Speakwrite

The Speakwrite is the dictation machine on which Winston Smith performs his duties in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, and the everyday instrument through which the Party falsifies the past. Into its mouthpiece Winston dictates rewritten newspaper accounts, invented statistics and fabricated orders from Big Brother, so that the machine stands at the precise point where individual labour is converted into official truth. The mechanical ritual of his working day begins with it: Winston pulls the Speakwrite towards him, blows the dust from its mouthpiece, puts on his spectacles, and then unrolls and clips together the small cylinders of paper that have already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk. Handwriting had become archaic, and the Speakwrite was the normal medium for everything except the shortest notes, which was exactly why it could not be used for the diary he was secretly keeping.

A Machine for Official Speech

In the Records Department the Speakwrite is not a single object but part of a whole apparatus of tubes and memory holes. Paper cylinders arrive through the pneumatic tube; completed corrections are pushed back into it; waste is dropped through a wire grating into the memory hole, where it is whirled away on a current of warm air to furnaces hidden in the recesses of the building. The instrument's name belongs to the vocabulary of Newspeak, counted in the appendix on Newspeak among the compound words of the A vocabulary, convenient abbreviations without special ideological colour; yet its actual function is to strip official language of the trace of a human hand. Dictation into the Speakwrite is the approved substitute for writing, and the machine therefore marks the point at which the Party's version of reality ceases to belong to the person who utters it.

The Instrument of Rectification

Winston's working day is spent in what the Ministry calls rectification, and the Speakwrite is the tool of that euphemism. He dictates corrections to the Times so that Big Brother's failed predictions appear to have been fulfilled, adjusts the forecasts of the Ministry of Plenty to the actual output, and replaces promises with warnings once the promises have been broken. As he re-adjusts the Ministry of Plenty's figures, he reflects that the work is not really forgery but the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another, since most of the material he handles has no connection with the real world, not even the connection contained in a direct lie. The Ministry of Plenty had estimated the quarter's output of boots at a hundred and forty-five million pairs; the actual output, on paper, was sixty-two million; Winston marks the figure down to fifty-seven million, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. Very likely no boots had been produced at all, and nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared.

Creating and Destroying People

The same machine that corrects the past can invent a human being. When Winston is given the task of rewriting Big Brother's Order for the Day after the dissolution of the FFCC, he pulls the Speakwrite towards him and dictates, in Big Brother's familiar style, the biography of Comrade Ogilvy, a hero who has never existed. Ogilvy refuses all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun and a model helicopter, joins the Spies at six, denounces his uncle at eleven, designs a hand grenade that kills thirty-one Eurasian prisoners at nineteen, and dies in action at twenty-three; a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs bring him into existence as a fact. The Speakwrite is thus an instrument of creation as well as of destruction. It is also the instrument O'Brien uses in the softly lit room where he receives Winston and Julia, rapping out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries before turning to address them.

Alienation and the Sound of the State

The Speakwrite turns work into alienation in the most literal sense: the product of Winston's labour leaves him and enters the official record as something that can be used against him, a lie with no connection to material reality. His surroundings reduce life to a round of dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning worn-out socks and cadging saccharine tablets, while the Party's ideology extends even to the sexual act, which is to be treated as a slightly disgusting minor operation. In such a world the voice dictating into the Speakwrite is not quite a human voice; it is the larynx of the system. By contrast the proles, in Winston's growing conviction, have stayed human, loyal to one another and holding on to the primitive emotions he himself has to relearn by conscious effort, precisely because they have not been absorbed into the machinery of official speech.

Significance

The Speakwrite is therefore one of the small, unglamorous devices through which the Party makes history. It is a machine that produces doctrine, that can invent a dead hero and erase a living colleague, and that offers no way of saying anything true. Its place in the novel's machinery of power is complete: once it is in front of you, the only alternative is to write by hand, in secret, in a book that must be hidden away. Winston's diary is opened in the same room where the telescreen can be dodged only in a shallow alcove, and it is the impossibility of using the Speakwrite for that purpose that first forces the question of what a man can say when every official mouthpiece belongs to the Party.