Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Oranges
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Oranges By Stanley Edgar Hyman Anthony Burgess is one of the newest and most talented of the younger British writers. Although he is 45, he has...
...Free to will, even if he wills to sin, Alex is capable of salvation...
...Alex has no interest in women except as objects of violence and rape (the term for the sex act in his vocabulary is characteristically mechanical, "the old in-out-in-out...
...It ends quoting Raj's unfinished manuscript on race relations: "Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration, but unfortunately"—the manscript breaks off...
...In what there is of a plot, the miserable protagonist, Frank Lydgate, a civil servant, struggles with the rival claims of his wife and his native mistress, only to be snatched from both of them by his first wife, a formidable female spider...
...By A Clockwork Orange it has become truly infernal...
...the headhunters upriver shrink a Belgian head with eyeglasses and put Brylcreem on its hair...
...As the hoodlums drive to their "surprise visit," they run over a big snarling toothy thing that screams and squelches, and as they drive back they run over "odd squealing things" all the way...
...Jonny Zhivago, a "Russky" pop singer, is a juke-box hit, and the teenage language sounds very Russian...
...Some of the words are inevitable associations, like "cancer" for "cigarette" or "charlie" for "chaplin," and may even be current English slang...
...The principal activity of the townspeople seems to be the weekend exchange of wives, and their dispirited slogan is "Bit of fun" (prophetically heard by Mr...
...A few simply distort the word: "banda" (band), "grappa" (group), "kot" (cat), "minoota" (minute...
...The book's ironic message is Love...
...everybody "not a child nor with child nor ill" must work...
...It is not quite so hard to decipher as Cretan Linear B, and Alex translates some of it...
...Eventually Alex tries to kill himself by jumping out a window, and as a result of his new injuries he recovers from the conditioning, and again loves violence and music...
...Deprived of his capacity for moral choice by science, Burgess appears to be saying, Alex is only a "clockwork orange," something mechanical that appears organic...
...I found that I could not read the book without compiling a glossary, although some of my translations are approximate...
...The humor derives mostly from incongruity: the staple food in Dunia is Chinese spaghetti...
...The gang then does a burglary job, at which Alex beats an old lady to death...
...Then the reader discovers that some of it is clear from the context: "to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood...
...Other words are intelligible after a second context: When Alex kicks an enemy on the "gulliver" it might be any part of the body, but when a glass of beer is served with a gulliver, "gulliver" is "head...
...A running lecture on free will, first from the prison chaplain, then from the writer, strongly suggests that the book's intention is Christian...
...One thinks of A Passage to India, several decades more sour...
...After his capture, Alex is treated as brutally by the police as he treats his victims...
...That night he fights two members of his gang for leadership and defeats them by cutting their wrists with his razor...
...But perhaps this is to confine Burgess' ironies and ambiguities within simple orthodoxy...
...Hardly anyone still reads, although streets are named Amis Avenue and Priestley Place...
...Although he is 45, he has devoted himself to writing only in the last few years...
...Burgess seems to me the ablest satirist to appear since Evelyn Waugh, and the word "satire" grows increasingly inadequate to his range...
...Devil of a State is less bitter, more like early Waugh...
...Neither book at all prepares one for the savagery of Burgess' new novel...
...Alex always was a clockwork orange, a machine for mechanical violence far below the level of choice, and his dreary socialist England is a giant clockwork orange...
...No part of the female body is ever mentioned except the size of the breasts (it would also interest a Freudian to know that the hoodlums' drink is doped milk...
...It is his high point...
...A streak of grotesque surrealism runs all through Burgess' books...
...Before that he was a composer, and a civil servant in Malaya and Brunei...
...It has a wonderful sound, particularly in abuse, when "grahzny bratchny" sounds infinitely better than "dirty bastard...
...He goes out, picks up two 10-year-old girls, gets them drunk on whisky, injects himself with dope, puts the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth on the phonograph, and rapes both girls, brutally and perversely...
...It was followed the next year by Devil of a State, and now by A Clockwork Orange (Norton, 184 pp., $3.95...
...Coming to literature by way of music, Burgess has a superb ear, and he shows an interest in the texture of language rare among current novelists...
...Alex's only "aesthetic" interest is his passion for symphonic music...
...Other words are onomatopoetic sound imitations: "collocoll" (bell), "razrez" (to tear), "tootles" (slippers...
...He is, he says, "cured...
...there is an opposition and elections, but they re-elect the Government...
...The next day Alex pleads a headache and stays home from school...
...His first novel, The Right to an Answer, was published in England in 1960 and here in 1961...
