24. Thoughts on Nineteen Eighty-Four: Part III

Hello, welcome to the third part of this little experiment where we're looking through all of 1984 on a part by part basis. So the previous two episodes we were looking at part one and part two of the novel, we were looking at various things to do with how Winston Smith and Julia and O'Brien are characterised and the various senses in which they can be taken to be meaningful, we are now coming in the third part to the climax of the novel, the sort of the high point of its tension and then the release of that tension in the form of Room 101. This is the most difficult bit of the novel to deal with in the sense that it is very morally objectionable what Winston Smith is subjected to. This is not to say of course that all well in any way approves quite the contrary, he is clearly writing against torture and against the brutality that Winston Smith experiences in the Ministry of Love. At the same time, it is detailed unrelentingly and in that sense there is a kind of excess of gore and excess of physical pecking and excess of torment that all well is wanting us to experience and to feel and to register. And it is difficult, it is a difficult part of the book for many people. It is very important, though, it is not only a torture sequence and a sort of brutalising show, it is also very philosophical and the conversation that O'Brien and Winston have which occupies most of this part of the book is highly significant for drawing out into the open sort of uttering without restraint the various principles that the context or the resistance between Winston Smith and O'Brienia represents. So again, it is a crucial part of the book. It is something that can't be ignored. It is where everything comes to a head and is most sort of obviously engaged with by all well as the obviously and you know, as we all well know, the political novel writer, the political novelist that he by this point was unmistakably operating as. Let's just dive in. The beginning of part three starts with Winston in the Ministry of Love, although he's not sure about that, he doesn't really know. He's in a windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. If anybody is aware of Orwell's other novel, Keep the Asperdistra Flying which is from 1936, there's a similar sequence in that when the protagonist of that novel, Gordon Comstock, wakes up in a prison cell after a night of debauchery and there the situation is played for sort of for laughs, he kind of wakes up with this intense hangover and the light is burning into his eyes and he can't see and he can't feel properly and he doesn't know what's going on. Here there's a terror to the situation which is not present in that book. He's been, he has an eaten Winston, he's hungry, his belly is aching and he's been put into a cell to sort of await his torment. Before he goes there, he was put into a different prison, what's called an ordinary prison or a temporary lockup used by the patrols and he doesn't know how long he'd been there for but he knew or knows that there was a constant come and go of prisoners of every description and one of the people that he meets there is a woman who is described in all well typically fearful terms, for fearful in the sense that he's always fearful of large people, you know physically sizable people. He's described it as an enormous wreck of a woman aged about 60 with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles and she's carried in kicking and shouting by four guards who hold her one at each corner. There's again there's a sort of comical element to that but it's also I think more indicative of the way all well can't seem to imagine certain people in you know except in certain ways. One of the other episodes on this podcast deals with all well as lipophobia, his fear of fatness and you know that's worth listening to. One of the more interesting things about this woman that Winston is sort of alert to or thinks about as a possibility is that she could well be his mother. He doesn't know this for sure, he doesn't even know if his mother's alive or dead or he knows is that she was taken away and vaporised in one of the purges, one of the parties purges but he sort of reflects that it could be possible. She's the right age, she's got the right physique for her age as he sees it and as the narrative suggests it was probable that people changed somewhat after 20 years in a forced labour camp so it could well be that all well has it in mind sort of in the background of this that he that Winston is in fact meeting his mother in this sequence but just doesn't know it or can't be sure of it it amounts to the same thing. So you know it's not sure it's it's not clear it's not it's not sort of unambiguously the case that she is his mother but there's the suggestion there's also this disgusting sort of episode where as soon as the woman sits down she vomits copiously on the floor and then sort of relieves relieverly sort of leans back and goes oh that's better. Winston all well Winston too have a have a fascination with disgusting physical things as I've already said and there could be a chapter to be written I would say on all well's reflections on vomiting might make for disgusting material but but there it is I mean we might ask why this is the case. I mean I think in the context of the novel at any rate it's another narrative means with which to expose Winston to a form of degradation and to making recoil from something as part of the sort of unrelenting systematic torturing of him that the party puts him through it's part of breaking his spirit in other words that he's put in a situation where somebody might conceivably vomit on the floor and he would have to smell it and be disgusted by it so so there's there's that going on in the background here as well. The narrative then returns to Winston waiting in the cell with the porcelain bricks and he's been trying to pass the time by by counting them. Here in this cell Winston is then exposed