Reading Goldstein's book

Reading Goldstein's book is the intellectual climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the moment when the forbidden scholarship of the Party's legendary traitor reaches Winston Smith in the room above Mr Charrington's shop. The copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, delivered by a stranger during a Hate Week demonstration and carried unopened for six days, gives systematic form to every heresy Winston has privately nursed: it explains the tripartite division of the world, the real function of perpetual war, the machinery of doublethink, and the Party's will to power for its own sake. To read it is to cross from passive dissent into full membership of the Brotherhood, and at the same time to step closer to the Ministry of Love.

The Book Arrives

Winston received the book through an elaborate chain arranged by O'Brien. On the sixth day of Hate Week, at the climax of a demonstration in a London square, the announcement came that Oceania was not at war with Eurasia after all but with Eastasia; in the riotous disorder that followed, a man whose face Winston never saw tapped him on the shoulder and said that he appeared to have dropped his brief-case. The exchanged case contained the book, and Winston carried it unopened for six days, keeping it between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept. At last, in the room above Mr Charrington's shop, he lit the oil stove, put on a pan of water for coffee and sat down in the shabby armchair to undo the straps. The volume was heavy and black, amateurishly bound and without any name or title on the cover; its pages were worn at the edges and fell apart easily, as though it had passed through many hands. The title page carried the words The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein.

Reading in Safety

Winston's first act was to stop and appreciate the safety of reading. He was alone, beyond the range of any telescreen, with no ear at the keyhole and no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page; the sweet summer air played against his cheek, faint shouts of children floated in from the street, and the only sound in the room was the insect voice of the twelve-hour clock. He settled deeper into the armchair with his feet on the fender; it was bliss, it was eternity. So certain was he that he would read and re-read every word that he opened the book not at the beginning but at the third chapter, headed War is Peace, before turning back to Chapter I. The book fascinated him because it told him nothing that was new; it was the product of a mind like his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic and less fear-ridden, and it said what he would have said if he could have set his scattered thoughts in order.

The Theory of Oligarchy

Chapter I, headed Ignorance is Strength, opens with a claim as old as the Neolithic Age: three kinds of people have always existed, the High, the Middle and the Low, and their aims are entirely irreconcilable. The High wish to remain where they are, the Middle wish to change places with the High, and the Low, too crushed by drudgery for more than intermittent consciousness, wish to abolish all distinctions and create equality. History is a gyroscope that always returns to equilibrium: the Middle overthrows the High by enlisting the Low under the banner of liberty and justice, then thrusts the Low back into servitude and becomes the new High. Only the Low are never even temporarily successful, and no advance in wealth, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. The book's most unsettling insight is that equality had become technically possible by the early twentieth century, and that this is precisely why the new ruling groups set out to abolish it. The movements of the mid-century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia and Death-Worship in Eastasia, consciously aimed to perpetuate unfreedom and inequality, to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment.

The book then dissects the structure of the Party and the methods of mental control that sustain it. Big Brother stands at the apex, not a man but a guise, a focusing point for love, fear and reverence, a face on the hoardings and a voice on the telescreen. Below him the Inner Party numbers six million, less than two per cent of the population of Oceania; the Outer Party is the hands of the State, and the proles, numbering perhaps eighty-five per cent, are the dumb masses. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination at sixteen; there is no racial discrimination; and the Party is not hereditary in the old sense, but an adoptive, self-perpetuating organisation concerned not with transmitting blood but with persisting as a world-view imposed by the dead upon the living. Its members live from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police and can never be sure that they are alone. There is no law in Oceania: the endless purges, arrests, tortures and vaporisations are not punishments for crimes actually committed but the wiping-out of persons who might commit a crime at some time in the future.

The book names the disciplines that make this possible: crimestop, the protective stupidity that stops short at the threshold of any dangerous thought; blackwhite, the loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands it and to forget that one ever believed the contrary; and doublethink, the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in the mind simultaneously and accepting both. Because the Party can never admit to a change of mind or policy, history is continuously rewritten, and the mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc; the day-to-day falsification carried out by the Ministry of Truth is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression carried out by the Ministry of Love. Chapter I ends by raising the question Winston has circled all his life: why should human equality be averted? The answer is announced as the central secret, a never-questioned instinct for power, but the passage breaks off in midsentence, leaving the sentence unfinished.

War as Imposture

Chapter III, headed War is Peace, sets out the true nature of the permanent war. The world is split into three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, whose frontiers are arbitrary and fluctuating, and war has been continuous for the past twenty-five years. It can never be decisive: the three powers are too evenly matched, their natural defences too formidable, and in a material sense there is nothing left to fight about. The fighting takes place around a disputed quadrilateral of cheap labour with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong, and the object of war is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour; a Floating Fortress, for example, locks up in itself the labour that would build several hundred cargo ships, and is finally scrapped as obsolete without having brought any material benefit to anybody. The needs of the population are always underestimated, because scarcity is policy: a general state of shortage magnifies the importance of small privileges and keeps the hierarchy intact. Far from being a struggle between rival states, the war is a purely internal affair, waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and by becoming continuous it has ceased to exist. Even the Inner Party administrators know that much of the war news is untruthful and often that the entire war is spurious, but that knowledge is neutralised by doublethink; among the Inner Party, war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. The book's conclusion is that the three rival philosophies, Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism and Death-Worship, are barely distinguishable, and that the three super-states prop one another up like three sheaves of corn.

Julia and the Close of the Reading

Julia was present for the reading, but it meant almost nothing to her. She dismissed the news of the book with a casual remark, made coffee, and once they were in bed told Winston to read it aloud and explain as he went; she called it marvellous, then fell asleep with her cheek pillowed on her hand and a dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Winston read with the book propped against his knees in the evening light, and though he had not read to the end, he knew that the book's final message would be that the future belonged to the proles. He shut the book, laid it carefully on the floor, lay down and pulled the coverlet over both of them. He reflected that he still had not learned the ultimate secret, that he understood how but not why, yet he knew better than before that he was not mad; being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make one mad. With the sun on his face and Julia's body touching his, he fell asleep murmuring that sanity is not statistical, feeling that the remark contained a profound wisdom.

Consequences and Aftermath

The consequences of the reading reach to the end of the novel. O'Brien had promised that once Winston had read the book he would be a full member of the Brotherhood, and the reading fulfilled that promise; the book was the Brotherhood's only real bond, an indestructible text that could be reproduced almost word for word even if the Thought Police destroyed every existing copy. In the Ministry of Love, O'Brien disclosed that he himself had written the book, or rather collaborated in writing it, so that the text which had confirmed Winston's sanity was itself an instrument of the Party; its doctrines were then turned against him during his re-education, when O'Brien explained that the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake and offered his vision of a boot stamping on a human face for ever. The peace of the reading room, with the clock, the oil stove and Julia asleep, was the calm before the arrest: within weeks the room would be invaded, the glass paperweight smashed, and the reader carried off to the windowless Ministry of Love, the place with no darkness.