MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature A Clockwork Orange Analysis Bachelor Thesis Tereza Kuderová Brno 2018 Advisor: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. Declaration I declare that I worked on the bachelor thesis independently and I used only the sources listed in the bibliography. Prohlášení Prohlašuji, že jsem bakalářskou práci vypracovala samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných zdrojů uvedených v seznamu literatury. Brno, 30.3.2018 ______________________ Tereza Kuderová Acknowledgement I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. for her guidance, help, patience and advice. Abstract This thesis deals with an analysis of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and its most prominent features and issues. The work analyses issues such as violence, the presence of good and evil, the importance of free will, the significance of the last chapter, The Ludovico Technique, government control, music in A Clockwork Orange and the fictional language Nadsat. Key words: Violence, good and evil, free will, music, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, Nadsat Anotace Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá rozborem knihy Mechanický pomeranč od Anthonyho Burgesse. Práce analyzuje nejvýznamnější témata v knize jako je násilí, přítomnost dobra a zla, důležitost svobodné vůle, význam poslední kapitoly, Ludovicovu metodu, vládní kontrolu, hudbu v Mechanickém pomeranči a smyšlený jazyk Týnů. Klíčová slova: Násilí, dobro a zlo, svobodná vůle, hudba, Mechanický pomeranč, Anthony Burgess, jazyk Týnů Table of contents Intorduction ........................................................................................................... 6 1. Good and Evil ............................................................................................ 10 2. Violence ..................................................................................................... 15 3. Free will ..................................................................................................... 17 4. Chapter 21 – adulthood – changing priorities............................................ 20 5. The Ludovico Technique – changing people’s behavior ........................... 25 6. Government control - misuse of power .................................................... 29 7. Music in ACO ............................................................................................ 33 8. Nadsat......................................................................................................... 37 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 41 List of References ................................................................................................ 43 Intorduction John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born on 25. February 1917 in Manchester as a son of a singer and dancer Elizabeth Burgess and a piano-player Joseph Wilson. He was an English novelist, critic, journalist, composer, and playwriter. He had one older sister, Muriel, but she died, as well as his mother, in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Later his father married a publican Margaret Dwyer (“A brief life”). He studied English language and literature at the University of Manchester. After graduating, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Army Educational Corps for six years. In 1942 he married his first wife Llewela Jones. After the war, he worked as a college lecturer and as a grammar-school master. Then he moved to Malaya and worked as an education officer at the Malay College. In 1959 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and was told to have only one year left of his life so he returned back to England where he started writing books. Fortunately, the doctors were wrong and Burgess lived for another thirty-three years (ibid). Anthony Burgess wrote about fifty books, and even though he considered some of his other works to be much better, A Clockwork Orange, which was later made into a film by Stanley Kubrick, is probably the book he is famous for the most. A Clockwork Orange (1962) is a dystopian novel about a teenager Alex and his friends who enjoy stealing, raping and beating random victims. One day, Alex is caught and sent to prison. After a few years in prison, he has the opportunity to take part in an experiment called the Ludovico Technique which should make him lose interest in violence. As a result, Alex is not able to see violence or be violent without feeling sick. But he is also deprived of the ability to choose what he really wants to do. He is forced to be good. When he is released from prison he meets F. Alexander, one of his victims, who tries to use Alex to overthrow the government. Alex ends up in a hospital and after a blood transfusion the Ludovico Technique stops working and he can enjoy violence again. However, this kind of life is not so satisfying as it was for him before and he starts changing and dreaming about having a proper job, wife, and children. There are many reasons why the book is so popular among readers. Firstly there is the unusual title, which comes from a Cockney expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” (Morrison viii) and includes the most important statement of the book – that the application of a mechanic morality to a living organism is unnatural. Then there is the young rebellious hero, 6 or anti-hero, who is fond of violence but also classical music. Another interesting aspect of the book is the language Burgess used. By creating Nadsat, the language of the youth in the novel, he added to the originality of the book, but also produced a timeless language, which keeps the novel still up to date as we cannot tell where and when the story takes place. But the most controversial subject in the book is the explicit violence as the Burgess᾽s description of beating and raping is very detailed. There are several causes that inspired Burgess to write A Clockwork Orange. One of the impulses came when Burgess returned from Malaya and Brunei where he worked as a teacher. He noticed that England changed since he was a young boy. “A new youth culture was beginning to appear, with pop music, milk bars, drugs and Teddy Boy violence” (“A Clockwork Orange”). The brutal violence of his protagonists is also inspired by his own experience when his wife, Llewela Jones, was beaten up and robbed by American soldiers in London during the wartime. He was also influenced by other authors, for example, George Orwell and his Nineteen Eighty-Four, and by fear of a totalitarian world. Another inspiration was the claim of some psychologists such as B.F. Skinner that free will is not important. Burgess came up with the Nadsat language when he was in Leningrad and therefore a lot of words originate in Russian (ibid). Burgess’s work was strongly influenced by music. As a composer, he wrote music of many genres and styles including symphonies, opera, musicals and music for a film. His music was influenced mainly by classical music, specifically by Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but also by jazz and popular music. The scenes of robbery, murder, and fantasy in A Clockwork Orange are combined with songs by real or imagined composers. He uses classical music mainly by Ludwig van Beethoven, which is unusual for the teenage culture of the 1950s and 1960s, as the popular or rock and roll music would be more obvious (“The Music of ACO”). According to The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (2017) the reviews on the book were mixed. Burgess was praised for the use of language and for his directness in dealing with current social issues, but he was also criticised for expressing too much brutality in his work. Other reviews claimed that it is difficult to read. But fellow writers were mostly impressed by the book. Kingsley Amis said: “Mr Burgess has written a fine farrago of outrageousness, one which incidentally suggests a view of juvenile violence I can't remember having met before” (“ACO reviewed”), and Malcolm Bradbury stated: “All of Mr Burgess’s powers as a comic writer, which are considerable, have gone into the rich language of his 7 inverted Utopia. If you can stomach the horrors, you’ll enjoy the manner” (“ACO and the Critics”). In the beginning, the book did not sell very well. It took a while to become it popular. One of the reasons that it became so famous was that Stanley Kubrick made the novel into a film adaptation. After the film came out, Burgess was invited to many interviews to talk about his book, Kubrick’s adaptation, and violence. He did not like the book as much as some of his other works so he did not understand why this book earns so much attention. However, he kept returning to the book, if it was in articles he wrote about it or in his book The Clockwork Testament (1974). A Clockwork Orange is considered to be one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature and still inspires new readers (ibid). The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (2017) explains that there had been attempts to make a film ever since the book came out, but as the society was not prepared to see a film with such explicit violence and rape, the idea was to make a film on a very low budget and only for a small audience in film clubs. The members of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles were suggested to play the droogs in the film. Burgess wrote a script for the film himself and the director Nicolas Roeg was supposed to make it into a film, but for unknown reasons, it was never carried