A Clockwork Orange, Burgess

Review and notes on A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.

Imaginatively written, with an approachable narrative arc and interesting philosophical questions.

The most visible feature of the novel is its imaginative use of novel slang, borrowed mostly from Russian. As someone familiar with the Russian language, I understood many of the words but the integration of what is functionally a new dialect of English was still jarring. The titular question raised here is how the uniquely crafted language shapes how we understand the narrator’s psyche, motivations, and the actions they commit. Perhaps it is most directly in comparison with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which is a similar investigation of a violent psyche told from third instead of first person in less vividly imaginative language.

What is the metaphysics of the narrator in relationship to the reader? First-person narration is not a new narrative technique, but there are certain novel metaphysical nuances. It is often unclear where the reader ontologically resides with respect to the world of the story and the characters that inhabit it. Alex talks directly to the reader and attempts to present his psyche to the reader, but this is through the veil of retrospect. It is revealed in the concluding pages that this narrative is being told like a story as such, although it becomes primarily plausible that this is happening well before.

From these two previous points, we can think about the complex ways in which we are both entangled and estranged from sympathy with Alex. Alex describes his glee in committing violent acts often in the preceding regions of the novel, which we are estranged from in both our conception of morality and a functional ‘language barrier’ which too distorts the units with which we structure our understanding of reality. Alex is functionally disowned by his family, and is biologically engineered to corrected behavior through violent Pavlovian associationist mechanisms, and cries ‘boo hoo, boo hoo’ - a viciously ironic, satirical caricature of crying; yet we feel a certain sympathy. Alex is a complex character. The disjoint both in language and the action said language describes works both to entangle and estrange us from Alex.

The titular question raised by the religious-minded character is whether one can be moral because they are forced to be moral, to which I respond - when has morality not been forced? Religion enforces morality through threats of hell and heaven, or their equivalents, and physical violence or restraining in this life; the State enforces its morality through incarceration and punishment, whether it was through torture or through Foucault’s and Baudrillard’s conceptions of punishment and threat in the modern era as residing in the dissemination and reproduction of images and abstractions over the brutal physical. Althusser similarly offered insight on how ideology not only represses unmoral behavior but makes us enforces and pioneers of morality too, demonstrated somewhat in Orwell’s 1984. So morality never really involved this concept of ‘free choice’ or agency; it was always a function of our entanglement in systems bigger than us. But let us reason directly in the palpable. Is it more moral or virtuous for someone not to kill someone else when they could kill someone else or for someone not to kill someone else because they have no choice in the matter? This question is itself ill-fated because morality is always deconstructing immorality about the axis of choice. Choices are made as a function of reasons, whether such reasons are rational or not. And such reasons may either be functions of choices or endowed by a larger system. A choice can thus be recursively defined as a complex function which is at root provided by a broader system. The concept of having a choice and not having a choice is equivalent with respect to the system. Thus the concept of morality is not applicable to individuals but the system. A system which allows citizens to be killed is immoral. A system which does not allow citizens to be killed is moral. This is the conclusion I derive from the book - morality is principally an attribute of systems and ideologies, rather than individuals. Morality is unstable with respect to individuals. It is not transferrable. Morality itself is endowed with the social, and therefore it cannot be applied from a metaphysically external position to individuals, albeit it may be applied internally – which is of no intellectual value beyond the solipsistic.