| A Clockwork Orange | |
Dust jacket from the first edition |
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| Author | Anthony Burgess |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English, Nadsat |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel, Satire |
| Publisher | William Heinemann (UK) |
| Publication date | 1962 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio Book (Cassette, CD) |
| Pages | 192 pages (Hardback edition) & 176 pages (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | [[Special:Booksources/ISBN 0-434-09800-0 (Hardback edition) & ISBN 0-14-118260-1 (Paperback edition UK)|ISBN 0-434-09800-0 (Hardback edition) & ISBN 0-14-118260-1 (Paperback edition UK)]] |
A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess. It tells the dystopian story of a teenage boy Alex, his violent and unlawful lifestyle, the effort of the state to reform him and henceforth the consequences.
The novel also contains an experiment in language: Burgess creates a new speech that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future.
Contents |
Alex, a young teenager living in a socialistic near-future England, leads his gang on nightly orgies of random, opportunistic violence. Alex's friends ("droogs" in the novel's Anglo-Russified slang) are Dim, a slow-witted bruiser who is the gang's muscle, Georgie and Pete. Alex, quick-witted and often disconcertingly funny, is clearly the smartest of the group and even somewhat cultured.
The novel opens with the thugs hunkered down in their favourite hangout, the Korova Milkbar, where they drink drugged milk and hype themselves for the night's mayhem. They beat up a scholar walking home from the library, stamp a panhandling derelict, scuffle with a rival gang led by Billyboy, rob a newsstand and leave its owners unconscious, steal a car and then go joyriding in the countryside. In a harrowing sequence, the droogs force their way into an isolated cottage and maul the young couple living there, beating the husband, before taking turns raping his wife. After ditching the car, the droogs head back to the Korova, where it becomes clear that Dim and Georgie are restive under Alex's domination of the gang. Alex goes home to his dreary flat and plays thunderously loud classical music while bringing himself to climax with fantasies of even more orgiastic violence.
Alex does not go to school the next morning and is visited by P.R. Deltoid, "(his) post-corrective advisor," assigned to him after unspecified past acts of juvenile delinquency. While visiting his favourite music shop, Alex picks up a pair of young girls, buys them lunch, then takes them back to his parents' flat, where he gets them drunk and, after dosing himself with music and an unspecified drug, repeatedly rapes them. (Stanley Kubrick's film turns this into a consensual orgy -- one of several changes that serve to make the filmic Alex less appalling than the literary one.) The girls leave, threatening to call the police, as Alex falls asleep.
Alex wakes up later and has a revealing chat with his ineffectual parents, who are suspicious of his claims about having a night job but too intimidated to press the issue. Arriving late to meet with the droogs, who have already pumped themselves up with "the old knifey moloko" (i.e., drugged milk), Alex is at a disadvantage. Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, demanding that they pull a "mansized" job by robbing a wealthy old woman who lives alone with her cats. Alex quells the rebellion by slashing Dim and Georgie in a knife fight, then in a show of generosity takes them to a bar for some fortifying drinks. Georgie and Dim are ready to call it a night, but Alex bullies them into proceeding with the burglary. Alex enters through a second-floor window and, after a farcical struggle, knocks the old woman unconscious. When he tries to flee, Dim attacks him and the droogs leave Alex incapacitated in the doorway as they run off. Alex is roughed up by the police, but the worst is yet to come -- the next day, it turns out that the woman has died and Alex will be charged with murder.
After enduring prison life for 2 years, Alex gets a job as an assistant to the prison chaplain. He feigns an interest in religion, and amuses himself by reading the Bible for its lurid descriptions of "the old yahoodies (Jews) tolchocking (beating) each other", imagining himself taking part in "the nailing-in" (the Crucifixion) of Jesus. Alex learns of his ex-droog Georgie's death by an intended victim during a botched robbery. He also hears about an experimental rehabilitation programme called "the Ludovico technique", which promises that the prisoner will be released upon completion of the two-week treatment and, as a result, will not commit any crimes afterwards. The prison chaplain warns against it, arguing that moral choice is necessary to humanity -- a theme introduced earlier during the home invasion scene, when Alex reads a passage from the victimised husband's work in progress.
After helping to kill (although accidentally) a fellow prisoner in his cell, Alex is selected to become the subject in the first full-scale trial of the Ludovico Technique. The technique itself is a form of aversion therapy, in which Alex is given a drug that induces extreme nausea while being forced to watch graphically violent films for two weeks. Strapped into a seat before a large screen, Alex is forced to watch an unrelenting series of violent acts. During the sessions, Alex begins to realise that not only the violent acts but the music on the soundtrack is triggering his nausea attacks. (Kubrick's film version, curiously, narrows this down so that only Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has this effect.) Alex pleads with the supervising doctors to remove the music, crying that it is a sin to take away his love of music, but they refuse, saying that it is for his own good and that the music may be the "punishment element." By the end of the treatment, Alex is unable to listen to any classical music -- let alone the Ninth Symphony by his beloved "Ludwig van" -- without incapacitating nausea and distress.