...There are slight inconsistencies, when Burgess (or Alex) forgets his word and invents another or uses our word, but on the whole he handles his amazing vocabulary in a masterly fashion...
...The endless sadistic violence in the book, unimaginably nasty, mindless and mind-hating, is described by Alex with eloquence and joy, at least until it turns on him...
...It is a moral fable, if a nasty one, and it proceeds with all the patness of moral fable...
...Still others are rhyming slang: "luscious glory" for "hair" (rhyming with "upper story...
...shout or scream), "domy" (domicile), "guff" (guffaw), "pee and em" (pater and mater), "sarky" (sarcastic), "sinny" (cinema...
...Raj, a visiting Ceylonese, as "bitter fun...
...At first the vocabulary seems incomprehensible: "you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches...
...In jail, he kicks a cellmate to death, and his reward is being chosen as the first experiment in conditioned reflex rehabilitation...
...Some are portmanteau words: "chumble" (chatter-mumble), "mounch" (mouth-munch), "shive" (shiv-shave), "skriking" (scratching-striking...
...Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the book is its language...
...A Clockwork Orange is a nightmarish fantasy of a future England where the hoodlums take over after dark...
...Others are produced simply by schoolboy transformations: "appy polly loggy" (apology), "eggiweg" (egg), "interessovat" (to interest), "skolliwoll" (school...
...He lies naked on his bed, surrounded by his stereo speakers, listening to Mozart or Bach while he daydreams of grinding his boot into the faces of men, or raping ripped screaming girls, and at the music's climax he has an orgasm...
...they cap off the evening by stealing a car for the "real kick," "the old surprise visit," which consists of invading the suburban house of a writer, tearing up his manuscript, beating him bloody, holding him while they strip his wife and rape her in turn, then smashing up the furniture and urinating in the fireplace...
...Alex thinks and talks in the "nadsat" (teenage) vocabulary of the future, a remarkable invention by Burgess of several hundred words...
...finally they push the car into a filthy canal and go happily home to bed...
...Its subject is the dubious redemption of one such hoodlum, Alex, told by himself...
...The Right to an Answer is a terribly funny, terribly bitter smack at English life in a provincial city (apparently the author's birthplace, Manchester...
...For two weeks he is injected daily with a drug and shown films of sadistic violence even more horrible than his own, accompanied by symphonic music...
...criminals have to be rehabilitated because all the prison space will soon be needed for politicals...
...At the end of that time he is so conditioned that the thought of doing any violence makes him desperately ill, as does the sound of music...
...Its comic target is the uranium-rich East African state of Dunia (obviously based on the oil-rich Borneo state of Brunei...
...Still others are foreign words slightly distorted: Russian "baboochka" (old woman) and "bolshy" (enormous), Latin "biblio" (library), Chinese "chai" (tea), Italian "gazetta" (newspaper), German "forella" ("trout" as slang for a woman) and "knopka" (button), Yiddish "keeshkas" (guts) and "yahoodies" (Jews), French "sabog" (shoe) and "vaysay" (WC, watercloset...
...In a public display of his cure, he tries to lick the boots of a man hurting him, and he reacts to a beautiful underdressed girl by offering to be her true knight...
...As a most promising writer of the '60s, Anthony Burgess has followed novels that remind us of Forster and Waugh with an eloquent and shocking novel that is quite unique...
...The best of them are images and metaphors, some quite imaginative and poetic: "glazz" (eye), "horrorshow" (beautiful, beautifully), "lewdies" (squares), "pan-handle" (erection), "rabbit" (to work), "sammy" (generous, from "Uncle Sam...
...The society is a limp and listless socialism at some future time when men are on the moon...
...then they catch another gang raping a child and fight them, chaining one boy in the eyeballs and kicking him unconscious, carving another's face with a razor...
...soviet" (an order), "starry" (ancient), "viddy" (to see, from "video"), "yahzick" (tongue, from "say-ah-when-zick...
...Others are amputations: "creech" (from "screech...
...In the opening pages, we see 15-year-old Alex and the three other boys in his gang out for an evening of fun: They catch an old man carrying library books on the street, beat and kick him bloody, smash his false teeth and tear up his books...
...Raj's love has just led him to kill two people and blow his brains out...
...As he flees, with the police coming, one of the boys whose wrist he had cut blinds Alex by chaining him in the eyeballs, and the police catch him...
...and "pretty polly" for "money" (rhyming with "lolly" of current slang...
...then, wearing masks (of Disraeli, Elvis Presley, Henry VIII and Shelley), they rob a shop, beating the middle-aged proprietor and his wife unconscious and undressing the woman for laughs...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 1
