Sheer Destruction

A Clockwork Orange a novel by Anthony Burgess.  Norton.  213 pp.  $15.95.  *****

In the early seventies, there were three movies that took violence in cinema to a whole new level: The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange.  My wife and I saw Straw Dogs, which portrayed Dustin Hoffman as a confirmed pacifist who was dealing with a home invasion and discovered he had an inner warrior after all.  That movie was so extreme, and such an assault on the senses, that we weren’t tempted by the other two.  A Clockwork Orange, in particular, had a reputation for shocking and gratuitous violence.  I skipped the movie, and though I soon became a Burgess fan (his short early novels were perfect for a new teacher who didn’t have a lot of reading time), I didn’t read this most famous of his novels because of the violence, also because I read somewhere that the thugs in this novel had a secret language all their own, and that the book was slow going.  Burgess was, among other things, a startlingly inventive linguist.

I would have to say that A Clockwork Orange is a linguistic marvel, a book in which you often don’t know what the words mean, but the syntax lets you know what’s going on.  Burgess relates in his second memoir, I Had the Time, that he had begun to study Russian for a trip he and his wife were making, and that language inspired him in inventing the language for this gang of thugs, who call themselves droogsb.  The interesting thing is that the language, because it’s all a little vague, has the effect of cushioning the violence; you don’t quite know what it’s saying, or it at least takes you a while to figure it out, so it isn’t as vivid as plain English would be.  Almost any paragraph serves as an example.

“So we scatted out into the big winter nochy and walked down Marghanita Boulevard and then turned into Boothby Avenue, and there we found what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with.  There was a doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open to the cold nochy air. . . .  He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us like that . . .”

I would have to say, though I was young once, and though I knew a few rough characters, at least by reputation, I don’t get the motivation of these young men, especially in the first two chapters.  They seem just to be destroying things for the sake of destruction, beating people nearly to death not for any good reason—not to steal money for instance, though they do that—but just for the sake of doing it.  And though I understand the anger of young adolescents—I was angry myself, for various specific reasons—I don’t get this.

The first night I read the novel—just two chapters, as I remember—it was total mayhem, and as much as I admired the writing, I wasn’t sure I could continue.  I had to read something else for a while before I went to bed.  But by the third chapter, our protagonist and narrator, Alex, had gone back home, where he led a half-normal life (though his parents often wondered what he was up to) and even spoke the King’s English, which he could do.  And not too much further on, he and his buddies did a home invasion—they seemed to be trying to up the ante—and went a little further than they’d intended.  The old lady who lived in the house died, and Alex, the only droog left behind, was charged with the killing.

The story then takes up the criminal justice and prison system, which seem about as bad and perilous as they are everywhere.  Alex manages to hold things together in prison for a couple of years, but he finally gets the opportunity to get out if he will undergo a special kind of conversion therapy.  Without especially knowing what that is, he agrees.  And that leads us to the novel’s moral heart.

I thought they were going to give him a lobotomy, but the book is classified as science fiction, and a doctor has invented a new form of therapy in which he injects the patient with some unknown substance, then forces him to watch scenes of violence, very much like those Alex has been committing.  He can’t look away; he’s strapped into a chair, and his eyelids are forced open (?).  He undergoes this therapy day after day, for many hours a day, while the doctors test his reaction.  In time he is released, and we see how the therapy has worked.

The moral question—and it’s a good one—is whether the state has the right to so alter a human’s psyche that he, in effect, no longer has free will.  He can’t be violent because it’s too painful.  That means he can’t fight back when he’s attacked.  It also seems that he feels pain at strong emotions of any kind.  Alex becomes a test case, with the two sides arguing the case, and winds up becoming a political football.  He also runs into some of the former droogs, who are now involved in, you guessed it, law enforcement.  They haven’t really changed; they’re just on the other side of the law.

The British version of this novel—as Burgess explains in a forward to this later edition—had 21 chapters, the American just twenty.  That 21^st chapter, which Burgess considered vital to the story, takes Alex into an adulthood in which he has settled into his new self.  That’s the ending that Burgess intended, but the Americans apparently preferred to leave things ambivalent.  I agree that the twenty-first chapter is vital.  And though Burgess wrote the book in that first year of breathless writing, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, it is among his best.  The man had a stupendous verbal gift.