I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world’s literary memory. It refuses to be erased, however, and for this the film version of the book made by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible. I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted. I receive mail from students who try to write theses about it, or requests from Japanese dramaturges to turn it into a sort of Noh play. It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust. This is not an unusual experience for an artist. Rachmaninoff used to groan because he was known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while the works of his maturity never got into the programmes. Kids cut their pianistic teeth on a Minuet in G which Beethoven composed only so that he could detest it. I have to go on living with A Clockwork Orange, and this means I have a sort of authorial duty to it. I have a very special duty to it in the United States, and I had better now explain what this duty is.
So, first of all, wow. A Clockwork Orange is evidently Burgess’s Frankenstein monster -- a creation he despises, but which continually begs for recognition from its creator. I didn’t know that. But an even bigger wow is the duty that Burgess begins to describe in the following paragraphs, and the only reason, it seems, that he wrote this introduction in the first place.
In case you didn’t know, A Clockwork Orange, as written by Burgess, is a short novel of 21 chapters. That’s the way it was first published in Britain. But when it came to the United States, it was published there with only 20 chapters, and that is also the version on which Kubrick’s film was based.
What’s the difference, you may ask? Well, according to Burgess, everything. The 21st chapter gives the novel an entirely different ending. It is the one in which his young protagonist grows up and seeks a new way of life.
There is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter. The boy is conditioned, then de-conditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will. ‘I was cured all right,’ he says, and so the American book ends. So the film ends too. The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.
Double wow. This is, by far, the most interesting thing about A Clockwork Orange. And one has to wonder that if the American publisher hadn’t removed the 21st chapter whether Kubrick would’ve made his film, or whether it would be the monster still plaguing its Dr. Frankenstein.
Because the novel, short as it is, is kind of a slog. Burgess’s gimmick of an entirely slang-based narrator -- Yarbles! Bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine! -- is more impenetrable than it is interesting. It’s almost a shame, because at its core, A Clockwork Orange is a philosophical novel, but one that takes almost half its length to even broach its philosophical point.
‘It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321. But all I want to say to you now is this: if at any time in the future you look back to these times and remember me, the lowest and humblest of all God’s servitors, do not, I pray, think evil of me in your heart, thinking me in any way involved in what is now about to happen to you. And now, talking of praying, I realize sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think. So, God help us all, 6655321, I shall like to think.’
This is said to our young protagonist Alex, a violent wretch, by the man about to reprogram him, to reprogram him in such a way that even the thought of committing violence will make Alex retch and feel so sick to his stomach that he will do anything -- even not commit the violence -- in order to keep the brainwashed sickness at bay.
And this is the philosophical point that the novel would have us ponder. In such a schema, where does morality lie? Is the man who does good, but who would do evil if he could, a moral man? Or is only the man who chooses good the moral one?
Much of the movie stays true to the trappings of the plot of the novel in driving this question home. Alex is a connoisseur of classical music. As part of the reprogramming, classical music is played under the violent films and images that are conditioning him so that the music, too, brings on the sickness. Once out and reprogrammed, Alex is set upon by his former violent friends, who abuse and beat him for past grievances, and Alex is unable to fight back. Weak and injured, he seeks shelter at a stranger’s home, one he doesn’t realize he had previously visited in disguise prior to the reprogramming, a place where he had already committed violent crimes against the home’s occupants. The homeowner, kind to Alex at first, eventually discovers who he is and what has happened to him, and so locks him in a room where he purposely blasts classical music at him in order to make him sick and suicidal. The homeowner then uses the spectacle of Alex’s suicide attempt to discredit the government program that reprogrammed him, and the reprogramming is undone, returning Alex to his original violent state and tendencies.
As Burgess explains, this is where the film and the American version of the novel ends. And it is seemingly at this point that American audiences are required to draw their conclusions about the moral of the tale.
In this reading, it seems to support the concept that freedom of choice is the superior moral option, even if that choice is used to do violence. In comparison, it seems, compelled acts of goodness are absent the moral foundation of will. To be moral, once must choose.
But, as Burgess laments, there are cracks in this interpretation. He thinks those cracks are because the story is not complete, that with the novel ending with the twentieth chapter, Alex has only chosen to do violence and been compelled to do good -- leaving us with a twisted morality tale that appeals only in a Kubrickian sense of spectacle and excess. He believes the twenty-first chapter is needed to rescue the reader from this flawed interpretation, for it is there that Alex chooses to do good. Morality is not just choice, but choosing to do good.
But Burgess is going to find me disagreeing with even that, because Alex has never chosen to do violence, neither before nor after his reprogramming. The philosophical reality that seems curiously absent from the work is the fact that Alex, like all of us, is programmed either way. First by his genes and upbringing, and second by the “vitamins” and “real horrorshow films.” If choice is required for morality to occur, then I fear the deeper subtext of A Clockwork Orange is that we live in an amoral universe.
Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
Right you are, Alex. But unfortunately, it is not just the young who act like malenky wind-up toys. Even adults, ready to choose something different, only make those choices when the spring inside them winds down.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment