Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [176]

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 176

Note

The palimpsest figure compresses the entire epistemology of Oceania — history as a reusable surface — into a single ancient image of erasure and rewriting. The sentence ‘once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place’ shows Orwell’s rigor: the erasure is total precisely because it extends to the evidence of the erasure. This is the plumbing (both literal and logical) beneath the panoptic surface.