MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature
Aspects of Postmodernism in Anthony Burgess’ Novels
Diploma thesis
Brno 2011
Supervisor: PhDr. Pavel Doležel, Csc. Author: Bc. Radka Mikulaková Bibliographic note
Mikulaková, Radka. Aspects of Postmodernism in Anthony Burgess’ novels. Brno:
Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2011. Supervisor Pavel Doležel.
Anotace
Diplomová práce Aspekty postmodernismu v románech Anthony Burgesse pojednává o literárním postmodernismu v románech Anthony Burgesse. Jmenovitě v románech
A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed a 1985, které jsou tematicky propojeny autorovou teorií vývoje moderní společnosti. Práce je rozdělena do tří základních oddílů. První část shrnuje základní literárněvědné přístupy k samotnému pojmu postmodernismus a stanovuje tak teoretická východiska k dalším oddílům práce.
V následující části jsou výše uvedené romány podrobeny literární analýze z hlediska teorie fikčních světů a závěrem je stěžejní téma románů, Burgessova teorie cyklického vývoje společnosti, porovnáno a zkoumáno z hlediska dobových filozoficko-sociologických tendencí.
Annotation
Diploma thesis Aspects of Postmodernism in Anthony Burgess’ Novels deals with literary postmodernism in Anthony Burgess‟ novels, i.e. in A Clockwork Orange,
The Wanting Seed and 1985, which are thematically connected by author‟s theory of the development of contemporary society. Thesis is divided into three chapters.
The first chapter deals with basic scientific approaches to the term postmodernism and thus defines a theoretical basis for other chapters. In the following part the three of Burgess‟ novels are analyzed from the perspective of fictional semantics and, finally, the main theme of these Burgess‟ novels, a cyclic theory of human development, is compared and contrasted with the then socio-philosophical tendencies.
Klíčová slova
Postmoderna, postmodernismus, britská poválečná společnost, teorie vývoje moderní společnosti, fikční světy, dystopie
Keywords
Postmodernity, postmodernism, British post-war society, modern post-war society‟s development theory, fictional worlds, dystopia
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the sources listed in the primary and secondary sources section.
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I would like to thank my supervisor, PhDr. Pavel Doležel, Csc., for his valuable advice. Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 7
1. INTRODUCTION 8
2. POSTMODERNISM IN BURGESS’ NOVELS 12
2.1. POSTMODERNITY VS. POSTMODERNISM 12
2.2. THE SOCIETY OF CHANGES 15
2.3. VARIETIES OF POSTMODERN THEORIES 20
2.4. ON THE POSTMODERN POETICS 28
3. FICTIONAL WORLDS IN BURGESS‘ NOVELS 34
3.1. CHARACTERS 37
3.2. SOCIETY 42
3.3. PLOTS AND FICTIONAL NARRATIVE ORGANIZATION 47
3.4. MODALITY 50
3.5. TEXTURE 51
4. MAIN THEMES IN BURGESS‘ NOVELS 56
4.1. THE AFFIRMATION OF INDIVIDUALISM AND DYSTOPIAN SOCIETY IN
BURGESS„ NOVELS 57
4.2. THE DYSTOPIAN SOCIETY WITHIN THE CYCLE 66
5. CONCLUSION 75
6. RESUMÉ 78
7. SUMMARY 79
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 80
7
1. INTRODUCTION
There are a lot of various theories about Anthony Burgess and there are a lot of various theories about postmodernism. Both seem to be quite controversial
– and still current – topics. The former has been interesting literature, film and music fans, the latter men of science. In my diploma thesis I have decided to connect these two subjects and thus analyze Anthony Burgess from postmodernist point of view and postmodernism from Anthony Burgess‟s point of view.
What were Anthony Burgess‟s literary and philosophical tendencies? What was the aim of his work? What is the cyclic theory he introduces in his books about?
What was the background and inspiration for the theory? Is his work postmodernist?
What is – not – postmodernist and what is postmodernism itself? How can we define postmodernist literature and is there a specific poetics of postmodernism? These are few of my questions I would like to ask and deal with.
First, this final thesis is based on my bachelor thesis The Picture of an Antihero in A Clockwork Orange, which was supposed to be a literary study of Anthony Burgess‟s most famous book A Clockwork Orange focusing on the main character, teenager Alex. The book was often misunderstood and mispronounced as vindication of brutal violence, which it definitely is not. Briefly said, the readers and film adaptation viewers have mistaken a romantic defence of freedom for a defence of violent behaviour, which, anyway, probably influenced Burgess‟s other works and his overall attitude to expressing his ideas through literature, because in his later works he seems to tend to explicitness and including straightforward essays in his books.
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Second, the topic of the bachelor thesis is going to be widened to a literary analysis of three of Anthony Burgess‟s novels, of which one is again A Clockwork
Orange. The rest are The Wanting Seed and 1985. These books are thematically connected by a socio-theological cyclic theory of human development based on two oppositional theological attitudes to human nature and the original sin. According to Pelagius – a British monk living at the turn of the fourth and fifth century A.D. – there is nothing like the original sin committed by Adam in the Garden of Eden, no human predisposition to evil and disobedience. Man is born free and neutral; therefore also his character is neither good, nor bad. This idea was denied by St Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, who condemned Pelagius and reaffirmed the orthodox doctrine of the original sin (Burgess 1979: 55-56). According to these two representatives, the first cyclic stadium of free will and effort given to man is called the Pelagian phase – or the Pelphase –, which is followed by the Interphase, in which the stadiums turn, and finally, there is the Augustinian phase – or the
Gusphase – of the sinfulness of man, in which man – according to the traditional
Christian doctrine – is more likely to sin. Nevertheless, the cycle goes back to the first Pelagian phase and again and again.
Considering the background, the years of publishing the books – 1960s and 1980s – and the crisis of modern sociology (Smart 1997: 70-72), the cyclic idea seems to be very postmodern. Nevertheless, according to literary scholars, the definitions of postmodernism and what is postmodern have stayed unclear.
I would like to study the Burgess‟s theory of the cycle and its background in order to better understand, describe and interpret it according to the then socio- philosophical base.
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Because of this fact the first part of my diploma thesis is going to summarize
fundamental scientific approaches, theories and principles of postmodernism,
the relation between postmodernism and postmodernity, social background, socio-
philosophical theories and poetics of postmodernism as a theoretical basis for
the other parts.
Before interpreting the cyclic theory itself in the final part, the three of Burgess‟s books already noticed are going to be analyzed according to the postmodern theory of fictional and possible worlds in order to specify the literary world of the Burgess‟s novels. For interpreting the fictional world of Burgess‟ novels I am going to follow mainly fictional semantics described in Lubomír Doležel‟s book titled Heterocosmica, which offers the fictional theory as well as practical literary analyses. Moreover, this book is to be an often cited source for describing the general concept of fictional worlds in literature and fictional semantics, therefore one can consider it a sufficient authority in these branches.
Nevertheless, I am going to analyze Burgess‟ work with a respect to other theorist dealing with the possible and fictional worlds, such as Ruth Ronen, Bohumil Fořt and
Thomas Pavel, in order to challenge Doležel‟s conception in Heterocosmica.
The final part is going to deal with the theory of the cycle itself from
the perspective of the then sociology and philosophy. The idea of revisioning
and rewriting a theme of a book already published is strongly postmodern, therefore
I would like to either find other postmodern features in the Burgess‟s books or
at least identify Burgess‟s attitude to postmodernist scholars‟ concepts – in case
we can find anything such as a typical postmodernism.
In 1978 Burgess has rewritten and reacted to George Orwell‟s famous
dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four, of which future predictions seemed to be improper
10 to Burgess, who, therefore, wrote his own version of European society‟s future development including a number of essays considering Orwell‟s aims, visions and their possible sources from the late 1970‟s point of view. Nevertheless, the Burgess‟s
1984’s revision could be connected to his previous cyclic theory of human development introduced in The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange in the 1960s, when postmodern sociologists presented new – by no coincidence often also cyclic – theories about (post)modern society, and thus it make a complex picture of Burgess‟s social scheme. The basis of the novels 1984, The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork
Orange is the cyclic theory that functions as a narrative construct describing the regretful condition of postmodern society. What Burgess seems to stress is the position of individuality within the society, the contrast and imbalance in their relation.
Whereas Burgess commented on George Orwell‟s novel in the age of postmodernism, I – as some people say we are in the era of even post- postmodernism – would like to comment on Burgess‟s comments.
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2. POSTMODERNISM IN BURGESS’ NOVELS
2.1. POSTMODERNITY VS. POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism seems to be quite a loaded term – even controversial – evoking many heterogeneous ideas, theories, names and works across intellectual and scientific disciplines. To make things more complicated one should distinguish between terms postmodernity and postmodernism.
The phenomenon of postmodernity is associated mainly with the historical, cultural and political condition of the society of approximately second half of the twentieth century and its development and changes. The idea of postmodernity has been paid much attention to since 1960s and it has been examined by sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, historical and theological studies etc. (Smart 1997: 11; Hutcheon 2005: 3; Connor 2001: 6) Despite occasional scepticism and disclaim, postmodernity has been an issue in many humanities and sciences, which confirms rather the fact that there has been noticeable changes in the post-war society than that it is simply a made-up scientific issue. Yet, both the terms, postmodernism and postmodernity, lack a clear, generally accepted definition.
Generally speaking, postmodernity might be identified as a particular historical period, of which social, cultural and political organisation has created incentive conditions for a corresponding scientific as well as artistic trend, postmodernism.
Precisely there should be mentioned that for some scientists and analytics it used to be an issue, for, according to one of many historical concepts, the era of postmodernity is definitely over and the contemporary society already belongs
12 to what could be called post-postmodern age (Smart 1997: 12). Such concept claims that the period of the very postmodern society lasted from the mid-1970s to 1980s only. In his critical review Postmodernity, Professor Barry Smart supports rather the other idea of postmodernity being still in progress rather as a form of life and general reaction to the past. Smart argues that the concept of postmodernity should be understood as a response to the modernist way of life, which is still developing; however the contemporary condition has been closely connected to and originating from the period of modernity and modernism. Barry Smart says: “Clarification of the matters in dispute is not helped by the fact that some of the key terms in play in the debate over new times, namely modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism, are closely connected and in consequence difficult to distinguish and disentangle from each other” (Smart 1997: 15-16).
Moreover, there appeared comments describing postmodernity and postmodernism as directly following modernity and modernism, as their straight continuation denying any notion of disruption between these eras (Smart 1997: 12).
Among many existing approaches to the postmodern phenomenon, in their reviews, Smart as well as Professor Steven Connor describe that there could be found two main alternatives of relations between modernity/modernism and postmodernity/postmodernism (Smart 1997: 16; Connor 2001: 23). The first branch describing postmodernism as being not significantly different but rather a consequential period refers to typical features that are common for both, such as artistic self-consciousness and reflexiveness, preferring simultaneity and montage to basic narrative structure and composition in literature, paradoxicality, ambiguity and uncertainity and emphasising subject‟s heterogeneity. On the other hand, there is a branch which stresses the difference and discontinuity and argues that even if there
13 was a set of features that both phenomena share, there would still be a distinction in their meaning and function in the society. Smart introduces distinct postmodern features set by a literary critic Fredric Jameson, such as absence of depth, weakened historicity, fragmented subject, pastiche and crisis of representation. What is arguable is mentioning a “prevalence of a nostalgia mode” (Smart 1997: 16-17), because in another part of the same book, Smart mentions that “there has been (...) a cult of the new, a social and economic context in which innovation and novelty have been promoted... (Smart 1997: 14). Barry Smart also adds important cultural, technical and economical attributes of postmodern society, such as the fast development of technologies and their close relation to society, globalization and changes in the world‟s economics.
Despite these, in general terms, one of the most crucial characteristic of the postmodern – considering whatever alternative – is questioning and challenging the past and general phenomena or - using Lyotard‟s voice – grand narratives. As he argues, the postmodern society is no longer in a position to honour unquestionable universal truth, because man – such highly developed and cultivated
– should now move from honouring to critical revising their intellectual values. Such argument led to suggestions about global crisis of humanity (Smart 1997: 37), though
Linda Hutcheon claims that humanistic values are still being valid, however they only became arguable (Hutcheon 2005: 13).
Another important notice Hutcheon - and Lyotard too - deals with is the fact that both knowledge and contemporary intellectual values is only human constructs based on unnatural basis, therefore they could be disconfirmed at any time
(Hutcheon 2005: 13). Consequently, realizing how fragile our artificial principles are as well as the decline of cultural authorities may lead to general depression and
14 doubts within society (Connor 2001: 8) as well as among scientists and analytics.
The direct response to such breakdown of objectivistic phenomena is general criticising and negotiation. Lyotard explains the intellectual crisis as an allegory to the state of the contemporary society. Moreover, this situation does not affect only general academic debates and research but also individuals for it seems that any scientific research or book published causes a wave of evaluation, negotiation or even re-writing original texts evoking author‟s feeling of vanity and frustration
(Connor 2001: 36; Lyotard 1987: 7-8).
Finally, I would like to mention that for my diploma thesis‟s purposes – despite all the uncertainity and ambiguity in trying to define and interpret the period of the second half of the twentieth century – I am going to result from the opinions that there actually was or is a postmodern period particular in the way of noticeable and specific global changes of the world and its society, which could have a concrete influence on the contemporary philosophy, literature and writers‟ overall attitudes to the world and their literary work.
2.2. THE SOCIETY OF CHANGES
The effort to define and explain the essence of postmodernism remains unclear, though, what seems to be more certain is the concept of the broader context of changes in the society of the post-war world that have became remarkably visible.
The conception of postmodernity is generally linked to a particular social, political and cultural organization of the second half of the twentieth century and to the shift from the era of modernity. Moreover, according to specific references to sociological, economical and technological factors, co-occurrence
15 of postmodernity and post-industrial society has been mentioned (Smart 1997: 23;
Keller 2009: 23). Such idea is carried also by an American literary critique Fredric
Jameson in his foreword to Lyotard‟s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Jameson says:“... postmodernism as it is generally understood involves a radical break, both with a dominant culture and aesthetic, and with a rather different moment of socioeconomic organization against which its structural novelties and innovations are measured: a new social and economic moment (or even system) which has variously been called media society, the society of spectacle ..., consumer society ..., the ´bureaucratic society of controlled consumption´ ..., or ´postindustrial society” Lyotard 1987: vii).
Later on, even another opinion appeared held by Linda Hutcheon in her study
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, which disconnect the period of the consumer society and postmodernism. Unlike Jameson, she stresses the importance of the break from the homogenizing consumerism of the late capitalism and renewal of accepting or even highlighting heterogeneity and the decentralized society for originating postmodernism (Hutcheon 2005: 12).
Nevertheless, all of these concepts could be defined as analyzing the state of the society since the 1950s or 1960s, whereas in his concept of the “crisis of narratives,” Lyotard – as well as other critiques and historiographers – argues for continual cultural transformations that has begun to define future development of the western society as early as at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century
(Lyotard 1987: 23, Smart 1997: 24). Even if he approves of the post-war changes in society he rather stresses the continuality of changes.
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What are these changes? How do they contribute to the contemporary conditions of the western society and to postmodernism? When did they start? Are they outcomes of a long-term development or rather a break from the previous period? Since the development of society and analyzing possible sources and outcomes are very complex and demanding issues, asking these questions would need far more pages than is outlined for a diploma thesis. Therefore, I have decided to only mention and comment on the most important and determining issues connected with the postmodern condition of society.
Whenever the new times of postmodernity started and whatever they originated from – and it now seems to be impossible to say so – the changes include mainly the fast development of global culture, politics, economics and technologies.
Generally, in his introduction to postmodernity titled Postmodernity, Barry
Smart offers three possible senses of the concept of postmodernity – relating to distinctive approaches of postmodernity/postmodernism to modernity/modernism
–. First of them implies a long-term continuous relationship to modernity. Secondly, there is an indication of a break with the modern condition and, lastly, relating to the modern way of life (Smart 1997: 23). Additionally, what needs to be mentioned is the fact that such concepts as the Smart‟s one mentioned above are always schematic and simplifying, which – especially in case of postmodernism typical for its impossibility to be briefly described – should not be taken for granted utterly but rather as an effort to systematize various theories.
Those alluding to the shift from industrial to postindustrial society make references to increasing comments from the 1970s about the decline of industrial society and its turn to post-industrial period characterised by a transition of mainly industrial society and workers to service trades, which is an echoing situation
17 of similar importance as migrating of workers from agriculture to industry between the world wars and after the end of the World War II. Economically, the “deruralization” was very successful, because the high number of factories increased a need for unqualified workers, who easily assimilated themselves in modern industrial society; therefore the same expectations were hold in 1970s.
Unfortunately, the “deindustrialization” was not as successful as the transition from agriculture, since there were many sociocultural and economical factors that had not been taken into account, such as far lesser population – as a consequence of economic crisis and wars –, in which the employed population used to be primarily men – for women used to be mainly housewives – and convenient settling of “deruralized” workers in cities (Keller 2009: 23-24).
On the other hand, the onset of service trades society was followed by fundamental changes in employment. However, a more important factor of origination of the post-industrial society was a changeover in family structure.
In his critical discourse Soumrak sociálního státu, Jan Keller compares the state of postmodern families to the “flexibilization” of employment, in which much of economical insecurity is transferred from the employer to the employees as well as much of the family and household business is transferred from the family to the state and individuals. The family crisis could be defined as a loss of family security as well as stability. A family no longer functions as organization guaranteeing social and economical reliance, since the family has became an instable institution limited and shaped by superordinate labour market demands. What is more, a person with family and children is logically less flexible than a single; therefore having a family has become a very uneconomical luxury.
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Jan Keller says: “ A person, who invests their free time in the family as well as in employment, is less flexible than a professionally-aware enough person without any children. And those, who would even adopt a child, if they cannot have their own, are deathly irresponsible to their professional career... On the contrary, the childless have become ultimate winners. Not only their pension is paid from the others‟ children‟s salaries, but they also get better with the money the others cannot save, because they has already invested it into their children” (Keller 2009:
33-34, my translation).
Besides, in my opinion, there could be find a close relation between the insecurity of family members‟ social and economical status and the rise of feminism movements, for a woman – with or without children – is a far more endangered part of a family than a man, whose employment position and income has always been better secured.
Another feature of postmodern world and factor negatively influencing the family status is increasing individuality among contemporary society. On one hand, people tend to individualism in order to be independent. On the other hand, such behaviour provides loosing and less definite relationships. Where is the border between independency and loneliness? One of unconscious but strong factors that support individualism among society is a social state and its social benefits. Feeling secure and knowing that in case of emergency the state offers benefits is definitely necessary but decreases the importance of the family, which used to assure its members instead of the state. Moreover, the social state provides even other services, such as education, health care and supplies that used to be the responsibility of the family, therefore the family has lost its main functions (Keller 2007: 112-113).
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On the contrary, in his concept, Lyotard argues for the postmodern as a result of a long-term crisis of metanarratives resulting from as early as the Enlightenment period that have lost their credibility. According to Lyotard, postmodernists distrust any form of universal philosophy and master narratives of the conquest of nature
(Lyotard 1987, xxiv; Sarup 1993: 145). He also claims that art, knowledge and science have become isolated and independent of society. Art as well as knowledge have lost their use-value and rather become instant consumer products, while science is undergoing a crisis of determinism and has locked itself in exhibitionism rather than efficiency.
2.3. VARIETIES OF POSTMODERN THEORIES
On one hand, there are particular changes and alternations among the post- war society, on the other hand, there should be – and have been – following serious and scientific questioning and analyzing status quo. There have been many theorists from almost all scientific branches studying consequences of alternations within public society and science. The most known belong to the so-called post-structuralist school of linguists, of which members responses to structuralism as well as postmodernists responded to modernism. The post-structuralists disclaimed the idea of language being a system with a clear structure in the Saussurean way and, by contrast, referred to the instability of language. They also challenged the general social and cultural phenomena, such as science, art, history and consumerism.
In his significant book entitled The postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard defines his reflections on social changes, science, language and the differences between what he calls “narrative knowledge”
20 and “scientific knowledge,” the oppositional approaches to reason. The basis of Lyotard‟s concept of the postmodern crisis lies in a fundamental opposition of “narrative and scientific knowledge.” He says that what seems to has been forgotten is the fact that knowledge – in its wider sense – can be reduced to neither science nor learning. Lyotard sees the terms science, knowledge and learning in their particular sense and strongly distinguish among them. Learning is a set of statements that refer to objects and could be declared true or false; science is a section of learning; while Lyotard‟s concept of knowledge includes far more from metaphysical common sense. Lyotard says: “Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth, extending to the determination and application of efficiency
(technical qualification), of justice and/or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beautiful a sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), etc. Understood in this way, knowledge is what makes someone capable of forming „good‟ denotative utterances, but also „good‟ prescriptive and „good‟ evaluative utterances...”
(Lyotard 1987: 18).
What is more, knowledge could be divided into the narrative and scientific one. The former refers to narrative traditions such as myths, legends and mystic stories, through which the narrators transfer a set of pragmatic rules functioning as a social bond. What is important is the fact that these pragmatics are immediately authorized by the narrator as being true for its addressees and, therefore, do not need further legitimacy. Nevertheless, there are so-called “metanarratives” (or “grand narratives”) such as philosophy, religion and Marxism that used to be used to legitimate knowledge. Although, what defines postmodernism, according to Lyotard,
21 is incredulity towards the metanarratives, which is the source of instability and the general crisis.
On the other hand, the scientific knowledge is based on positivism and verification that have lost their credibility, though. What is the main issue of current science according to Lyotard is a lack of legitimation. Since science has reached a level in which researchers and scientists no more result from determinism and positivism but rather operate with abstract ideas, the aim of science turned from inventing to searching for counterexamples and paradoxes. Briefly said, there is not unlimited amount of possible scientific inventions and as far as the science is based on artificial bases any invention could be disclaimed and opposed with another set of artificial proofs, which leads to disillusionment and demoralization of researchers and teachers.
He argues that the fast technological development and transformations have influenced the human approach to knowledge, for they have become closely interconnected. Lyotard predicts that anything that will not be translatable into quantities of language and computer language will be abandoned. Moreover, whatever one wants to invent or learn is limited by the inventor‟s computer knowledge, which all – as well as the ideology of communicational transparency and preferring information easy to decode – therefore leads to simplifying and a misuse of knowledge as a pure commodity, of which the main purpose is an easy exchange among producers and consumers of knowledge (Lyotard 1987: 4). It has lost its self- value and is now useful as a product one wants to acquire only in order to raise their employment value (Fromm 2001: 170-178).
In other words, the main purpose of acquiring knowledge, which Lyotard calls the “mercantilization of knowledge,” is nothing else than profit and power.
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Lyotard adds that the main danger lies in global economic power, which has been transferred from states to even more powerful multinational corporations not controlled by the public any more but by businessmen.
The linkage of knowledge and power has been an important issue also in the work of Michel Foucault. Along with the postmodernism, he denies theorizing as well as systematicity. What is important are his detailed analyses of the mad and his conception of historiographical discontinuity.
Foucault‟s ontology of history is a form of a critique avoiding general rationality of explaining historiographical phenomena. While general historiography tends to elaborate any notion of difference between the present and past in favour of finding linearity of the historical development, Foucault‟s conception, which is derived from the Nietzsche‟s (Sarup 1993: 58), is based on stressing the unexplainable gap between the past and present. History cannot be controlled and rationalized; it is unreasonable and directionless, it has had neither great moments, nor heroes. What is more, in his genealogy, Foucault focused on moments of discontinuity, local memories and otherness in order to disclaim the general historiographical uniformity and hierarchies.
In his work, Foucault was mainly interested in social sciences. As well as
Lyotard, in his studies, Foucault went further in history to the Age of Reason, in which a new philosophical conception of man being a centre of nature as well as research was constituted. However, he disclaimed such rational conception and preferred discontinuity and madness.
Foucault holds a relativist attitude and seems to partially romanticize madness. In his works, he described in detail the developing and changing approach of the social majority to the mad – including mania, melancholia, hysteria and
23 hypochondria (Sarup 1993: 60-63). He argues that since the period of Renaissance treating madness has moved from acceptance to condemnation, which, moreover, witnesses changes not only of the insane treating but also of the whole society. While during the Renaissance vagabonds and the mad were allowed to freely wander, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century they were locked in madhouses – as a result of new social sensibility and reaction to the unemployment. There were not any differentiations made in these houses; vagabonds, the mad, the sick and criminals mingled together. However the main aim of the confinement was not curing the internees but making them work. Foucault says: “Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labour. Our philanthropy prefers to recognize the signs of benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness” (Rabinow 1991: 128). The turn in the approach toward the mad also refers to a social change of instituting labour a part of moral reform. As well as rationalism, labour has become a crucial part of social life.
In the nineteenth century the madhouses appeared to be an error and the system of condemnation was substituted by a system of surveillance and medical treatment. Being taken as a social failure, the insane has become absolutely isolated from the social majority (Sarup 1993: 63). Consequently, in his romanticizing view,
Foucault seems to highlight the wisdom of madness and appreciates the balance of reason and unreason that, unfortunately, has been repressed.
According to Foucault, together with the surveillance system, which seemed to be more efficient for the state, there appeared a new conception of power. In his
Discipline and Punish, Foucault distinguishes between monarchical power, that used
24 to be applied in feudal societies, and disciplinary power, a system of surveillance that substituted the former one. The latter one appeared to be less expensive, since a permanent control over population is preferred to the expensive individual punishment. Current all-seeing computer monitoring is a form of what Foucault calls
“Panopticorn” symbolized by a central watch-tower, which has become the only possible option of overall control due to increasing number of population.
Another postmodern theorist disclaiming the Western search for the rational essence of being is Jacques Derrida. Although, what is Derrida mainly concerned with is the role and function of language, which no longer seems to function as a clear structure as structuralists used to claim. As a post-structuralist, Derrida disclaims a structuralist idea of language as a stable system. In his language theory, he stresses the inadequacy of the Saussurean idea of a sign being an exclusive unity of a signifier and signified. Derrida demonstrates that a signifier and signified always relate to each other only partially and, therefore, one sign leads to another and another and they make rather an unlimited chain of signifiers than single pairs. In his guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism, Madan Sarup says: “In other words,
Derrida argues that when we read a sign, meaning is not immediately clear to us.
Signs refer to what is absent, so in a sense meanings are absent, too. Meaning is continually moving along on a chain of signifiers, and we cannot be precise about its exact „location,‟ because it is never tied to one particular sign” (Sarup 1993: 33).
A sign never has a single meaning for it refers to a non-present object or idea, hence the meaning or the signified is neither present, nor clear as well. The impossibility of presence alludes to Derrida‟s deconstruction of what he calls
“metaphysics of presence,” on which most of significant philosophers rely as the
25 only available area of metaphysical certainty (Sarup 1993: 35). He argues that there is not any notion of presence as a definable period of time.
Secondly, by deconstructing general metaphysical phenomena such as Order,
Freedom and God he therefore subverts even the philosophical basis of the Western culture. Derrida denies any form of centrism, such as a human search for a stable and present metaphysical authority. Concerning forms of centrism, he mentions mainly phonocentrism, i.e. preferring speech to a piece of writing as one of the effects of metaphysical presence, and logocentrism, which means a Western dependence on rationality and searching for the essence of human being, which could be presented as the transcendental signifier directly relating to the transcendental signified, i.e. logos. As noticed above, such direct relation of any signifier and signifier is, according to Derrida, not possible, therefore also human search for the logical centre of being is fundamentally aimless.
Last, but not least is the work of Jean Baudrillard, whose sociologist work has been claimed to be provocative and controversial, yet his concept of the nature and influences of consumer society and mass media has been of great importance. His early works deal with a neo-Marxist critique of capitalism, hence later he considered
Marxism to be inappropriate for comprehension of current society, and, therefore, he adopted rather postmodern views.
Baudrillard worked on the assumption that commodities should be understood and function as a Saussurean system of signs with consumer products being a network of signifiers that incite desire among members of the society. He claims that the main function of such commodities is not to fulfil an individual´s needs as it used to be, but rather relate them to a social group they wish to be a part of.
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The main part of his idea is related to consumer society and mass media. The latter, according to him, has become a predominant feature of the current world, since he claims that consumerism of the post-war society created a new form of communication – the mass media – that have totally dominated a public sphere as well as private lives. In his guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism, Madan
Sarup says: “Media practises have rearranged our senses of space and time. What is real is no longer our direct contact with the world, but what we are given on the TV screen: TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life, and life is dissolved into TV. The fiction is „realized‟ and the „real‟ becomes fictitious. Simulation has replaced production” (Sarup 1993: 165). Therefore mass media have become the main source of perceiving the outside world. On one hand, we know what is happening on the other side of the world, but, on the other hand, we are losing a sense of straight interpersonal communication. Moreover, what used to be real is nowadays so far and distant and it turned to seem to be fictitious and vice versa. The artificial media world has become the everyday reality. What is even more, through media one acquires an enormous amount of information, with which the only way to deal is to accept it only as superficial meaningless signifiers not related to any signified
(Sarup 1993: 165).
Considering Baudrillard‟s concepts in general, his conception of the world means that the world is constructed of models – or simulacra – that does not refer to any reality besides themselves (Sarup 1993: 163), in which the signification of simulacrum varies and progress in time. The order of simulacrum is divided into three phases: early modernity, modernity and postmodernity, which includes a description of the development of simulacrum from clear, unconfused signs of the era before the Industrial Revolution followed by replacing the dominant image of the
27 first order and the contemporary period of the third order in which models, codes and hyper reality replaced production. The postmodern era stands on simulacra, simulations that no longer relate to reality and that, moreover, have overruled the real and become the depleted major phenomena.
Overall features of the postmodern theorists‟ conceptions could be summarized as heterogeneity, contradiction and instability. The authors mainly focused on disconfirming homogeneity of society (Foucault), instability of knowledge (Lyotard,
Derrida), a cohesion of knowledge and power (Lyotard, Foucault) and instability of perceiving reality (Baudrillard). Briefly said, in their particular approach they all seem to dare to criticise general phenomena of Western culture that used to be unquestionable, which leads to rich debates, arguments, disillusions and even demoralization, which is, I guess, the current stage.
2.4. ON THE POSTMODERN POETICS
In the previous sub-chapters I have summarized the general condition of postmodern society and science. However, what I would like to primarily focus on is postmodern literature. Yet, as well as in postmodern science we also have to deal with the obvious impossibility to define its terms, essence and features. It seems to be similarly exacting to search for characteristics and common poetics of postmodern literature – and art in general –, since the postmodern fundamentally tends to avoid any form of generalizing and totalizing – which is probably the single principle almost all the postmodern theorists seem to approve of when analyzing the postmodern –. There might be as many concepts as theorist and only a few of them share similar features. Nevertheless, even in such nihilistic background there are
28 efforts of literary scholars to analyze and locate the postmodern poetics, such as
Linda Hutcheon in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction and Barry Lewis in his article Postmodernism and Literature or Word Salad Days,
1960-1990 in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism edited by Stuart Sim, in which there could be found tendencies to outline the poetics of postmodern art.
Before summarizing the characteristics of postmodern literature, when concerning the fundamental postmodern principle of challenging and rethinking
“meta-narratives,” what should be taken into account is a question whether searching for common features is not only a remain of rational phenomenon of centring and totalizing, to which postmodernist tend to oppose. In The postmodern Condition,
Lyotard explains the uneasy condition of postmodern artists and the impossibility to find common features of their work. Lyotard says: “A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work.
Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done” (Lyotard 1987: 81). Lyotard claims that postmodern artists should not work according to particular rules, for there are not any ready-made rules how to create or write a piece of postmodern art or writing; the one who creates these rules is the writer himself/herself. Therefore, the interpreter of postmodern art could only search for similarities retroactively; hence such similarity may not be significant. Additionally, the postmodern artist is not bounded by any conventions, such as genre, originality and historiography. Lyotard‟s concept also seems to correspond with the idea of possible and fictional worlds (Doležel 2003;
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Ronen 2006), since he claims that the artist or writer should not be limited by
“familiar categories,” which could be applied to not being limited by the actual world and creating new possible worlds not dependent on the actual one.
The predominant tendency, according to Linda Hutcheon, of the postmodern is challenging institutions, the past and certainties, such as order, values, meaning, identity and control (Hutcheon 2005: 13), from which other features derive. What is different from the previous literary movements is the fact that postmodernists do not insist upon solving fundamental and metaphysical contradictions. Hutcheon says:
“The result of this deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions is a contesting of what
Lyotard calls the totalizing master narratives of our culture, those systems by which we usually unify and order (and smooth over) any contradictions in order to make them fit” (Hutcheon 2005: x). What Hutcheon stress is the postmodern tendency not to regulate natural phenomena and contradictions with human reason, which, according to her, relates to and derives from Lyotard‟s “crisis of metanarratives.”
Applied to postmodern art, what is meant by challenging is rethinking and crossing boarders and limits of artistic conventions, mixing arts and genres.
Hutcheon gives examples of blending genres, such as prose and poetry, fiction and autobiography, novel and history and novel and short stories (Hutcheon 2005: 9), e.g. Chuck Palahniuk‟s Haunted, A Novel of Stories, of which the title indicates that the book is a collection of independent stories, though, with an interconnecting theme. Suitable means to challenge history are intertextuality, irony and parody, which postmodern writers often use. A form of intertextual rethinking is also
Burgess‟ 1985 clearly alluding to and revising George Orwell‟s Nineteenth Eighty-
Four from the 1970‟s point of view. What Lubomír Doležel stresses on the concept of literary intertextuality is that the postmodern rewriting not only use the original
30 text as a source, but also revise and challenge it, therefore intertextuality enriches both the texts, the original and rewriting (Doležel 2003: 198-9). On the other hand, there are also argues that paraphrasing the past signifies rather literal exhaustion and frustration, which is in literal context called a pastiche.
Additionally, considering the revision of literary works from the past, there are concepts of rethinking the originality of works of art (Hutcheon 2005: 11). By undermining the common approach to an identity based on social conventions, in his book The Limits of Interpretation, Umberto Eco gives examples and disclaims notions and definitions of identity, originality and authenticity and criteria of their assessment as being unsatisfied (Eco 2005: 188-218). As well as Doležel, he claims that the process of intertextuality is bilateral; therefore the prior text is not misused, but enriched.
What is also being challenged, according to the Foulcaltian tendencies refusing the centralism and totalizing, is an omniscient, omnipresent third person narration as well as a single narrator, which is in postmodern writings substituted by so-called autofiction (Hutcheon 2005: 10), multiperspective, e.g. Milan Kundera‟s
Žert – Barry Lewis includes Kundera in his list of prominent postmodern writers
(Lewis: 96) –, and general preferring heterogeneity and mixing. While the former includes also social, ethnical and gender minorities, the latter mixing élite and popular culture, which has appeared as early as in pop art and Andy Warhol‟s conception of turning commodities into art, as well as mixing art, theory and critiques. Therefore, in postmodern writings, the imaginative and scientific literature and its genres mingle as in Burgess‟s 1985, in which the story itself is preceded by a number of essays, fictional interviews and interpretations of Orwell‟s Nineteenth-
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Eighty Four. What is more, Burgess‟s story of 1985 is also paraphrasing Orwell‟s famous novel.
According to Barry Lewis, the postmodernism is definitely over since the
1990s, however, he provides a clear set of common features of postmodern novels and short stories. Besides parody and pastiche, he mentions also temporal disorder, fragmentation, paranoia, vicious circles and looseness of association. Temporal disorder includes apocryphal history, i.e. mock or false history potentialities, anachronisms such as TV in the nineteenth century and mixing history and fantasy
(Lewis: 98) that are to a certain extend related to the philosophical concept of possible worlds applied to literature as so-called fictional worlds (Doležel 2003;
Ronen 2006) This concept disclaims literature as simply relating to the actual reality, but rather offers an idea of literary narratives being independent worlds of not realized entities and events. Temporal disorder disrupts the past as well as present, in which it breaks the coherence of narrative and perceiving the real.
Looseness of association or fragmentation corrupts composition and by various means, such as Dadaist cut-ups, rather divides the text into independent fragments. Paranoia – according to Ihab Hassan‟s list of differences between modernism and postmodernism in The Dismemberment of Orpheus belongs to modernist poetics – is usually a character‟s feeling of being stalked and endangered or a notion of social conspiracy against the individual as in Ken Kesey‟s One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
In his Heterocosmica, Doležel mentions also metanarratives, narratives that are aware of themselves as being fiction, and vicious circles, which are based on melting of fictional and actual worlds and their entities such as in Paul Auster‟s City
32 of Glass, in which the actual author melts into two characters and thus disrupts the natural border between the fiction and actual world.
Consequently, even if there are few common features, it might be demanding to search for the postmodern poetics for several reasons. The authors and literary theorist themselves seem to underestimate the importance of being marked as postmodernist, because that would be exactly the homogenizing principle they seem to avoid. Hence, the writers are less dependent on any form of literary regulations they would have followed in order to be particularly marked. This fact gives them enormous freedom of artistic creativity and also lets literature free of totalizing and determining principles of the previous eras.
