Just past the midpoint of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel of an authoritarian society, protagonists Winston and Julia make their way through a text purportedly authored by the fabled dissident Emmanuel Goldstein entitled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” which details the origins, organization, and ideology of the totalitarian society Oceania. Within the book itself, the question of the Goldstein manuscript’s authenticity and provenance is never really resolved. Is the account it offers reliable, or is it merely an invented backstory contrived to obfuscate the truth? Why has the enigmatic inner-party official O’Brien given the text to outer-party functionaries Winston and Julia in the first place? What do its latter chapters — referenced though never actually read by Winston before his arrest — contain? Is Goldstein a phantom created by the party’s propagandists, or a flesh-and-blood, Leon Trotsky–like figure agitating for revolution somewhere beyond the panoptic gaze of its telescreens?

Later in the story, a cryptic exchange between Winston and O’Brien obscures things as much as it clarifies them:

“You have read it?” said Winston.

“I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.”

“Is it true, what it says?”

“As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. . . . ”