to a parade of former associates. Ampleforth is one of them and he's the first one to come through and the reason that he is brought there Ampleforth the poet with the hairy ears the reason that he's there is that he was trying to produce a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling and he was unable in translating Kipling's verse into new speak to find a rhyme with rod other than God and that is enough to to make him arrestable and to and to make him vaporizable and to make him an enemy of the state so he is whipped away he's taken to the Ministry of Love and Room 101 is announced and he's marched out and he goes to some as the novel puts it uncomprehending so that's the novel's word uncomprehending fate. We don't know what that is yet we we are alerted to the idea of Room 101 but we don't yet quite know what's in there unless we've read the novel before of course but if assuming one hasn't this is this is something as yet properly unspecified. Another former associate is paraded in this is Parsons so if you remember in part one of the novel Winston goes next door in victory mansions to help Mrs Parsons unclog her sink and and of course he also meets Parsons for lunch in the Ministry of Truth Cantine where he has the conversation between him and Simon the chess playing new speak dictionary writing. Enemy of the state as well because he's vaporized we know earlier on in part two we learn that he's been vaporized or at least Winston suspects that he has been there's no definitive confirmation of it but but the suggestion is that he has been. Parsons has been brought to the Ministry of Love because his children have dubbed him in the spies the the the young children that belong to the spies and he couldn't be prouder of them he's he's proud of how obedient to the state's needs they've become and it's this sort of impossible position for us to accept that the that a parent could be proud of a child for betraying them. Anyway Winston see some other people come in and then all of a sudden Winston is alone and a very long time passes. He's been alone for hours and he's got this, you know, he's still hungry and he's still thirsty and his mouth is sort of getting smelly and sticky and tasting horrible and he's, you know, approaching Whitsend. And then all of a sudden, O'Brien comes in. The door opens, the door to the prison cell opens in the Ministry of Love and O'Brien walks in. And at first, initially at first sight Winston thinks this is because O'Brien is also in trouble. He thinks he too has been captured by the state and is going to be, you know, some awful is going to be done to him. And he says they got you too and O'Brien replies, they got me a long time ago. And it says here with a mild, almost regretful irony. And again, it's just a little suggestion that or a reminder maybe that we don't quite know what O'Brien's position is. Is he someone who is absolutely committed to the party? Absolutely in the orbit of the party's politics and ideology. Is he a true believer in other words? Or is he someone who pledged himself, despite his better knowledge to the party some indefinable time ago and has ever since, you know, plugged away at being a good party member, but always with the sense that what he's doing is wrong or at least there could be an alternative. And when he says, you know, they got me a long time ago, said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He can't mean that they got him in the sense that he was in trouble. Otherwise, they would have executed him or at least tortured him into compliance. And then either executed him or forgotten about him. So it's hard to know quite what is meant by this. But in a sense, that doesn't matter. All it's doing is reminding us, reminding the reader, reminding Winston that there are depths to this world that are unverifiable. It's not this clear black and white situation. Different people are involved in the situation for different reasons. And on the basis of different motivations, and we can never finally be sure what they are. So if we are wanting to think about the degree to which Winston, Winston Smith is involved, and then also all well is involved behind him, and how complexly the novel tries to account for motivation and sort of objectives, character objectives. We can think of moments like this and be reminded that the novel is actually being quite subtle and nuanced in the way it portrays these things. Anyway, O'Brien steps aside and a guard hits Winston and hits him on the elbow. He sort of hits him with a truncheon on the elbow and he falls down to the floor in enormous pain. And he basically, the assumption is that he kind of passes out or something. So we move on and here really is where we get to the crux of the novel. This is the bit where we are firmly in the grip of Winston's ultimate fate. Winston has been captured. He's being beaten, he's being sort of brutalized and broken and beaten into submission. And then eventually we get him, we follow him rather, we follow him in the course of the narrative to a cell or room where he is strapped onto a table or a kind of bench of some kind. And when he comes to, he says he did not remember any ending to his interrogation, there was a period of blackness and then the cell or room in which he now was had gradually materialised around him. So the suggestion here is that Winston is being beaten up so regularly and with such violence that in a sense he's passing in and out of consciousness or at the very least he just can't lock on sort of conceptually to the nature of his surroundings. He can't figure out where he is or why. But eventually the beating's cease or at least are interrupted and things settle into the recognizable shape of the room that he's in on this bench or bed with O'Brien sat closely to him, watching him and talking to him. And the very first thing he does is electrocute his body without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. So we're in chapter 2 now of part 3. It was