A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good? To which Burgess, not hedging his bets, answers clearly: yes.

Burgess uses music to address the question of whether high art is civilizing. The fact that the men who ran Auschwitz read Shakespeare and Goethe, and played Bach and Beethoven, was much discussed at the time Burgess was writing A Clockwork Orange: the essays collected in George Steiner’s Language and Silence (which Burgess reviewed on its publication in 1967) repeatedly address it.

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

‘I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.’

The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. 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 woodness 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?

And yet, 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. So I shall like to think.

It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

‘You felt ill this afternoon,’ he said, ‘because you’re getting better.

‘Rest, rest, poor lad,’ he said, turning the tap on so that all steam came burping out. ‘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.’

‘They always bite off too much,’ he said, drying a plate like absent-mindedly. ‘But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.’

F. Alexander seemed to think that we all like grow on what he called the world-tree in the world-orchard that like Bog or God planted, and we were there because Bog or God had need of us to quench his thirsty love, or some such cal.