Part Two, Chapter 4

1984

Mountaineers · 10th–12th

Copywork

It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?

Lying in bed at sunset, Winston wonders whether an evening like this was ever “a normal experience.” He doubts it. What keeps him from believing it?

For the educator Two passages, five sentences. The first is Winston waiting on the bed, thinking of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It opens on “It was curious how”, a calm frame around a horror. The second sentence pins the horror in place with three phrases (“There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death”) and a comparison as sure as counting, “as surely as 99 precedes 100”. The third sets “avoid” against “postpone” on either side of “but”, turns at a colon on “and yet instead”, holds back its verb behind two interruptions (“every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act”) and lands on the choice: “one chose to shorten the interval”. Winston thinks of himself as “one”, not “I”. The second passage is the same man later that evening, in bed at sunset. Its first sentence wonders, then piles up phrases (“making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there”) until the sentence itself seems to lie still. The second is a short question. Students copying them practise a framing sentence, a verb held back, a turn at a colon, a run of phrases with a repeated word, and a question that expects no answer. Set side by side, the passages share a verb: in the first, one “chose” to bring the end nearer; in the second, they make love “when they chose” and talk “of what they chose”. For the talk prompt, listen for more than one reading. One says the past has been taken even from memory: it is “the abolished past”, and Winston, who “had occasionally slept in” a double bed “in his boyhood”, still cannot trust that such evenings were normal. Another says the doubt is wonder: the evening is too good to feel ordinary, because every pleasure he has is hidden and timed, and the water in the pan is already “boiling fast”. A strong student may notice that “Surely” is a word for being certain, used here to doubt. Keep to the page: the chapter does not settle whether such evenings were ever ordinary.

Discussion

Narration Tell back the chapter, from Winston waiting in the room while the woman sings in the yard, through the day Julia could not come, to her bag, her painted face and the rat. End on the rhyme and what Winston sees in the glass.

1. The song in the yard was written by a machine, with no person involved at all. Yet Winston hears “a sort of happy melancholy” in the woman’s voice. Where does the feeling in that song come from?Tone

2. Of everything in her bag, Julia is proudest of the coffee. It is Inner Party coffee, and she calls the Inner Party “those swine.” Why would she be proudest of that?Character

3. Winston turns round expecting to see Julia naked. Instead she has painted her face, which is “much more surprising than that.” What can paint do that taking off her clothes cannot?Character

4. After the rat, Winston is back in a nightmare he has had all his life. In it, his deepest feeling is “self-deception,” because he knows what lies behind the “wall of darkness.” How can he fool himself about something he knows?Inference

5. Julia learned the rhyme from her grandfather. She says he “was vaporised when I was eight – at any rate, he disappeared.” Why might she correct herself?Character

Make a Connection Think of a place, in a story, in history or in your own life, that someone kept secret from everyone. How did keeping it secret change what the place meant to them?

Vocabulary

predestined It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness.

wilful One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

emanation The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

abstractedly Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.

inconsequently I wonder what a lemon was,’ she added inconsequently.

countersign It was like the two halves of a countersign.

inexhaustibly The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.

Critical thinking

1. Winston’s heart keeps calling the room “conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.” After the evening he spends there, which of those three words fits it worst?

Thesis

Objection

Revision

2. At the end Winston sees his life and Julia's inside the paperweight, “fixed in a sort of eternity.” Is that a hopeful picture or a frightening one?

Thesis

Objection

Revision