British author Anthony Burgess was inspired to write his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), by the uncivil drift that he perceived among the youth of his time. That is why, a decade later, when headlines in the vein of “Police hunt the Clockwork Orange rapist gang” or “Child dies in Clockwork Orange war” started to appear in the press, he could not help but feel that something had gone tremendously wrong.
“The misunderstanding [of the novel] will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation,” he wrote in 1985 in Flame into Being, a biography of D.H. Lawrence where he compared the scandal caused by Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) with the controversy surrounding his popular dystopia. “If a couple of nuns are raped in the Vatican, I get a call from a newspaper. They have turned me into some kind of expert on violence,” he lamented in a television interview. Burgess, however, was clear that his problems did not necessarily stem from the book, but from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation.
An interesting article. Not overly related to the article, but something I’m reminded of nonetheless, is the time I was having a conversation with someone I know about books, and reading. She mentioned how much she enjoyed books that experimented with the English language, devising fictional new dialects of English and making extensive use of them, and so forth. So naturally I said, “Oh! Well if you like that, you should read A Clockwork Orange, because the whole thing is written in this fictional, Russian-influenced argot…”
She told me she had heard this, but she’d also “heard” there was a rape scene in A Clockwork Orange, and that this was the reason she’d never read it, because she really hated reading about “anything like that”. She did ask me to confirm whether it did or it didn’t, but of course I had to be like, “Well, uh, yes, I really recommend you never read A Clockwork Orange then…”
Anyway, it’s been many many years since I read this book. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I read it again now. I guess at the time I got the impression it had some confused premises, and ultimately couldn’t provide a satisfying answer to the core question it posed, which was whether the state has the right (or even the responsibility) to effectively torture people into behaving “morally”. Partly because it concludes that such torture isn’t even effective (which seems about right), but also because IIRC it never bothers to wonder why Alex and his crew are running around committing violent crimes in the first place, beyond a vague “oh, they’re young, lol”. In the final chapter – the one infamously omitted from the original American edition as well as the film adaption – it becomes apparent that Burgess’ “solution” is for young men to settle down with a wife and child, as if violent men won’t just become domestic abusers. And I get Burgess basically wrote the book as a trauma reaction to his pregnant wife being brutally bashed (losing her baby, and dying a few years later from unresolved complications), but still, it doesn’t a satisfying thought experiment make.
There was another quote from the article I found interesting:
“Anthony Burgess was an established man, conservative in many of his beliefs, his social, religious and political values. With that ending, he was putting the middle class as the savior against authoritarian states,” explains Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, teacher of English literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. “The problem with free will is the philosophical concept that the novel articulates and that he sees as the space where youth develops. When he starts to explore it, he notices the enormous burden of the influence of the state on that free will. His way of understanding good and evil in the novel is political, not metaphysical or moral in the classic religious sense. The authoritarian state penetrates the psyche of the individual, the self.”
As in: maybe the reason he couldn’t satisfyingly answer his own question is that as a conservative, his conservative values impeded his ability to think through a logically coherent position. Why would you presume that “free will” means violence, and that “the state” is a counter to violence, when the state is the most violent entity of all under capitalism? The men who bashed Burgess’ wife were soldiers, after all. Who teaches soldiers to live and breathe violence? And not just under “authoritarian regimes”. The idea that middle-class respectability politics is another counter to violence is another laughable proposition, but whatever…
I guess the point is, it’s a book with a complicated legacy. But at least that Nadsat stuff was unique.