A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange (translated as A Clockwork Orange) is a novel by British writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962 and adapted by Stanley Kubrick in the film of the same name released in 1971. It is considered part of the tradition of British dystopian novels, a successor to works such as 1984, by George Orwell, and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

Source of title

Burgess mentioned that the title is derived from the old cockney expression "As queer as a clockwork orange". In his essay Clockwork oranges, the author mentions that "this title would be ideal for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical principles to an organism that, like a fruit, has color and sweetness". The title alludes to the protagonist's conditioned responses to feelings of evil, responses that restrict his free will. However, other people found new interpretations for the title.

For example, there were people who thought they saw references to an anthropoid (more precisely to an orangutan, since the word orang is of Malay origin) mechanical. There were rumors that Burgess originally intended to title his book A Clockwork Orang and that, after an ultra-correction, he ended up with the title we know it by today.

Another version is the one that mentions that, being the original title of the film A Clockwork Orange (orange in English means orange), It actually comes from another word, orang, a word from Malaysia, where the author of the book lived for several years. This word has another meaning and that is person. In this way, the writer would have made a play on words and, really, what the title would mean is The mechanical man, alluding to the fact that a machine can be programmed to perform a task, but always at the same time. cost of removing another feature. This is related in the book to Alex's inability to cause harm, at the cost of his inability to defend himself.

Nadsat

The book, narrated by Alex, is written with an abundance of Nadsat expressions, fictional teenage slang, mix of Russian-based words, certain voices of Cockney rhyming slang, and words invented by the author himself. In the second part of the book (Chapter 6), one of Alex's doctors, Dr. Branom, describes nadsat this way: “Fragments of old jargon. Some gypsy words. But most of the roots are Slavic." Burgess wrote that his book, read systematically, was like "a carefully programmed course in Russian."

The expression “horrorshow” became especially famous (transcribed in the Minotauro edition as “joroschó” and in the Spanish dubbing of the film as “of horrors”). It is a play on words between the Russian expression for "good" or "good" and the English "horror show", "horror show". ».

Burgess, a keen commentator on the work of James Joyce, on whom he wrote the essays "ReJoyce" and "Joysprick", he took from this the solution of inventing a new language by inserting words from other languages.

The author used this resource —the creation of adolescent jargon— to make the work timeless, since otherwise the passage of time would have revealed a non-current book in syntax and vocabulary. In this way, by creating an artificial way to narrate the plot, this language would act with an anti-aging effect that would allow it to be read fluently despite the passage of time.

Plot

The story begins at the Korova dairy bar where Alex, Pete, Georgie, and Dim, who really was dim, consume milk-plus, which consists of milk with velocet, synthemesco (synthetic mescalines), or drencrom (adrenochrome), which the leaves prepared to resort to ultraviolence. Leaving the bar, they attack a man who was returning from the library and destroy the crystallography treatises he was carrying. Later they go to the Duke of New York bar, where they offer to drink and eat two old women, to have an alibi. They leave the bar to go hold up a store, beating the owner and his wife until they are unconscious and bloody. They return to the Duke of New York, where shortly after two policemen enter asking about the incidents and the old women affirm that they were always there.

Leaving the bar, the protagonists meet a drunken old bum, singing in front of him. They start to beat him, but Alex tells his droogs to stop for a moment, so he can hear what the drunk is saying. After listening to his diatribe, the four finish hitting him and leaving him unconscious.

Walking near a power station, they find five young men trying to rape a girl, but they don't get their attention until they see that it was a rival gang led by Billyboy. A fight between the two gangs begins while the girl runs away and calls the police, so Alex and his droogs flee without being able to kill Billyboy. With a vehicle that they have just stolen, they reach the outskirts of a village. They manage to enter a very colorful house that had a "HOME" sign, where they beat and tie up a writer while they rape his wife.

After such a hectic night they return to the dairy bar and there is a small argument between the droogs, since Alex had hit Lerdo for booing a woman who was singing a fragment of the opera Das Bettzeug by Friedrich Gitterfenster.

The next day Alex is questioned by his caseworker, who threatens him strongly and assures him that he will be caught soon. Alex doesn't give it much importance. After this he goes to a place where they sell music. While he waits, he observes some girls (about 10 years old) having an ice cream, in which he invites them to his house to listen to music. Before going home, Alex takes them to eat at a restaurant. In the house they listen to music and Alex intoxicates them with whiskey mixed with drugs, before stripping them naked and sexually abusing them.

When you're done with the girls, the drooges await you at their portal. When he hangs out with his drogos, they verbally attack him in anger at Alex's role as leader, who responds by beating them up to show his leadership. Later, they convince him to enter a house where a woman with a lot of money and a lover of cats lives. They knock on the door and follow the same pattern to be let in as in the previous robbery. The woman notices this and calls the police. But they get in. Alex enters and confronts the lady, whom he kills with a silver statuette. Seeing what had happened, he quickly leaves the house. His droogos wait for him at the door and Lerdo hits him across the face with his chain, temporarily blinding him. The police show up and find Alex red-handed. Despite his young age, Alex is locked up in jail for being the culprit in the old woman's death.