a frightening pain because he could not see what was happening. Winston could not see and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening or whether the effect was electrically produced but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose trying to keep silent as long as possible. Winston has been shown through being subjected to what will occur to him in this torture sequence for various reasons. First of all to remind him of the power structure that he's in, the fact that he really has nowhere to go, he is now a victim, sort of unmistakably a victim and has little hope of sort of escaping through his circumstances. Except through maybe the right kind of talk, the right kind of conversation and this is really what the moment is about. It's about O'Brien taking the time to talk to Winston to show him why he's wrong, at least as O'Brien and the party sees it and maybe to get Winston in responding to him to demonstrate the kind of purity, the kind of pure thought, the sort of pure obedience to Inksok and to Oceania, that he has not shown in his day-to-day life and anything less than a full intelligent honest answer will be met with the kind of pain that he has just been subjected to. And O'Brien says that that was the pain that he had inflicted on him right at the beginning of this sequence was at 40 on the scale, the scale running up to 100 and he says basically remember at any time I can subject you to this. So the conversation takes a lot of twists and turns, there's lots of elements to it and it begins with O'Brien saying first of all that he's taking trouble with Winston because he's worth the trouble. There's always this slight uncertainty in thinking about 1984 whether those who find themselves in the position of Winston Smith, namely Refuse Next, people who refused to bow down to party ideology and seek to rebel, whether all of them are subjected to the same kind of treatment that Winston gets, i.e. they be their monitored, they're lured into some kind of trap, they're arrested, brutalised, tortured, made, clean and then executed, whether that's the case with everybody we don't know, there's the suggestion that it might be in the sense that we know that Julia goes or at least we're told that Julia goes through something similar because they're both arrested at the same time. We know of course from the parade of people that come into the sale in the Ministry of Love that Ampleforth and Parsons and a few other people go through much the same experience. So there's the suggestion that the party takes a great deal of trouble with its rebels with those who do not obey it. And for the reason that O'Brien lays out he says that they're defective in their eyes and what the party wants to do is to turn so-called defectives into non-defectives before they execute them so as to prove that it can be done before the source of trouble is removed before the source of trouble is eliminated. One of the ways that O'Brien seeks to do this is through sort of discombobulating Winston through confusing him and through reminding him that truth in a sense is whatever the party says it is. He begins this by showing him the photograph of Jones, Aronson and Rutherford, the men who are executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confessions that Winston knows he has seen and knows in seeing that they in fact were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He says to Winston that you had a hallucination, you believed that you had actually held this photograph in your hands, it was a photograph something like this and O'Brien shows him the photograph as the novel puts it. So in some sense although it seems to have been destroyed, here it is nevertheless it's here again. And Winston says it exists because he can't quite believe that this is occurring and Winston, you know in that moment it's fully believing this and O'Brien says no it does not exist. He walks away puts it in a memory hole and it's burned and destroyed and he then says ashes, not even identifiable ashes, dust, it does not exist, it never existed. Winston can't have this, he says but it did exist, it does exist, it exists in memory, I remember it, you remember it. And then O'Brien says I do not remember it and he means it because because he performs double think in saying that. He forgets the memory and then forgets the act of forgetting the memory. So there's a sort of double denial. He does this and Winston knows that he's done it and the novel suggests that he recognizes it. That was double thing. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter, but it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph, and if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it and forgotten the act of forgetting. That's the novel's words. How could one be sure that it was simply trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen. That was the thought that defeated him. The thing that Winston is struggling against and the thing in a sense that all well is so fearful of is the possibility that people really can forget in this way, not just forget things, but forget the act of forgetting the things, and do this as a sort of willful act to do it on purpose, and then also to have forgotten the willful act, as if there had never been the thing that Winston or someone else is remembering and seeking to find value in the memory of. That is a troubling thought for Winston, and a very troubling thought for all well behind him, because all well remains committed, with varying degrees of challenge, but nevertheless remains committed to there being a world of fact. And something that is sort of out there and that can be seen and known and touched and felt and understood and recorded and treasured. That is an enormous question to deal with in something, in sort of venue like this, in this sort of quick podcast episode. But there is a lot of scholarship written about this question, with varying degrees of skepticism over whether all well is kind of epistemological