Political Fiction In Post-War Britain: A Clockwork Orange
The 20th century opened with the Boer War and continued with World War I, World War II, The Balkans, Korea, and Vietnam, The First Gulf, Granada and many others. As a result of the wars, most of the British literature has the common themes of alienation, isolation, loneliness, and fragmentation and much of the work of this century is marked by deep psychological trauma. The change in England's role in the world is another historical or social influence on the themes in British literature. England was the dominating power with its imperial power, colonies and political influence all over the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, its global influence is weakened after the two great wars. This development changed many others things together. Labor organizations raised in power, women asserted their equal rights, attention to social legislation and welfare concerns raised and Britain moved towards a more modern socialist state.
These changes in the worldview caused to emerge works of literature representing the new post-war life, the changed condition of social welfare, the advent of a new, yet more democratic society, the realignment of social classes, the emergence of new subjects: women and the immigrant population of Britain, and the shift to the aspects of a mass consumerist economy. The old values and certainties such as religion were begun to be questioned. The themes of freedom and equality tended to predominate. Personal morality in challenging and liberated times became one of the frequently expressed issues of the literary works in the 1960s and 1970s. That issue composes one of the central themes in Antony Burgess' works, for instance, A Clockwork Orange, 1962. A Clockwork Orange will be examined in this article as a political fiction in Post-war Britain, that is why it will be necessary to begin with and touch upon the life of the write, Antony Burgess.
John Antony Burgess Wilson (1917-1993) was born and raised in Manchester, England. Burgess spent most of his adult life abroad in the army by teaching in Malaya with the British Colonial Service. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1960 and began to write novels in the hope that the royalties from his books would support his wife after he died. He wrote five novels that year alone. When he later discovered that his condition had been misdiagnosed, he continued to write at a rapid rate. Although he wrote nearly forty novels, his most famous work is the dystopian novella and political satire A Clockwork Orange (1962). It owes much of its popularity to Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation.
Burgess was inspired to write A Clockwork Orange during a visit to Leningrad in 1961. He observed the state-regulated, repressive atmosphere of a nation there. And that nation was threatening to spread its dominion over the world at that time. At the time of his visit, the Soviet Union was one of the largest countries in possession of land after the United States and communism was establishing itself in far regions like Vietnam and Cuba. Burgess considered communism as an improper system as it alters moral responsibility from the individual to the government while disregarding the individual's welfare.
Burgess's novels address fundamental issues of human nature and morality, such as the existence of good and evil and the importance of free will. In his novel, A Clockwork Orange, Antony Burges says that free will is the most important thing and then comes the evil and good. Antony Burges does not try to show us what we should do with free will in his novel, he just emphasizes and underlines the importance of free will. According to Burgess, if you are following an ideology, If you are a part of a political system, it means you do not have free will because you are trying to obey the rules of this system. Burges questions all the rules of meta-narratives like politics, government, morality, social system, religion by creating such violent characters who are rapist, robbers, and criminals in his novels. He is trying to question all these institutions and structures, that is why this work is one of the significant examples of dystopian fiction in a futuristic England.
During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi, gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. While Burgess was eating dinner at a restaurant one night, a group of queerly dressed teenagers pounded on the door. Burgess thought they were targeting him as a westerner, but the boys stepped aside willingly when he left and then resumed pounding. Burgess insists that he based nadsat, the invented slang of his teenage hooligans in A Clockwork Orange, on Russian for purely aesthetic reasons, but it seems that this experience influenced his portrayal of Alex and his gang. Along with English Teddy Boys, a youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s associated with American rock music, the Russian gangs provided a template for the gangs in A Clockwork Orange. However, A Clockwork Orange should not be understood simply as a critique of the Soviet Union or communism, because the dystopian world of the novel includes mainly the elements of English and American society. In his own estimation, Burgess had a tendency toward anarchy, and he felt that the socialistic British welfare state was too willing to sacrifice individual liberty in favour of social stability. He despised American popular culture for fostering homogeneity, passivity, and apathy. He regarded American law enforcement as hopelessly corrupt and violent, referring to it as “an alternative criminal body. ” Each of these targets is ridiculed in A Clockwork Orange, but Burgess's main satire is reserved for the psychological movement known as behaviourism.
