1984

1984 is the fictional present of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: the year in which Winston Smith commits his opening act of rebellion by dating a diary page "April 4th, 1984." Within the book the year is far more than a calendar setting. It is a contested quantity, impossible to verify in a society that controls all records, and the date itself becomes the first truth-claim in a story built on the systematic falsification of time and memory.

A Bright Cold Day in April

The novel enters 1984 on "a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast "in an effort to escape the vile wind," slips through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. Later, alone in the alcove whose unusual position puts him outside the range of the telescreen, he takes up an archaic pen and writes "April 4th, 1984." in small clumsy letters. The text is explicit about the weight of the gesture: "To mark the paper was the decisive act." The date is the first thing the diary contains, and the act of writing it down is the rebellion from which all else follows.

A Year the Party Cannot Confirm

For Winston himself the identity of the year is suspect. He "did not know with any certainty that this was 1984". At thirty-nine, believing that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, he can fix the date only approximately, since "it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two". The uncertainty is systemic rather than personal: in the Records Department, where his labour consists of making statistics and records agree with the Party, everything fades into a shadow-world in which "even the date of the year had become uncertain".

The political alignments of the year share the same instability. "At this moment, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia" — an arrangement Winston privately knows to be only four years old, though officially the enemy of the moment has always been the enemy. Big Brother's exploits have been pushed backwards in time until they extend into the fabulous world of the 1940s and 1930s, and the Party holds that whoever controls the past controls the future. In such a world the calendar belongs to the Party as surely as the newspapers do.

The Texture of the Year

Life in 1984 is built from scarcity and unrelenting surveillance. The telescreen receives and transmits simultaneously, so that Winston must live in the assumption that every sound he makes is overheard and every movement scrutinised; the poster in the entrance hall of Victory Mansions carries the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Rationing governs even small comforts: "the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty". "About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present" — about twenty or thirty rocket bombs. The three slogans of the Party — WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH — are lettered on the white face of the Ministry of Truth. Even popular music marks the year: a prole song "had been haunting London for weeks past".

The year also stands at a precise point in the Party's timetable for the future. Syme, the Newspeak philologist, is one of the team of experts compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary — "the definitive edition", in his phrase — whose purpose is to cut the language down to the bone so that heresy becomes literally unthinkable. He predicts that "by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now". In 1984 that final victory is still decades away, but it is already being engineered, word by destroyed word.

A Letter Addressed to the Future

The date in the diary points outward from the year as much as inward. Winston wonders for whom he is writing — "for the future, for the unborn" — and whether the future will resemble the present and refuse to listen, or differ from it and make his predicament meaningless. His greeting runs "To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone". He knows that "the diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour", and that only the Thought Police would ever read what he had written before wiping it out of existence and out of memory. The year 1984 is thus the hinge of the novel's meditation on time: the moment when one anonymous hand can still inscribe an unverifiable date and, in doing so, test whether the past can be carried forward at all.