and ontological positions actually hold up. But nevertheless, there's this sense. And Winston is the spokesperson for it in 1984, of course. So there is a real world, there are such things as facts, and there are things outside the self that are just there and that whatever we think about them won't change the fact of there being there. O'Brien's role in this part of 1984 is to challenge this position and to do it remorselously, and that's what he does. He carries on. O'Brien accuses Winston, and this might be in some ways a kind of finger being pointed at all well, he says, "You are no metafusion," Winston. In other words, you are not a great user of metaphysics, you are not some great metaphysical philosopher. There is in fact, at the moment, some very interesting scholarship being written about all well and philosophy, that I think the common consensus is that all well is no great philosopher in the sort of formal, professional sense. But that's not to say that he doesn't have interesting philosophical thoughts. He certainly knew philosophers and responded to their work, and one of the most important is Bertrand Russell. But there's all well-he clearly read philosophy. But Winston doesn't have the space, the mental fortitude to have settled on a philosophical system. At least O'Brien thinks that. He says as much, he says, "You are no metafusion." A metafusion, that's a very hard word to say. Until this moment, you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects where the past is still happening? And Winston says no, to which O'Brien asks, "Then where does the past exist if at all?" And Winston says, "Well, it's in records. It's where we write it down." So O'Brien says to that, the obvious rejoinder or apostor reaction, "Well, if the party controls all records, then the party controls all memories." And Winston says, "But how can you stop people remembering things?" It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine. And O'Brien's rejoinder to that is to say, "Well, no, you haven't controlled it Winston. You are not an obedient subject of the state. Therefore it is not our fault. You are in the wrong. You are the one who is not a good obedient user of double think. And therefore you're the one with the problem." And this is all in some sense a kind of slow build up to one of the most well-known bits of the book. When O'Brien starts this line of questioning where he says, "Do you remember Winston writing in your diary, freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four?" And Winston does. And O'Brien holds up his hands, holds up his left hand with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. And he says, "How many fingers am I holding up Winston?" Four. And if the party says that it is not four but five, then how many? Four. The response to that is pain. Winston is subjected again to that terrible pain from the torture device that O'Brien is using. And in the midst of this, the pain stops and we get this very odd moment where for a moment Winston is clinging to O'Brien like a baby curiously comforted by the heavy arm-round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside from some other source and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it. And it's a sort of displaced longing for the parent that O'Brien can only now occupy in a sort of perverse, other uncanny way. One of the things that he says to Winston is that he's a slow learner and that although on the one hand Winston can't help at this point anyway but see four fingers. O'Brien wants him to know that sometimes they're four fingers and sometimes there are five. And the point is that he has to try harder to see and not only to pretend to see but really to see five and to have no lie in the seeing of it, no pretence, no subdefuse, no nothing that will suggest anything other than a perfect compliance in the perception of the impossible. That is really what Inksok is all about. It's about making its subjects ascent, agree to the impossible thing in order to show them and the state that they are willing to suspend the evidence in front of their eyes and believe whatever it is that they must believe for the true exercising of Oceania and political power. He, O'Brien continues to torture to electrify Winston as a sort of further brutalizing of this. The novel continues and there's some discussion of the past of what it might mean for Oceania to have emerged from similar programs such as those what O'Brien calls the totalitarians, the German Nazis and the Russian communists. Oceania is in some way a kind of perfection and a transcendence of those political programs as O'Brien sees it. And he is, remind is it sort of inclined to remind Winston amidst all of this. They sort of enjoy a sort of historical conversation for a bit and then all of a sudden O'Brien is prompted, reminded to, remind Winston says, "Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us." So he's saying on the one hand, "You must be made compliant. You must be made perfect. You must be brought into the fold of Oceania and obedience." But that's not going to save you. All it is going to do is to make you a perfect subject who, having been corrected in inverted commas, will then be dismissed, will be ejected or jettisoned from life, destroyed, vaporised. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared," he tells Winston. We might think back there to that moment when O'Brien says to Winston, "Before the torture sequence, they got me a long time ago. If what he says there is true, that no one who has once gone astray is ever spared, then if that's true, then O'Brien can't have been a rebel. He can't ever have been a rebel because if that was the case, then he too would not have been spared." So we wonder here what exactly O'Brien's original motivations for being got to quote the novel by the party. As I've already said, it's not finally answerable, but this is another sort of peak behind the curtain of what might be going on. He says to Winston, "Anyway, even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back." So it's a sort of total brutalization, a total emptying of him, and then a pouring into him of Oceania purity and obedience. Winston asks O'Brien what's happened to Julia, and he says that very quickly, he says that she betrayed you Winston immediately, unreservedly. I've seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her, or her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty mind-indness. has been burned out of it. