Comrade Ogilvy

2006-06-04T17:28:44+02:00

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. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the
rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely
in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It
ran:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons
rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.

In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of
December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to
nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher
authority before filing.

Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother's Order
for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of
an organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other
comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade
Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for
special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous
Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no
reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates were now
in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the press or
on the telescreen. That was to be expected, since it was unusual for
political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The
great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of
traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their
crimes and were afterwards executed, were special showpieces not
occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. More commonly, people
who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and
were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what
had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps
thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had
disappeared at one time or another.

Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper clip. In the cubicle
across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over
his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile
spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged
on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece
of work would never be entrusted to a single person; on the other hand,
to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of
fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were
now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually
said. And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select
this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex
processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the
chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.

Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it
was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely
getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone
close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps-what
was likeliest of all-the thing had simply happened because purges and
vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The
only real clue lay in the words "refs unpersons," which indicated that
Withers was already dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the
case when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed
to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being
executed. Very occasionally some persons whom you had believed dead long
since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he
would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing,
this time forever. Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not
exist; he had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough
simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech. It was better to
make it deal with something totally unconnected with its original
subject.

He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors
and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to
invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the
Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was
needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind,
ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had
recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions
when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some
humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an
example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade
Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but
a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring
him into existence.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite toward
him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once
military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and
then promptly answering them ("What lessons do we learn from this fact,
comrades? The lessons-which is also one of the fundamental principles of
Ingsoc-that," etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

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 smglemindedness of Comrade
Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no
recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of
celibacy, believing marriage and the care of 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 debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the
Order of Conspicuous Merit; and in the end he decided against it because
of the unnecessary crossreferencing that it would ent

Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle.
Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on
the same job as himself. There was no way of knowing whose version would
finally be adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be
his own. Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It
struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living
ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed
in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would
exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne
or Julius Caesar.

Comments

Ogilvy31

Comrade Ogilvy