1984 (1,4) Comrade Ogilvy

[monk222]

We are still with Winston at the Ministry of Truth where he is carrying out that perverse form of journalism, in which he re-reports and rewrites the past, notwithstanding the quip that the only thing that makes this perverse from the journalism that we know is that our journalists invent the present. In this dreary and maddening life that Winston leads and works, we come across this striking upbeat note that seems so out of place in this grey and joyless world:

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem - delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing.

He has to rewrite one of Big Brother’s speeches from last winter because it references an “unperson”, a certain Comrade Withers, who had been a prominent member of Inner Party but has since obviously had a serious falling out with the powers that be. Pondering the job before him, instead of writing up a minor modification, Winston has a creative inspiration, almost hypermanic, and decides what is needed is “a piece of pure fantasy”, in which he creates our of whole cloth a Comrade Ogilvy, who he has die heroically in battle in this newly made-up scenario. Big Brother’s speech will hence be about singing the praises of this newly created person. And Winston lets fly with a fantastic biography:

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At six - a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules - he had joined the Spies; at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and all - an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and singlemindedness of Comrade Ogilvy’s life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had on recreation except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.

Winston’s expertise of the system is so thoroughgoing that he holds back on awarding Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit because he understands that it would require extra cross-referencing.

I like to read into this the idea that Winston’s verve for such news forgery had marked him out to the Party, and that this is even why O’Brien just happened to catch the same two-minute hate session that Winston was at. According to this line of reasoning, the Party wanted to take a closer look at Winston on account of his obvious grasp on the logic of Big Brother. Maybe they even wanted to see if Winston might be Inner Party material. The could always use new talent to help run the shop. Or was a little knowledge a dangerous thing in Winston’s case? Was he a bit unorthodox? Was he more like another Withers rather than an Ogilvy?

However, I do not believe that Orwell had any of this in mind. There is not a clear, positive word supporting this in the text, and it would have been a bravura move for Orwell to lay this intelligence on Winston during the interrogation and torture scene toward the end of the novel, that he, Winston, was actually being considered for a promotion, but was found unfortunately to be more clever and smart than wise.