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3. FICTIONAL WORLDS IN BURGESS‘ NOVELS
In the following chapter I am going to move from general theorizing about postmodernism to a practical analysis of a literary text based on a conception of possible worlds applied to fiction, so-called fictional worlds, described – among others – in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible worlds by literary theorist Lubomír
Doležel and Possible Worlds in Literary Theory by Ruth Ronen. According to the authors, unlike mimetic doctrine of classic narratology, the concept of fictional worlds is supposed to sufficiently implicate and interpret postmodern literature.
Possible worlds are a philosophical conception with a long tradition that has been restored in a postmodern philosophical and logic discourse and later in various natural and social sciences as well as in humanities (Peregrin 2005: 135). In the theoretical literary discourse it has functioned as so-called fictional worlds. Applied to fiction, it disclaims the concept of a one world framework as well as mimetic reading interpretation and, by contrast, holds an idea of possible worlds of fiction made up by semiotic system, language, that differ from the actual world and also from the possible worlds of philosophy and logic in six aspects: fictional worlds are sets of non-realized possible states, these sets are unlimited and varied, the fictional worlds of literature are accessible through semiotic channel, language, and are incomplete, which a reader hardly realizes, though, they might be semantically heterogeneous and are created by a creative textual activity (Fořt 2005: 70-71; Ronen
2005: 168-172; Ronen 2006: 128).
While mimesis maintains the concept of a fiction representing or imitating the actual world (Pavel 2009: 8), the theory of fictional worlds argues for the possible worlds paradigm applied to literature. Therefore, it offers an alternative to classic
34 mimetic reading, which seems to no longer suffice for interpreting literary experiments of postmodern writings, such as metafiction, vicious circles and impossible fictional worlds (nemožné fikční světy). The literature possessing such phenomena – including Burgess‟ novels – neither describes, nor relates to the actual world, hence cannot be analyzed by mimetic reading. According to Doležel, fictional semantics, in which fiction does not simply imitate the actual world but rather represents one of possible worlds, is a more suitable system for interpreting postmodern literature. Doležel says: “…this book is strongly objecting to the ancient, but still outlasting mimetic doctrine, fictional theory, which claims that a fiction is simulating or describing the actual world and life. Mimetic doctrine is the basis of popular reading, which transforms fictional characters into actual people, fictional place into the actual one, fictional narratives into actual world events” (Doležel 2003:
10, my translation). Since in mimetic semantics the fiction correlates with the actual world, the narrator seems to correlate with the author, which may lead to misinterpretation of postmodern fiction, in which an unreliable narrator may occur or the narrator may represent an attitude oppositional from the author‟s as in Anthony
Burgess‟ A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist and the narrator, young delinquent Alex, is often misunderstood as Burgess‟ voice adoring violence.
(Morrison 2000: ix).
For the reasons mentioned above I have decided to start the analysis of
Burgess‟ novels using the fictional world concept. The basis of the fictional semantics does not lie in the story, but in the fictional world itself, therefore I am going to analyze the construction and characteristics of fictional worlds in the three of Burgess‟s novels: A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985, of which all include the socio-theological concept of society developing in a three-phase cycle.
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The interpretation is going to follow a simplified structure based on Lubomír
Doležel‟s literary analyses in Heterocosmica. Fictional semantics divides a narrative into the “extensional and intensional meaning,” which covers both the entities of the fictional world and the texture.
“Extensional meaning” is a set of entities, to which a sign refers. It is not interested in the sign itself, but in the entity or object it expresses, i.e. the extensional structure. Considering a fictional world of a narrative, the extensional meaning refers to the set of fictional entities of the narrative (Fořt 2005: 73-74). These fictional entities include constructing parts of fictional worlds of novels, action and its rational or impulsive forms, intentionality and motivation including instincts, emotions and cognitive factors and modality, i.e. the influence of aletic, deontic, axiological and epistemic limits on creating a structure of fictional worlds. The constructing parts could be divided into people and circumstances of the fictional worlds functioning.
People stand for a set of protagonists and secondary characters, agents/ patients and social groups they make as well as forms of their interaction and connections. Unlike the circumstances, which are represented by the society as a whole. In
Heterocosmica, Doležel highlights the position and role of a character within social groups, institutions, social, political and cultural systems (Doležel 2003: 99), which form particular hierarchies, and connections within society, limits as well as power, ideology and dogmata. What is interesting is mentioning a Foulcaltian idea of a connection between power and erotic (Doležel 2003: 98) that play a significant role in both the actual and fictional world.
On the other hand, the “intensional meaning” refers to the sign itself. It relates to the form of the language sign and defines the texture of a narrative. What is the aim of the “intensional structure” analysis is searching for relevant language
36 regularities, irregularities, figurative language, rhymes etc. Therefore the objects of my intensional structure analysis are similarities and analogies of the texture of the novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985.
Consequently, first, I am going to describe the fictional world of the novels itself and then separately the thought content, themes and motifs. Main themes and motifs are going to be described in the final, independent chapter of my diploma thesis, for I would like to elaborate them in detail focusing on the Burgess‟ cyclic theory appearing in all of the three novels – and thus connecting, including and organizing some of Burgess‟ overall attitudes to contemporary society as well as literature – and its relation to the then philosophical and sociological tendencies and concepts shortly outlined in the first chapter.
3.1. CHARACTERS
According to Lubomír Doležel, in order to analyze constructing parts of the
“extensional structure” – that is a set of entities in the fictional world, to which the semiotic system refers – of the novels‟ fictional worlds, the interpreter must start with describing the characters followed by a description of social groups the characters make and the whole fictional world society, according to which they are able to interpret accidents that happen to the characters and forms as well as functions of communication that is proceeding among the characters. All of the three
Burgess‟ novels contain fictional worlds with more than one person; therefore the plots are based on the interaction of characters functioning as individualities or a group. The most productive background for a narrative is a fictional world, in which there are present two or more agents. The main source of the story is
37 an interaction of the characters performing as individuals or groups. Moreover, these characters must function as agents; they must be actively involved and take part in the interaction to make an action and plot.
Fictional characters could be divided into protagonists and secondary characters. They altogether get in contact and make various social structures of a particular hierarchy and level of involvement (Doležel 2003: 106). Considering protagonists of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985, they seem to be a good example and a clear result of Burgess‟ literary intentions, because in the first and third book, which are both supposed to be a defence of individuality (Morrison
2000: ix), there is only a single protagonist undergoing a struggle against a society, secondary characters. Both Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Bev Jones from
1985 are strong individualities. Their function is different, though. Alex struggles for primarily personal reason, to mature, while Bev is in a position of a martyr in order to become an exemplified example for the whole society.
The protagonists may have a group of peers as in A Clockwork Orange,
Alex‟s so-called “droogs”, who they later turn traitors. In 1985 Bev‟s wife dies at the very beginning and daughter is mentally retarded. Therefore, the protagonist becomes solitary. While in The Wanting Seed, which has, in my opinion, an explanatory function as an outline of the cyclic theory of Pelagian and
Augustinian phases, there are two protagonists, a couple, on which Burgess could demonstrate relationship and family consequences of a particular cyclic phase, e.g. also at the very beginning the protagonists‟ son dies and his mother, Beatrice
Joanna Foxe, grieves for losing her child as well as motherhood itself, while the doctor just says “cheerfully:” “You‟ll get over that... everyone does... Think of this in national terms, in global terms. One mouth less to feed... You‟ve had your
38 recommended ration. No more motherhood for you. Try to stop feeling like a mother” (Burgess 1965: 4-5). According to which the reader can see the strict rationality and coolness of the government and social system. Also, a reader is suggested that there is a birth ration, probably because of over-population, which becomes clear within next few pages.
Secondary characters are those, with whom protagonists interact and communicate in order to invoke action and evolve the plot (Doležel 2003: 105). The purpose of secondary characters in A Clockwork Orange and 1985, such as the droogs, post-corrective advisor and Dr Branom, is to focus on and highlight the wrongness, nonsense and degeneracy of the society, with which the solitary protagonist is in opposition. Even despite A Clockwork Orange‟s protagonist‟s violence, he still stands against the society in a sense of his keeping freedom and thus right to choose whether to be either a good or bad person, while the society has ultimately lost its sense of freedom and has become a means of manipulation. In the introduction to A Clockwork Orange Blake Morrison says: “There is the devastating simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlines 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, answer clearly: yes” (Morrison 2000: viii). On the other hand, in
The Wanting Seed the set of secondary characters is more variable, for there are both good characters, Beatrice Joanna‟s brother-in-law Shonny and The Prime Minister‟s slave Abdul Wahab, and the bad ones, Derek Foxe, Captain Loosley, police officers etc., in order to plausibly describe the fictional worlds with its negativeness as well as positiveness.
The set of a protagonist/protagonists and secondary characters might be organized into an a/symmetric compositional pattern (Doležel 2003: 106) that either
39 frames the plot or function as a leitmotiv implementing through the whole story.
A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed have the framing symmetric pattern, because the protagonists and secondary characters begin and end the narrative in the same structural set. In the former there are the protagonist Alex and his droogs and the latter is framed by the protagonists, Tristram and Beatrice Joanna Foxe, being a couple; while 1985 ends with a suicide of the protagonist, which might highlight the tragic imperativeness and hopelessness of the story. 1985 is not framed by a character compositional patter but by a death.
In my opinion, the difference of 1985‟s character compositional pattern might indicate an alteration in Burgess‟ conception of the cyclic development and allow a spiral as another possible shape of progression, Which he admits as early as in The
Wanting Seed, in which the protagonist Tristram says: “Perhaps all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into coil” (Burgess 1965: 234-5). Realizing that even his novels‟ fictional worlds with the symmetric compositional pattern do not operate as closed circles, but rather vary might has led to a partial revision of the theory of the cycle.
What connects A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed is an epiphanic character of a religious man, whose function is to present the real status quo and to explicitly explain the affirmation of individuality to a reader, such as the priest in The
Wanting Seed and the prison chaplain in A Clockwork Orange, who says: “I must confess I share those doubts. The question is whether such a (i.e. Ludovico‟s) 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,”
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(Burgess 2000: 63) or “Very hard ethical questions are involved... You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State‟s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that... 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? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321” (Burgess 2000: 71).
In all of the three Burgess‟ books there is also a set of police officers, officers and public figures that are always described with a strong and clear antipathy, which also leads to Burgess‟ romantic defence of individuality and opposition to majority, masses and government.
What is typical for all Burgess‟ characters is a certain level of psychological flatness, which could be seen as an author‟s failure or, by contrast, an intention to direct attention from characters‟ inner life to the explanation of outer matters, such as the state of current society. Moreover, flatness is a frequently listed feature of postmodernism included also in Ihab Hassan‟s table of differences between modernism and postmodernism in his article Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.
As has been already said, characters interact with each other as individuals or as members of a social group, which causes action. What is the main interaction of
Burgess‟ novels is a conflict of a protagonist/protagonists and a strict social organization as well as political system. There is always a strong contrast between an individual and anonymous social group. In his novels, Burgess designs fictional worlds with powerful institutions, with which the individual needs to struggle in order to fulfil their purpose. The interaction among characters usually starts a set of accidents, although, protagonists are later left alone to struggle against the system,
41 e.g. in A Clockwork Orange Alex is caught and send to prison because of the
“droogs” that betrayed him, in The Wanting Seed Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna are attacked by the government because of Tristram‟s brother Derek, with whom
Beatrice-Joanna is expecting a baby. The narrative of 1985 seems to be more determined, since Bev‟s tragedy is caused by his wife‟s death, which is a result of firemen‟s strike, though. Consequently, the relation between the individual and society is always asymmetric; the protagonist is determined to lose.
3.2. SOCIETY
The social basis for Burgess‟ novels is always south-east of England in 1970s and 1980s. The Wanting Seed and 1985 are set in London, in A Clockwork Orange the placement is not explicitly mentioned but it could be London too. Yet, according to dates of publishing, 1962 and 1978, these novels were supposed to describe near future of the then society. Although, as Blake Morrison suggests in his introduction to A Clockwork Orange (Morrison 2000: xi), what is to be analyzed is not the accuracy of Burgess‟ predictions of future social development but the fictional world of the author‟s novels itself, its literary constructing and constitution that should follow the author‟s intentions and support his message.
Social constructs of the novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and
1985 seem to be an essential part of comprehending Burgess‟ fictional worlds, because the society provides the necessary environment for a protagonist‟s journey through the novel. The main aim of the constructs of society in the novels is to picture the particular phases of the cyclic theory, their features and their sources in the society as well as the impact upon it.
