This is going to be a long one. To save you time and money, I've installed the first-ever table of contents in this blog post. See below.
PART I : A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
I'm finished with Anthony Burgess's masterwork of dystopia and ultra-violence. And whew, what a ride it was. I'd heard some disturbing things about A Clockwork Orange before I even picked it up. The work has a rap sheet a mile long; street cred similar to Jack the Ripper's. The only visual clue I'd gotten regarding its subject matter was a random glimpse of a movie poster, which showed some young, pale, dapper delinquent with a bowler, eye makeup, and a disquieting smile on his face.
The copy I picked up at the used bookshop bore this review from Time magazine on the back cover:
So I read it. Ostensibly the novella concerns a gang of young punks with too much time on their hands, high on drugs, who rob, punch and rape their way through the streets of a futuristic English city on a nightly basis. But A Clockwork Orange turned out to be much more than that. It was as the reviewer suggested: on the surface the book was a gut-wrenching investigation of the depths of depravity (and downright evil). The protagonist, "Alex," (our first-person narrator) and his three "droogs" venture forth from their homes, drink drug-laced milk, and beat up whatever hapless victim they come across. Occasionally they'll steal a car, drive into the countryside, break into someone's home and have their way with its tenants. They destroy, steal, smash, and desecrate, all for the sake of the act itself: a pastime Alex calls "ultra-violence."
That's only the first part of the book, though. After a home invasion goes terribly wrong, Alex is arrested and imprisoned for murder. This is all very shocking for a young man, not even fifteen, living with his parents and with a peculiar liking for Beethoven and other classical composers. The worst is yet to come. Alex's less-than-model behavior in prison lands him a job—as the first test subject for a brutal new rehabilitation method, the Ludovico Technique. Alex, injected with nausea-inducing drugs, strapped to a chair, head and limbs restrained, eyeballs pried open, is forced to watch graphically violent films for hours on end, without interruption or respite. As much as he formerly enjoyed viewing and engaging in acts of sadism and brutality, the drugs eventually condition him to feel sick at the mere thought. During a public exhibition just prior to his release, Alex is goaded by a belligerent man and tempted by a femme fatale, both of which reduce him to a quivering, groveling, nauseous heap on the floor.
And so the novella's title is thus vindicated. "Clockwork orange" is a term which author Burgess explained thus:
I won't spoil the rest. Needless to say, Alex's troubles are far from over. But this is no tale of triumph and redemption, nor a cold, impartial philippic of social justice; suffice it to say that though Alex is not out of the woods (not one malenky bit, my droogs), his fate is not beyond hope.
The point, as far as I can see, is best framed by the question which the prison chaplain, who attempts to mentor young Alex shortly before the latter's Ludovico baptism, contemplates aloud:
Is forced goodness truly superior to chosen evil?
Which is better: a life lived poorly but freely, marked by willful corruption? Or a life spent in preconditioned sanctity, involuntary virtue, unadulterated moral slavery, as it were? The life of a clockwork orange?
Burgess reports, you decide.
A Clockwork Orange is a disturbing and yet wickedly fun read, made all the more so by Burgess's experimental use of a fictitious dialect, Nadsat. Described in the book as an amalgamation of gypsy talk, Cockney rhyming slang, and Slavic lexicon (ostensibly gleaned from Soviet propaganda), Nadsat is a herky-jerky, nigh-incomprehensible mélange of anglicized Russian and teenage argot. It's tricky to get into at first, but if you stick with it and pay close attention to context, you'll puzzle it out. It took me a while to understand "gulliver" (head), but I got "litso" (face), "malenky" (little), "rooker" (hand), "viddy," (see), and "droog" (friend) reasonably soon. The more esoteric terms like "cutter" (money) Burgess allows Alex to explain to his audience. My personal favorites were "chelloveck" (man), "govoreet" (talk), "groodies" (the part of the female anatomy below the neck and above the stomach), and "horrorshow" (a sort of catch-all term meaning "good" or "awesome").
