A Clockwork Orange (1962). 1: Queer As

Re-reading A Clockwork Orange was a process of unlearning my assumptions about it. Before, I took the novel to be a fairly straightforward sign-o-the-times diatribe, a more-or-less curmudgeonly middle aged white man looking with displeasure on the rise of youth culture. He sees young people taking drugs, hanging out in gangs (when Blackboard Jungle was shown in UK cinemas in 1956 it provoked excited Teddy Boys to rip up seats with knives; some then spilled outside to fight; in some places there were riots. Mind you, the Mods vs Rockers phenomenon didn't get going until 1964). There was a degree of cultural panic about 'youth violence' in the late 50s and early 60s, and this novel is part of that larger context. The Russian provenance of Alex's 'Nadsat' slang seemed to me part and parcel; for after all it's Orientalism 101 to think of 'the East' as more prone to cruelty and violence, and we can imagine the insidious nature of assumption at a time (1961) when the cold war was still hot. My main judgment was that using Beethoven, instead of pop or rock, as the catalyst, or accelerant of Alex's violence was a false step. Rousing though the last movement of the Ninth is, the idea that youth subcultures would accrete around Classical Music was, well, daft. Burgess may have considered pop beneath contempt and therefore notice; posterity has well and truly disagreed.

Still, as I say, re-reading upended these assumptions. A new perspective on the novel orange-crushed upon my faculties. I'll jot a few things down here:

1. It occurred to me for the first time that ‘Alex’ is so-called because he is a-lex, that is lawless.

2. The violent delinquency of youth is hardly an anxiety unique to the early 1960s. This is not to deny that Clockwork Orange is inevitably a product of its time. But re-reading the novel made me wonder if, rather than projecting current violence into a notionally nadsaturn (nadsattish? nadsattelite?) future, Burgess isn't actually using the novel to reflect backwards on the histories and traditions of violence. Ernest Ryman's Teddy Boy (Michael Joseph 1958; it made quite a splash as an Ace paperback original in 1960) looks like it might be the sort of work Burgess is aping.

(Bit unfortunate, the book's own blurb calling it ‘pathetic’ on the front cover there. I mean, you see what they're getting at. But still). In the event Ryman's rather restrained novel has almost nothing in common with what Burgess is doing. It's a straightforward tale of moral decline and karmic punishment, written by an ex-Navy officer and public school teacher with a didactic aim (in The Observer Penelope Mortimer thought that it was ‘really the nicest possible book’). Burgess’s Alex has almost nothing to do with  Ted. He has rather more to do with Brighton Rock’s Pinkie, although without that latter’s neurosis and disgusted fear of sex. Indeed, where Greene portrays a sociopath as a person with something patently and profoundly wrong in their soul, Burgess’s originality is in creating a character who is, basically, ordinary. He doesn’t engage in acts of violence, rape and murder because he is driven, or twisted, or (like Pinkie) because he has essentially self-melodramatising notions of his own satanic elevation, or declivity. He does it because he enjoys it. He's well aware that what he's doing is wrong, and that 'you can't have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night'. Nonetheless he professes puzzlement that the State wishes to reform him: he's happy to let people alone who wish to act in socially licit ways. It's just that he ‘goes to the other shop’.

