A Not-Working-for-Me Orange

A Clockwork Orange is a book that wears its moral on its sleeve:  we must be free to choose between good and evil, or we cease to be human at all.  It is a simple tale of the struggle between the individual and the capital-s State.  Burgess’s brilliant twist is to make the protagonist a fantastically despicable human being, and to give him a first-person voice.

In the first 7 chapters of the novel, Alex bullies a homeless drunk, leads the attack on an old man coming home from the library, robs a store and beats the owner, strikes up a battle with a rival group of teens, leads the gang rape of a woman and beats the tar out of her husband and makes him watch, rapes two ten-year-old girls, fights with his own gang to exert his dominance despite being the youngest member at 15 years old,  and breaks into an old woman’s home to rob her but ends up killing her instead.  At one moment, we think that there may be some hope for Alex as he tells us of his love for classical music, but our thinking is corrected when we learn that Alex loves the music because he fantasizes about all sorts of violence and rape as he listens to it.  Alex never displays sympathy or empathy for another human being, repeatedly portraying himself as the victim and disowning any responsibility for his own behavior when discussing it with others.  He is a sociopath and an awful human being.

But as the narrator, he brings us into his head and forces us into a kind of alignment with him.  After he undergoes the Ludovico Technique, he is at the whim of everyone he encounters, and of course he is but one font of violence in a world of violence.  Every character who is not busy being raped shows flashes of violence and a thirst for revenge, so the ability to commit an act of violence is necessary for survival in the world.  Even having witnessed all the horrors Alex committed, we feel uncomfortable with his powerlessness in the final sections of the book.  To his credit, Burgess never lets us forget Alex’s nature even as we are made to squirm by his punishment.  That is really where the power of the book lies, in the tension created by the conflict of two evils.  To protect the individual from the State, we must accept that we have to protect what is vile and rotten inside the individual.

I found the world interesting and the slang oddly compelling.  Alex has a great voice.  But in the end, the book felt flat to me.  Perhaps it is the baldness of its moral.  Perhaps it is that testosterone-filled narratives never do much for me even under the best of conditions.  Perhaps it was the inclusion of the 21^st chapter that Burgess uses the entirety of the 1986 introduction to the novel to discuss.  The final chapter of the book was not included in the original printing of the book in America, and Kubrick’s movie ends on the 20^th chapter as well.  This exclusion really chaps Burgess’s hide, because he feels the final chapter raises the novel from a “fable” to a “novel.”  In this final chapter, Alex, the sociopath who nevertheless has the right of moral choice, suddenly outgrows his childish ways, puts rape and murder behind him, and longs for a baby and a wife and a quieter life.  Ahh.  Isn’t that nice? Apparently if the state just gave him a little more time, he would have outgrown rape and murder, as all boys do.  Ugh.

I finished the book on the same day the Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby case, deciding that a closely held company can practice a religion and can deny basic medical rights to its female employees in the name of that very religion.  Judge Alito’s dismissal of what he characterizes as a vague issue of “gender equality” struck home for me what was so tiring about reading A Clockwork Orange today.  The men of the novel are doers and thinkers, the philosophers and subject of philosophy.  The women—well, they get raped and are the object of rape fantasies.  The only exception is Georgina in that final chapter, who is a giggling empty character, the object of a settling-down fantasy.  Hell, the two ten-year olds who are plied with alcohol and then raped serve no purpose whatsoever in the larger narrative.  They do not come back to visit Alex.  Indeed, while Alex seems to meet up in the final section with every man he met in the opening section, all the women are dead and gone.  In my current state, I find it hard to care about the moral Bugess tattoos on his novel’s chest  as I stand among the discarded and silent female bodies of the dead.  It’s the same vonny cal that’s been shoveled for years.  While Burgess’s novel is interesting and well written, I conclude that it lives on primarily because it (and Kubrick’s adaptation) made such an impact at the time of its release.