Future Schlock
RIEFF, DAVID
Future Schlock 1985 By Anthony Burgess Little, Brown. 272pp. $8.95. Reviewed by David Rieff Like the Trollopes, mereet fits, Anthony Burgess has come to resemble a 19th-century cottage industry....
...Big Brother, Ingsoc, and the rest were, in Burgess' view, hopelessly timebound conceptions, exaggerated projections of what Orwell saw around him...
...Orwell was not fundamentally concerned with the details of life under Big Brother...
...that is his special privilege...
...Clockwork is a brilliant tour de force because, for once, the author marshaled all his linguistic inventiveness to the service of his art-rather than simply to make a point or to exhibit his cleverness...
...What Burgess does not seem willing, or able, to face is that notions which may appear crude to him have their raison d'etre in history and in politics...
...One, her travel book about America, is still readable today...
...Each work now is a struggle that virtually demands to be lingered over...
...Thus, the book in toto is a kind of polemic that Burgess has chosen to express in a variety of different prose forms...
...In it, he succeeded in transforming his oft-expressed anxieties about the future into an inspired work...
...That is a great pity since Burgess, a Joyce scholar and a writer almost painfully attuned to the possibilities of language in modern fiction, is superbly equipped to undertake a really major work...
...It is a chaotic place, brimming with Arabs, and utterly dominated by the trade unions (England here is also known as Tucland, from the TUC or Trades Union Congress...
...To this end, he begins with a precis of Orwell's 1984, follows with a critique, and concludes with a rambling "interview" that enables him to hold forth on the real nature of totalitarianism, the future, the human prospect...
...Culture, naturally, no longer exists and the masses speak a state-inspired bastard tongue called "Workers' English," abbreviated as WE (take that, Zamyatin...
...But it would be a mistake to attribute the artistic success of the book to its theme: It is possible to disagree totally with Burgess' assertions and still admire his achievement...
...He's wrong...
...In her time, you simply wrote one novel, finished it, and immediately began another...
...Poor Jones ends up in a rehabilitation camp where, try as he will to keep the past alive, it is all for nought...
...Unlike sadness or horror or foreboding or despair, indignation-particularly in sclerotic form-is a rather callow emotion...
...His odyssey through the underworld of Tucland comprises the bulk of 1985...
...Burgess' cleverness is not enough to carry him through what is, by any reckoning, a project demanding a great deal of thought, and enormous sophistication and, above all, sobriety...
...It is as if he feels he is so clever, so on top of things, he need not exert himself...
...If he did understand, surely he could never have taken the themes he handled so well in Clockwork and repeated them in 1985 with no authority and little passion...
...He does not simply write, he produces...
...His latest novel, 1985, is the 19th book of fiction in a body of work that also includes nine volumes of literary criticism, three books of verse, a travel guide, and a children's book...
...Burgess is said to dislike his best book, suggesting that he has completely failed to understand what distinguishes it from other serious Utopian satires (including those he himself has written), or from the crude efforts of the science fiction writers...
...Burgess, who understands almost nothing about politics, dismisses or distorts the real nature of Orwell's thrust and proposes instead a vision of the future that is little more than cranky union-baiting...
...And while 1985 is rich in indignation it is poor in everything else...
...The artist can fulminate to his heart's content without endangering his enterprise...
...Sandwiched rather tightly between these effulgences is the work of fiction (more a novella than a novel) called 1985...
...In short, Burgess faults Orwell for believing that the individual consciousness had the slightest chance of surviving the pressures brought against it by state-controlled technologies...
...Few serious contemporary writers have been so prolific...
...He has found an outlet for his fears and his spleen...
...Orwell, he contends, drew too heavily on what he knew of Nazi Germany, on the prevailing conditions in immediate postwar Britain, and on the political situation of that period...
...he was trying to depict the nature and danger of totalitarianism...
...Burgess believes that Orwell's vision of the future, as expressed in 1984, does not even come near to being an accurate portrayal of what real totalitarianism might be like...
...Burgess is a natural writer, if such an animal exists, but he is certainly no struggler...
...The only esthetes left are the omnipresent young hooligans who pepper their conversation with Latin phrases...
...She wrote 50 books that way...
...Burgess has written only one first-rate novel: A Clockwork Orange...
...Trol-lope would have been at some pains to understand...
...And the book sang...
...None of this would have been required to produce an interesting novel, as witness A Clockwork Orange...
...In place of Orwell's Winston Smith we are given Bev Jones and taken on a revised tour of late 20th-century Britain...
...In contrast to Burgess, he really knew something about politics, about the totalitarian impulse and the totalitarian temptation...
...Moreover, Burgess' criticisms of Orwell for having extrapolated too much from his own historical situation make very curious reading when one realizes that the anarchic Britain painted so lovingly in 1985 is itself little more than an exaggerated rendering of a certain kind of Tory rhetoric-the "too many wogs, too much union power, too much crime, the country is going to the dogs" syndrome-that is the stuff of after-dinner conversation in the better appointed London homes...
...Unfortunately, 1985 is merely the most recent confirmation that A Clockwork Orange, far from marking a turning point in Burgess' career, was one of those happy accidents where a writer who has been his own worst enemy succeeds briefly in giving full voice to his talent...
...One has to be pretty far removed from the realities of present day Britain to make such a fatuous remark...
...Interestingly, at one point in 1985 Burgess remarks that "there is no such thing as the proletariat...
...To illustrate, Burgess presents 1985...
...In the 20th century, most authors have been both more and less ambitious...
...Bev Jones rebels against this system after his wife dies in a fire (the firemen were, of course, on strike...
...The future, he argues, will be both more anarchic and more repressive than Orwell would have imagined, since Orwell had no notion of what Burgess calls "the scientific takeover of the free mind...
...Not only is Burgess guilty of precisely what he attacks Orwell for, but in his case the offense is more serious...
...His attempt to outdo 1984 is the undoing of 1985...
...Without a union card he is an unperson: The true totalitarian state will brook no resistance, nor will any be successful...
...As the title indicates, the book is in part Burgess' attempt to correct and amend the totalitarian prospect as put forward by George Orwell...
...The public services have ceased functioning, everyone is on strike, crime is rampant...
...it assumes-during the creation, at least-a kind of centrality Mrs...
...But in seeking to apply the artist's freedom outside of its realm, Burgess only serves to demonstrate how widely the laws and rights of art have diverged, in the modern period, from the laws and obligations of political and social discourse...
...Throughout his career he has been all too content to let his undeniable talents as a wordsmith, and his not inconsiderable erudition, carry more than their fair share of the artistic burden...
...ultimately, however, he does not really make much of an argument...
...His apparent unwillingness to do this-to take the time to do it-is the worst kind of arrogance...
...1985 has its share of querulous or timely comments on the present and the future, yet stripped of artfulness it makes for rather thin reading...
...in a sense, Burgess is a throwback to that heroic age when, with the editor pounding on the front door and the creditors howling out back, the author was accustomed (indeed, was constrained) to write and write and write...
...Science fiction writers have been cranking out similar narratives for a good many years now?think of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451...
...There is nothing particularly novel about all this...
...The argument, it must be emphasized, is practically the same one made in A Clockwork Orange, but that book did not demand to be judged as an argument...
...Stripped of his individualism, he dies...
Vol. 61 • November 1978 • No. 23