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case. And Winston asks, "You tortured her?" And O'Brien leaves this unanswered. There's the suggestion later that she may well have been tortured. And I think one of the reasons why O'Brien is so keen to move past this questioning about Julia and to sort of move on from it is that it's kind of irrelevant to Winston's conversion. What matters for O'Brien is more that Winston is manoeuvred or allows himself to be manoeuvred into a place where he will really see five fingers on his hand, because if that's true then he'll believe anything. So it doesn't matter in a sense right now anyway, what happens to Julia? What happens more is what is happening to Winston? One of the other questions that he asks him is, "What is in Room 101?" And the answer to that is, "Be patient. You'll soon find out." So there are lots of moments of terror to be experienced by Winston as the sequence unfolds. The questioning continues. Winston keeps asking O'Brien about the nature of the world. And O'Brien at one point has a moment of self-reflection. He says, "Where are we now? We're in chapter three. Yes, chapter three of part three. Just a few pages in." He says to Winston, "You are thinking that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand Winston that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism." And he says this channeling Richard Burton in a very poor degraded way. Richard Burton being the actor who played O'Brien in the 1984 film of 1984, which is a great film. You should see it if you can. John Hurt is Winston Smith in it. Brilliant adaptation. The point here is that O'Brien is kind of amused by the thought that Winston Smith might see him, might see O'Brien as the weaker party in this position, as the weaker agent. But he's saying that it doesn't matter what's happening to O'Brien's body. It doesn't matter that he's aging, because the party itself is immortal, he says. It will always be there. It will live forever. That's his belief anyway, or at least the principle that he's holding to. What he's trying to show him is that power is the thing that motivates the party, and that power is beyond the local limits of the human body, beyond the local limits of the individual, and that in a sense, power is the thing that is being aimed at at all times. And he reminds Winston of his poor grasp of metaphysics. He says the word you were trying to think of is solipsism, and the reason that he's thinking of solipsism is that one of the things that O'Brien is trying to show, or to persuade Winston, is that the party controls everything, not only information, but also reality itself. And Winston is totally unable to accept this. He says, how can you control matter? You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death, and then he's interrupted. And O'Brien says, we control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation, anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to, but I do not wish to because the party does not wish it. He's holding to this very strong and very uncomfortable metaphysical position, which is that in a sense, whatever the party says to be reality is reality. And the reason that he can have confidence in this is that it's not the case that the party will say that a rock is water and water is rock, and it will actually change. It's more that through the operations of double think, it will be possible for people to forget that water is a rock and a rock is water. And then forget that there was any ever difference, any kind of difference between those two things, but also to have forgotten the act of forgetting the difference. And double think is the mechanism through which this becomes possible. And that is why O'Brien is able to say that reality is inside the skull. Reality is inside us, not outside us. It's what we perceive to be the case that is real. Not the nature, the true, unyielding, incontestable reality of the thing, whatever it might be. And he's sort of positioning himself in a long line of historical and philosophical thoughts about such questions. He's not inventing these questions. There is a lot of debate in philosophy about the nature of reality and how in the perceiving of reality we constitute it or if we make it. But here that's not a kind of calm armchair like thought told between or debated among friends in a polite way. This is right at the crux of the party's power and how Winston accepts or does not accept it. We'll determine his fate and determine how violently he is brought into this thought system. O'Brien asks Winston to wonder about the kind of world that Oceania that Inxok is creating. He says it is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic utopias that the old reformers imagined. And what he has in mind there is, I think at one level, the sort of socialist utopia that all well himself was really interested in and fascinated by which was a kind of world of plenty and that someone like H.G. Wells was attracted to in different ways and behind him William Morris. But O'Brien is rejecting this. He's saying, "No, it's not this that we're after. We are not moving towards that. The goal of the party is not to bring plenty for all. It is purely to achieve power. