#141 A horrorshow cure: A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess

"When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."

Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange was as controversial as it was profitable. Its depiction of a dystopian near future terrorised by ultraviolent teenage gangs made a startling impact on release in 1971. The film was an adaptation of a book that was nearly a decade old.

This episode explores Anthony Burgess' 1962 book A Clockwork Orange. Included in David Pringle's list of the 100 must-read science fiction novels, it is an anomalous venture into SF by Burgess, who was then better known for his humorous novels. This landmark book came to dominate the author's reputation, with its linguistic invention, philosophical themes, and brutal violence.

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Transcript

A Clockwork Orange is one of the most notorious novels of the 1960s, a detour into social science fiction by “Protean man of letters” Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993). Later adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick, the book is set in a still-shocking vision of the near future. In what may or may not be London, law and order is breaking down and the generation gap has become a yawning gulf. Gangs of brutal teenagers roam the streets, indulging in drugs, theft, and ultraviolent mayhem. All the while, they use a mode of speech all of their own: nadsat.

Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as a jeu d’esprit, something of a playful exercise which was written in just three weeks. It came to dominate his reputation and overshadow his legacy as a comic novelist and a composer. He went as far as to say that he regretted writing it, because he felt it was too likely to be misinterpreted. Despite his misgivings, it is clear that Burgess put a great deal of himself into A Clockwork Orange. It incorporates his fascination with linguistics, his love of classical music, and his dislike of the behaviorism pioneered by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner.

The novel focuses on Alex, leader of a particularly vicious gang. Upon his capture, he is subjected to a cruel and radical process designed to cure his sociopathic nature. This invites the core questions of the book - is it possible, or desirable, to alter a person’s nature? If a person can no longer choose, are they still a real or whole person?

Burgess’ mean streets

Born in 1917, Burgess developed a multifarious career. He was a novelist, literary critic, translator, playwright, screenwriter, and composer. What he was not was a part of the science fiction world. A Clockwork Orange represents a highly successful anomaly in his career, but one which is unmistakably SF. 

A Clockwork Orange is set in the near future from the time of Burgess’ writing - it is often stated to occur in the 1970s. The location is kept deliberately vague, but is often assumed to be London. Burgess was inspired by his return from Malaysia to the UK in 1960, at a time when there was growing concern about “juvenile delinquency”. The novel was also apparently inspired by a harrowing incident after World War II, when Burgess’ first wife was beaten by drunken deserters from the United States Army.

The novel introduces Alex and his three droogs, his fellow teenage henchmen and subordinates: Pete, Dim, and Georgie. They gather in the Korova milk bar, where they can enjoy moloko laced with potent drugs. Night after night, they embark on harrowing rampages of theft, rape, and assault. The gang’s brutal lifestyle reflects a conclusive schism between the generations, and their crimes are made possible by collapsing law and order. In time, Alex is undone by his ruthless treatment of his own gang, who turn on him, and abandon him to get sent down for murder.

The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1 details Alex’s “normal” day to day life of crime. Part 2 explores his subjection to an experimental form of aversion therapy designed to cure his violent impulses. Part 3 is a mirror, as Alex again encounters figures from part 1, greatly changed by his experiences in prison. 

Prestoopnik govoreet: nadsat and the articulation of violence

The most famous and striking element of Burgess’ novel is his creation and deployment of nadsat. This distinctive mode of speech, spoken by Alex and his droogs, is principally based on Russian but also has inclusions from schoolboy slang, cockney rhyming slang, German, the King James Bible, and Latin. Within the novel, its origins are unclear but it is described at one point as being the result of “subliminal penetration”: perhaps an effort by the Soviet Union to sow discord? 

Nadsat makes every page of A Clockwork Orange bracingly strange and often darkly funny. After a night of savagery, Alex wants only to eat his eggiwegs and listen to the sladky sounds of Beethoven’s ninth. Because Alex is a first-person narrator, his strange worldview and stranger lexicon suffuses the entire story. The novel represents a wholesale immersion into a different and unsettling view of the world, and this is what makes it interesting decades later.

Nadsat also dampens the effect of the novel’s violence, which even Burgess felt to be “nauseating”. At all times, the reader is insulated to some extent from the intensity of Alex’s catalogue of crimes. He does not mention blood, but instead krovvy; not rape but the old in-out in-out; and his victims do not scream, they creech. Without this linguistic insulation, A Clockwork Orange would be even more harrowing, and could have courted an intolerable level of controversy. The plain fact is that Alex is a truly vile protagonist. What is to be done?

We can rebuild him

When Alex is imprisoned, his captors subject him to a conditioning process designed to eliminate his violent tendencies. It is made clear that this is done for crudely political rather than moral reasons - the government wants to empty its prisons, and to avoid the cost of rehabilitation. The process involves forcing Alex to endure watching films of appalling atrocities, while affected by emetic drugs (notably, many of the films are archive footage of Nazi war crimes during World War II). After he is “cured”, Alex experiences debilitating symptoms when he even thinks about violence.

In the process, Alex’s ability to enjoy classical music is destroyed, because it is used to soundtrack some of the atrocity footage. This reinforces a key point: that behaviour modification critically compromise’s a person’s ability to choose, and therefore to be themselves. One possible conclusion that could be drawn is that a sociopath like Alex cannot be cured without removing their humanity; perhaps the real curable sickness is the one in society itself, that caused Alex to come into being to begin with.

Burgess had a mixed relationship with A Clockwork Orange. It brought him notoriety and a film adaptation, but he felt it was widely misinterpreted and he claimed to regret writing it. In any case, it is clearly a notable SF novel for the early 1960s. Burgess’ vision of out of control youth violence would become influential, as would his use of nadsat - ultraviolence in particular has become a commonplace term. 

The novel should not be seen as a convincing or persuasive explanation for youth violence or social decay, and its experimental therapies are quite fanciful. As a literary and linguistic experiment it remains important, and Alex’s unhinged voice and perspective are valuable ones in the history of SF.