Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [835]

To tell you the truth –’ He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite Winston. ‘There is only one offence, is there not?’ he said. … ‘These things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been able to recall one instance – a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realise that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 835

Note

Ampleforth’s offence is purely aesthetic — a rhyme scheme — and he cannot grasp that his real crime was something else entirely. His pedantic indignation (‘only twelve rhymes to “rod”’) is tragicomic: he has internalized the Party’s new language so completely that he cannot perceive his own thoughtcrime. The passage shows how terror is processed through different subjectivities; Ampleforth’s mind converts even his arrest into a footnote about prosody.