In summary, I've never read anything quite like A Clockwork Orange. It's graphic, violent, dark, and ominous; but Alex's brash, sardonic narrative and the aural hilarity of Nadsat temper this darkness effectively. The book is not without its judgment or morals, but it passes them along barehanded and unvarnished, without allowing itself to become preachy or pretentious; and the ending (make sure you get the version with the long-lost 21st chapter) lifts the book out of shocker status and propels it into the realm of speculative fiction and psychosocial analysis. It's deeper than it appears to be. Keep that in mind, droogies.
And now for the big one:
PART II : MOBY-DICK
It ain't just about a whale.
That much has become apparent, now that I'm halfway through this tome. (I'm up to Chapter 77 or something.) This is much farther in than I've ever penetrated into Melville's opus before.
The action's shaping up well. There've been a few tantalizing tales of the white whale bandied among the whale-ships sailing off the Cape; Ahab's clumping about and muttering darkly; Stubb is eating whale-steak, ordering the cook to proselytize to the sharks; Ishmael is on lookout duty, basking in tropical sunshine and musing on the wider issues of life; at least two self-styled prophets have laid odds against the Pequod; and Gregory Peck still can't even begin to portray just how determined, ominous, and downright crazy Ahab is.
I'm not into sinister books with sinister characters, honestly. It strikes me that I went from one book with a scary anti-hero to another, even longer book with a scary anti-hero. Coincidence, I assure you.
What I've noticed so far is this: Melville, perhaps in keeping with other 19th-century authors like Jules Verne, likes to digress. Scientifically digress, mind. The Pequod will be sailing along, Ahab will be angrily pacing the deck, Ishmael will be in the crow's nest or the poop deck or the scuppers or whatever, and all of a sudden, WHAM! Didactic interlude. Take five, guys, let's break for Whaling 101. Melville, through his mouthpiece Ishmael, will go off on a tangent: factoids about the whaling industry, mostly. The percentage of the GNP based on whale-oil; that the corsets of queens and the lamp-light of civilization have been wrought from whale-bone and spermaceti; the demographics of your typical whaling crew; and zoological points of interest, like what whales eat, what eats whales, which parts of the whale are good for eating, which parts of the whale will kill you, and so on and so on and so on. You can tell that, if Melville were alive today, he'd be working with the guys at The Guinness Book of World Records. He loves to wow his audience. It's his privilege as well as his prerogative; most of the American public was (and undoubtedly still is) horrifically ignorant about sailing, whaling, and cetology in general. Melville knew it. And in Moby-Dick, he took it upon himself to throw off the veil, dismantle the rumors and half-truths and display his subject in its truest form. Therefore, he is constantly breaking off from the plot to discourse about the differences between sperm whales and right whales; the complete form and function of a whale-boat, including all the ropes, oars, harpoons and fitments found on board; and a few choice matters applying to krill, baleen, and giant squid. I'm impressed with the amount of knowledge Melville exhibits regarding cetology, a primitive science in those days. Many of the theories he puts forth on the behavior, morphology and habits of whales are dead-on. Melville confirms what marine biologists would discover centuries later. Sperm whales are bad-ass. They do, in fact, dive insanely deep, battle it out with giant squid, use their heads like battering-rams, employ spermaceti like a fish's dive-bladder, keep warm with blubber, and travel vast distances in short spans of time.
Now on the one hand, these diversions do round out the picture. They give the novel a grandiose sort of air, a subtle majesty, realism and truthfulness both refreshing and satisfying. Whaling is an arcane sort of business, and a lot of the jargon and technical whiz-bang has to be set aside and explained at length. I get that. But on the other hand, these digressions do the same thing to Melville's epic that they do to Verne's science fiction: they break up the story. They interrupt the action. They take what would otherwise be a fast-moving adventure (with metaphysical and philosophical implications) and turn it into an awkward, choppy hunk of academia.
To lecture, or not to lecture? That is the question.