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A Clockwork Orange represents a society at the beginning of the Augustinian phase (Morrison 2000: xii). The country is paralysed by the aggressiveness of the youth as well as a high number of brutal attacks upon its citizens. Therefore, the new
Minister of Interior establishes the “Reclamation Treatment” based on Pavlovian techniques of “negative reinforcement” (Morrison 2000: xv) that is supposed to suppress the bad aspects of a violent person‟s personality. The protagonist Alex becomes the first who undergoes the treatment, the first deterrent graduate of the so- called “Ludovico Method.” There is a clear criticism of a homogenizing majority oppressing an individual as well as human intellectual and cultural decline. Besides the struggle of the individual, the novel portrays the never ending generation conflict between the youth and the old. The young generation is aimless, aggressive and takes drugs; still it wins a reader‟s favour, because the old, despite their maturity, do not seem to be fully taking advantage of their being. Alex says: “My stereo was no longer on about Joy and I Embrace Ye O Ye Millions, so some veck had dealt it the off, and that would be either pee or em, both of them now being quite clear to the slooshying in the living room and, from the clink clink of plates and slurp slurp of peeting tea from cups, at their tired meal after the day‟s rabbiting in factory the one, store the other. The poor old, the pitiable starry” (Burgess 2000: 36-7). Moreover, as
Alex describes the drug intoxication: “You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn‟t care,” (Burgess 2000: 5), the effect seems to be the very same as the consequences of ignorant consumerism. Therefore, in the world of
A Clockwork Orange taking drugs and consumerism are sort of the same influence.
In this novel, Burgess shows disrespectful youth and ignorant old, that, none the less, cannot be banished by any – however strict – government.
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In The Wanting Seed Burgess describes a Western society in its exaggerated form. At the beginning there is a liberal, multinational society governed by Pelagians that faces over-population with officially pronounced homosexuality and a birth ration. By contrast, the final part shows society in the third phase of strict and pessimistic Augustinians maintaining population stability by reinforcing fertility on one side and a pseudo-war on the other. Citizens‟ life is organized and strictly limited by political institutions, such as “Ministry of Infertility,” “Population Police” and
“Metropolitan Institute of Correction” that dramatically interfere in people‟s privacy.
Nevertheless, the major part of the book deals with the so-called “Interphase,” a mid- stadium, in which the liberal Pelagian government is disappointed with a bad condition of the society and tries to improve it by a new ordering of strict rules and punishment, which leads to the society‟s refusal, chaos and general crisis. The narrator even informs a reader about extreme violence and rumours about cannibalism among people. The narrator says: “There was chaos in the metropolis, and that chaos seemed at first like a projection of his (Tristram‟s) own new freedom.
Chap whooped like a big laughing Bacchante and told him, not very far from
Pentonville, to club harmless man with his truncheon and steal his clothes. This was in an alley, after dark, in the hinterland of public cooking, flares spluttering with human fat. Electricity, like other public utilities, seemed to have failed” (Burgess
1965: 163). Finally, riot is ceased and the mid-phase is followed by the Augustinian
Gusphase. The cycle continues.
While in A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed the division of the cyclic phases is quite clear, in 1985 identification seems to be complicated, because the 1985‟s fictional society carries features of both stadia at the same time. On one hand, there is not any private market. All national companies belong to the state;
44 therefore all inhabitants are state employees. Proletariat has created very strong unions that actually govern the country instead of the official government, of which power is weakened by unions on one side and by a transnational Islamic organisation on the other. The unions defend themselves as being protecting workers, but they have become the strongest power within the country destroying any possible form of oppression. Liberal socialism hints to Pelagianism but, on the other hand, the majority of the society is heterosexual and there is no notion of birth limits, which, according to Carol Dix, is a feature of Gusphase. (Dix 1971: 20) Moreover, when
Bev Jones is undergoing the reformation, he is brutally assaulted for disobedience.
There is a try to freely reform the convicted but also brutal suppression of the disobedient.
In all of the three novels roles within the society are strongly determined.
There is an individual within the anonymous crowd, against which they have to struggle, but there is also an authoritative group of either political party or unions that holds power in firm hands. The social system is strongly hierarchical and determined. Even if there are two oppositional parties, the Pelagians and
Augustinians that alternatively govern no one can enter them.
Social system in all of the three novels is highly secular. Christianity is tolerated in the period of Pelagianism but only as a means in order to moderate panic among citizens after the Interphase. Government and all political as well as social institutions are organized as highly late rational formations, which corresponds to tendencies of the actual postmodern society introduced by sociologist Max Weber and described in Barry Smart‟s book titled Postmodernity. Smart says: “For Weber the „problematic of the modern mode of life – disenchanted, rationalised, disciplined‟ introduces a process of depersonalisation which increasingly affects all aspects of
45 human life, undercutting in particular the possibility of an ethical conduct of. The more the modern worlds is „rationalised‟ the less the likelihood of living life in an ethically interpretable manner” (Smart 1997: 86). According to Weber‟s attitudes described in Smart‟s book, the weakening of religious aspects of life and relying purely on rationalism causes significant changes in human perception of life and in human ethics. Consequently, government in Burgess‟ narratives show respect neither to human nor to life itself if they pretend their liberalism by supporting fertility but kill inhabitants in a worthless pseudo-war. The major in 1985 says: “Contraception is cruel and unnatural: everybody has a right to be born. But, similarly, everybody‟s got to die sooner or later... The War department is a bit like prostitution: it cleanses the community” (Burgess 1965: 278). The major‟s disapproving of contraception for its unnaturalness and killing people in the useless war at the same time is very disrespectful towards humanity, even ironic.
Moreover, one of possible reasons for the government‟s negation of religion is noticed in Burgess‟ essay Cacotopia in 1985. Burgess says: ” Strictly, the moral duality which these words (right and wrong) represent is within the province of the
State, while good and evil relate to theological permanencies” (Burgess 1979: 57).
By displacing religion and the „theological permanencies,‟ the state becomes free to operate with and define morality of its citizens, who, therefore, become easily manipulative.
Finally, as we can see, societies of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985 are based on the same system of ideology, (non)religion and hierarchy; they are interconnected with the socio-theological concept of the cyclic development and altogether seem to complement different variables, phases and periods of the same fictional world.
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3.3. PLOTS AND FICTIONAL NARRATIVE ORGANIZATION
A plot is one of the elements of a narrative structure. Despite this obviousness, its position within the hierarchy of a narrative organization is highly unclear. The importance of a plot within the narrative varies according to different perspectives of narratology. First, there is a concept, according to which the plot might be separated from the narrative as one of its non/narrative elements; it represents a set of at least two accidents and makes the minimum for producing a narrative text. Second, the plot is superordinate to characters and ideas and has a central position within the narrative as a global structure and organizing element
(Ronen 2006: 177). To a certain extent, the narrative semantics of fictional worlds relate to the latter concept, because it disclaims the plot as a separable unit and rather approves of it as a global organizing element, which is, moreover, highly connected with the psychology of its agents. According to Doležel, the plot constituting from particular elements of action is inseparable from its agents. Therefore, action and following events are dependent on the intentionality, motivation and rationality of characters (Doležel 2003: 67). What is more, fictional narratives differ from nonfictional narratives and actual action, for action within a fictional world could be always characterised by wholeness, narrative point and orientation (Ronen 2006:
179). Hence, the narrative organization is a feature influencing the general characteristics of the fictional world and must be taken into account.
What is typical for A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985 is the fact that intentionality and deliberateness of characters is strongly limited by a strict social and political organization interfering in its citizens‟ private lives. In the first part of A Clockwork Orange, the protagonist Alex is the agent of action, deliberately
47 disparaging every notion of order and authority. He attacks innocent passers-by for no particular reason, probably because of being bored and the feeling of dominance, rebellion and power. As early as at first page Alex explains: “Our pockets were full of deng (money), so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till‟s guts. But, as they say, money isn‟t everything” (Burgess 2000: 3). Alex and his
“droogs” attack people and pick quarrels for entertainment, while in the second part,
Alex turns from being the agent to the position of a patient treated and dominated by the government, doctors and the opposition led by F. Alexander. Even when he is set free he has to struggle along a set of accidents and a revenge of his ex-victims and get his lesson. His position moves from the agent to patient, action turns from intentionality of the protagonist to intentionality of a superior power followed by a set of accidents finally leading to maturity of the protagonist.
In Burgess‟ novels the power of governing system seems to have increasing tendency. While in A Clockwork Orange the intentionality and power are taken from the protagonist in the middle of the narrative and only because of his violent behaviour, hence partially reasonably, in The Wanting Seed and 1985 intentionality and independency are taken from the protagonists at the very beginning of the narrative. Therefore, protagonists are predominantly in the position of patients struggling against the government or powerful unions. The narrative starts with an accident, which, moreover, might be indirectly caused by the government itself. In
1985 the protagonist‟s wife‟s death is caused by firemen‟s strike and in The Wanting
Seed there is a suspicion that the Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram‟s son died because of
48 doctors‟ failure. Beatrice-Joanna says:” What I do see... is that you could have saved him if you‟d wanted to. But you didn‟t think it was worth. One more mouth to feed, more useful to the State as phosphorus. Oh, you‟re all so heartless” (Burgess 1962:
4). Of course, it could be only a desperate woman‟s cry, but it is true that the state operates in a shockingly rational and cruel way; therefore they could have only a little interest to save their patients.
The introductory accident is followed by a number of accidents that, in a classic Aristotelian manner, leads to a happy-ending in A Clockwork Orange and
The Wanting Seed A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex finally matures and the political system continues unchanged but the love of protagonists still have an ability to help them to overwhelm its destructiveness, and to catastrophe in 1985, a cacotopia, in which an individualist do not have any chance to survive.
The narratives are based on conflicts, which represent the destroying powerfulness of the governing system that oppress an individual. Moreover, in 1985,
Burgess shows that the governing power does not have to be only the government, but also unions or “multinational corporations,” which is an issue acknowledged also by J.-F. Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in which he says: ”Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling he stability of the State through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations. These new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states” (Lyotard 1987: 5).
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3.4. MODALITY
Characters, their inner life, interaction, society, institutions, social system etc. are the fundamentals for constituting fictional worlds. However, the macrostructure and system of a fictional world are created by global limitations of modality; i.e. what is physically im/possible, what are the norms, ideology and religion, what is good and bad etc. Doležel divides the basic fictional world modality according to four types of limitation: aletic, deontic, axiological and epistemic (Doležel 2003:
122-137).
Aletic limitations in Burgess‟ novel are not of that importance. The fictional worlds of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985 are in accordance with physical and logical patterns of the actual world. Characters are possible counterparts of actual people and their abilities are fictional projections of actual people‟s abilities.
Deontic limitations are particular norms, laws and conventions pronounced by responsible individuals or institutions. Deontic norms influence the effects and results of action. The fictional world of Burgess‟ novels is set as a narrative of the
“fall.” which is based on the protagonist‟s violation of norms followed by a punishment. Alex in A Clockwork Orange breaks the norms of citizens‟ safety and is send to be rehabilitated by the “Reclamation Treatment,” Tristram and Beatrice-
Joanna break the birth ration and refuse to remove Tristram‟s brother and Bev refuses to obey the unions‟ dictature. All of them are punished by the governing institution. Deontic structure of Burgess‟ novels is based on a change of norms and a tension between the ethic of an individual and society. The change of forms relates to changing of the particular phases of the cycle, which are, except for the Interphase,
50 oppositional to each other. The contrast ethic of the individual, the protagonist, is also clearly visible in all of the three novels, i.e. Alex against the society, Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna against the government and Bev in opposition to the unions.
Axiological structure defines what is good and bad, which may relate to different values according to a society and an individual. Burgess‟ protagonists disclaim official values of the society and government and create their own subjective axiology. One of the main themes of these three novels is a fundamental question dealing with the inequality of the individual‟s and majority‟s axiology.
Which one is more important or should they be at least equal? Deontic and axiological limitation are probably the most signifying for Burgess‟ novels‟ fictional world.
Epistemic norms are concerned with knowledge of characters and its level, global sharing of the same knowledge or, by contrast, the differences in particular characters‟ knowledge. There are examples of the latter in two of Burgess‟ books: in
A Clockwork Orange Alex is misused as the first graduate of the “Reclamation
Treatment” experiment and later as a victim of it; and in The Wanting Seed the opposition tries to convince Tristram to remove his brother from the leading position in the state government.
