A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen—’

But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.’

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

‘These are subtleties,’ like smiled Dr Brodsky. ‘We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime—’ ‘And,’ chipped in this bolshy well-dressed Minister, ‘with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons.’

You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.’

‘He will be your true Christian,’ Dr Brodsky was creeching out, ‘ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly.’ And that was right, brothers, because when he said that I thought of killing a fly and felt just that tiny bit sick, but I pushed the sickness and pain back by thinking of the fly being fed with bits of sugar and looked after like a bleeding pet and all that cal. ‘Reclamation,’ he creeched. ‘Joy before the Angels of God.’

Those horrible grahzny bratchnies in that terrible white mesto had done that to me, making me need help and kindness now and forcing me to want to give help and kindness myself, if anybody would take it.

‘You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly—that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.’