A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

‘Oh oh oh.’ I said, smiling very wide and droogie, ‘Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.’

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?

in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.

Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus (in Ulysses) refers to the world as an ‘oblate orange’: man is a microcosm or little world; he is a growth as organic as a fruit, capable of colour, fragrance and sweetness; to meddle with him, condition him, is to turn him into a mechanical creation.

I don’t know how much free will man really possesses (Wagner’s Hans Sachs said: Wir sind ein wenig frei – ‘We are a little free’), but I do know what little he seems to have is too precious to encroach on, however good the intentions of the encroacher may be.

A Clockwork Orange was intended to be a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice. My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished. But his evil is a human evil, and we recognise in his deeds of aggression potentialities of our own – worked out for the non-criminal citizen in war, sectional injustice, domestic unkindness, armchair dreams. In three ways Alex is an exemplar of humanity: he is aggressive, he loves beauty, he is a language-user. Ironically, his name can be taken to mean ‘wordless’, though he has plenty of words of his own – invented group-dialect. He has, though, no word to say in the running of his community or the managing of the state: he is, to the state, a mere object, something ‘out there’ like the Moon, though not so passive.

Theologically, evil is not quantifiable. Yet I posit the notion that one act of evil may be greater than another, and that perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanisation, the killing of the soul – which is as much as to say the capacity to choose between good and evil acts. Impose on an individual the capacity to be good and only good, and you kill his soul for, presumably, the sake of social stability. What my, and Kubrick’s, parable tries to state is that it is preferable to have a worl...

there is a good beyond mere ethical good, which is always existential: there is the essential good, that aspect of God which we can prefigure more in the taste of an apple or the sound of music than in mere right action or even charity.

towards that mechanism, the state, which first is concerned with self-perpetuation and, second, is happiest when human beings are predictable and controllable, we have no duty at all, certainly no duty of charity.

If Orange, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, takes its place as one of the salutary literary warnings – or cinematic warnings – against flabbiness, sloppy thinking, and overmuch trust in the state, then it will have done something of value.

we are surrounded by conflict. Like Yin and Yang, hot and cold, God and the Devil: everything is conflict. This is the universe and without conflict we have no life at all. But the terms of conflict are uncertain. For instance, Right and Wrong, what do these terms mean? I mean really, what is absolutely Right, and what is absolutely Wrong? We could sit down and make a list. What would you say is Wrong? Would you say it is Wrong to hate? Perhaps. But what about in a time of war? In wartime it is Right to hate our enemies. It is Right to kill our enemies. The words Right and Wrong in themselves mean nothing. They have a smell of police ward disinfectant about them.

And Evil. Some people appear to have an unexplainable desire to do evil. But for what? Can we know what evil is? What are the signs of evil? The desire to destroy is evil – unexplainable, wanton destructiveness. But even that is not categorical, is it? Most of history is written about destruction, not creation. Records are kept of wars, of the decay of civilisations, of murders and deaths, of men like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, and others who built enormous empires on their abilities to destroy. But in a sense, destruction is a means of creation. When a vandal knocks in the side of a telephone booth, or scratches his name on the side of a subway car, he is leaving his mark. He is, whether he knows it or not, attempting to show that he exists and that he has the ability to affect things, and to change things. Destructive violence is a way of saying, ‘Look, I am here.’ That’s the easy way. That’s negative creation. Positive creation is much more difficult – it requires patience and talent.

It’s much easier to destroy than to take a block of stone and slowly and carefully bring out an image – that requires an artist. Violence is much quicker; and to the hoodlums, the thug, I suppose violence is more rewarding because it is freer. There is no restr...

But you see, when a character or person is too free, then he challenges society. Now one of the basic premises of society is that no one has too much freedom.

we must give up certain rights and privileges so that we do not obtrude ourselves upon our neighbours. We must exercise control; we must limit our freedom for society’s sake. This means we relinquish our freedom of choice. The artist is a rebel who defies control through his work. He escapes to his closet where he paints, or writes, or makes a sculpture, and this way he maintains his identity. It may be that for the criminal violence is an expression of the same kind, or a similar kind, of freedom. However, by the time you use violence, you are out of control.

You must remember that to the poet, the artist and to the novelist, the nature of reality is revealed, not by vague images passing through the mind, but by words: words which suggest certain meanings and reveal actions as the author knows them.