3. I'm trying to think of earlier portraits of evil that do this, and I don't know if I can conjure any (Camus' L’Étranger is one possibility, I suppose; although I'm not sure 'evil' is the right word for that character). Recently I read Terry Eagleton's On Evil, which I didn't much like. As I say in another place Eagleton sets his face against those (as he sees them) modish and misguided leftists and postmodernists who think morality all relative, evil just another name for 'anti-social activity' and so on. Accordingly the core of his analysis is a close reading of what he presumably sees as the most important 20th-century fictional treatments of evil: Golding's Pincher Martin; Greene's Brighton Rock; Mann's Doktor Faustus. Burgess's name doesn't so much as appear in the index. There may be many reasons for this, of course; but it may have to do with Clockwork Orange's startling refusal to peg its moral portraiture to the grandiose superstructure of Cosmic Evil and Cosmic Good (as per Golding: sublime black lightning flickers through a winter sky! the sinner reduced to a monstrous pair of obsidian lobster claws!) of those three existential melodramas. It is the horrifying ordinariness of Alex's offending that is so appalling; the pettiness of it, the little shifts and lies he tells, the shop-soiled hypocrisy of his attitudes to authority–the act he puts on for his social worker, the police and prison guards. It's tempting to say that Burgess set out to re-write Crime and Punishment from the premise: how would this story go if Raskolnikov were perfectly untroubled by guilt? But it's more than that. The ‘Alexander the Large’ nickname he gives himself [52] is doubly ironic. It's not just that Largeness is a fundamentally different quality to Greatness (which of course it is); it's that he's not large. He has no ambitions beyond the gratification of his nasty appetites; stealing some small change; having a good time from one night to the next. There's nothing of Raskolnikov's self-dramatising discourse of ‘the great man’ about him. Alex's violence is fundamentally casual. That it is a large part of the greatness of Burgess's novel that it understands just how much of the evil in the world is precisely that: casual. In this I think Burgess puts his finger on an uncomfortable but, alas, profound truth of human nature.

4. It may have been for reasons connected to this that the ‘classical music’ layer of the novel bothered me less on this fre-read than it did the first time I encountered the book. It's easy to forget (with Kubrick's reimagining overlaying our memories) just how young Alex is: fifteen at the time of his arrest. The two girls he tempts back to his bedroom and rapes are ten in the novel. He shares with Janet in One Hand Clapping something of the terrifying perilousness of innocence, the capacity children have to access their desires in a blankly unmediated, unconsidered way. One way of putting this might be to say that Alex has the form of adulthood without the content of wisdom that comes from learned experience: the debateable final chapter is the first place in the novel where this starts to change. In that sense Alex is like music: form without specific content. Pop songs would work less well for Burgess in this context, because in them words and music have equivalent status. Most of the music Alex loves is sheer music: Bach, Handel, Mozart. Ludwig Van's final symphony is the exception because it is choral and for this reason it has a particular effect. After raping the ten year olds, and kicking them out, Alex nods off: 'they were going down the stairs and I dropped off to sleep, still with Joy Joy Joy Joy crashing and howling away' [52]. Burgess reads this emotion as a tigerish intensity of predation and cruelty; not the dictionary definition of the word ‘joy’, perhaps, but not outwith the realm of the possible, especially when we remember (as Burgess certainly knew) that Schiller's ode was originally to freiheit rather than freunde. If Alex is anything, he is the embodiment of a perfect existential frieheit, albeit one viewed through the lens of original sin. And this is the point about even the purest and most elevated music: as Schopenhauer says in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: 'the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.' The wrinkle is that Burgess takes it as axiomatic that this essence is, in a word, sin. Burgess makes Alex a kid not in order to make a Teddy Boy point about youthful delinquency, or not just for that reason. He does so because this moves him closer to the situation in which we are all born.

This is a roundabout way of coming back to one of the main critical currents as far as this novel is concerned: the way it stages a fundamentally theological debate about modes of evil. What Alex does is very, very bad; no question. But Burgess wants us to believe that what the State does to Alex is worse, because it removes his capacity for free will. Andrew Biswell's 2012 Penguin edition includes a wealth of useful material, including Burgess's 1972 Listener article on the book:

A Clockwork Orange was intended to be a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice. My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished. But his evil is a human evil, and we recognise in his deeds of aggression potentialities of our own—worked out for the non-criminal citizen in war, sectional injustice, domestic unkindness, armchair dreams. In three ways Alex is an exemplar of humanity: he is aggressive, he loves beauty, he is a language-user. ... Theologically, evil is not quantifiable. Yet I posit the notion that one act of evil may be greater than another, and that perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanisation, the killing of the soul—which is as much as to say the capacity to choose between good and evil acts. Impose on an individual the capacity to be good and only good, and you kill his soul for, presumably, the sake of social stability. What my, and Kubrick's, parable tries to state is that it is preferable to have a world of violence undertaken in full awareness—violence chosen as an act of will—than a world conditioned to be good or harmless. I recognise that the lesson is already becoming an old-fashioned one. B. F. Skinner, with his ability to believe that there is something beyond freedom and dignity, wants to see the death of autonomous man. He may or may not be right, but in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic that A Clockwork Orange tries to express, he is perpetrating a gross heresy. It seems to me in accordance with the tradition that Western man is not yet ready to jettison, that the area in which human choice is a possibility should be extended, even if one comes up against new angels with swords and banners emblazoned No. The wish to diminish free will is, I should think, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

