Blogging 1984: V (Part 2, Chapters 1, 2 & 3)

Previously in Blogging 1984, things got “hot and heavy” with a toothless prostitute, and that’s as much as I can say about Winston’s nighttime adventures without getting myself arrested.

Part 2, Chapter 1

At the conclusion of Part 1, Winston had just run into That Brunette from the Ministry, aka Dystopian Rey, while moodily strolling Proletown. She walked by him without stopping, and he naturally figured: welp, she’s going to report me to the Thought Police, and I’m a dead man. I could kill her right now, and live another day, but I’m probably going to just go home and sulk instead.

Now, Winston is at work, strolling the corridors when he again finds himself approaching Dystopian Rey. Her arm is in a cast and she trips and falls in front of him, wincing in pain. He offers his hand to help her up, and she slips a piece of paper into his palm, then hurries off with a curt “thank you, comrade.”

What do you think the note says?!!! My top guesses:

• They’re watching you
• Join the revolution
• Cool overalls, are those vintage Wranglers?
• ‘Yer a wizard
• #TeamJacob

What does the note actually say?

I love you

I know.

From there, it’s a very quick change of heart for old Winston:

“Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but that was of no importance.”

We are all systems go for a forbidden romance, and I am about it.

Winston knows he now needs to *actually talk* to Dystopian Rey, which means what it always does in life and love: track her down in the lunch room and go in for the kill. Despite being almost thwarted by a “blond-headed, silly-face young man named Wilsher” (+100 name points) who beckons Winston over toward an empty seat, Winston manages to sit his lunch tray down at Rey’s table. They are safe to speak out loud in a crowd of bumbling Party numpties, and she wastes no time in arranging a meet-up time: the next day in the public square.

*cut to the square*

Dystopian Rey is busy pasting propaganda onto a spire in Victory Square, and Winston stands close enough to receive directions out of town for that Sunday. I don’t know if she’s giving him the coordinates to a secret Brotherhood bunker, or an underground Nandos restaurant, or a rollicking sex party in the beach community of Bath; all I know is that I cannot wait to find out what is there. Before they part and disappear into the crowd, she squeezes his hand, and it is the best hand-touch of Winston’s entire life:

“He had time to learn every detail of her hand… Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight.”

And you thought light petting was for kids.

Part 2, Chapter 2

Winston journeys out into the countryside on a train full of proles, and wanders off into the brush. He is picking bluebells when he hears the snap of twigs behind him ~oh oh!~ and decides the only thing is to go on picking flowers, in the “just tying my shoelace” suite of amateur spy moves. Thankfully, the noise was just Dystopian Rey, who silently leads him into the woods, to a hidden clearing, beyond the reach of government microphones.

Winston steps toward her and takes her hand, then gives her the full When Harry Met Sally wind-up: “I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.”

THIS, my friends, is how not to write a Tinder bio. The girl, in any case, doesn’t care, and immediately hops his bones. They descend to the ground in their embrace—this is categorically what The Daily Mail would call a “romp”—and he realizes that the sensation of another person’s touch is so foreign that he can’t even enjoy the subtleties of it, just a sort of awareness of the on-off aspect of contact. This describes the entirety of my teenage years. Sad!

Winston, marooned on sensation island, can’t stay excited, and so they wind up talking. The girl’s name is Julia; she asks him what he thought of her prior to The Note. Winston, being ever the smooth talker, tells her: “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone.”

This kind of approach to smalltalk is inadvisable for all but the most advanced daters. But Julia is totally into it, and gets a real kick when Winston tells her he thought she was with the Thought Police. In fact she is VERY MUCH the opposite. Julia is a bonafide rebel who wears the Junior Anti-Sex League sash as a clever disguise, and hoards contraband chocolate (the real stuff, not that Hersheys junk), which they now enjoy post-makeout, the gist of

Julia and Winston stroll through the Garden of Eden, taking in the wildlife and triggering a vague memory for Winston of swimming in a nearby stream. Suddenly, Julia stops and pulls a Johanna Mason right there in the woods, shrugging her overalls to the floor, just like in Winston’s dream. Her body is white and naked (did you not get that?) and unashamed in the way only Kirke sistercan manage, and she claims to have slept with hundreds of Party men. Winston gets her #aesthetic and cries, “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones!”

And look, I don’t want to oversell the significance of Winston subsequently having actual, enjoyable sex, but:

“Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

Part 2, Chapter 3

So begins the great and risky period of Winston and Julia making out all around town. She arranges places and times for them to meet up, which are sometimes interrupted by patrols, or work, or bombings. She convinces Winston to volunteer his spare time to building munitions as a cover for his numerous Thoughtcrimes.

We learn that Julia lives in a women’s hostel and works in minitrue’s Fiction Department creating novels, a task achieved by flying around inside a giant machine like an acrobat. Her grandfather “disappeared” when she was eight, but she remembers little else pre-Revolution. She was captain of the hockey team (Winston called it!) in high school and a gymnast. Formerly of Pornosec, she used to help create dirty “literature” for the proles, such as “Spanking Stories” or “One Night in a Girl’s School.” Only females work in Pornosec because the Party thinks it’s too risky to involve men in sexy work like drumming up “Spanking Stories.”

If you were hoping Julia would be a gateway to some sort of underground army (*raises hand*), that is not the case; she’s merely a disaffected young person who thinks the way to #bestlife her days in Oceania is to quietly, sneakily undermine Big Brother by having lots of covert sex. Julia is excessively woke, and sees through all the propaganda dating back to the awful sex ed in schools:

“Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism… What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader worship.”

In her own words, “All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.”

In the same way the Party weaponizes sexual impulses, it turns family members against one another.

Speaking of which, Winston remembers taking a community hike with the ol’ ball and chain, Katherine, back in the day, and becoming separated from the group. Rather than go in for some naughty bush HND, Katherine of course freaked out that they were doing something wrong. They were all alone by a steep cliff, far from cameras and microphones, so Winston naturally thought about pushing her off into the abyss.

“Why didn’t you give her a good shove?” Asks Julia/all of us reading along.

His reasoning is sort of fatalistic—that it wouldn’t have made a difference—and isn’t that just the most Winston thing ol Winston “I’m hopeless, and awkward, and desperate for love” Bing could possibly have said in that moment?

Julia has a different view of things and feels that living dangerously, subverting the will of the Party, is the only way to know you are *living*. She’s a proponent of “mindful rebellious living,” to use a Goop-ism, while Winston is more of a conscious uncoupler.

Wow, we have come a long way; specifically, all the way from Winston wanting to bash Julia’s head in with a cobblestone to several naked romps in the bluebells. What do you think will happen next?

Notes:

1. I will take my $10 for calling the Winston-Julia hookup almost immediately.
2. By my count, Julia pulled 25 twigs out of her hair over the course of these three chapters, and I am whole-heartedly behind the symbolism of twigs as a stand-in for nothing more than “just got someeee.”

Read the next installment of Blogging 1984 here!

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