Winston is roused from his sleepy, dream-laden musings by the telescreen’s “ear-splitting whistle” calling everybody up for their mandatory calisthenics. Talk about the horrors of totalitarianism! And there is this comic lilt that plays in the background of this scene, as Winston struggles with the exercises, even getting called out on one occasion by the Party dominatrix. However, against this faintly comic background, Orwell takes advantage of Winston’s reflective mood and draws out some somber observations on the history of Oceania and on the Party, critically thinking about the problem of memory and history when one lives under a government that treats history like just another one of its tractable and servile minions:
At this moment, for instance, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
…
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”
…
The past, he reflected had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the Sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the Forties and the Thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Old-speak form - “English Socialism,” that is to say - it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented airplanes. He remembered airplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.
Wishing to absolve the reader of any confusion, Orwell has Winston conclude, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event,
it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”
I am tempted to take some issue with that point, I mean, sticks and stones may break my bones, but revisionist history will never hurt me. But Orwell’s point is well-taken, with an admiring appreciation for his ability to draw out the dramatic value and make one feel it, taking a point from abstraction and giving it to us so that we get goosebumps from the chill of it. He is describing for us totalitarianism made perfect. The Republicans and their plutocrats still only aspire to this.
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