A few weeks later, Alex is presented to an audience of prison and government officials as a successfully rehabilitated inmate and potential member of society. Alex's conditioning makes him unable to defend himself against a pummeling bully (who forces Alex to lick his boots) and cripples him with nausea when the sight of a scantily clad woman arouses his predatory sexual impulses. The prison chaplain rises to denounce the treatment and accuses the state of stripping Alex of the ability to choose good over evil. "Padre, these are subtleties," a government official replies. "The point is that it works." And so Alex is released into society.
The third part of the novel centres on Alex's life after he is released from prison. Alex encounters many of his former victims, all of whom seek revenge upon him. He finds himself powerless to defend himself against them, as the Ludovico treatment leaves him ill when he attempts violence. Alex returns home, joyful at the thought of starting afresh. However, he is unpleasantly surprised by the discovery that his parents have rented out his room to a lodger named Joe, essentially "replacing" their son. With no place to go, stripped of the ability to fight back, Alex despondently wanders London. He stops at the Korova Milk Bar and drinks euphoria-inducing milk, something he has never done before, and then to the music store for some classical music. However, in an unintended side effect, the technique has also rendered him incapable of listening to his beloved classical music, and he runs screaming from the store. Alex decides to commit suicide, but is unable to because the technique prevents him from committing any act of violence, including against himself. He wanders into the public library, only to be quickly recognised by the elderly librarian whom he had beaten up with his droogs in chapter one. With his friends, the librarian attacks and beats Alex. The police - called by the librarian - turn out to be his old ex-'droog' Dim, and old arch-enemy Billy Boy. Taking advantage of their positions, they take Alex to the town's edge, beat him and leave him for dead.
Alex wanders in a daze through the countryside until he collapses at the door of an isolated cottage. Too late he realises this is the home he and his droogs invaded at the start of the book. He is taken in by Fred Alexander, the husband of the woman the droogs gang-raped; Mr. Alexander doesn't recognise Alex because the droogs were wearing masks during the assault. We learn that Mrs. Alexander died of the injuries inflicted during the gang-rape, and her husband has decided to continue "where her fragrant memory persists" despite the horrid memories. Mr. Alexander recognises Alex from newspaper publicity about the behaviour-mod treatment, and sees an opportunity to use him as a political weapon by turning him into a poster child for the victims of fascism. Alex has been careless with words during his time in Mr. Alexander's care, and the writer begins to suspect they have met before. One of his political activist friends takes Alex aside and puts the question to him bluntly: Alex, cornered, makes a non-denial denial by saying "Lord knows I've suffered." "We'll speak no more of it," the friend assures him, but later on Alex is taken to another house, locked into a high room and tormented with classical music, triggering the maddening effect of the Ludovico treatment. Driven to insanity by the music, Alex jumps from his bedroom window in an attempt to end his life.
Alex wakes up in a hospital, where he learns that the government, trying to reverse the bad publicity it incurred in the wake of Alex's suicide attempt, has reversed the effects of the Ludovico treatment. As a bonus, the vengeful Mr. Alexander has been incarcerated in a mental institution, "for his own protection, and for yours," Alex is told. In return for agreeing to play ball with the powers that be, Alex is promised a cushy job at high salary. His parents take him back in, and Alex happily ponders returning to his life of ultra-violence.
In the final chapter, Alex finds himself half-heartedly preparing for yet another night of crime with a new trio of droogs. After watching them beat an innocent stranger walking home with a newspaper, he begins to feel bored with his life of violence. He abandons the gang then has a chance encounter with Pete, an old droog who has reformed and married. Alex begins contemplating giving up crime himself to become a productive member of society and start a family of his own, while reflecting on the notion that his own children will be just as destructive-- if not more so-- than he himself.
The book is divided into three parts, each containing seven chapters. Burgess has stated that the total of 21 chapters was an intentional nod to the age of 21 being recognised as a milestone in human maturation. The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986.[2] In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he'd first brought the book to an American publisher, he'd been told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways and resolves to turn his life around (a slow-ripening but classic moment of metanoia; the moment at which one's protagonist realises that everything he thought he knew, was wrong).
At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S. version, so that the tale would end on a note of bleak despair, with young Alex succumbing to his darker nature; an ending which the publisher insisted would be 'more realistic' and appealing to a U.S. audience. The film adaptation, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on this "badly flawed" (Burgess' words, ibid.) American edition of the book. Kubrick claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, but that he certainly had never given any serious consideration to using it.
Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange".¹ Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human (orang, Malay for "man").
Burgess wrote in introduction to the 1986 edition, titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state."
In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"², Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's positively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.
A Clockwork Orange is written using the first person perspective of a seemingly biased and unreliable narrator. The protagonist, Alex, never justifies his actions in the narration, giving a sense that he is somewhat sincere; a narrator who, as unlikeable as he may attempt to seem, evokes pity from the reader through the telling of his unending suffering, and later through his realisation that the cycle will never end. Alex's perspective is effective in that the way that he describes events is easy to relate to, even if the situations themselves are not. His narration includes many uncommon words and a slang called Nadsat, which are apparently common to the speech of the youth subculture in the novel.