The other thing I've noticed is that I like this book. I do. Honestly. I hated it the first few times I tried it. Found it as dry as a piece of ship's hardtack biscuit. This time around I'm truly engaged. I know next to nothing about whaling, so Melville's frequent lessons are informative and pleasant. As for the action, it's suitably intense, well-paced (considering), and told in an erudite yet passionate style, which (now that I'm old enough to understand what all the big words mean) I appreciate both for the fun of reading it and the obvious challenge. I'm having a grand time. Nearly 80 chapters in and still going strong. I'll have no trouble finishing, unless I hit a chapter that's 50 pages long or something. (Unlikely; most of 'em haven't even been two pages.) In fact, I think I'm still on schedule. I started January 5, and by that measure I should have precisely 77 chapters read by today. How about them apples?
PART III : READING LIST
Well, I could tell you what my reading list consists of, but (a) that would be rather ostentatious, (b) I've already mentioned the pertinent components in the table of contents, and (c) I added a reading list to the bottom right-hand side of this blog's home page last night. So go there if you want to see what I'll be reading next. Otherwise, you'll just have to stand the suspense. This post has gone on long enough.
Peace.
I. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
II. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
III. current reading list, including such gems as The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (historical fiction), The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux (nonfiction, travel), Transgalactic by A.E. Van Vogt (science fiction), and The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson (????)
I'm finished with Anthony Burgess's masterwork of dystopia and ultra-violence. And whew, what a ride it was. I'd heard some disturbing things about A Clockwork Orange before I even picked it up. The work has a rap sheet a mile long; street cred similar to Jack the Ripper's. The only visual clue I'd gotten regarding its subject matter was a random glimpse of a movie poster, which showed some young, pale, dapper delinquent with a bowler, eye makeup, and a disquieting smile on his face.
The copy I picked up at the used bookshop bore this review from Time magazine on the back cover:
"Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker, but is really that rare thing in English letters: a philosophical novel."Well, huh. What am I to think?
So I read it. Ostensibly the novella concerns a gang of young punks with too much time on their hands, high on drugs, who rob, punch and rape their way through the streets of a futuristic English city on a nightly basis. But A Clockwork Orange turned out to be much more than that. It was as the reviewer suggested: on the surface the book was a gut-wrenching investigation of the depths of depravity (and downright evil). The protagonist, "Alex," (our first-person narrator) and his three "droogs" venture forth from their homes, drink drug-laced milk, and beat up whatever hapless victim they come across. Occasionally they'll steal a car, drive into the countryside, break into someone's home and have their way with its tenants. They destroy, steal, smash, and desecrate, all for the sake of the act itself: a pastime Alex calls "ultra-violence."
That's only the first part of the book, though. After a home invasion goes terribly wrong, Alex is arrested and imprisoned for murder. This is all very shocking for a young man, not even fifteen, living with his parents and with a peculiar liking for Beethoven and other classical composers. The worst is yet to come. Alex's less-than-model behavior in prison lands him a job—as the first test subject for a brutal new rehabilitation method, the Ludovico Technique. Alex, injected with nausea-inducing drugs, strapped to a chair, head and limbs restrained, eyeballs pried open, is forced to watch graphically violent films for hours on end, without interruption or respite. As much as he formerly enjoyed viewing and engaging in acts of sadism and brutality, the drugs eventually condition him to feel sick at the mere thought. During a public exhibition just prior to his release, Alex is goaded by a belligerent man and tempted by a femme fatale, both of which reduce him to a quivering, groveling, nauseous heap on the floor.
And so the novella's title is thus vindicated. "Clockwork orange" is a term which author Burgess explained thus:
"...an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton."Not a pleasant prospect, is it?
I won't spoil the rest. Needless to say, Alex's troubles are far from over. But this is no tale of triumph and redemption, nor a cold, impartial philippic of social justice; suffice it to say that though Alex is not out of the woods (not one malenky bit, my droogs), his fate is not beyond hope.
The point, as far as I can see, is best framed by the question which the prison chaplain, who attempts to mentor young Alex shortly before the latter's Ludovico baptism, contemplates aloud:
Is forced goodness truly superior to chosen evil?