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progressed towards more pain and on it goes. And the very final thought that O'Brien brings up in this sequence, he says, "All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always do not forget this Winston. All ways there will be the intoxication of power. Only increasing and constantly growing subtler. There will be no love except the love of a big brother. There will be no laughter except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. If you want a picture of the future and this is a very famous remark in the book, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. And this is the world that O'Brien and the party are moving to. O'Brien encourages Winston to stand up from the bed and to look at himself and Winston sees this gray, bowed, gray coloured skeleton like thing that he's frightened by because he doesn't know quite how, you know, awfully sort of weakened by the situation he's become. So he doesn't quite know what he looks like physically at this point. The nature of the torture changes after this, in that they allow him some respite, they allow him to grow a bit fatter, they allow him to eat, they allow him to put some of the bulk back on his body and they're not just sort of torturing him and torturing him again. All of a sudden though, he hears himself Winston cry out, "Julia, Julia, Julia, my love, Julia, this is in chapter four." And he has this overwhelming hallucination of her presence. And when he realises that this has occurred, he's horrified by the thought of what he's just done to himself because he thinks that in this moment of weakness he's added years to his servitude and true enough, all of a sudden guards arrive and they pick him up. And a Brian confronts him and says, "You have had thoughts of deceiving me." That was stupid. Stand up straighter, look me in the face. He says, "You're improving. Intellectually, there's very little wrong with you." And the reason that he has confidence in this is that by this point, if I'm right, we know that he is able for a time, at least to see or at least to sort of suspect that there might be five fingers when there are four. He's sort of in a moment of extreme discombobulation and disorientation from the torture that he's receiving. He kind of at least sees the possibility of that. And this is why Brian says, "You're improving." But the final thing has not been achieved yet. Winston still hates Big Brother. And Brian, rather than rejecting this or seeking to punish Winston for it, says, "Good. You need to have got to this point in other words." And he says, "Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. is not enough to it. obey him, you must love him and this is where Room 101 arrives. So he's taken to Room 101 and he knows that this has always been coming and the what is contained in Room 101 is, as I've said, the worst thing in the world and the worst thing in the world is different for each person. It changes depending on who is being subjected to the punishment, you know, a different punishment for a different person. And the punishment here for Winston is rats. And we know from earlier points in the book that Winston has this fear of rats. There's a moment when Julia and Winston are in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop and Winston catches out of the corner of his eye a rat sort of scampering across the floorboards and dart into some hiding place. And he despite himself he sort of gripped with fear he can't help but be terrified by this. And sort of behind Winston in moments like this there is the presence of Orwell who maybe wasn't terrified of rats in the way that Winston appears to be but certainly had awkward and uncomfortable encounters with them. If you read homage to Catalonia you'll see there's some description in there. Of O'Brien of Winston, sorry, Freudian slip of Winston, no, still a Freudian slip of Orwell on the front lines in Spain in a trench and having the sensation of rats crawling over him and being made to feel very awkward and a very sort of unpleasant sensation. So Orwell is sort of channeling some of that into Winston's character but he's turning it into a much more significant thing which is basically the prospect of something that will fully and finally break him that will be the last straw, the straw that breaks the camel's back in other words. And what's coming is something that Winston can't possibly imagine. He doesn't know that the thing that is going to be headed his way is going to be quite so difficult to bear because what O'Brien has in mind is to put a cage on Winston's face in an in the cage in behind a sort of locked or temporarily locked compartment. Will be rats who have been starved and once the cage is opened up fully and attached to Winston's face the rats will leap out and more sort of tear into his face and eat his head basically. So it's an incredibly terrifying prospect and something that would scare anybody to be faced with but certainly someone who is scared of rats would add to the terror. And really what O'Brien is doing is not trying only to terrify Winston although that's obviously a key part of it. He is trying to scare him so much that he would be willing to abandon the final repository of strength that he has which is the memory of Julia and the sense that he has been loved and is loved by Julia. If he's willing to abandon that then Winston has nowhere else to go and of course that is what happens. He says he screams do it to Julia do it to Julia not me Julia I don't care what you do to her tear her face off strip her to the bones not me Julia not me. In the film we see that moment partially from Winston's first person point of view and we notice a slight smile flicker onto her Brian's face. In the novel we read the following there's just a paragraph that ends chapter 5 of the novel of the of the part sorry of part 3. He was falling backwards into enormous depths away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair but he had fallen through the floor through the walls of the building through the earth through the oceans through the atmosphere into outer space into the gulfs between the stars always away away away from the rats. He was like years distant