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3.5. TEXTURE
The characters, environment, society, institutions etc. as they have just been described are so-called fictional extensional entities; they form fictional worlds that are not related to the text of the narrative itself. However, the author encodes and the reader decodes the narrative through the original texture. The relation between the extensional entities and the actual author and reader is called the “intensional function.” For interpreting the “intensional function,” Doležel suggests the indirect analysis method (metoda nepřímé analýzy), which is based on searching for aesthetic factors of the text, literary figures, rhymes, rhythm, narrative forms, direct and indirect speech etc. and their appearance and regularity within the text (Doležel
2003: 143-4).
A reader approaches a fictional world through a narrator, who could be either anonymous, impersonal narrator (third person narration), or one of the characters
(first person narration), though, the only one able to communicate within the fictional world as well as with the reader (Doležel 2003: 151,157). A Clockwork Orange is an example of the first person narration, because the protagonist, Alex, is also the narrator of the story. The very beginning of the book starts with Alex‟s monologue:
”There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim,
Dim being really dim and we sat in the Korova Milkbar...” (Burgess 2000: 3). The first person narrator‟s perspective is the only one through which the reader may reach the fictional world. What the reader sees is only the protagonist‟s egocentric point of view, which can but necessarily does not have to be reliable, therefore, what the first person narrator needs to do is to declare their “reliability.” Alex, being a young trouble maker and a drug-addict, may not be trusted by the reader, hence through the
52 narrative he often calls himself “your faithful narrator,” (33) or “Your Humble
Narrator” (48) and relates to readers as ” my brothers and only friends” (58) in order to make an atmosphere of intimacy and friendship between him and the reader.
On the other hand, The Wanting Seed and 1985 are accessible for the reader through the third person narration, which is an omnipresent, omniscient impersonal entity standing beyond the narrative. The narrator of The Wanting Seed and 1985 is, however, being relatively subjective, because their narration is partially influenced by characters‟ perspective, opinions and emotionality. In The Wanting Seed the narrator describes Tristram and his brother Derek from Beatrice-Joanna‟s perspective: ”She (Beatrice-Joanna) still, she thought, loved Tristram. He was kind, honest gentle, generous, considerate, clam, witty sometimes... But Tristram‟s become carrion; that of his elder brother was fire and ice, paradisiacal fruit, inexpressibly delicious and exciting. She was in love with Derek, she decided, but she did not think she loved him” (Burgess 1965: 25). Confused opinions about the men are in accordance with Beatrice-Joanna‟s confused feelings; the narrator describes the men from her subjective perspective.
The third person narrator is generally considered to be reliable and, therefore, do not have to validate themselves (Doležel 2003: 152; Fořt 2005: 83-84), which
Burgess challenge by deliberately decreasing his omnipresent, omniscient narrator‟s reliability in The Wanting Seed and 1985. He emphasizes the narrator‟s presence within the narrative and let him joke (“His brimming ladder woke him next time and, a little secret, he voided it in the wash-basin” Burgess 1962: 271) and admit the fictionality of the story at the end of the book (“The wind rises... we must try to live.
The immense air opens and closes my book” Burgess 1962: 285). Additionally, in the latter way Burgess also challenge Alex‟s hard-won reliability in A Clockwork
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Orange by making Alex admit the fictionality and thus make a paradox of reliability
achieving by the protagonist and denying by the author (“If I have snuffed it I would
not be here to write what I have written” and “that‟s what it‟s going to be then,
brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale” (Burgess 1965: 125, 141).
By admitting the fictionality of the book the narrative creates so-called meta- fiction, which appears in all of the three novels. The narrative of A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed is aware of its own narrativity (viz. the two previous quotations) and in 1985 the metafiction appears when Bev speaks about his father, who fought with George Orwell in the Spanish civil war. Bev says: “George Orwell...
My uncle fought with him in Spain. God, fifty years back. Orwell died very unpleasantly at Pamplona or somewhere” (Burgess 1979: 164). The narrative includes entity from a different world, however, not from the actual one, in which Orwell survived the war and wrote Nineteen-Eighty Four. A fictional author relating to
Burgess appears in the fictional interview State and superstate: a conversation in the first theoretical part of 1985. The interviewer says: “I, a harmless British apolitical writer living in Rome, was well aware that the CIA was tapping my telephone”
(Burgess 1979: 63). Burgess, therefore, seems to have operated with the concept of possible worlds. Moreover, a similar situation appears also in A Clockwork Orange, in which there is a vicious circle of the actual Burgess and a fictional character
F. Alexander, who also wrote a book called A Clockwork Orange, however it is not the same novel. By sharing the same name F. Alexander relates also to the protagonist,
Alex.
In his Heterocosmica, Doležel mentions the postmodern adaptations and their forms: a transposition, extension (rozšíření) and mutation (Doležel 2003: 203). 1985 seems to be an example of the last one. It is a mutation of George Orwell‟s Nineteen-
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Eighty Four. Burgess‟ aim was to retrospectively challenge Orwell‟s conception of future. In the Intentions in 1985 Burgess says: ”We have the following tasks. To understand the waking origins of Orwell‟s bad dream – in himself and in the phase of history that helped to make him. To see where he went wrong and where he seems likely to have been right. To contrive an alternative picture – using his own fictional technique – of the condition to which seventies seem to be moving and which may well subsist in a real 1984 – or, to avoid plagiarism, 1985” (Burgess 1978: 19).
Burgess wanted not only to create an alternative future, but also to analyze the background and possible influences and thus to react to the original text as well as to enrich it by a new perspective.
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4. MAIN THEMES IN BURGESS‘ NOVELS
As has been already mentioned in the previous chapter, a fictional world and its narrative differ from the actual world in few aspects. In her book Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Ruth Ronen introduces wholeness, narrative point and orientation as significant representatives of fictional narrative (Ronen 2006: 177). However, she also mentions a unique type of so-called “thematic logic,” according to which the fictional world narrativity is organized and differs from the actual world (Ronen
2006: 172). According to Ronen, what is typical for fictional narratives is a particular thematic framework that frames and integrates the structure and entities of the fictional world, the “fictional macrostructure” (Doležel 2003: 36). The existence of such thematic pattern is supported and mentioned also by Thomas Pavel in his study of fictional semantics and mimesis Fiction and Imitation, in which he claims that fictional worlds differ from the actual one by containing a certain level of idealization in order to put an emphasis on a particular ethical message (Pavel 2009:
28). Therefore, unlike in the actual world, the fictional entities and structures are deliberately determined and organized in order to fulfil an author‟s message.
Burgess‟ novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985 could be taken as suitable examples of such doctrine, because, according to the previous chapter analysing the fictional worlds in Burgess‟ novels, Burgess seems to build his fictional narratives in order to evolve and describe a particular moral message. The purpose of his novels is to emphasize a fundamental opposition between an individual and majority as well as to show that human development is, according to
Burgess, not an accidental stream of events, but a systematic set of echoing possibilities.
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4.1. THE AFFIRMATION OF INDIVIDUALISM AND DYSTOPIAN SOCIETY
IN BURGESS„ NOVELS
One of the main themes that interconnect A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting
Seed and 1985 is a strong defence of individuality, uniqueness standing in eternal opposition to a mass as well as the individual‟s right to freely choose, decide and behave, partly influenced by the counter-culture of the 1960s, which turned attention from the anonymous to the individual and peculiar and showed strong opposition to a behaviouristic criminal-reforming method (Morrison 2000: xxii). Moreover,
A Clockwork Orange belongs to a period, in which there were written more books adoring individuality, such as Ken Kesey‟s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
According to Burgess, individuality is based on ability as well as possibility to independently choose whether to be good or bad. In A Clockwork Orange Alex says: ”All right, I do bad...But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don‟t go into the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good that‟s because they like it, and I wouldn‟t ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. 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...But what I do I do because I like to do” (Burgess 2000: 31). This
Alex‟s speech shortly explains the principle of A Clockwork Orange as well as
Burgess‟ individualist conception, which is present also in other Burgess‟ books.
According to him, the true human existence is based on free choice; – even if it is
57 a choice to be bad – the deliberate choice to be bad is superordinate to a constraint on being good. Alex represents free independent individuality, because he himself has chosen to be bad, which Burgess prefers to be forced to be good. What is crucial is the possibility to freely choose. Alex is well-aware of the brutality of his behaviour, which might seem vicious, but, according to Burgess, it is also an important part of his definition of freedom – to be fully aware of results of one‟s performance. Last but not least, Alex‟s performance is highly exaggerated and idealistic. It works only as a literary specimen of individuality that is not taken literally and involves an idealistic idea of self-awareness and self-correction of every individual, which seems to be very controversial. In his other books, The Wanting Seed and 1985, Burgess included the affirmation of individualism too, though, he chose good characters to struggle against the society and, in fact, the narratives then lost much of their attraction for readers.
Burgess‟ individualistic concept is based on a theological opposition of
Pelagianism and Augustinianism, which represents two views on human nature. The former claims that there is no original sin and people are born free to choose their way of life. There is no predetermination to evil, which is disclaimed by the
Augustinians, who believe in the original sin that predestines people to evil, therefore, people need to be either reformed or punished. Burgess is a supporter of
Pelagianism. In his essay Cacotopia in 1985, he says: “If we are Pelagians, we accept that man has total liberty of moral choice. To remove that choice is to dehumanize”
(Burgess 1978: 59), which confirms the above ideas expressed in A Clockwork
Orange. The individuality and moral freedom are conditioned by a possibility of choice; a person drained of such possibility is no longer a free individual. A person forced to be good – even if they are good – lacks chance to choose, therefore, cannot
58 be considered an independent individuality. Moreover, Pelagius appears in The
Wanting Seed as a symbol of fertility. The protagonist Tristram explains to his students that the name Pelagius means a “man of the sea” and later in the book
Beatrice-Joanna contemplates at the sea shore and contrasts the current social condition of vicious rationalism, over-population and homosexuality with the sea being a symbol of nature and life. Additionally, the theological doctrine of Pelagians and Augustinians was used as a basis for Burgess‟ cyclic theory, in which the periods of these two eras of Pelagianism and Augustinianism interchange.
Moreover, Burgess claims that knowledge and beauty are not related to ethics. Personal taste and knowledge cannot be linked to one‟s moral attitudes; they are independent of it. Music becomes one of important motifs in A Clockwork
Orange. The protagonist Alex is, despite his aggressiveness and brutality, an admirer of classical music, Bach, Mozart and especially Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony.
Alex says: “I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I‟d viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha ha power” (Burgess 2000: 32). He denies the idea that people may be humanized through art; by contrast, music has a very different effect upon him. Music makes him aggressive. What Burgess stresses in his essay Clockwork Oranges in 1985 is the cruel coincidence that happens to Alex when he is cured by the “Ludovico technique.” As a coincidence, the films he is exposed to as a part of the cure are
59 accompanied by Beethoven‟s music; therefore his nausea becomes associated with the music as well as with the brutal action. When he is cured, he loses not only ability to choose, but also his exalting music taste (Burgess 1979: 92-3).
The second constituent of individuality is its struggle within society, the opposition of an individual and a majority. In his works, Burgess opposes to the essential subordination of the individual and sees the majority as a homogenizing element that suppresses individuality and the self. The majority is always superordinate to the needs of the individual, who has to submit their weakness and dependency and assimilate to the habits of the majority. Therefore, they lose their individuality and uniqueness. In his fictional societies, Burgess pictures communities that are based on determination, inequality and masses rather than on freedom, equality and healthy community of individuals. There is not any democratic government constituting from representatives of the public, but a strong elite group usurping the power, any notion of equal rights or possibility to progress, any freedom of speech and any notion of supporting inhabitants as a group of individuals, but rather treating them as an anonymous mass bounded by bureaucratic norms and limitations. Moreover, either the government or the unions strongly affect the inhabitants‟ privacy and therefore decrease their autonomy, media are under the control of the government and the level of public education is very low. In 1985
Burgess says: “The individual, of whom Thoreau is the true patron saint, is always against the State, and his liberties are, inevitably, going to be reduced in proportion as the pressure groups gain more licence...But he can still exercise free judgement on epistemological, aesthetic and moral issues and act, or fail to act, on such judgements” (Burgess 1979: 82). Despite his romantic ideas about an essence of individualism, Burgess seems to be very pessimistic about the future of the society
60 and its leadership. He does not seem to see any progress and rather mentions that the only possible chances for inhabitants to express themselves are in knowledge, art and ethics, on which his protagonists are based. A Clockwork Orange‟s protagonist Alex challenges the freedom of “aesthetic and moral issues” by his brutality and unusual classical music taste and both The Wanting Seed‟s and 1985‟s protagonists are challenging “epistemological and moral issues” by opposing to the moral, social and historical phenomena of their fictional world.