‘I don't know how much free will man really possesses,’ Burgess says: ‘Wagner's Hans Sachs said: Wir sind ein wenig frei—we are a little free, but I do know that what little he seems to have is too precious to encroach on, however good the intentions of the encroacher may be.‘’ It's not just the anxiety that a B F Skinnerised future of smiling automata was just around the corner that makes this seem old-fashioned. It's the sense (as with Pincher Martin and Brighton Rock) that the ordinariness of Alex's evil somehow requires a grander theoretical superstructure to be comprehensible. Burgess is so worried the he will be accused of gleefully indulging in a pornography of violence that he over-stresses the extent to which the novel is a homiletic.

5. One thing that struck me forcefully upon my re-read is the playfulness of Alex. Of course, the game he is playing is a horrible one: violent, cruel, thoughtless and so on. But it is a game. In that same Listener essay, Burgess notes that readers are nonplussed by how likeable Alex is. But he is likeable as kids are, because they possess an unchallenged wisdom with respect to play that adults often lose. In this he reminds me a little of a character at the other end of the age-spectrum: Shakespeare's Falstaff. It's a rather elementary observation to make about Shakespeare that he is particularly fascinated by two interlocking dualities: appearance vs reality on the one hand, and 'play' (broadly conceived) vs reality on the other. Observed with any kind of ethical distance, Falstaff is a monster: colossally self-serving and self-indulgent, happy to use others, happy even to send others to their death so long as he can continue to indulge his own appetites. This isn't how he figures, of course. The reason he doesn't strike us as simply a cowardly, murderously irresponsible monster is that Falstaff understands the joy and necessity of play. He plays at being a brave knight, he plays at having a good time (plays with such immersion that he actually has a good time), even plays at being King; and the complexity of the representation is marvelously deepened by the fact that he is, actually, a character in a play. Falstaff's joy at playing is infectious, and we, the audience, 'play along', as the wonderfully apt expression had it. It goes without saying that, for Shakespeare, Falstaff's play must eventually collide with and lose to the harshly real world; but whilst he's able to maintain it, his playfulness is actually wonderful. He gestures to a Wodehousian/Woosterish world where all is play, and good food, and fun, with the addition of those rather unWoosterish joys of sex, street-fighting (Gad's Hill!) and killing.

The novel is playful in another, more Joycean sense. It plays with language. Nadsat, though, is too large a question to consider here, and I shall return to it in another post shortly. My last point here has to do with the related question of how Alex simultaneously flouts and in a sense represents the law. The first thing Alex and his droogs do is beat up an old guy emerging from the library with a bunch of books on the perfectly blameless subject of crystallography. They mock him:

‘But what is this here? What is this filthy slovo? I blush to look at this word. You disappoint me brother.’

‘But,’ he tried. ‘But, but.’

‘Now,’ said Georgie. here is what I would call real dirt. There's one slovo beginning with an f and another with a c.’

‘Oh,’ said poor old Dim, smotting over Pete's shoulder and going too far, like he always did, ‘’it says here what he done to her, and there's a picture and all. Why,’ he said ‘you're nothing but a filthy-minded old skitebird.’ [12]

