Blogging 1984: VI (Part 2, Chapters 4, 5 & 6)
Previously in Blogging 1984, Winston and Julia sat in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g., and we all had a terrible feeling about how that would turn out.
4
We open on the room above Mr. Charrington’s antiques shop, where Winston is preparing for another tryst with Julia. Out the window, a lady hangs washing and sings boisterous, rhyming folk songs, because ProleTown is basically the set of a Broadway production of Oliver. Winston has planned a super special date in bringing Victory coffee and saccharine tablets 🌹, but Julia out-romances him by bringing Inner Party coffee, actual real sugar, actual real tea, milk, jam, and the pièce de résistance, a bunch of Prole makeup. These kids would be blown away by a trip to Sephora + date at Starbucks.
Post-romp, their Edenic naked lazing in the antique bed is interrupted by a rat, who pokes his head through the wainscoting—and if that isn’t a metaphor for sex, I don’t know what is. It’s also a metaphor for darkness, though: “They’re all over the place,” Julia tells Winston/us helpfully. “Some parts of London are swarming with them.” They spend some more time lazing around in their moth-eaten sheets, and the general vibe is
In short order, Winston picks up an old glass paperweight in which a pretty piece of coral stands in suspended animation: “It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m worried that if we don’t get out of the Little Shop of Metaphors soon, this plot isn’t going to go anywhere.
(Lest you doubt my reading, “… The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”)
*underlines entire chapter*
5
“Syme had vanished.”
And just like that, we all feel a little sorry for Winston’s colleague-with-zero-chill from the Ministry. I mean he was annoying, sure, but did he deserve to be erased from his committee rosters and unmade from history just because he ran his mouth too much and bored our pants off? I feel like 99% “no, he didn’t,” and 1% “sure; he reminds me of people I have known.”
Meanwhile, everyone at the Ministry is busy getting ready for Hate Week—Julia is working on “atrocity pamphlets,” the Hate Song theme is being plugged over the radio, bunting is being strung, and if Oceania had Starbucks, you can just imagine the red “~Happy Hate Days~” cups that would have replaced the regular white and green numbers on the counter, much to the fury of Oceania’s Gretchen Carlsons. I can practically taste the hate spice in the air.
Bombing activity has also picked up, and there are some fresh new posters posted around town of a “monstrous figure of a Eurasian solider… striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face” to drum up patriotism, and that description is a tidy microaggression indeed, well done Big Brother. The effect is that everyone is getting nicely worked up into an anti-Goldstein fervor, including the good old Proles (when they aren’t being bombed into oblivion). But an escalation in shelling doesn’t interrupt the Julia + Winston show, with six trysts in June alone, each in Mr. Charrington’s hovel. Across each meeting, there is a lot of sexy time and a bit of casual discussion about the true nature of Big Brother and the Party’s regime. Julia is at once less affected by the duplicitous nature of their lives and also more cynical: she believes that the shellings could be committed by Big Brother himself to drum up support for the homeland—that in fact the whole war might be fake—yet can’t bring herself to bother disavowing questionable “facts” like “the Party invented aeroplanes.” Julia is like the worst kind of Facebook friend who is savvy enough to be interested in and engaged with politics, but then insists on clogging up your feed with hackneyed exposés on chemtrails.
Julia certainly doesn’t think the Brotherhood even exists, which leaves Winston at something of a loose end. I guess he’ll never get to find out if there really is a resistance…
6
Until the next page, when he is strolling down the hall at work and O’Brien happens upon him with an out-of-the-blue compliment about his skill as a scholar of Newspeak:
” ‘You write it very elegantly,’ said O’Brien. ‘That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for a moment.’ “
This is obviously a reference to Syme (RIP, Syme) steeped in so much code and innuendo that O’Brien may as well not even be talking, and instead just letting his eyes put on a mirrorball extravaganza inside Winston’s head while a backing track of his own making plays on the soundtrack (“I have turned the world upside down for you, Winston.”).
Having sparked a totally legitimate, not-at-all-suspicious conversation in the hallway/lair of the enemy himself, O’Brien offers to let Winston preview the newest edition of the Newspeak dictionary—stop by my house, he says, handing over his address on a piece of paper, and all my child predator alarms would be going off if Winston weren’t a 39-year-old dude with an ulcer.
Well, put on your pinnies and grease your pans, as they might say on the Great British Bake-Off, it seems like we are going deep into the underground:
“Even while he was speaking to O’Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave.”
I guess we are off to O’Brien’s…
Notes:
- I, for one, am ready for the Brotherhood. I’m ready to see what kind of tea they drink, and whether or not they have access to Cadbury’s.
- Even though Winston and Julia make a bit of a fuss about “sneaking around,” and even though we know there are all these cameras and microphones everywhere, Orwell spends so much time making Prole life look like a bucks party,* and painting so many people as subversive or occasional law-breakers (basically everyone except the sweaty Parsons) that I really doubt the integrity of the regime. Like Ben Affleck, it feels like the Party is one nannygate away from universal condemnation.
- Do we feel sorry for Syme?
*”Bachelor party”
Find all of Janet’s 1984 blog here, and find our Blogging the Classics index page here.
