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by Anthony Burgess
Social Issues
xvi + 192 pages
In his masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1962) author, playwright, poet, essayist and composer Anthony Burgess paints an ugly but technically brilliant picture of 21st century London in which juvenile crime runs rampant as traditional values and political freedoms are relinquished in favor of short-term excitement and benefits. At the heart of the novel is a discussion on Free Will versus new age psychological criminal conditioning techniques.
The book’s “protagonist” is Alex DeLarge, a “viscious, fifteen-year-old droog,” as the back cover says, whose principal interests are rape, murder, and ultraviolence. Alex starts the book the leader of a gang of merciless juvenile delinquents, but he is distinguished from the rest in that he is the only one who consciously knows what he is doing throughout his villainous activities, and he has enlightened sensibilities, such as his love of classical music.
Like many gang leaders, however, Alex’s friends eventually turn on him, sending him to prison.
The book, neatly divided into three parts, then moves on to the “punishment” phase, wherein Alex, sentenced to prison for murder in furtherance of theft undergoes a new “curative,” rehabilitation method called the Ludivico technique. Dr. Ludivico’s treatment is a mixture of classical and operant conditioning.
After this middle portion of the book detailing this process of psychological treatment, the book, in its third part, describes Alex’s remission into society, conditioned against violence, and the karmatic events that follow as Alex relives his past trespasses.
It is also in the latter part of the book where Anthony Burgess drives home his point on free will. For instance, he has the prison chaplain extol the value of freedom of choice:
‘The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man (83).’
It was this point, that Burgess expresses through the chaplain, which forms Burgess’s central point of the novel: that new age treatments of juvenile delinquents may be effective, but eliminate freedom of choice and therefore are inhumane.
In the introduction to the book, Burgess addressed this point:
[…] by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he 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 by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty state (ix).
The philosophical questions asked by A Clockwork Orange and the fascinating psychological conditioning that occurs in the book’s middle part are worth reading the book in and of themselves, but throw in an excellent and entertaining story with extremely creative use of language and what we have is one of the greatest works of fiction in the 20th Century.
- Reviewed by Mitch B.
React to this Review Great Rivers Regional Library
Hennepin County Library
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