A Clockwork Orange (and other Weirdo Novels)…Explained!

Lord be praised.

(This blog entry kind of got away from me and became very long, so I’ve divided it into sections)

The Art of Fiction

I’ve been reading a non-fiction book called “The Art of Fiction” by David Lodge (a non-fiction book about fiction, groovy). I’ve decided that, despite my overwhelming confidence in the enormity of my brain, there are some things I don’t completely understand. Weirdo novels being one of them (although I do understand weirdos). And it’s unlikely I’ll be taking myself off to college to do a course in literature anytime soon (mainly because I’d have to write…essays…but also, they might not let me in, especially if they read this blog). So I have to work out ‘the weirdo novel’ by myself, and I need some instruction.

“The Art of Fiction” is a collection of articles, written by David Lodge for the Washington Post and the Independent on Sunday, explaining and exploring different styles of literature. Each chapter is titled with a particular literary style or technique, eg magical realism* or intertextuality or unreliable narrator (Effulgent13 would fall into this category). The chapter then begins with an excerpt from a novel that highlights the particular literary style, and is followed by 3 or 4 pages of discussion.

The book gives a good overview of how to read not-so-straight-forward novels for someone who hasn’t studied literature since high school and who maybe didn’t pay as much attention to the teachers as she could have. It’s also given me an appreciation of the history and development of the novel. For example, I was interested to discover that in 18th century novels, the weather, and especially the weather as a reflection of a character’s mood, was hardly mentioned. But by the 19th century, no self-respecting novel would be caught published without at least one: “the weather added what it could of gloom”**. I’m always in two minds about the use of weather as a literary device – sometimes the sky thunders because of excess moisture and ionisation in the atmosphere, sometimes the sky thunders because the God’s are angry and sometimes the sky thunders because Heathcliff is angry. Dark and stormy Heathcliff, as written by Emily Bronte in the brilliantly moody “Wuthering Heights” (and sung about, in an impossible octave, by Kate Bush). I did enjoy Heathcliff’s brooding passion (although I was alarmed by his frequent ejaculations).

But I was extra interested to find an excerpt from “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess under the chapter heading ‘Ideas’. A ‘novel of ideas’ is a novel in which “ideas seem to be the source of the work’s energy, originating and shaping and maintaining its narrative momentum – rather than, say, emotions, moral choice, personal relationships or the mutations of human fortune”. English ideas-novelists (eg Anthony Burgess) tend to use satire or utopian/dystopian fantasy for their explorations; whereas, European ideas-novelists (eg Jean-Paul Satre, Dostoyevsky) tend to have highly articulate characters engaging in philosophical dialogue, without too much action (no car chases, explosions, bank heists etc).

A Clockwork Orange

The excerpt David Lodge uses from “A Clockwork Orange” details how 15-year-old Alex has been 'cured' of his previous enjoyment of beating and raping people (ultraviolence). Alex has undergone the Ludovico Technique. This is an experimental method whereby the subject is injected with nausea inducing drugs, then forced to watch films containing alarmingly realistic, high levels of violence (including street beatings, gang rape and war footage of torture and murder). The debilitating pain and nausea Alex experiences during these sessions eventually become part of his biochemistry, in a Pavlovian-type response. He can no longer witness or, more importantly, participate in, any kind of violence without feeling intensely ill. He also can’t fight back if he is attacked. In the words of the prison chaplain: “He has no real choice…he ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice”. And so he has been dehumanised.

It’s hard to feel sympathy for a character such as Alex, though, given his own record of unsympathetic dehumanizing. And this is where the novel is so strange (to me). Alex completely lacks empathy, and is aesthetically attracted to violence and to other people's suffering (a pretty lethal combination). Without any insight into why he might be like this, Alex isn’t really a human character . He’s a distortion; a bizarre archetype of a self-absorbed, hedonistic, disconnected, impulsive, manipulative, passionate, angry human. An archetype otherwise known as 'teenager'. But, in the case of Alex, the author’s nightmare vision of teenager.

So I’ve now gone and re-read “A Clockwork Orange” with open and more informed eyes. It’s definitely a thought-provoking read. At times I still found the style (first-person nadsat*** language) and content (some disturbing violence) difficult to handle. But, mostly, I was able to get into the flow of the language and be objective about the violence. I still found one scene extremely distressing though; when Alex rapes two 10-year-old girls. I read through it very quickly. Interestingly (disturbingly?), in the film version of “A Clockwork Orange”, Stanley Kubrick replaced the child-rape scene with a consensual threesome between adults (Alex being portrayed by 28-year-old Malcolm McDowell and the two "girls" being about 18-years-old). I wonder if the film would’ve reached the same level of cult status if this scene had been shown as it was written in the book.

Throughout the novel there are explorations of social/political/cultural habitats, group mentality and dynamics, survival instincts, social engineering, economics. And entwined into all these themes is the perpetration of violence to get desired results – by Alex, by Alex’s gang, by police, by scientists, by governments and by Alex’s victims. But the novel doesn’t offer solutions or attempt to understand the psychology of violence, that’s not its intention. Instead, it challenges the reader’s understanding of society by showing brutal extremes of that society.

(PS: I didn’t get much of this from watching the film, which, in my opinion, crossed over into sensationalism).

And finally:

I seem to be re-reading (and, hopefully, better understanding) most of the books from my Incomprehensibles list – the books that I own, at least. “Heart of Darkness”, “The Sound and the Fury” and “Paradise Lost” all came from the library. Of course, I could take them out again, and it’s not out of the question that I might try reading ”Heart of Darkness” again. But “Paradise Lost”, which is an epic poem (who came up with this crazy literary style?), really annoyed me, not so much for its style but for its continuation of the theme ‘woman is conniving-ruthless inferior and man is feeble-innocent favourite, helpless in the face of her ambition-driven seductive wiles (read vagina)’, espoused and popularized by religious doctrine. And, as for “The Sound and the Fury” and my interest in its ‘southern gothic’ style, I’ve since realized that I’ve already read the masterpiece of southern gothic - “Flowers in the Attic” by Virginia Andrews.


* I know it’s called magic realism, I just think 'magical' sounds more, uh, magical

**From “Emma” by Jane Austen

***’Nadsat’ is the name given to the dialect spoken by the teenagers in the novel. It was created by Anthony Burgess, from a combination of cockney rhyming slang and Russian. As the book was published in 1962, during the era of cold war and Communist paranoia, it's possible that the author was equating scary teenagers with scary communists. And Anthony Burgess was a Catholic, and Catholic’s are notoriously terrified of communists (eg the DLP (Australian) or Joseph McCarthy). [As a lapsed Catholic, I no longer fear the 'reds under the bed', however the right-wing conservative in the cupboard scares the shit out of me.]