Popularized by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s, behaviourism concerned itself with the study of human and animal behaviour in response to stimuli. Through the application of the carefully controlled system of rewards and punishments—a process referred to as conditioning—Skinner demonstrated that scientists could alter the behaviour of test subjects more effectively than had previously been thought possible. (In one famous experiment, he successfully trained laboratory pigeons to play ping pong. ) To many people, behaviourism seemed to offer an almost limitless potential to control human behaviour, and the movement had a profound effect not only in academia, but on education, government, and criminal rehabilitation as well. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess satirizes behaviourism with his portrayal of the fictional Ludovico's Technique.
Burgess was still a relatively unknown writer when he published A Clockwork Orange in 1962, and the novel was not an immediate success. To Burgess's dismay, the American version of the novel was published without the final chapter, in which Alex grows up and renounces violence. Burgess strongly disapproved of this decision, which he believed had distorted the novel into a nasty tale of unredeemable evil. Ironically, it was the American edition of the novel that became a cult classic among college students, and it was also the edition that Stanley Kubrick used for his 1971 film adaptation.
Stanley Kubrick's film version of A Clockwork Orange was both commercially successful and highly controversial, catapulting Burgess to a much wider fame. Initially labeled with an X rating and widely criticized for glorifying sex and violence, the film was blamed for several incidents of copycat violence, including one notorious British case in which a group of men, in imitation of the film, gang-raped a woman while singing “Singing in the Rain. ”
On the surface, the most obvious reason for Burgess' use of Nadsat is to allow the reader to empathize more easily with Alex, described as 'one of the most appallingly vicious creations in recent fiction'. Throughout the novel, Alex enjoys committing shocking acts of violence upon innocent people, which would usually make it difficult for us as readers to empathize with him. The use of the fictional language protects us from the full horror of his violence by creating a buffer between the actual events and what the reader comprehends, because many of the words no longer have the same connotations as they do in regular English. Burgess himself said, 'to tolchock a chelloveck in the kishkas does not sound as bad as booting a man in the guts'. Because these are new words in which the reader has no existing emotional investment, the reader doesn't have the same negative association with the action – leaving Burgess free to have Alex do what he wants without the reader judging him so harshly. By disconnecting the emotive response to the words from their meaning, nadsat creates a cushioning layer between the acts of violence and how the reader understands these acts. In A Clockwork Orange Resucked, Burgess says 'Nadsat, a Russified version of English, was meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography'. He also points out that he was sickened by his own excitement when he was writing the rape scene. If we delve deeper into this idea, however, we reveal the possibility of more layers than at first meet the eye. In Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias, David Sisk makes the claim that Nadsat makes this perverse enjoyment too attractive to resist and that it 'titillates our morbid curiosity and coaxes us into multiple readings'. We as readers are tempted to re-read any difficult or complex passages in order to more closely and fully comprehend the Nadsat words, and could inadvertently begin to immerse ourselves in the violence of the scenes.
We are then left with a choice – either we participate vicariously in the violence or we choose to avoid it by leaving the Nadsat largely unknown but for its general meaning. Burgess claimed that 'this strange new lingo would act like a kind of mist, half hiding the mayhem and protecting the reader from his own baser instincts', however, he did not realise the full ramifications of his language: Nadsat is not a buffer unless we choose it to be, and anyone who desires to secretly respond to the violence is free to do so. Alex uses nadsat to speak directly to his readers as narrator and treats them as friends, making us feel as if we are a part of his gang and his subculture instead of condemning Alex for his terrible acts of cruelty; their language includes anyone who uses it and excludes all who don't. Our feeling of complicity with Alex is further intensified by his use of 'oh my brothers' when he speaks to us, a phrase one might expect to hear between members of a union or resistance movement, 'thus uniting narrator and reader in resistance to the state'. Nadsat also helps prevent the reader from thinking of Alex as unintelligent or crass, instead of as a “sufficiently intelligent young man”. If written in regular English or even an existing and readily recognizable and comprehensible form of slang, the reader would have preconceived notions about the types of words used, who commonly uses them and where they are used.
Art as politics becomes liable to mockery and criticism as vivid embodiments of social degeneration as well as objects of aggression and murder. In this respect, another significant instance in Burgess' work suggestively epitomises this blurring of borders between high, low culture and mass media. Thus, the symbolic masks worn during Alex's gang attack on Alexander and his wife by him and his droogs representing Disraeli, Henry VIII (political power), Elvis Presley (materialism and mass culture) and Shelley (literature) imply an amalgamation of seemingly disparate cultural forces though clearly operating from an identical homogenised process of acculturation.
