1962 A Clockwork Orange - SSS

1 A Clockwork Orange (UK Version)by ANTHONY BURGESSC ontentsIntroduction (A Clockwork Orange Resucked)Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Glossary of Nadsat LanguageAnthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and was a graduate of the University six years in the Army he worked as an instructor for the Central Advisory Council forForces Education, as a lecturer in Phonetics and as a grammar school master. From 1954 till 1960he was an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Brunei. He has beencalled one of the very few literary geniuses of our he borrowed from no other literary source than source produced thirty-two novels, a volume of verse, two plays, and sixteen works ofnonfiction-together with countless music compositions, including symphonies, operas, and most recent work was A Mouthful of Air: Language, English. AnthonyBurgess died in Clockwork Orange ResuckedI first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962 , which ought to be far enough in thepast for it to be erased from the world's literary memory.

2 It refuses to be erased, however, and forthis the film version of the book made by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible. Ishould myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted. I receive mailfrom students who try to write theses about it or requests from Japanese dramaturges to turnIt into a sort of Noh play. It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value morebite the dust. This is not an unusual experience for an artist. Rachmaninoff used to groan becausehe was known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while the works ofhis maturity never got into the programmes. Kids cut their pianistic teeth on a Minuet in Gwhich Beethoven composed only so that he could detest it. I have to go on living with A ClockworkOrange, and this means I have a sort of authorial duty to it. I have a very special duty to it in theUnited States, and I had better now explain what this duty me put the situation baldly.

3 A Clockwork Orange has never been published entire in book I wrote is divided into three sections of seven chapters each. Take out your pocketcalculator and you will find that these add up to a total of twenty-one chapters. 21 is the symbolfor human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you got the vote and assumed adult its symbology, the number 21 was the number I started out with. Novelists of my stampare interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that number has to mean something inhuman terms when they handle it. The number of chapters is never entirely arbitrary. Just as amusical composer starts off with a vague image of bulk and duration, so a novelist begins with animage of length, and this image is expressed in the number of sections and the number of chaptersin which the work will be disposed. Those twenty-one chapters were important to they were not important to my New York publisher.

4 The book he brought out had only twentychapters. He insisted on cutting out the twenty-first. I could, of course, have demurred at this andtaken my book elsewhere, but it was considered that he was being charitable in accepting thework at all, and that all other New York, or Boston, pub-lishers would kick out the manuscript onits dog-ear. I needed moneyback in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, andif the condition of the book's acceptance was also its truncation-well,so be it. So there is a profound difference between A Clockwork Orangeas Great Britain knows it and the somewhat slimmer volume that bears the same name in theUnited States of us go further. The rest of the world was sold the book out ofGreat Britain, and so most versions-certainly the French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Russian,Hebrew, Rumanian, and German translations-have the original twenty-one chapters.

5 Now whenStanley Kubrick made his film-though he made it in England-he followed the American versionand, so it seemed to his audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat did not exactly clamour for their money back, but they wondered why Kubrick left outthe d nouement. People wrote to me about this-indeed much of my later life has been expended onXeroxing statements of intention and the frustrations of intention-while both Kubrick and myNew York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is of course, happens in that twenty-first chapter? You now have the chance tofind out. Briefly, my young thuggish protagonist grows up. He grows bored with violence andrecognizes that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction. Senseless violenceis a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

6 Itsdynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars andsmashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of thestupid and ignorant. My young hoodlum comes to the revelation of the need to get something donein life-to marry, to beget children, to keep the Orange of the world turning in theRookers of Bog, or hands of God, and perhaps even create something-music, say. After all,Mozart and Mendelssohn were composing deathless music in their teens or nadsats, and all myhero was doing was razrezzing and giving the old in-out. It is with a kind of shame that thisgrowing youth looks back on his devastating past. He wants a different kind of is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter.

7 The boy is conditioned, thendeconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will. 'Iwas cured all right,' he says, and so the American book ends. So the film ends too. The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle thathuman beings change. Their is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show thepossibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character orcharacters. Even trashy best-sellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to showchange, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you areout of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or KubrickianOrange is a fable; the British or world one is a my New York publisher believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout.

8 It was veddyveddy British, don't you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept thata human being could be a model for unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, weretougher than the British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it inVietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was reallywanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on thepage and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish,Christian, Muslim, and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such abook would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use thisto choose between good and evil.

9 If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is aclockwork Orange -meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour andjuice but is in fact only a Clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this isincreasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to betotally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order thatmoral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This iswhat the television news is about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we findevil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. We like to havethe pants scared off us by visions of cosmic sit down in a dull room and compose the Missa solennis or TheAnatomy of Melancholy does not make headlines or news my little squib of a book was found attractive to many because it was as odorous asa crateful of bad eggs with the miasma of original seems priggish or Pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate thenastier propensities of my readers.

10 My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in thebook and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist s innate cowardice that makeshim depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself. Butthe book does also have a moral lesson, and it is the weary traditional one of the fundamentalimportance of moral choice. It is because this lesson sticks out like a sore thumb that I tend todisparage A Clockwork Orange as a work too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist s job topreach; it is his duty to show. I have shown enough, though the curtain of an invented lingo gets inthe way-another aspect of my cowardice. Nadsat, a Russified version of English, was meant tomuffle the raw response we expect from pornography. It turns the book into a linguisticadventure. People preferred the film because they are scared, rightly, of don t think I have to remind readers what the title oranges don t exist, except in the speech of old Londoners.