Burgess‟ pessimism about the organization of the society of the second half of the twentieth century corresponds to C. Wright Mills‟ conception of a “mass society” superseding a “public society.” In a study The Mass Society included in his book titled The Power Elite, he distinguishes between the “public society” and the
“mass society.” The former being an ideal image of classic democracy, in which people are free to express themselves, the inhabitants are treated as a community of individuals, the communications and mass media are well-organized, independent and there is an actual chance to immediately and effectively response back and the authoritative institutions are far from interfering into the public‟s privacy (Mills
1959: 303-4). However, this form of democracy is possible only if there are “a natural and peaceful harmony of interests” of all social groups, rational society and proper representatives protecting the voice of the public. According to Mills – and also according to Burgess – such society is a pure dream and the actual social organization leads to the very opposite, the “mass society.” Mills describes the “mass society” as a community of publics that lacks free and full access to information, in which it is impossible for the public to answer back in public communication, opinion-making is controlled and limited by the authority and the inhabitants do not have any autonomy from the institutions (Mills 1959: 303-4).
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He also defines the relation between power and public as a “law of spokesmanship.” He says: “The gap between the speaker and the listener, between the power and public, leads less to any iron law of oligarchy than to the law of spokesmanship: as the pressure group expands, its leaders come to organize the opinions they „represent.‟ So elections, as we have seen, become contests between two giant and unwieldy parties, neither of which the individual can truly feel that he influences, and neither of which is capable of winning psychologically impressive or politically decisive majorities. And, in all this, the parties are of the same general form as other mass associations” (Mills 1959: 308). Even despite the exaggeration of
Burgess‟ novels, they seem to agree with Mills‟ study in few important points. First, concerning Burgess‟ and Mills‟ ideas about the organization of the government, none of them see oligarchy as the future authority, but both hold the idea of bureaucracy.
In the fourth chapter of 1985 Bev is exposed to the bureaucratic system when he is released and finds out that even if he has paid the insurance he will not get the unemployment benefit, because he does not fulfil the conditions, he disobeyed the unions‟ employment rules. Second, the governing unions in 1985 as well as the governments in The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange pretend to be representing the public‟s opinions. In 1985 the unions act in order to protect workers‟ right to a sufficient payment and working conditions, but actually they are much stronger than the employer, the state, in The Wanting Seed the government acts as a protector of the global “stability” and the government in A Clockwork Orange decides to reform young violators in order to protect the public. But, in fact, the actual purpose of the improvements is to broaden their power over inhabitants.
Third, in all of the three Burgess‟ novels there are two opposing parties, of which none really represents the public‟s voice, but of which both the propulsion is the lust
62 for power. Fourth, all the authorities in Burgess‟ novels are aware of the importance and advantages of the psychological pressure and highly (mis)use it.
Burgess‟ bureaucratic system in 1985 might be a critical response to oligarchy in the Nineteenth-Eighty Four, because in an essay Ingsoc considered, one of essays included in 1985, Burgess says: “The oligarchy has learned how to reconcile opposites, not through dialectic, which is diachronic and admits absence of control over time, but through the synchronic technique of doublethink. Ingsoc is the first professional government, hence the last” (Burgess 1979: 40). Burgess defines the government in the Nineteenth-Eighty Four as oligarchy and admits that it succeeded in creating its own metaphysics capable of influencing the inhabitants‟ knowledge, but at the end of the essay he claims that 1985 is the “unrealizable ideal of totalitarianism which mere human systems unhandily imitate” (Burgess 1979: 51).
He disclaims the Ingsoc totalitarianism as being an extreme metaphor of conquering human individuality and freedom that, however, is actually impossible.
Concerning equality and the difference between the “mass and public,”
Burgess‟s and Mills‟ opinions would agree also with a psychological approach of reputable American psychologist Erich Fromm, who, is his book titled The Art of
Loving, calls attention to the significant difference between equality and uniformity, both terms having been misused in the current society. While the former means, according to Fromm, to have the same opportunities and not to be disqualified for being different, the latter stands for being the same, without differences, lacking variety and variability. Equality is a positive aspect, unlike uniformity, which stands for an anonymous mass that, nevertheless, could be unequal and treated as a herd.
Fromm – as well as Jan Keller – blames capitalism for supporting and misusing such
“standardised society” in order to maximize the profit and power. Moreover, he also
63 seems to hold an idea of peaceful, but psychological pressure from the anonymous authority, which lacks government of particular leaders and rather is governed by an anonymous management and bureaucracy, which moreover, no longer has to be a government, but a global corporation (Fromm 2001: 74-5, Keller 2009: 37-8) as unions or the global Muslims organization in 1985.
What is also challenged in Burgess‟ novels is treating a distinct minority within the society. He disclaims not only the opposition between the rational and irrational, but also the division into the sane and insane itself. This is mostly significant in A Clockwork Orange, in which Burgess disrupts the primary division between the insane youth and sane society and government by gradual detection of the actually rationality of the youth and, by contrast, the wrongness of the society and its leaders. The brutal protagonist Alex is gradually maturing, while the government and the reformers are showing the real purpose of their acting, the lust for power as well as disrespect for life and human beings, which is clear from the prison chaplain and Dr Brodsky‟s dialogue, in which Dr Brodsky opposes to the chaplain‟s argument that Alex will no longer be a full-value human after the treatment. The chaplain says: He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.‟ „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 – “(Burgess 2000: 94). The government is interested only in a superficial effect of impressing on the public before elections and ignores the fact that by their acting they may destroy human‟s life. The distinction between the sane and insane is, therefore, more fragile and unclear than it seems to be. Moreover, this aspect of breaking the certainty of the rational majority and irrational minority is visible also in The Wanting Seed and 1985.
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The fragility of defining the rational and irrational is one of the main issues of
Michel Foucault‟s work, with which Burgess would probably agree and to which
Burgess‟ books correspond in few aspects. Both Burgess and Foucault seem to share romantic opinions about the oppressed minorities, criticize rationalism for oppressing the “unreason” and stress the insufficiency of such distinction to “reason and unreason.” In his work Madness and Civilization, Foucault calls the attention to the break in the dialogue between the “reason and unreason” as a consequence of rising rationalism and capitalism. He shows the consequences and changes in treating the mad during the classical period in approximately 1500-1800 (Sarup 1993: 60).
Together with the rise of rationalism, the mad ceased to be treated as free wanderers and were rather confined by a social majority. However, the purpose of the original madhouses was not to cure the internees, but to dislocate them and make them work in order to “cure” their idleness (Rabinow 1991: 128). With the development of new economic structures and the opening of capitalism, the mad started to be considered cheap manpower. Foucault says: “But what had been a moral requirement became an economic tactic when commerce and industry recovered after 1651, the economic situation having been reestablished by the Navigation Act and the lowering of the discount rate. All able-bodied manpower was to be used to the best advantage, this is as cheaply as possible” (Rabinow 1991: 133). What started as a moral demand later became a purely economical issue. And since the society turned from industrialism to consumerism and the mass society, the intention of treating the mad has changed as well. In the period of industrialism, the mad were misused for the industrial purposes, cheap labour, while now, in the consumer society, the mad are misused for usurping power as in A Clockwork Orange.
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Foucault adds that the obligation to work was supposed to increase internees‟ moral credit. It served as “askesis,” a punishment for a certain disability or sin, which partially corresponds to Augustinians‟ vision of original sin that – as well as being mad – needs to be punished. Therefore, Burgess opposes to the treatment of the
“unreason” and mad from a position of a Pelagian, with which Foucault may also agree. What is more, since the houses of correction were concerned with moral issues, the morality has become institutionalised and administered in the same way as if it were a commodity; it has lost its sense of intimacy and metaphysics as well as in
Burgess‟ novels.
Consequently, Burgess‟ work seems to follow the general scientific approach to the contemporary society. In most factors, he seems to agree with postmodern scientists and theorist calling attention to important changes that has appeared within the society and that has significantly stigmatised the life of an individual, which
Burgess uses as the main theme for his literal works and challenges it in his particular – slightly exaggerated and controversial – artistic way.
4.2. THE DYSTOPIAN SOCIETY WITHIN THE CYCLE
In A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985, using particular means described in the previous sub-chapter dealing with the fictional worlds of his novels, such as the exaggerated form, high social determinism and the social causation of the accidents, Burgess calls the attention to the social organization of the fictional world of his novels. The general condition of the society seems to be a crucial theme of the novels, because Burgess gradually stresses the fatality and impact on its inhabitants,
Burgess‟ protagonist. All of these novels correspond to the ethical doctrines of
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Augustinians and Pelagians and what is more, Burgess claims that Pelagianism and
Augustinianism are phases that interchange through the human history; they make a historical cycle. A Clockwork Orange is mainly concerned with the defence of individuality, which, though, is captured within the forces of Augustinians in power and Pelagian political opposition (Morrison 2000: xii). In The Wanting Seed there are explicit and exhaustive descriptions of the doctrine of Pelagians and Augustinians.
Also, the narrative functions as a practical example of a period, in which the phases interchange, and of the impact upon the society. 1985 connects both the individualism and the impact on it within the dystopian society while challenging and reevaluating the prior Orwell‟s text Nineteen-Eighty Four, a picture of an extreme endangering of an individual (Burgess 1979: 51). The cyclic theory, therefore, connects the ideas of endangered individual and social development of current society, because it demonstrates the varying status of the individual within the phases of Pelagianism and Augustinianism.
One of the strong themes appearing in all of the three novels is instability of knowledge. The society as well as the science is under the control of an authority of the state, either the government in A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, or the unions in 1985, of which leaders use the knowledge and science in order to manipulate with the inhabitants. In A Clockwork Orange the science is misused in order to “reform” the brutality among the youth; the government in The Wanting
Seed seems to use similar techniques as the “double-think” in Orwell‟s Nineteen-
Eighty Four. When Beatrice-Joanna is standing at the sea shore and watching the statue of Pelagius, she recollects that the statue used to represent somebody else – according to the actual government. “Her eyes were drawn upwards to the tremendous bronze statue that stood defiant, a mile in the air, at the summit
67 of Government Building, the figure of a bearded man, classically robed, glaring at the sun. At night he was floodlit. A cynosure to ships, man of the sea, Pelagius. But
Beatrice-Joanna could remember a time when he had been Augustine. And, so it was said, he had been at other times the King, the Prime Minister, a popular bearded guitarist, Eliot (a long-dead singer of infertility), the Minister of Pisciculture, captain of the Hertfordshire Men‟s Sacred Game eleven, and – most often and satisfactory – the great unknown, the magical Anonymous” (Burgess 1979: 15-6) In the period of
Pelagianism the statue represented Pelagius, but in other periods it could have represented somebody else important for that particular time. The government, therefore, changes the meaning of objects and symbols according to the current state; they adapt the past to present. Moreover, considering Derrida‟s concept of instability of language, the statue might be a symbol representing the instable meaning, the signifier that alters from a context to context. With the changing context the statue‟s names alter as well as the signifier‟s signified changes, which stresses the motif of instability. Beyond that, the symbol alluding to Derrida‟s concept disrupts not only the historical continuity, but also the language the fictional government use as itself.
The instability of knowledge may also come from what Lyotard calls the
“problem of legitimation,” i.e. the problem of defining what is right and what is not.
Lyotard claims that in contemporary society the problem is caused by a close interconnection of political authorities and science; therefore defining what is right depends on political intentions. The dependent science is forced to declare particular doctrines as being true, because the doctrine is suitable for the authorities‟ purposes
(Lyotard 1987: 8). In the essay Cacotopia in 1985, Burgess adds that the”problem of legitimation” might be caused also by strict secularity of society, because in religious societies what is right is influenced by the unchangeable religious doctrines but,
68 on the other hand, in secular societies there are not any such religious doctrines that could participate in legitimating general phenomena (Burgess 1979: 57). Without religion the only – and unlimited – legitimating power is the political authority.
Then, the government becomes the ultimate power that could declare anything as essential, even if it is homosexuality, birth control or belonging to the unions – as happens in Burgess‟ novels.
What has been already mentioned is the fact that in Burgess‟ novels the political authority has the possibility to influence and even conquer the inhabitants‟ knowledge, because the authority has become an unlimited legitimation power and overruled the science. This has become a major issue in Lyotard‟s and Foucault‟s work, though, their attitudes seem to differ from each other in the general comprehension of what the power is, what is its essence and how it functions within society. Nevertheless, both Lyotard‟s and Foucault‟s conceptions are necessary for comprehending Burgess‟ dystopian society and the essence of the cycle, because
Lyotard explains the interconnection between power and knowledge in such society and Foucault, on the other hand, studies the strategies and mechanism of power as being the ultimate principle of a social reality (Sarup 1993: 73).
