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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9201743 Clockwork oranges: The development of the cyborg as fictional character Rogerson, Charles William, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1991 UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106 CLOCKWORK ORANGES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CYBORG AS FICTIONAL CHARACTER DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Charles W. Rogerson, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1991 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Walter Davis Barbara Rigney James Phelan Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere gratitude to Dr. Waiter Davis for his inspiration and guidance. I thank the other members of my committee, Dr. Barbara Rigney and Dr. James Phelan, for their encouragement and editing suggestions. In unique ways, all three members of my committee exemplify my idea of what a college professor ought to be. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to wife, Mary. I couldn’t have done it without her. And I wish to thank Dr. Robert H. Sykes, whose teaching, writing and scholarship inspired me to go to graduate school. VITA December 28 , 1959............ Born--Wheeling, West Virginia 1982........................... B.A. , West Liberty State College, West Liberty, West Virginia 1984........................... M.A., Western Illinois Univers ity, Macomb, Illinois. FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: English iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................... ii VITA ...................................................iii CHAPTER PAGE I. THE BODY ELECTRIC ..................................1 II. GERALD CRICH AND CLIFFORD CHATTERLEY: D.H. LAWRENCE’S INCIPIENT CYBORGS ................... 39 III. THOMAS PYNCHON: THE ENCODED POLITICS OF A NEO-LUDDITE ...................................... 98 IV. STANLEY KUBRICK’S CINEMATIC CYBORGS AND CLOCKWORK ORANGES ...............................157 BIBLIOGRAPHY 22U CHAPTER I THE BODY ELECTRIC The fear of death, the desire for an immortality... is a tremendously strong factor in determining both people’s overt and covert behavior. Such immortality, when achieved, will doubtless--like our other technological advances— provide more problems than it solves. It could provide us with the worst problem, indeed, since civilization began. --Frank George Still, the fervor of the scientific and philosophical debate over programs for human engineering arises from the extent to which the mechanization of humanity tends to entice those for whom the manipulation of people holds profit. --David Porush In the late 20th century, we are no longer merely surrounded by machines; they have invaded our bodies and brains. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have often been reduced to cogs in the machinery of the assembly line, enduring labor as repetitious as the motion of a piston in a cylinder. But now, especially with rapid advances in prosthetics, a variety of human limbs and organs can by replaced by mechanical substitutes, and the body itself can become, to borrow a phrase from William S. Burroughs, a "soft machine." Even the human heart, for centuries the imaginative locus of love, anguish, and courage, can now be replaced by a Jarvik-7— a steel and plastic blood pump. Since its inception in the 1940’s, the science of cybernetics has proceeded on the assumption that a human being is basically a sophisticated, finite mechanism and the brain, in Marvin Minsky’s words, is "a computer made of meat"; therefore, human brain patterns and language capabilities can eventually be duplicated by computers. In this uneasy conjunction between human and machine, the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate, the logical culmination occurs in the cyborg--the half-human, half-machine with which our culture is increasingly fascinated in both literary and visual mediums. Cyborgs are metaphors for the contemporary human condition, for they vividly dramatize the fundamental conflict between the human and inhuman, the spiritual trauma which occurs when the mechanical is imposed upon the animal. More than a hundred years ago Hegelian and Marxist concepts of alienation established the philosophical basis of the confrontation of human and machine. Hegel’s assertions about alienation strongly influenced Marx, and he subsequently grounded them right in the industrial assembly line, emphasizing the emerging gulf between the worker and his productions. Since then the concept of alienation has become increasingly relevant to contemporary western civilization, in spite of a relative decline in the sort of assembly-line labor Marx witnessed. For instance, contemporary thinkers such as Ernest Mandel and Fritz Pappenheim argue that alienation in the consumer culture of late capitalism has increased rather than declined, because, in part, "Late Capitalism, far from representing a ‘post-industrial’ society, thus appears as the period in which all branches of the economy are fully industrialized for the first time" (Mandel 191). Technological advance constantly challenges existing theories of alienation with a bizarre array of contingencies. To illustrate just one such contingency, we must first look back to the Economico- Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which Marx wrote: The externalization of the worker into his product does not only mean that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him independently, as something alien to him, as confronting him as an autonomous power. It means that the life which he has given to the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (134) Consumer culture has, of course, complicated Marx’s schematics; for instance, the consumer’s embracing of the alienating object may signal a dealienation and merging. Now, with the advent of the cyborg, new and disturbing questions arise (apart from the obvious medical dilemmas) which further problematize the internal/external dualism discussed by Marx above. For example: What happens when the external object is an artificial organ produced in a factory, sold as a commodity to the "sick" consumer, and implanted internally in that human body— a clock inside the orange, so to speak. Alienation takes on a whole new dimension in the cyborg when the object/source of alienation is embodied within, when the human nervous system is spliced to the machine. Underlying the various concepts of alienation is the basic idea that industrialization and technology tend to convert human beings into tools, into mere appendages of the machine, and finally into machines themselves. In Norbert Wiener's words: "What is used as an element in a machine, is an element in the machine" (Human Use. 213). Though the word "cyborg," a relatively new coinage (circa 1960), owes itself to the science of cybernetics, a range of other terms have been used to describe mechanized humans such as "android," "robot," "automaton," and "bionic man." Even casual conversation betrays this mechanizing trend when we occasionally speak of a person as being on "auto pilot," or as being "programmed." (Surely Marx was thinking along these lines when he talked about human labor being sold as a "commodity" on the "market.") In a recent movie review, Richard Corliss, a critic for Time magazine, described a new breed of film character (e.g., Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon 2 and James Bond in License to Kill) as a "heroid": "Never really alive, a heroid cannot die; he must be available for the next assembly-line sequel. He is the cyborg chauffeur of mechanical movies" (53). In his critique of consumer society, Jean Baudrillard discusses how objects and gadgets are replacing human contact: "As the wolf- child becomes wolf by living among them, so are we becoming functional. We are living the period of the objects: that is, we live by their rhythm, according to their incessant cycles" (29). The phenomenon of mechanization has been of vital concern to creative artists since the rise of industrialism. A significant portion of nineteenth century American and British literature