In prison, he befriended the chaplain for convenience, to speed up his release, making him believe that he was very interested in the Bible and wanted to put it into practice in his daily life. After two years in jail, he kills a new prisoner who was brought into his cell and, on a visit from the interior minister, he makes a comment and is chosen to receive the Ludovico treatment experimentally.

Alex is taken to a room where he has all the comforts and where he is injected with a medicine that makes him nauseated when he sees scenes of sex or violence. Alex is taken to a kind of cinema where he is forced to watch ultraviolence movies set to classical music; due to the injected medicine, he associates the feeling of discomfort with ultraviolence videos and classical music, so that violence and classical music (especially Ludwig van Beethoven's ninth symphony) cause him such great discomfort that he is forced to perform the good. Finally Alex is released from jail for having been "cured"; of his inclination to violence.

Upon arriving home, he realizes that his parents have replaced him with a tenant whom they seem to love more than their own son, so he decides to leave. Wandering through the streets, he goes to the public library to consult some books. In the reading room there is an old man that Álex does not recognize, but to his surprise he is recognized by the old man, whom Alex and his former droogs had beaten at the beginning of the story. All the old men who are with him beat up Alex until two policemen show up. As Alex tries to thank the agents, he realizes it's Dim and Billyboy, the former leader of the rival gang. They take him to a forest where he is once again heavily beaten and abandoned. While Alex looks for a place to help him, he finds a house where there is a sign that says "HOME" and when he enters he realizes that it is the home of the writer he had beaten two years ago.

Alex is very well received by the writer, who doesn't recognize him at first, until he starts talking on nadsat and mentions Lerdo. But since the writer does not want the current government to be elected again, he plans along with three other subjects to use Alex as a symbol of his campaign.

The other three individuals linked to the government smear campaign take Alex to the apartment where they published the campaign materials and lock him up there. So they use Otto Skadelig's music to make Alex commit suicide by throwing himself from the balcony of the apartment and blame the government for the re-education methods Alex was subjected to in jail so that he is not re-elected. The pressure placed on the government by society forces it to "heal" Alex. He receives a visit in the hospital from the Minister of the Interior, who after a friendly talk, convinces him to give the government a good image to the people. Alex agrees since, in a last moment of lucidity, he seems to have rid himself of all traces of the Ludovico treatment. "Without a doubt, he had cured me."

In Chapter 21 (which does not appear in all issues), Alex finds himself much the same as at the beginning of the story, with three new droogs at the Korova Dairy Bar. On the way out, his friends beat up a man and steal his money, but Alex explains that he was no longer attracted to ultraviolence. He goes with his droogs to the place where he bought alcohol at the beginning of the novel, there he tells them to continue alone. He walks alone and upon entering a cafeteria he meets his old friend Pete, who had married. Seeing him so happy with his wife, Alex discovers that the emptiness he felt was that he needed a wife to start a family with and that ultraviolence no longer attracted him because he was maturing (remember that in the book Alex is 15 years). He says goodbye to the reader and finally asks him to remember him as the boy he is at the beginning of the story. Something is seen in this chapter that is not seen in the film, as well as in the American edition of the book, for example: the notion of positive metamorphosis that Kubrick substituted for the pertinent and immovable vile nature of the human being, forcing to a certain extent draw a final negative conclusion (unlike in the original novel), reflecting in an almost anthropophobic way that man and his society are simply garbage. However, the edition that Kubrick had read of the book was one of those that did not contain this last chapter, and he shot the film without knowing of its existence, something that greatly upset Anthony Burgess, the novel's author, who expected an ending. including "chapter 21".

Characters

• Alex DeLarge: the antihero of the novel and leader of his drugos (friends). He often refers to himself as "your humble narrator." His last name is only revealed in the cinematic adaptation of the novel. Alex likes violence and classical music

• George or Georgie: Lieutenant who aspires to command. Georgie tries to undermine Alex's position as a band leader. While Alex was in prison, he died at the hands of the owner of the house where he had entered to rob Pete and Dim.

• Pete: the most rational and less violent of the band. He's the only one who doesn't play when the drug fights. This character later founded a family and meets Alex, causing him to consider joining a normal society.

• The Lerdo (Dim): an idiot and completely short member of the band, continuously treated with condescence by Alex. He later became a policeman, demanding his revenge on Alex for the abuse he once suffered under his command and along with Billyboy he was beaten up in the woods.

• P. R. Deltoid: a neurotic social worker with the task assigned to keep Alex on the right path. He apparently does not know how to deal with young people, and lacks empathy or understanding of his problematic charge.