but a Brian was still standing at his side there was still the cold touch of a wire against his cheek but through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open. So the point is the rats do not attack him Winston is not actually put through the torment that he has been at risk of it's more that the mere well mere in inverted commas but the mere threat of it is enough to make Winston a band and his most cherished principle his most cherished allegiance which is not to a Brian it's not a big brother it's not to Oceania or the state it's not to his colleagues it's not even to his family it is to Julia his love and he abandoned so we might ask what we would do under the same circumstances it would take a great deal of mental fortitude to not cave to not collapse in the way Winston does you know it's it's a very very extreme position to be put in so in many ways understandable that this is what happens because who would have the strength to resist this it's a it's a it's a ghastly predicament there's this enormous shift so the novel the prose of the novel at that point in that paragraph I just read out goes into a very sort of poetic mode you know he's falling through the floor through the walls of the building through the earth through the oceans through the atmosphere into outer space poetic maybe is the wrong word it's certainly visionary it's excessive there's a kind of excess to the to the ideas that are sort of delivered to us through that paragraph and I think and I think the point here is that Winston's mind has been destroyed all of the familiar struts the props that have been holding up his mind to this point have been kicked away by the circumstance and so he is just unmoored he's unanchored he's thrown out into a kind of conceptual blank space into into some nothingness mentally speaking that is from from which he he can only return through perfection being turned into the perfect subject so so we don't see that process we don't see what occurs to Winston after the moment of full and final breaking after the destruction of his allegiance to Julia we don't see what occurs we just see the aftermath of it so so one assumes that there was now after room 101 some lengthy process of reconstitution and purification um I mean that could be a possibility or it might be in Orwell's imagination that the moment of breaking that the moment of abandoning one's principles in a sense the purification has already occurred and therefore the recovery is kind of neither in or there but either way we're we're shown what Winston has got up to or is getting up to after that moment some time has passed he's in the chestnut tree cafe which seems to be the place where all cured in a vertical was perfected again in a vertical was subjects end up that's where they go and he sees the the familiar poster of big brother is watching you he's listening to the tele screen and he's very worried about the conduct of the war it's something that he's been sort of agonizing over and and of course now what we notice in in his worrying about it is sort of obedience we we see now that he is no longer keeping that skeptical distance from things that he had at the beginning of the novel that distance has closed to no distance at all there is no skepticism there's no irony he he is he is responding to the tele screens announcements as intended he is worried about the conduct of a conflict that may well not actually be occurring between eurasia and east Asia and here no sorry between eurasia and oceania a eurasian army oceania was at war with eurasia oceania had always been at war with eurasia and we know that this is not true because we know from earlier in the book that oceania was at war with eustasia and had always been at war with eustasia so in other words the the the confines of the situation have switched but the deceit at the heart of them remains there's no there's no change there um we also know that Winston's mind has been altered to the extent that these days as the novel puts it he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time so his his mental capacity has been drastically reduced he's not able really to think about anything um he's playing chess um he's got a chess board in in front of him and he's he's got chess there he's presumably playing it against himself and And he's sort of been left to his own devices. He's got a chess problem out and he's looking at it. But the suggestion is that this is a sort of daily routine, that he comes here on a daily basis. And he's looking at the problem of chess from a very particular way. He looks up at the portrait of Big Brother and then realizes that white always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism, always without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won, did it not symbolise the eternal unvarian triumph of good over evil. We've got a couple of things happening here. We've got on the one hand the suggestion because of the close implied association between the chessboard and the white pieces on it with Big Brother that Winston has been checkmated and he has been outmaneuvered by the party. He's been defeated in his rebelliousness. There's also the sense that one can, you know, of side switching, so the East Asia, Eurasia confusion that the novel plays with, black versus white, white versus black. There's also the sense that in that one is never really about playing a game so much as it is trying to understand what the rules of the game are in the first place as a subject or even as a person sort of pitched against or denying them. What I mean by that is that those who understand the rules of the game are able to operate within it for a time. Julia does this very well. Winston understands the rules but doesn't want to operate within them. He wants to sort of leap outside them but either way there's one outcome which is that white always wins and that Big Brother is associated with that. So the position that the pieces on the board are always stacked in such a way