What sets A Clockwork Orange apart in popular fiction is the sheer amount of senseless violence, blunt to the point of offence, which participates in it. Burgess was perhaps quite aware of the inevitable shift in social consequences with the influx of youth’s increasing debauchery. Perhaps he took some inspiration from across the Atlantic where America found itself in threat of the biggest organized crime sect it had ever witnessed: the young motorcycle outlaws: The Hell’s Angels. In Britain, it was quite impossible for motorcycle gangs to efficiently function in the fringes of the isle’s overflowing traffic so what emerged as a form of rebellion was the increased clashes between groups of teenagers who found their differences in ideology, fashion and music (and more recently, football). Often these parameters were not taken into consideration at all; the sole purpose of violence being the simple presence of an Enemy; anyone out of one’s collective and on the other side; a victim of the increasing Us and Them mentality.
What sets Alex apart from his popular counterparts in fiction like the All-American-kid-next-door Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye and the All-American-kid-next-door-in-Texas Vernon God Little of Booker prize winning Vernon God Little is that he is, unlike his coming-of-age doppelgangers, admittedly-and-unashamedly violent and their predecessor.
Alex is the poster-boy for British middle-class youth; informed, opinionated, privileged and…bored. One only need take a stroll down the towns now to see ‘piss-heads’, drug-fiends and football hooligans claim the concrete jungles for their own silly battles. Alex, welcomes us into a similar grim reality that him and his ‘droogs’ – Pete, Dim (the dim one) and George – have stitched, a reality where this band of criminals plays to their own tune purely for their own enjoyment, roaming the streets at night and attacking vulnerable preys. Their wrath is even-handed and sees no difference between rich intellectuals and babbling bums; it is mainly to seek entertainment and finance after a visit to the Korova Milk Bar which quenches the physical and mental thirst of its customers with drug laced ‘milk-plus’ (it is for the same reason why the current editions of the books have a glass of milk on the cover). Further into the night, the group battles a rival group and assaulting them, set out speeding in a stolen car until they reach a house named HOME (‘a gloomy sort of name’) in the suburbs, which is peopled by a writer and his wife, bringing along with it a mayhem that finds climax in the rape of the wife and the destruction of the home.
By the time most readers reach this part of the story, they are overwhelmed by the mindless violence, or as Alex calls it ‘ultraviolence’, and have set a dark corner in Hell for the band of hooligans, robbers and rapists. However, it is here that the story actually begins in its pursuit of subject matter. Right from the start, it is noticeable that Alex is not an ordinary boy and stands out from his gang. The very poetry of his Nadsat language and the simple explanations provided by his nihilistic mind have us observe him from a keener eye. He also addresses us as ‘O my brothers’, throughout his narration which sort of brings us closer to him than most narrators. He completely agrees right from the start that what he does is intellectually wrong, saying: ‘you can’t have society with everyone behaving in my manner of the night’, but, he simply and beautifully adds as well that he would never interfere with the desire of others to be good; it’s just that he goes to ‘the other shop’.
This articulacy of his violent nature is puzzling to us until he reaches home. For when he comes home to his apartment that he shares with his parents (‘pee and em’), we finally see that what balms such a troubled and cruel soul: music. Yes, for our Alex is a connoisseur of classical music, especially Beethoven, whom he calls, ‘lovely, lovely, Ludwig van’. To see this most malicious of characters, going to bed listening to classic music is a highlight of the tale - ‘Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!’ - These pictures of slaughter and torture arouse him and perhaps satirize the Nazis who could emotionally listen to a Schubert lieder after a hard day’s genocide.
Eventually a tussle over power (‘power, power, everyone wants power’) between the intelligent Alex and his droogs, sees his conniving pals get the best of him after setting him up for arrest at the site of one of the gang’s crimes which subsequently sees Alex sent to prison for murder.
Alex’s sudden arrival at prison makes him go milder due to confinement. However, his friendship with the Prison Chaplain sees him benefit when the ominous new government, in order to cut down crime and the place it occupies in the populated prison system, decides to pick a candidate for an experiment that it believes will cure criminals and erase the need for prisons. By a stroke of luck and some lobbying, Alex is picked as this candidate who the Interior minister thinks to make a good example of, him being young and wicked.
This experiment carried on by the government, the ‘Ludovico Treatment’, turns out to be an aversion therapy where Alex is subjected to much discomfort as he is drugged and strapped to watch hours and hours of violence and rape on a giant screen. He can’t even close his eyes as his eyelids are taken care of as well. Even a seasoned criminal as Alex is eventually sickened by the mindless tactics of those in the movies and those playing it. This excessive exposure to violence is followed by a nauseating drug so that Alex will associate any thoughts of violence with sickness and grow sick at the thought of hurting anyone in the future. To top it off, the soundtrack to these sadistic movies is the music of Beethoven, the one thing that Alex liked the most in the world and which now he cannot listen to without getting sick. After some demonstrations of his new nature to the government and press, Alex is set free again into the world.
