is the same: we are strong through collective action and in community. Isolated, afraid, and angry, we are easily brainwashed and weakened. We are also too distracted to think of rebellion.

2. A recent article¹ cited that millennial and Gen X luxuries include expensive groceries. I find that remarkably sad. Costs have gone up in the past five years due to corporate greed and billionaires have stolen from the middle class. What do we have left but Plugra butter and brioche loaves? It’s not even a matter of craving simplicity; we’re an exploited workforce buried in debt.

When you can only catch fleeting moments of has been taken away, the present feels empty. This is the part Winston has difficulty with. He cannot fathom anything worse than what he cannot have, save death itself. For Julia, she approaches the past luxuries he’s been denied as if they were normal. Her acquisition of it is a game. For Winston, the perpetual lack is a reality starved of any feeling. That push and pull of wanting the past, enjoying the present, and hoping for the future seem bridges the pair will not cross. They might always be at odds that way but I hope they can come to some middle ground. It is important to know history but we must accept what’s in our control. There’s a lot more in Winston’s control than he believes and I hope he finds it.

O’Brien… I’m worried about him. Winston read into O’Brien’s mannerisms and the look on his face but I wonder how good of a judge Winston is. His dreams also have a big influence on what he believe is true. I keep thinking of the phrase from his dream and what it means.

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Discussion prompts:

Does the Party know but ignore the infractions of people like Julia?

How are black market items kept secret?

Dystopian and science fiction often predict future technologies. Is the versificator is the first AI driven device mentioned in fiction? Where else have you seen in Orwell’s time?

What’s next?

• Poetry to round out National Poetry Month

• Part 4 of 6, pages 159-225 (end of Part II) or 5:31:01 to 8:05:16 in the audiobook

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1. https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-gen-z-splurge-groceries-spending-inflation-gen-z-boomers-2024-4

“Millennials and Gen Z's trendy new splurge: groceries”

Honestly, I do buy fancy bread. What is life if you don’t have a nice challah every once in a while?