Which is better: a life lived poorly but freely, marked by willful corruption? Or a life spent in preconditioned sanctity, involuntary virtue, unadulterated moral slavery, as it were? The life of a clockwork orange?
Burgess reports, you decide.
A Clockwork Orange is a disturbing and yet wickedly fun read, made all the more so by Burgess's experimental use of a fictitious dialect, Nadsat. Described in the book as an amalgamation of gypsy talk, Cockney rhyming slang, and Slavic lexicon (ostensibly gleaned from Soviet propaganda), Nadsat is a herky-jerky, nigh-incomprehensible mélange of anglicized Russian and teenage argot. It's tricky to get into at first, but if you stick with it and pay close attention to context, you'll puzzle it out. It took me a while to understand "gulliver" (head), but I got "litso" (face), "malenky" (little), "rooker" (hand), "viddy," (see), and "droog" (friend) reasonably soon. The more esoteric terms like "cutter" (money) Burgess allows Alex to explain to his audience. My personal favorites were "chelloveck" (man), "govoreet" (talk), "groodies" (the part of the female anatomy below the neck and above the stomach), and "horrorshow" (a sort of catch-all term meaning "good" or "awesome").
In summary, I've never read anything quite like A Clockwork Orange. It's graphic, violent, dark, and ominous; but Alex's brash, sardonic narrative and the aural hilarity of Nadsat temper this darkness effectively. The book is not without its judgment or morals, but it passes them along barehanded and unvarnished, without allowing itself to become preachy or pretentious; and the ending (make sure you get the version with the long-lost 21st chapter) lifts the book out of shocker status and propels it into the realm of speculative fiction and psychosocial analysis. It's deeper than it appears to be. Keep that in mind, droogies.
And now for the big one:
PART II : MOBY-DICK
It ain't just about a whale.
That much has become apparent, now that I'm halfway through this tome. (I'm up to Chapter 77 or something.) This is much farther in than I've ever penetrated into Melville's opus before.
The action's shaping up well. There've been a few tantalizing tales of the white whale bandied among the whale-ships sailing off the Cape; Ahab's clumping about and muttering darkly; Stubb is eating whale-steak, ordering the cook to proselytize to the sharks; Ishmael is on lookout duty, basking in tropical sunshine and musing on the wider issues of life; at least two self-styled prophets have laid odds against the Pequod; and Gregory Peck still can't even begin to portray just how determined, ominous, and downright crazy Ahab is. I'm not into sinister books with sinister characters, honestly. It strikes me that I went from one book with a scary anti-hero to another, even longer book with a scary anti-hero. Coincidence, I assure you.
What I've noticed so far is this: Melville, perhaps in keeping with other 19th-century authors like Jules Verne, likes to digress. Scientifically digress, mind. The Pequod will be sailing along, Ahab will be angrily pacing the deck, Ishmael will be in the crow's nest or the poop deck or the scuppers or whatever, and all of a sudden, WHAM! Didactic interlude. Take five, guys, let's break for Whaling 101. Melville, through his mouthpiece Ishmael, will go off on a tangent: factoids about the whaling industry, mostly. The percentage of the GNP based on whale-oil; that the corsets of queens and the lamp-light of civilization have been wrought from whale-bone and spermaceti; the demographics of your typical whaling crew; and zoological points of interest, like what whales eat, what eats whales, which parts of the whale are good for eating, which parts of the whale will kill you, and so on and so on and so on. You can tell that, if Melville were alive today, he'd be working with the guys at The Guinness Book of World Records. He loves to wow his audience. It's his privilege as well as his prerogative; most of the American public was (and undoubtedly still is) horrifically ignorant about sailing, whaling, and cetology in general. Melville knew it. And in Moby-Dick, he took it upon himself to throw off the veil, dismantle the rumors and half-truths and display his subject in its truest form. Therefore, he is constantly breaking off from the plot to discourse about the differences between sperm whales and right whales; the complete form and function of a whale-boat, including all the ropes, oars, harpoons and fitments found on board; and a few choice matters applying to krill, baleen, and giant squid. I'm impressed with the amount of knowledge Melville exhibits regarding cetology, a primitive science in those days. Many of the theories he puts forth on the behavior, morphology and habits of whales are dead-on. Melville confirms what marine biologists would discover centuries later. Sperm whales are bad-ass. They do, in fact, dive insanely deep, battle it out with giant squid, use their heads like battering-rams, employ spermaceti like a fish's dive-bladder, keep warm with blubber, and travel vast distances in short spans of time.