Lyotard calls attention to the fact that in contemporary society power and knowledge are closely interconnected and dependent on each other. He claims that together with the development of computer technology the essence of power has moved from the property of money and land to the property of information, or rather to an access to information and data banks. His main questions are concerned with the control of the access, channels and information the data banks include, “Who will know?” (Lyotard 1987: 6). He argues that the access and control of the information and knowledge is the new basis of power. Those who have a chance to be the source
69 of information and possibility to influence it have also power. And, according to
Lyotard, it is no longer the state that is in the possession of the data banks, but global professional, labour, political and religious corporations as well as the corporate leaders and high-level administrators (Lyotard 1987: 14). This seems to be true also for Burgess‟ fictional societies, mainly for 1985. In his earlier works, A Clockwork
Orange and The Wanting Seed, it is still the government that holds the power, but in
1985, published approximately fifteen years later, power has been already removed from the state by the unions and the international Muslims corporation.
On the other, Foucault disclaims the idea that the power may be “possessed” by an individual or a particular social group, because, in accordance with his tendency to decentralize and stress the discontinuity, the power has neither a structure, nor a centre or a source. It is rather a “network” that extends everywhere.
He suggests that what should be studied are not the power possessors and their intentions, but the processes and effects of power. According to Foucault, power cannot be centred within a particular subject of power. Rather than a “transcendental subject,” it is a transcendental force of social reality (Sarup 1993: 73-4).
The interconnection of power and knowledge is bidirectional. Power induces knowledge, because it functions as a force that supports discovering and exploration, while knowledge gives power.
Concerning Lyotard‟s and Foucault‟s concepts of power and knowledge, the former seems to better explain the social and political system of Burgess‟ fictional world. It helps reader to comprehend the system that allows a certain group to achieve almost unlimited power over society and its phenomena. Lyotard‟s concept explains the reasons and sources of the current condition of the fictional society in the novels, unlike Foucault‟s, whose concept ignores the possible
70 continuity and sequence of events that could cause the current situation, but it rather focuses on power as a general principle of human behaviour, which, moreover, argues that the situation simply cannot be that definite, because power is not a commodity belonging to anybody. It is an inner principle included in human nature, which can be neither centred, nor systematized. Foucault‟s objections give the reality another point of view that avoids simplifying and generalizing of the social condition. It helps to ask crucial question about doctrines. Therefore, it may seem that Lyotard‟s and Foucault‟s views oppose to each other but, in fact, they complement each other, because while the one helps to understand the system and global organization, the other helps to ask critical questions and doubt the actual state and affairs.
The sense of instability seems to be very important feature of the postmodern society for many theorists. One of them is Jean Baudrillard, a controversial sociologist, whose work is based on criticizing consumerism. He argued for the fact that the current society has been living in an illusory sense of freedom provided by commodities ownership. According to Baudrillard, consumption has become a basic principle of current society. By advertising codes consumer products have been given a sense of symbols representing a certain lifestyle and by buying the products people acquire membership in a particular social group they desire. By preferring particular series of products, consumers are given an illusion of freedom. They think they are free, because they could choose products and the social group they belong to. Consumerism has overruled any other ways of life, of which logical market reaction is overloading society with commodities. Such commodity overload as well as an “information overload” by mass media causes a gradual loosing of the sense of originality. Society is “overloaded” by advertisement, models and symbols that have
71 lost their original meaning, though. They have become empty signifiers, of which signified has been lost in the production and information overload (Sarup 1993: 161-
5). Similar situation appears also in Burgess‟ novels. However, the condition seems to be exaggerated as well as the narratives of the novels. In the fictional worlds of
Burgess‟ novels, the society not only looses the sense of freedom, but they also deny it, which is clear from Bev‟s dialogue with an officer in 1985. Bev says: “You people have forgotten what freedom is.‟ „Freedom to starve, freedom to be exploited,‟ said
Devlin with an old, no longer pertinent bitterness. ‟Freedom I‟m very pleased to see belong only to the course in history that you refused to teach. You‟re a bloody- minded individual, brother,‟ said Devlin, a growl entering his tone” (Burgess 1979:
116). The officer, Devlin, denies freedom as well as individuality, phenomena on which all the three novels are based. This could be a nightmare and a real cacotopia for Burgess – and for Baudrillard as well.
Burgess based his novels on two phenomena he considered crucial for human nature, the idea of individuality and society, of which endangering means danger for the whole human race. Watching the decline of these two phenomena in society of the second half of the twentieth century, he may have felt the need to warn society.
In order to frame and structure the current condition he set his novels in the cyclic framework based on the concepts of Pelagianism and Augustinianism. What is more, in his novel 1985, he challenged the dystopia he already knew, Orwell‟s Nineteen-
Eighty Four and reevaluated its future predictions from his perspective.
Nevertheless, what needs to be added is the fact that Burgess was not the only author who tried to systematize the development of society. In his book titled
Postmodernity, Barry Smart offers two social theory concepts that may be marked as cyclic.
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Smart admits that the history may seem to be repeating, especially when considering references to the similar condition of the end of the nineteenth century, so-called “fin de siècle,” and the current condition of postmodernism, which both has been connected with a mood of desperation and decline of humanity, in which he sees an interesting parallel. Both these periods are said to be emancipating from the
Age of Reason. But as well as similarities there are also differences. Smart argues that even if there is the plurality of a struggle, the position and situation of the cultures is different (Smart 1997: 28). One of the examples of distinctions may be a different approach to determinism, one of the main principles of naturalism that took place at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century and that has been disclaimed by a postmodern literary theorist Thomas Pavel in his essay Freedom, from Romance to the Novel: Three Anti-Utopian American Critics, in which he denies determinism as well as “backshadowing” in literature as being as an unfair remain of romanticism (Pavel 2009: 61). Therefore, science and the theoretical concepts have changed since the period of “fin de siècle” as well as the social, political and cultural condition.
Second variant on the historical parallelism is Umberto Eco‟s “neomedieval” concept, in which he finds “equivalents” between the postmodern period and the
Middle Ages comparing the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of these periods (Smart 1997: 29). Eco claims that there are significant “equivalents” to be found between these eras, though, they also should not be considered as direct parallels, but rather as similarities that could help people understand the current condition and see the condition in wider global, historical sense. He offers three aspects that could connect the postmodern era to the Middle Ages. First, there are fundamental social, economic and political changes that have led into an economical
73 crisis and general mood of instability, fear and violence. Second, he mentions the
“medievalisation of the city,” i.e. development of microsocieties and inhabitants‟ tendency to separate themselves from their neighbours, which increases possibility of conflicts. Third, Eco notices the decline of the technological development and general distrust to technologies connected with the climate and global crisis (Smart
1997: 30-1).
Consequently, there are postmodern theories as Eco‟s, of which aim is to structure the history and human development in order to better understand it, see the consequences, sources and estimate the possible results. It has been an effort to generalize the history and rationally explain the current condition using the knowledge of history. Burgess‟ cyclic theory seems to belong to this group of rational effort to organize and explain the human development. It also relates to the possible similarities that appear to re-occur within the history, though, being a fictional literary concept, it is rather an exaggerated and extreme metaphor of the actual condition. On the other hand, there are also concepts that disclaim any such effort to generalize and rationally explain the history – as Foucault‟s and Pavel‟s, because they argue that such rationalization of the historical development is only a human construct. The history and the development are independent of people and thus cannot be organized and rationally explained. As Thomas Pavel suggests in one of his essays, the truth is always somewhere in between.
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5. CONCLUSION
For my diploma thesis I have chosen two controversial topics, postmodernism and Anthony Burgess, and tried to find relations and analogies between them.
Postmodernism seems to be controversial for the impossibility to be described and explained that invokes various efforts to do so. Still being a current topic it has been analyzed without the necessary distance that would allow a detached – neutral – evaluation of the period. On the other hand, Thomas Pavel would argue that the detached evaluation lacks neutrality, because the regressive evaluation tends to “backshadowing,” i.e. shared knowledge about the results of an analyzed event or period that definitely influences the perspective of the interpreter. For instance, the
Nazi Germany has been considered an evil, because it lost the war; if Hitler had won, he could have been adored as well as the Nazi Germany. Consequently, what is obvious – also from this paragraph about the impossibility to define postmodernism
– postmodern science as well as society has reached a stadium of impossibility to clearly define anything. What I have just showed is very typical of postmodernism;
I have disclaimed the former idea by the latter and ended in an indecisive result and so does postmodernism. It has been disclaiming – one might say – anything and everything –. Whether it is an advantage or disadvantage one cannot say; it is ambiguous as well as defining postmodernism, as postmodernism itself.
Both postmodernism and Burgess are controversial, because they both show the unpleasant truth about the condition of contemporary society. Burgess has been misunderstood as being adoring violence, but actually he just hold a mirror up to society. In his novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985, Burgess uses the narrative and its fictional world as a deliberate construct in order to picture
75 what postmodern society, according to him, actually is about. His main worries are concerned about the condition of individuality and the individual within society, because, according to Burgess, despite having democracy, the contemporary Western states are leading not to the “public society” of free and equal individualities, but to the “mass society” of an anonymous and powerless mass. The construct of the cyclic theory represents two possible variations on postmodern society and the way they treat individuality. Despite the superficial differences, such as the declared sexual orientation and the attitude towards fertility, one is the same evil as the other. What is Burgess‟ – as well as postmodern theorists‟ – message is to put an emphasis on the fact that the current social, political and cultural trends may cause dystopias to happen. And, according to Burgess, the principle of dystopia is the individuality annihilation, because individuality defines the essence of human nature. Without free individuality, society leads into doom.
As a means to interpret Burgess‟ novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting
Seed and 1985 I have chosen the fictional semantics, one of contemporary approaches to literature, an opposite to mimetic doctrine. The main principle of the fictional semantics is a refusal of the concept of fiction representing or imitating the actual world and rather the paradigm of possible worlds applied to literature, so- called fictional worlds. Unlike the actual world, the fictional ones represent a set of non-realized possibilities, deliberate constructs accessible through a semiotic channel, language, therefore they are more suitable for interpreting postmodern literature, such as impossible worlds in literature, vicious circles as well as postmodern adaptations that do not relate to the actual world and, therefore, cannot be interpreted by the mimetic doctrine.
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Despite the general unclarity of defining postmodernism as itself and in literature, there are efforts that search for similarities and analogies in postmodern literature and try to suggest clues for defining postmodern books. According to these definitions, I have found many postmodern features in A Clockwork Orange, The
Wanting Seed and 1985 in both the thematic and textual levels of the novels, including the postmodern “mutation,” paranoia, vicious circles and metanarratives as well as the agreement with some of postmodern socio-philosophical tendencies of
Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.
Consequently, these Burgess‟ novels may be considered as postmodern, which could re-define the view on the message they signalize. From one – and by far not the only one, of course – perspective, they might be considered to be postmodern dystopias calling attention to the contemporary condition of society
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6. RESUMÉ
Diplomová práce propojuje postmodernismus a literární práci britského autora druhé poloviny 20. století Anthony Burgesse. Práce se nejdříve zabývá samotnými pojmy postmoderna a postmodernismus a snaží se definovat jejich podstatu a rysy vzhledem k současné společnosti a vědě, zejména literární teorii.
Následně analyzuje Burgessovy romány A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed a 1985 z hlediska fikční sémantiky a definuje fikční světy těchto románů. Fikční sémantika byla zvolena jako interpretační postup, jelikož lépe koreluje s žánry a specifiky postmoderní literatury. Závěrem se práce zabývá hlavními tématy těchto tří románů, individualismem a jeho ohroženou pozicí v současné společnosti a cyklickou filozoficko-sociologickou teorií vývoje společnosti, kterou ve svých knihách Burgess představuje.
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7. SUMMARY
Diploma thesis connects postmodernism and literary works of a twentieth century British writer Anthony Burgess. First, it deals with terms postmodernity and postmodernism as such and tries to define their essence and aspects considering contemporary society and science, especially literary theory. Secondly, it analyzes
Burgess‟ novels A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and 1985 from the perspective of fictional semantics and defines fictional worlds of these novels.
Fictional semantics has been chosen as the basis of interpretation, because it correlates with genres and distinctions of postmodern literature. Finally, the thesis deals with basic themes of these three novels, individualism and its weak position within current society and a cyclic socio-philosophical theory of human development, which Burgess introduces in these novels.
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