(February, 2016)
In the introduction to the 1986 American edition of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess writes his novel off as “too didactic to be artistic.” The novel’s overt message is a simple one about the paramount importance of moral choice. This message, that what truly makes us human is our capacity for choice, is cached within the title, and reiterated time and again throughout the text by the subversive novelist, F. Alexander, as well as by the prison chaplain. The novel’s resolution seems to align with this simple truistic notion, presenting an optimistic vision of a changing Alex, one prepared to exercise his ability to choose and to start something anew. Despite the novel’s seeming didacticism, another reading of A Clockwork Orange lurks beneath the surface, challenging the possibility of moral choice altogether, and blurring the lines between juicy, oozing humanity and cold, sterile machinery. Burgess’ novel simultaneously upholds the appearance of metaphysical freedom and correct moral choice while dissolving the moral distinctions and human agency necessary for such a capacity to exist. Seen through the lens of the novel’s engagement with Western conceptions of morality, and through an analysis of societal conditioning, Burgess’ novel emerges less as a testament to the power of the human will than as a condemnation of the modern world, individual agency and the possibility of ethics altogether.
Ethics and questions of morality, for Burgess, have never been far from the enterprise of writing. In his own words, “As novels are about the ways in which human beings behave, they tend to imply a judgement of behavior, which means that the novel … is a form steeped in morality.” A Clockwork Orange certainly constitutes just such a work, though rather than upholding a positive “judgement of behavior” through the novel, Burgess flagrantly subverts and confronts the moral sensibilities of the reader with Alex’s proclivity towards heinous crimes. In this sense, A Clockwork Orange piques the ethical conventions of the late 20th century, exaggerating and extrapolating societal flaws, and carrying them into a dystopian future where the reader is presented with two dominant and opposing modes of behavior. Alex and his “droogs” terrorize the night after drinking “milk with knives in it,” “tolchock”-ing civilians and raping girls and women indiscriminately, while the expanded totalitarian State seeks to eliminate crime by any means necessary, without any “concern[] with motive, with the higher ethics.” Because the novel refuses to stake a specific moral stance other than Burgess’ explicit emphasis on the importance of moral choice, the text satirizes the possibility of a flawless ethic, leaving the reader in a position of equivocality, wondering what to make of the events the novel depicts.
The equivocality and moral relativism of A Clockwork Orange deepens and becomes more palpable when placed in dialogue with the Western moral philosophy that grounds and frames the novels engagement with questions of right and wrong. Following an attempted escape from the corrective hospital which provokes Alex’s anti-violence conditioning, Alex lies in bed and confides to the reader, “And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it.” Burgess draws explicitly upon Plato’s “Gorgias” in this passage, recasting and inverting Socrates’ oft-invoked moral proposition that, “doing wrong is worse than suffering wrong.” Alex’s specific phrasing not only contradicts Socrates, but implies a moral condemnation of the State, suggesting that the “feeling” induced by the State is itself wrong. Notably, Alex also omits the word “wrong” in his reiteration of Socrates statement, and instead uses the word “hit,” placing ethical concerns at a remove from violence altogether. Alex’s unapologetic rejection of what for Plato, by “nature” and by “convention,” constitutes a moral truth should not be surprising: in Alex’s own words, “What I do I do because I like to do.” Through Alex’s malignant paraphrenic narcissism, Burgess seeks to critique not only Alex’s behavior and felt superiority to moral convention, but in fact the very conventions and social conditions that might produce someone like Alex. As part of what it means for A Clockwork Orange to be dystopic, Burgess employs Alex as an allegory of the violence cached within modern society, exaggerated and distorted in the light of an imagined future. Nonetheless, because the text is written in the first person, and provides Alex with an outlet for his unadulterated subjectivity, the novel fails to offer the reader a reliable yardstick by which to gauge Alex’s actions: like the protagonist, the reader remains irredeemably plunged into a world where “badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies” — always isolated, and always equivocal.
Though Burgess depicts a world without a reliable moral center, he also undermines the possibility of metaphysically attributable moral action through A Clockwork Orange’s examination of conditioning. The State explicitly and artificially conditions Alex to be revulsed by violence, “turn[ing him] into something other than a human being.” Yet the State’s “Ludovico’s Technique” represents only one form of conditioning at work in the text. Alex turns “gloopy” and sardonically retorts “Right right right” in response to the assertion that “the adult world … with their wars and bombs and nonsense” might be responsible for his criminal behavior, yet by asserting the possibility of societal conditioning, Burgess destabilizes Alex’s status as trusted arbiter of the novel’s ontological mechanics. Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack address Alex’s dubious worldview, writing:
For Alex, the idea of free will — the glorification of the self-determined individual whose actions are not, and cannot be, controlled by any outside force, spiritual or material — represents a radically truncated and undeniably immature philosophical position based upon nothing more than desire and self-indulgence. [He remains] unable to grasp how the structures of his pseudo-family, other broader cultural systems, and the material reality of his existence impinge upon and essentially diminish much of his ‘free will.’”
For Davis and Womack, Alex is inevitably conditioned and mechanistic as a function of his sheer humanity — a notion which flies in the face of F. Alexander’s naïve conception of the human as “more like a natural growth like a fruit,” or an organism with the capacity to effectively make legitimate choices, moral and otherwise. Alex’s “diminish[ed]” free will renders him akin to a fleshy robot, programmed by the natural conditions of his existence, as well as by the artificial mechanisms of the State.
Despite the grim implications societal conditioning has for Alex’s status as a free agent, the novel nevertheless presents a trajectory of growth, manifesting for the most part in the 21st chapter. Alex himself acknowledges the mechanistic shortsightedness of his youth, describing it as, “being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets … [that] itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being one of these malenky machines.” Though the novel seems to end on a hopeful note, Burgess tempers this optimism as Alex remarks that even his own son will not be able to learn from his violent past, and that generation after generation of humankind will necessarily reckon with moral nihilism and their own helplessly qualified autonomy. Socrates refers to the study of morality as the question of “how life should be lived,” and yet, if we cannot choose how to live our lives, but instead must merely live them automatically, as though in a waking dream, the question of morality becomes an antiquated moot point. In the world of A Clockwork Orange, “higher ethics” and morality have fallen by the wayside, and Burgess looks to the future to warn us about the present, imploring us to exercise our capacity of moral choice in the constantly diminishing hope that it still exists.
WORKS CITED:
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Print.
Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. “”O My Brothers”: Reading the Anti-Ethics of the Pseudo-Family in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.” College Literature 29.2 (2002): 19-36. JSTOR. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.
Plato. “Gorgias.” Trans. Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 