They ‘punish’ him by ripping his books, stealing his false teeth, beating him and tearing off his clothes. But why do I put ‘punish’ in inverted commas, there? What happens to the poor old feller is certainly punishing. Of course Alex has no ‘actual’ authority, and there's nothing ‘actually’ obscene about the books the old man is carrying. Alex is playing at being a manifestation of authority, of the superego (‘"You naughty old veck, you," I said, and then we began to filly about with him’: presumably ‘filly’ replaces ‘horse’, slangwise, here). It is of course part of Alex's obscene play that he pretends to be an authority figure, punishing a malefactor, when in fact he is (and knows full well that he is) the criminal. But it's a game he carries through the whole of the novel. When he lures the two truant ten-year-olds back to his flat, he styles his rape of them as an education ('well if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had' [52]) as if he were some ghastly school teacher. Presumably the 'lesson' they learn is that the world is a horrible place, or perhaps ‘don't trust strangers’, which many people would consider apt. Later, in the state jail ‘staja’, a rambunctious new arrival into the crowded cell is ‘taught’ his place: ‘if we can't have any sleep let's have some education. Our new friend here had better be taught a lesson’ [97]. Gleefully entering into the spirit of this, Alex kicks the newcomer to death.

It makes perfect sense, in the logic of the novel, that Alex's former droog Dim, and his old sparring partner Billyboy, end the novel as policemen. They beat Alex badly, 'doling out a bit of the old summary' and 'having our say in the State's name' [160]. There's never any doubt in this novel that violence is the mode of state-sanctioned law enforcement: the police assault their charges as a matter of course, and the Ludovico treatment, described over several chapters, is a violent and invasive attack upon both body and soul. In all this the delinquency of Alex is revealed to be not violence as such, but violence unsanctioned by the state.

Alex, clearly, is Sadean in his appetites. The state notionally takes a Kantian approach to ethics, and something of Kant's clockwork regularity and machinic absolutism is evident in Burgess's broad-brush satire. Dr Brodksy seeks to make perfect Kantian citizens, incapable of violating the categorical imperative (Kant valued ‘free will’ highly. of course; but if we boil it down, his argument is that we are really only actually free if we obey the moral law). A Clockwork Orange is, in fact, deeply interested in the extent to which Kant is actualised in de Sade, or de Sade in Kant. That de Sade is the hidden ‘truth’ of Kant's ethical absolutism is the argument of Slavoj Žižek, in his ‘Kant with (or against) Sade,’ [it's in The Zizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 285-301]. Jodie Dean summarises:

Žižek draws out the equivalence between the Kantian moral law and the superego insofar as both reject contingent feelings, emphasize pain, and rely on cold, unconditional injunctions that compel the subject to “sacrifice his attachment to all contingent, ‘pathological’ objects”—Do your duty! Enjoy!” He emphasizes how Sade makes visible the subject of the enunciation of the moral law. Kant conceals this subject, this author of the command to universalise, to abstract. For Kant, the autonomous subject simply posits the moral law. The actual source of the injunction is invisible. Žižek, following Lacan, argues that the injunction comes from the Sadean sadist-executioner, that is to say, the superego. Put somewhat differently, Sade separates out what Kant links together: “the assertion of an unconditional ethical injunction and the moral universality of this injunction.” The end result is a formal equivalence between the injunction of law and the injunction of superego. [Jodi Dean 'Žižek on Law' https://www.blogger.com/jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/zizek_on_law_2.doc]

It's complicated, in A Clockwork Orange, by Alex's perfect absence of guilt; and then reinforced by the novel's insistence that when the Law intervenes 'in' Alex to prevent his Sadean excesses, it results in a kind of impossible short circuit that is absolutely intolerable—intolerable for the novel, within fewer than 40 pages Alex's conditioning has been 'magically' reversed (in his sleep, no less), because intolerable for Burgess's Catholic-derived sense that humanity itself depends upon having the freedom to transgress. But this is just another way of saying: permitting the Sadean executioner superego its power. It's the perfect circularity of the process, here, that is interesting: the roundness, we might say, rather than the clockworkness, of the orange. Given the, it could be argued, essentially Protestant nature of this Kantian perspective, it may also be the colour. But at any rate, the violence with which a short-circuit cuts bang! a circuit is the currency of this novel. Short and sharp and shocking.

6. The ‘a’ that prefixes the law in Alex's name is a curious thing. It can be either privative or copulative. It could be that we see Alex as a-lex in the sense of being lawless; or it could be that he is a-lex in the sense of being 'at one with the law'. Fitting.