Once out, freedom comes at quite a price for Alex as he finds himself rejected by his parents, chased by his past victims of the ultraviolence days and beaten by policemen who turn out to be none other than Dim and Billy-boy from the rival gang. Just when we think that poor Alex has had enough, karma makes another somersault and takes the miserable Alex to the HOME of one of his previous victims, F.D. Alexander, the writer (curiously F.D. was also working on a novel called A Clockwork Orange which Alex had earlier destroyed). On account of his wearing a mask on the first visit, the writer only recognizes Alex as the boy from the papers and as the subject of the ‘Ludovico Treatment’. He alerts some of his friends who are against the government and who want to prove that state-oriented and funded conditioning should not be supported as it erases freewill. They are unaware of the sins of Alex in the very same house but perhaps this gives karma a more shamanic quality in what happens next.
In order to prove the desolation of a conditioned being, these people lock Alex in a room and blast some Beethoven at full volume so that they can get some of the reactions they’d been reading about. The piece produces the same nauseating effects on Alex as in the rehabilitation experiment and unable to stand any more of his physical pain and mental anguish, he jumps out of the window to kill himself. However, he survives the fall with a lot of broken bones and wakes up in the hospital to learn that his tormentors have been prosecuted and the ‘Ludovico Treatment’ reversed. The cherry on the pie is that the Internal Minister comes down in person to tell him that he can have a good job with a high salary and upon leaving gifts Alex a huge stereo-system on which he can listen to sweet Beethoven, without any side effects. As the cheeky Alex puts it, ‘I was cured, all right.’
(Here the story is supposed to have ended in the popular American edition and also in the famed Stanley Kubrick movie of the same title, implying that Alex would return to his delinquent ways. However, in the original British version that Burgess wrote, there were 21 chapters which was symbolic of the accepted age of maturity in Britain and the following paragraph discusses the original last chapter which was omitted and which is crucial to complete the saga as the author intended.)
The actual final chapter is resonant of the preceding ones. We see that Alex has found a new gang and relapsed into his old lifestyle. On the particular night of question, however, he doesn’t want to join the gang and goes for a walk on his own instead. He confesses that the whole lifestyle of ultraviolence is tiresome and lately to him it appears rather meaningless. Of all things under the Sun, the Alex of before (the Ludovico treatment now reversed) surprises us by acknowledging hidden parenting longings. And further into the night, when he walks into a café, he bumps into the last of his old gang members, Pete (George being dead). To much of Alex’s bewilderment, Pete is not only a respectable member of society but also married. After this bizarre meeting, Alex decides that it is time he too wrote a new chapter of his life and got domesticated. He renounces violence but also concludes that his early behaviour was only the unavoidable heat of youth acting up and that this has always been the manner of the world and will go on forever, perhaps swallowing in itself his own unborn son. And here he urges us to remember him as a friend who had taken us for a ride along his uncanny life, ending, ‘Amen. And all that cal.’ (all that shit).
The reason this dystopian novel has etched itself on the world literature like it has is simply because it asks a very important question amidst all of its seeming ultra-violence and chaos – How far can freewill go? Alex is given a choice to be cured of his evil nature but it only gets him in hot soup and once the treatment is reversed he surprisingly goes back to being good by his own choice. It goes on to show that freewill is a dangerous weapon but it is a weapon that man must possess liberally (hence, freewill), even if it means that society will pay. This aestheticization of violence by the author only dissects society for what it is: clockwork.The title of the novel was a reference to an old cockney expression, ‘as queer as a clockwork orange’ which Burgess thought could also refer to a mechanically responsive person.
Alex is a clockwork toy in the hands of his rehabilitators because his freewill is taken away from him and he is tuned to the beliefs of others which go against his own, however wrong. As Anthony Burgess himself commented, ‘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 the God or the Devil.’ His own beliefs find a voice in the novel through the prison Chaplain when he says that, ‘If a man cannot choose, he ceases to be man.’
Fortunately, the kidnapping of Alex’s freewill and moral choice is tragic but brief. As soon as he becomes a real person with real choices, he goes on to do the right thing unlike a Pavlovrian dog. People who criticize the novel for its sadism and negative tone, perhaps forget that since the book was published in 1962 – the world has only turned up its volume of carnage and revulsion for how different are the drug-dealing teenagers of today; idolly listening to Eminem, 50cent or some other ‘gangster’ Hip-hop music from the classically trained but just as bloodbathing Alex? No other author, apart from James Joyce, has done as much with language as Burgess. Thus, if anything, the novel remains of immense power because it is linguistically inventive, socially prophetic and philosophically profound and goes to ask a very, very important question to its audience:
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
A Clockwork Orange movie trailer
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