Early on in Orwell’s 1984 Winston decides to break the law and keep a diary. He comes across a predicament;
April 4th, 1984. He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
I’ve always wondered - is the real date in 1984 before or after that date? Which would The Party prefer and why? I reckon they change it on a whim to test how honed people’s skills of doublethink are, anyone who argues about it ends up loving Big Brother.
I think it is a mix of the fact that he trusts nothing the Government tells him and that his life is so rote and boring one day blends into the next. The exact date is unknown because his life is so empty it doesn’t matter.
I’m going to go with at least 20 or 30 years after. The Party couldn’t have such absolute control over Winston’s thoughts unless he had been born under it, which means that his year of birth of '44 or '45 must be a lie. His age is probably also off: By the time you get to that age, it starts to become easier to just remember your year of birth and do the subtraction than to actually remember your age (which changes every year), and so if he can’t even remember his year of birth, he almost certainly can’t remember his age, either.
I agree with Chronos…definitely significantly post 1984. Almost certainly early-21st century if they’d actually been keeping proper track. IIRC, the old Prole he speaks to after he starts rebelling remembers the party being in control even when he was young, albeit not as pervasive as it was now.
I do like the idea of it having been 1984 for a while - every new year, the MiniTrue tells you that last year was 1983 and always was. Since historical record keeping is a crime anyway The Party would see no loss in the same year over and over.
I don’t agree at all. Winston has memories of his early life before the party had established control. Besides, no man could be 20 or 30 years off on his own age; your body will tell you how old you are to a greater degree of accuracy then that.
Winston’s uncertainty about the year is a cry of despair, but with little foundation in evidence. He describes all sorts of falsifications at the Mininstry of Truth in great detail, but never once describes being asked to falsify the current date. The amount of back-correcting for such a change would be prodigious, greater even than the change of the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia. But Winston gives no inkling of such a change ever happening even once, much less repeatedly.
No man could rationally be off by that much, but we’re talking about an entire society of people deep in denial. Besides which, I suspect that the greater error is in Smith’s date of birth, not in his age.
And he would never need to falsify the year, as it’s no longer a matter of public record at all. There’s a reason why he has to calculate the year from his age, instead of just getting it from a calendar.
I thought it was 1984, though I have not read it in awhile. I know that he talks to an older guy who remembers the time before the current government.
Also, isn’t Winston named after Winston Churchill, but he doesn’t even know who that is? I thought someone(perhaps that older guy) makes a passing reference to it, but Winston doesn’t know who that is.
IIRC there’s only a vague reference to the war, as in WWII from the man in his 80s but he’s pretty unspecific about it;
*"When I was a young man, mild beer–wallop we used to call it–was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.’
‘Which war was that?’ said Winston.
‘It’s all wars,’ said the old man vaguely.*
Winston asks him what it was like in 1925 but the old man just complains about prostate problems, so no luck there.
But it is. The back issues of the Times which Winston “corrects” are presumably dated. How else could they be corrected? At the very beginning of the novel, Winston receives an order to “correct” Big Brother’s Order of the Day of December 3, 1983.
Of course, like most fictional worlds, the world of 1984 is not entirely self-consistent.
I think its pretty close to the actual date since Winston’s memories indicate there was extensive warfare in his childhood as well as the memories of the old man of the Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park.
Arguably it is, in the sense that the concept of doublethink allows the Party to maintain a strict calendar for administrative purposes while simultaneously believing the Party was eternal and unchanging, reaching infinitely into the past and sure to last infinitely into the future.
Well, you could look at it from another perspective: if you change the events that happened on a particular day, you don’t need to change the day at all. And if you have two separate people making edits, they never need to realize what’s happening.
So, for example, let’s say Big Brother went to a museum yesterday, to a farm on Saturday and to a factory on Friday. Person A edits the museum story to indicate that BB actually went to a farm. Person B edits the farm story to indicate a factory. Voila! You’ve just eliminated a day from history. The only way to catch the deletion would be to find something that contradicted the timeline… and wouldn’t pointing something like that out be treason? By the time you get to be Winston’s age, you don’t think “But what happened to the museum trip yesterday?”
So BB’s order of the day from 12/3/83… maybe version A of the speech references a forest fire. That happened on the “real 12/3/83.” But it’s time to delete 1983 entirely, so the ministry edits the 12/3/83 speech to reference the flood of 1984. Since BB talked about the flood in 83, it couldn’t have happened in 84, could it? So the flood wasn’t this year, it was actually last year.
People don’t remember things so well more than a year or two back, and Winston’s own confusion accounts for that - it’s only the recent year or two that are hard to keep track of.
Still… there is some evidence from outside the Party presented in the novel that makes me think 1984 can’t be too far off. As some others have said, maybe another 20 or 30 years have passed, but it really couldn’t be more than that unless BB has some way to manipulate what the proles believe. If the proles are unreliable witnesses, then it could be any date.
And… maybe the proles **are **unreliable. Winston himself winds up a toothless old man telling stories in a bar, doesn’t he? He’s so broken at that point, he’ll recall - and believe - whatever story they beat into him. When asked to recall 1925, maybe he’ll be the one changing the conversation to his prostate.