Fiction Department
The Fiction Department is one of the sub-divisions of the Ministry of Truth that manufactures Oceania's novels and entertainment, and it is above all Julia's workplace. It is the novel's most concrete image of art reduced to an industrial process: books are turned out on novel-writing machines, plots are roughed in on kaleidoscopes, and the finished products are treated as commodities indistinguishable from jam or bootlaces. The department also supplies the story with its most deceptive cover, since Julia's mechanical job and her scarlet Junior Anti-Sex League sash make her look like the Party's most reliable young servant while she is in fact preparing her first act of rebellion.
A factory for manufactured fiction
Within the Ministry of Truth's vast apparatus, the Fiction Department was the subdivision responsible for novels and entertainments; the Ministry as a whole supplied Oceania with plays, films, textbooks and telescreen programmes, and repeated the whole operation at a lower level for the proles. Its emblematic machines were the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were "roughed in", and the novel-writing machines that Julia was sometimes seen servicing with oily hands and a spanner. A crushed hand from swinging one of the kaleidoscopes round was a common accident in the department; Julia appeared in the corridor one morning with her right arm in a sling after doing exactly that. From Julia's own account, a novel moved from a general directive issued by the Planning Committee to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad, and she, being not literary, had worked only on the kaleidoscopes; books were simply a commodity to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
The department's lowest stratum was Pornosec, the sub-section that manufactured cheap pornography for distribution among the proles and was known to its own workers as Muck House. Julia spent a year there, selected because she had always borne an excellent character, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories and One Night in a Girls' School, which proletarian youths bought furtively in the belief that they were buying something illegal. All the workers in Pornosec except the head of the department were girls, on the theory that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled; married women were not wanted either. The sub-section was part of a broader Ministry of Truth effort to flood the proles with rubbishy newspapers, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex and mechanically composed sentimental songs, while no Party member other than those who worked on it was permitted to look at the pornography at all.
Julia's double life and the department's official voices
Before Winston knew Julia's name, he knew only that she worked in the Fiction Department, and that single fact shaped his terror of her. Her mechanical job, her bold appearance, her swift athletic movements and the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League wound round the waist of her overalls made her seem the most dangerous kind of Party loyalist; a sidelong glance from her in the corridor had once filled him with black terror, and the idea had crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. Her later confession that she really was, to look at, that sort of girl — a troop-leader in the Spies who did voluntary work for the Junior Anti-Sex League and always yelled with the crowd — showed how completely the department's culture of manufactured orthodoxy disguised her rebellion. When she slipped a note reading "I love you" into his hand, the almost unthinkable setting was precisely this: a girl from the department of official fantasy declaring a real desire.
The department also produced the canteen's most chilling embodiment of orthodoxy. At a table in the noisy lunch hall sat a man of about thirty who held some important post in the Fiction Department; his head thrown back and his spectacles catching the light so that they looked like two blank discs, he talked on without a pause in a stream of pure Ingsoc from which it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Winston once caught the phrase "complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism", and reflected that whatever the man was saying, every word of it was pure orthodoxy — not speech in the true sense but a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. The Newspeak word duckspeak, explained by Syme in the same scene as praise when applied to someone you agreed with and abuse when applied to an opponent, fitted this anonymous official exactly. In the canteen Winston instinctively grouped him with Parsons and the scuttling beetle-like men who would never be vaporised, while he saw Syme, himself and O'Brien as marked for destruction; oddly, he also exempted the girl from the Fiction Department from that list.
War work and the department's place in the plot
As Hate Week approached, the department's priorities shifted abruptly. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department was taken off the production of novels and rushed out a series of atrocity pamphlets, while Winston, in the Records Department, spent long periods going through back files of the Times and altering news items that were to be quoted in speeches. The same apparatus that produced a handful of interchangeable plots — Julia said the department's stories had only six plots, swapped round a bit — could be switched overnight to mass-producing hatred. For Julia herself the work remained purely mechanical: she enjoyed running and servicing the tricky electric motor, was not interested in the finished product, and never cared much for reading, because books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
Significance
In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four the Fiction Department is where the Party's aesthetic doctrine becomes visible as a production line. Thomas Pynchon, introducing the novel, observed that Julia, who works in the Fiction Department, presumably knows the difference between rubbish and reality, and that it is through her that the love story keeps its grown-up, real-world edge; her workplace thus guarantees her unsentimental clarity. Yet the department also shows what the Party does to the imagination: novels are assembled like machine parts, pornography is rationed out to the proles as a safety valve, and atrocity pamphlets are whipped up for Hate Week with the same efficiency as love stories. The organization's name is itself a quiet irony — a Ministry of Truth running a fiction factory — but within that factory the only genuine fiction, as it turns out, is the cover it gives to Julia's desire, which is the one thing its machinery cannot produce.
