Bellyfeel

Bellyfeel is a word from the B vocabulary of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, and one of the sharpest demonstrations in Nineteen Eighty-Four of a term engineered to make unorthodox thought impossible. In the appendix "The Principles of Newspeak" it is introduced through the canonical sentence "Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc," which Oldspeak can only render as "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism." The appendix immediately warns that this is not an adequate translation, because bellyfeel carries the full force of a "blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today" - an acceptance located in the body rather than the reasoning mind.

A Word Built to Destroy Thought

Bellyfeel belongs to the B vocabulary of Newspeak, the second of three classes into which the language is divided and the class of composite words deliberately constructed for political purposes, words intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Such words are welded together from two or more existing elements into an easily pronounceable noun-verb; bellyfeel fuses the body with the act of feeling. Its meaning is so subtle that it is barely intelligible to anyone who has not mastered the language as a whole: only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc can appreciate its force, which Oldspeak can only approximate with long paraphrase. The polarity with oldthink is built into the canonical example. An oldthinker, formed before the Revolution, may acknowledge Ingsoc intellectually but cannot bellyfeel it; the properly conditioned Party member does not need to understand the principles because he or she experiences them as a physical certainty. In the appendix's account, words of this kind function less to express meanings than to destroy them: a single comprehensive term covers and abolishes whole ranges of vocabulary that might describe doubt, criticism or merely individual feeling.

The word also demonstrates the importance Newspeak attaches to euphony and speed. Because it can be uttered rapidly and without hesitation, bellyfeel belongs to a political language designed to make articulate orthodoxy flow from the larynx without engaging the higher brain centres. Its full meaning is inseparable from Ingsoc itself: to feel the sentence "Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc" is to know, instantly and without reflection, that pre-revolutionary mentalities are cut off from the emotional life of the Party. In this way the word is not merely a description of a state of mind; it is a mechanism for producing that state of mind in everyone who uses it correctly.

Bellyfeel in Party Life

Everyday Oceania is organized to manufacture bellyfeel. The Two Minutes Hate, in which the face of Emmanuel Goldstein flashes onto the telescreen as the Enemy of the People, is a ritual engine of visceral conformity: hisses break out among the audience, and the little sandy-haired woman gives "a squeak of mingled fear and disgust." Goldstein is the figure around whom this emotion crystallizes - the primal traitor, once almost on a level with Big Brother, who is said to command a vast shadowy underground army, the Brotherhood, and to be the author of a terrible outlawed compendium of heresies known simply as the book. The intensity of hatred directed at him keeps the feeling of belonging to the Party at fever pitch, and the fact that he is only ever encountered as rumour and image makes the emotion easier to switch from object to object while remaining undiminished.

The same bellyfeel is demanded by the fabricated triumphs of the Ministry of Plenty. Telescreen announcements speak of a standard of living risen by no less than 20 per cent, of workers marching out of factories and offices in "irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations" of gratitude to Big Brother. When the chocolate ration is announced as raised to twenty grammes a week, only a day after it had been announced as reduced to twenty grammes, Winston reflects that people swallow it. Parsons swallows it "with the stupidity of an animal"; a fanatical orator swallows it with a furious desire to denounce anyone who remembers the old figure; even Syme swallows it, in a more complex way involving doublethink. Winston is left wondering whether he is alone in the possession of a memory.

Bellyfeel also has a visible, social face. In Oceania, to wear an improper expression is itself a punishable offence - facecrime in Newspeak - and Party members train themselves to show the "expression of quiet optimism" that Winston adopts when he turns to face the telescreen in his flat. Julia, the girl from the Fiction Department, openly describes her own camouflage: "Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe." Her boasts of hours spent pasting up Junior Anti-Sex League slogans, carrying banners and never shirking voluntary work amount to a performance of bellyfeel on demand - enthusiasm produced so constantly that it becomes indistinguishable from conviction, while the performer stays privately untouched.

The Machinery Behind the Word

Bellyfeel is inseparable from the memory control on which Oceania rests. Orwell's introductory essay links the mentality to a "schizophrenic manner of thinking" he diagnosed among the English Left, who had been driven to accept the Russian regime as socialist while silently recognizing its spirit as alien to socialism - a split in which words like "democracy" could bear two irreconcilable meanings. The Ministry of Truth exists to make the same split unnecessary for ordinary citizens by rewriting the past until no standard of comparison remains; the Ministry of Love, windowless and unenterable except on official business, waits for those whose emotional surrender is incomplete.

The word thus belongs to Orwell's lifelong campaign against totalitarianism. In the years after the Spanish war, as he wrote in 1946, every line of serious work he produced was written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism; bellyfeel is the negative image of that socialism - a loyalty not argued, chosen and shared among equals but felt blindly, in the belly, on command. It is the psychological lining of the totalitarian system, the point at which obedience ceases to be outward conformity and becomes the citizen's own body, closing the last inner distance between the individual and the Party.