He is strapped in a chair and forced to watch of incredibly brutal films, some of them are fiction but others actual documentaries of Japanese and Nazi atrocities during World War II.
he is rescued by three policemen one of them being a former member of his own gang and another a former leader of a rival gang who has probably been recruited apparently on the theory that their criminal desires can be useful in the maintenance of order in the society.
It is a book centering on 'the chance to be good' and resulting from a single, significant existential dilemma: Is an evil human being with free choice preferable to a “good monster” without it? The dilemma is clearly suggested to us in the novel when Alex, who is on the verge of submitting to conditioning, is admonished by the prison chaplain:
'It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. . . . Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”.
A terribly difficult question.
'It's better to do wrong of your own free will than to do right because the state ordains it,' [said Burgess]. His dark eyes vanished behind their lids in a mixture of wrath and amusement. He'd seen the film and liked it. [1]
Burgess's creation of an internationalised figure of youth delinquency, the droog, may have its roots in his first-hand experiences, yet it also intersects with his Catholic philosophy. A Clockwork Orange, like The Wanting Seed published in the same year, is framed by Burgess's sense of two opposing theological positions through which the problem of evil can be understood.
Pelagianism – from the fifth-century heretic monk Pelagius – considers all humans capable of being perfected, while Augustinianism – from St Augustine – considers all humans bound by original sin. From these two positions, Burgess extrapolates the political positions of Pelagian liberalism and Augustinian authoritarianism, but also Pelagian utopianism and Augustinian pessimism. As for the youths he encounters in You've Had Your Time, they are seen to 'love aggression for its own sake. They were expressing the Manichean principle of the universe, opposition as an end in itself'. [2]
This is essentially the manner in which A Clockwork Orange is understood by Burgess. His own reading of the novel is that of a conflict between 'youthful free will having the choice of good and evil although generally choosing evil versus the artificial extirpation of free will through scientific conditioning which is potentially a greater evil than the free choice of evil'. [3] The Augustinian notion of evil as a natural state in a world encumbered with free will and original sin lies at the core of Burgess's own conceptual framework for the novel and can be seen to dictate its narrative structure.
The importance of Burgess's use of St Augustine's theology in framing A Clockwork Orange, especially when considered in relation to moral panics, is the pre-modern core that informs Augustine's world-view. Looking at his Confessions, arguments for free will are often posed with an Aristotelian concern for logical reasoning: 'When I chose to do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self, and not some other person, who made this act of will, so that I was on the point of understanding that herein lay the cause of my sin. '[4]
'Original sin' directs human action at all times away from God and, implicitly, towards the Devil. The impulse towards evil exists almost from the moment of conception: 'If babies are innocent,' writes Augustine, 'it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength'. [5]
Consciously or not, Burgess's Augustinian framework puts Alex in the position of the Devil in human form, a living embodiment of immortal chaos.
Observing all of this with great pleasure, the Justice Minister exclaims that the conditioning has succeeded. Alex is 'impelled towards good by paradoxically being impelled toward evil,' with the physical symptoms of illness leading him from violent desire to 'a diametrically opposed attitude. ' At this point, the prison chaplain alone stands up and names the problem. 'Choice. The boy has no real choice, has he?. . . He ceases. . , to be a creature capable of moral choice. ' The priest's response momentarily lifts the veil off of the notion of the treatment as a cure, if a treatment at all. Yet, significantly, the Justice Minister quickly brushes aside the distinction between action and intent, behaviour and identity, or even theory and practice. Padre, these are subtleties. We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics; we are concerned only with cutting down crime. And with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. . . He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek. Ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly. Reclamation, joy before the angels of God. The point is that it works!
The novel is set in a future England, where an aggressive gang of young criminals rob, rape, torture, and murder. The gang speaks Nadsat, a private teenage slang, an 'inhuman' language invented by the author (but based on Russian) to emphasize the gang's collective identity and their distance from conventional society. Eventually, their leader Alex is captured and treated, but he begins to produce mechanical, robotic responses to the things that make him human: sex, violence and the arts. The story's main concern is morality and how to deal with transgressions of it, in a tale which satirizes both totalitarian and liberal humanist approaches. The book can be read as a straight horror comedy depicting picaresque villainy or, on a deeper level, as a social satire, a fable of good and evil and the importance of human choice. In 1971 the story was made into a highly successful film by Stanley Kubrick.