• The prison chaplain: the character who first asks if really forced goodness is really better than chosen evil. The only character who is really concerned about Alex's well-being; despite that, is not taken seriously by Alex (it is nicknamed by Alex "chaplino", a wink to Charlie Chaplin).

• Minister of the Inferior or Interior: the man who decides to let Alex collaborate in the experiment on the Ludovico technique.

• Dr. Brodsky: a scientific and co-founder of Ludovico's technique.

• Dr. Branom: Brodsky's colleague and co-founder of Ludovico's technique. He seems friendly and almost paternal towards Alex at first, before forcing him in the theater to be psychologically tortured. It's a lot more passive than Brodsky and he talks less.

• F. Alexander: an author who was in the process of machine writing his magnum opus, "A Clockwork Orange", when Alex and his drug workers broke into his house, brutally beat him and then raped his wife in group, causing his death some time later. He was deeply marked by these events, and then met Alex two years later, used him as a guinea pig in a sadistic experiment to demonstrate the inefficiency of Ludovico's technique.

• Otto Skadelig: a fictitious Danish composer.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21 (the novel has three parts, the first two with seven chapters), which did not appear in the first American edition of the book (the third part included only six chapters) and which was also not included in the film, tells how Alex, freed from the Lodovico effect, goes back to his misdeeds until he meets up with his old droog Pete and his wife, the only one of his friends we haven't heard from since Alex's imprisonment. Seeing him, he understands that it is time to grow up and sees what is truly important in the book for Burgess: the concept of positive evolution, finally the moral choice of good. Burgess agreed to have this chapter deleted from the American edition of the book as long as the text was published in the United States market. This version of 20 chapters served Kubrick for the film adaptation. Burgess, who debated his novel at length after it was published, after the Stanley Kubrick film was exposed, continued to defend the importance of chapter 21 as an omitted point that would give him the meaning he himself felt the story should have. The editions that appeared later do include this chapter; see, for example, the edition cited in this reference.

Plot inspiration

The book is inspired by events that occurred in 1944 to Burgess's own wife, when she was robbed by four American soldiers in the streets of London, while she was four months pregnant. Burgess defended despite everything his desire that every criminal can be redeemed; hence the ending he chose for his novel.

The movie

Stanley Kubrick's film is characterized by extremes and bold perspectives of formal experimentation: it speeds up or slows down narrative time, uses frieze composition during the scene in which the gang acts as suicide drivers, sometimes uses the handheld camera, resorts to collage with fragments of old films, on some occasions anticipating the technique of the video clip, engenders the genre of ultraviolent films, which would later give so much play, and uses innovative electronic music on the recently created Moog synthesizer by composer Walter Carlos, then Wendy Carlos after her sex change. The aesthetics of the film, likewise, is groundbreaking in language and in the demystifying and cynical impetus that shines through. The moral message he leaves is that it is better to be bad by choice, than to be good by obligation (as the priest says). There is also a message of a moral and social nature at the beginning of the film when Alex and his & # 34; drugos & # 34; they find the old drunk and he confronts them.

The script, however, is inspired by the American edition of the novel, which lacked the last chapter in which the protagonist reforms. explicit, and particularly cruel in some scenes. As explained in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, by Warner Bros., published in 2001, at its premiere it had such an impact that, in England, a series of crimes perpetrated by young people took place. that supposedly looked inspired by the movie. Stanley Kubrick found himself under great pressure, since some media pointed to him as the culprit of what happened. Kubrick was seriously affected, not only because he lived in England, but also because he knew that not everyone had correctly interpreted the messages behind the violence that he shows in his work. Faced with this situation, Kubrick forced Warner Bros. to completely withdraw the distribution of the film from Great Britain, after 61 weeks on the billboard. This shows the great freedom that the director enjoyed (being able to impose a personal decision on some big studios), as well as his great determination. A Clockwork Orange was not shown theatrically in Britain again until after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999.

Ludovico's technique

The Ludovico technique (as presented in the film version) is a treatment based on classical conditioning. It consists of pairing (comparing) an unconditioned stimulus (a drug that causes vomiting) with a conditioned stimulus (sexual and ultraviolent images) with the purpose that through the repetition of said pairing (simultaneous presentation of the drug with the images) the individual ends up responding to the images in the same way that he responds to the drug (with physical discomfort). Finally, the presentation of the conditioned stimulus, the images, and the music associated with them, elicits the conditioned response of physical discomfort. Alex manages to cure himself of the treatment by a process called "flooding" (flooding): By consistently performing classical music without the drug, the physical discomfort response is extinguished.

The misinterpretation

According to the book's original author, Anthony Burgess, Kubrick misinterpreted the work's message. The writer explained: 'The movie made it easier for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will haunt me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation."

It wasn't the last time that one of Kubrick's films drew notoriously devastating statements from the author of the source material. Stephen King once said that The Shining is the only film adaptation of his books that he can look back on with hate, but Burgess's anger is arguably the most memorable, for he gave up his own book. after seeing the movie.