Now on the one hand, these diversions do round out the picture. They give the novel a grandiose sort of air, a subtle majesty, realism and truthfulness both refreshing and satisfying. Whaling is an arcane sort of business, and a lot of the jargon and technical whiz-bang has to be set aside and explained at length. I get that. But on the other hand, these digressions do the same thing to Melville's epic that they do to Verne's science fiction: they break up the story. They interrupt the action. They take what would otherwise be a fast-moving adventure (with metaphysical and philosophical implications) and turn it into an awkward, choppy hunk of academia.
To lecture, or not to lecture? That is the question.
The other thing I've noticed is that I like this book. I do. Honestly. I hated it the first few times I tried it. Found it as dry as a piece of ship's hardtack biscuit. This time around I'm truly engaged. I know next to nothing about whaling, so Melville's frequent lessons are informative and pleasant. As for the action, it's suitably intense, well-paced (considering), and told in an erudite yet passionate style, which (now that I'm old enough to understand what all the big words mean) I appreciate both for the fun of reading it and the obvious challenge. I'm having a grand time. Nearly 80 chapters in and still going strong. I'll have no trouble finishing, unless I hit a chapter that's 50 pages long or something. (Unlikely; most of 'em haven't even been two pages.) In fact, I think I'm still on schedule. I started January 5, and by that measure I should have precisely 77 chapters read by today. How about them apples?
PART III : READING LIST
Well, I could tell you what my reading list consists of, but (a) that would be rather ostentatious, (b) I've already mentioned the pertinent components in the table of contents, and (c) I added a reading list to the bottom right-hand side of this blog's home page last night. So go there if you want to see what I'll be reading next. Otherwise, you'll just have to stand the suspense. This post has gone on long enough.
Peace.
4 comments:
Hmmm. Couldn't get past A Clockwork Orange, in this post, but will come back and read the rest later. I too have known next to nothing about this work, except I've heard that it's tremendously disturbing, so I've avoided both the book and the movie. What you've said here definitely intrigues me and opens me up (a bit) to reading the book. But what's especially interesting in this discussion is the questions you say the book addresses. Earlier this evening a blogging friend posted about the meaning of safety, which made me go back and read one of my early posts, "Swan Song for the Moment," which was a big long rumination on freedom vs. safety. Do you remember that? We had quite a comment-conversation, if you remember.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I let myself blather on longer than I'd planned. I'm a wordy cuss and when I talk about books...
I'd steer clear of the movie. The novella's imagery is quite vivid enough.
I do remember that. That's always been one of my favorite posts of yours. I've been meaning to go back and reread it. Now I've a catalyst.
A good friend of mine LOVED A Clockwork Orange. I've got to give it another chance, and the same goes for Moby Dick.
I'm reading a novel right now with all sorts of asides, incidental explanations, and back stories. It's like getting stuck in the elevator with somebody who adores the sound of their own voice, and it's driving me crazy. Moby Dick would be a welcome respite; at least I WANT to learn about whales.
I've heard more than one disturbing thing about A Clockwork Orange. I think I'll add it to my ever growing list on goodreads anyhow. It seems like the sort of thing you either love or hate, and I MUST find out which side I'm on.
Maybe in a few years I'll try battling it out with Moby Dick again. I just don't think I have the patience currently. But 77 chapters? I salute you.
I'm a little over half way into The Sherlockian right now, and I'm loving it. Fast paced dual-setting mystery: one foot in the 1900s with Arthur Conan Doyle and the other in present day with an ardent fan who thinks he's as cool as Sherlock Holmes. Can't give a definite opinion yet, of course, but I think it's going to be highly recommended.
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