The book, narrated by Alex, contains many words in a slang argot which Burgess invented for the book, called Nadsat. It is a mix of modified Slavic words, Polari, Cockney rhyming slang, derived Russian (like "baboochka"), and words invented by Burgess himself. For instance, these terms have the following meanings in Russian - 'droog' means 'friend' ; 'korova' means 'cow'; 'golova' (gulliver) means 'head'; 'malchick' or 'malchickiwick' means 'boy'; 'soomka' means 'sack' or 'bag'; 'Bog' means 'God'; 'khorosho' means good, 'prestoopnick' means 'criminal'; 'rooker' is 'hand', 'cal' is 'crap', 'vec' is 'old man'; 'litso' is 'face'; and so on. One of Alex's doctors explains the language to a colleague as "Odd bits of old rhyming slang; a bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav propaganda. Subliminal penetration." Some words are not derived from anything, but merely easy to guess, e.g. 'in-out, in-out' or 'the old in-out' means sexual intercourse. 'Cutter', however, means money, because 'cutter' rhymes with 'bread-and-butter'; this is genuine Cockney rhyming slang, which is intended to be impenetrable to outsiders (especially eavesdropping policemen).
In the first edition of the book, no key was provided, and the reader was left to interpret the meaning from the context. In his appendix to the restored edition, Burgess explained that the slang would keep the book from seeming dated, and served to muffle "the raw response of pornography" from the acts of violence. Furthermore, in a novel where a form of brainwashing plays a role, the narrative itself brainwashes the reader into understanding Nadsat.
Droogism refers to the commission of a crime for the sole sake of committing a crime, without material gain or benefit; robbery and kidnapping with the intent to demand ransom, for example, do not qualify as droogisms, as they are committed with the intention of some sort of material benefit for the perpetrator.
The term "Ultraviolence", referring to excessive and/or unjustified violence, was coined by Burgess in the book, which includes the phrase "do the ultra-violent." The term's association with aesthetic violence has led to its use in the media.[3][4][5][6]
Movement 1 of the symphonic suite Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was featured in the movie when the main character Alex DeLarge imagines himself whipping Jesus. Movement 2 was used when Alex imagines himself sleeping with the handmaidens of his wife.
The novel was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.[8]
The best known adaptation of the novel to other forms is the 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick.
A 1965 film by Andy Warhol entitled Vinyl was an adaptation of Burgess' novel.
Excerpts from the first two chapters of the novel were dramatised and broadcast on BBC TV's programme Tonight, 1962 (now lost, believed wiped).
After Kubrick's film was released, Burgess wrote a Clockwork Orange stage play. In it, Dr. Branom defects from the psychiatric clinic when he grasps that the aversion treatment has destroyed Alex's ability to enjoy music. The play restores the novel's original ending. One of Alex's early victims, a bearded trumpeter who plays "Singin' in the Rain" at the Korova milkbar, is not modeled on Kubrick.
In 1988, a German adaptation of Clockwork Orange at the intimate theater of Bad Godesberg featured a musical score by the German punk rock band Die Toten Hosen which, combined with orchestral clips of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and "other dirty melodies" (so stated by the subtitle), was released on the album Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau. The track Hier kommt Alex became one of the band's signature songs.
In 2001, UNI Theatre (Mississauga, Ontario) presented the Canadian premiere of the play under the direction of Terry Costa. [9]
In 2002, Godlight Theatre Company presented the New York Premiere adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 'A Clockwork Orange' at Manhattan Theatre Source. The production went on to play at the SoHo Playhouse (2002), Ensemble Studio Theatre (2004), 59E59 Theaters (2005) and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2005). While at Edinburgh, the production received rave reviews from the press while playing to sold-out audiences. The production was directed by Godlight's Artistic Director, Joe Tantalo.
In 2003, Los Angeles director Brad Mays[10] and the ARK Theatre Company[11] staged a controversial multi-media adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange," which was named "Pick Of The Week" by the LA Weekly and nominated for three 2004 LA Weekly Theatre Awards: Best Direction, Best Revival Production, and Best Actress.[12] Vanessa Claire Smith won Best Actress for her androgynous portrayal of Alex.[13]This inventive production utilised three separate video streams outputted to seven onstage video monitors - six 19 inch and one 40 inch. In order to preserve the first-person narrative of the book, a pre-recorded video stream of Alex, "your humble narrator," was projected onto the 40 inch monitor,[14] thereby freeing the onstage character during passages which would have been awkward or impossible to sustain in the breaking of the fourth wall.[15]According to the LA Weekly, "Mays' visceral, fast-paced multimedia show brings into stark relief the Freudian struggle between the primal self and the civilised self for domination over the human spirit. The director deftly conveys the horror of violence by subjecting the audience to an onslaught of images of war, torture and hardcore porn projected on seven TV screens."[16]
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