that play on, play off, white will always win and that is what happens. Big Brother has won. Big Brother has triumphed. Winston sort of reflects on these things. He reflects on the chess board and he reflects on the report of the conflict in Africa that's being announced by the tele screen. And then there's this very important moment in the book where he almost unconsciously traces on the dust on the table that he sat at 2 plus 2 equals 5. And there is no hesitation here. There's no finally anyway. There's no hesitation. He knows from what O'Brien has done to him that what happens inside your head is forever. And what happens inside the ministry of love is forever. And something has been killed in his breast burnt out and quarterized. And that thing is independence of mind, independence of spirit. That's all been destroyed and he is now whatever the party determines him to be basically. So there's a memory or at least a sort of a description of a day in March. So sometime before this has occurred, I mean if we think that the novel maybe takes place over the course of a year, April, from April 1984 to say April 1985 maybe. Which could be a possibility, the novel ending in 1985, having begun in 1984. About a month earlier from this final sequence, Winston and Julia encounter each other. And they are honest to each other. They say, "I betrayed you and you betrayed me." And there's this sort of sense that they know exactly what's occurred and they know that things have been done to them ghastly things. Winston sees the scar on her forehead and temple. And there's this sort of moment of wondering whether she's been kind of lobotomized or something or she's been subjected to a great deal of sort of physical trauma. And that she has been tortured in the way precisely in the way that A'Brien says she had been in the long sequence of conversation with Winston and A'Brien. The more interesting thing though, I think, is just before the very end of the novel, Winston has a memory or sort of allows a memory to come into his head of playing snakes and ladders with his mother and his sister. And he's sat there and he's a boy of nine or ten and they're laughing and they're playing. And it's a happy memory. And it's something, he says, for a whole afternoon they'd all been happy together as in his earlier childhood. They played eight games when he four each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster laughing because the others were laughing. So it's a moment of pure happiness. There's no judgment, there's no sense of anything that other being the case is just living in the moment and enjoying it. And Winston remembers this. But very soon the operations of Double Think arrive and he pushes the picture out of his mind. The narrative, the narrator says it was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chess board and picked up the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped onto the board with a clatter. So he's picking up the subtle, not so subtle suggestion is that picking up the white piece, the white knight again is that the force, the power of big brother arrives either way and sort of makes him do what he's meant to do, which is to forget such memories and to recognize them in scare quotes as the false recollections that the party wants him to think they are. So we're very close to the end of the novel now. And in the final moments we learn that in a sense there's a total route of the enemy in the African sort of military space. The vast strategic maneuver, perfect coordination, utter route, half a million prisoners, complete demoralization, control of the whole of Africa, which will bring the war within measurable distance of its end, victory, the greatest victory in human history, victory, victory. These are just empty words really. There's no sense that anything that is being announced is in fact happening. Winston doesn't know this, really the point is that at this point he believes it to be happening and that's all that matters. Winston, we leave Winston gazing up at the enormous face of big brother and accepting that he had taken him 40 years to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. And there's this incredibly sort of exaggerated language at the end, "Oh, cruel, needless misunderstanding, oh stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast." This kind of language to me has always suggested that Winston finally is inhabiting the sort of the excessive rhetoric, the excessive sentiments of love for big brother and it's sort of activated on the page. Two gin-centred tears trickles down the side of the nose, but it was alright, everything was alright. The struggle was finished. It won the victory over himself and he now loves big brother. And that's where the novel ends. It's not where the book ends because we now go on to the new speaker pendix. I'm not going to talk about this in this episode because I've already recorded an episode of some length in which I talk about the appendix and other similar appendices in other dystopian works with Liam Knight. And if you just scroll back a few episodes on the podcast, you'll see that episode and we get into the details of the new speaker pendix in that conversation. So if you want to know some more about what the appendix is doing and how it relates to other sort of texts within texts in the book, in the novel 1984, then you can go and listen to the thoughts there. I hope this has been useful. I hope this has been helpful as a way of sort of quickly going through 1984, three hours to go through the whole novel and to talk about some of its complexities and some of its points of interest. It's not a long time. There's a lot more to say about the novel than can be covered in three episodes like this. But nevertheless, I hope it's been helpful and I hope it's useful and continues to be useful for people as maybe a refresher of some of the main lines of thought in it. Anyway, thank you very much for listening and take care. I'll see you again.