Alex as a character is one of pure evil, only stopping “raping and ripping” due to boredom, so it’s safe to say he’s quite possibly a sociopath. When the author speaks of not doing things out of cowardice he writes this:
“My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.”
Am I not catching onto something, or taking it too literally?
by BeyondOrnery2737
35 Comments
Everybody has evil inside them. Not acting on it but experiencing it through other media is called catharsis and an absolutely human thing to do.
I think you’re being slightly too literal.
Everyone has urges they don’t act on, sometimes quite dark ones. *A Clockwork Orange* explores this, and allows Burgess as an author to tap into this, by taking it to its most extreme end point.
He’s not admitting to “actually wanting to be a violent rapist” here. He’s admitting to finding catharsis in making someone else indulge in the most extreme of their sins.
He’s basically going “I’d never act on them, sure, but I still came up with all these fucked-up ideas, so what does that say about me?”
Too literal. He was employing some poetic prose. Translation: he enjoyed writing the character.
To me it comes across as deflecting criticism on the subject matter by preemptive self-degradation. He portrays it (not entirely seriously) as worse to enjoy these sins vicariously and voyeuristically. The manful thing to do is to either deny the temptation or embrace it, not to indulge in it at no risk in the slimy, diluted form of a novel.
Reminds me of the Bob Dylan lyric:
*if my thought-dreams/could be seen/they’d prob’ly put me/in a guillotine*
The author also put himself in the book writing the exact same book that Alex reads and ends up kicking Alex out of his house. It’s meant as metafiction.
The author also put himself in the book writing the exact same book that Alex reads and ends up kicking Alex out of his house. It’s meant as metafiction.
Grow up and stop looking for stuff to be outraged by.
doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I always like Burgess for his preparedness to say quiet things out loud. that’s what literature is meant to be.
I mean, it’s why people play GTA. It’s simply ideas that people would never act upon in the real world so they do it in a virtual counterpart, be it video games, books, movies, etc.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the author requested his book be banned in the UK because of reports that it increased violence (or the perception it contributed to increased violence).
Whatever he meant by that, like if he was in character while writing it, his real life actions are anti-violence.
Don’t think it’s something you can take too literally. I think it’s the raw honesty of the statement (which is, ironically, courageous of Burgess in its own right given his belief that he was a coward) that might be shocking.
I think his wife got assaulted and this book was a reactionary piece to the assault? Check the other comments but I think Burgess was feeling a lot of complicated things at the time.
We all have some fucked up fantasies. But hey, as long as you keep them in the realm of fantasy and have the self-control to not actually hurt anyone, I see no serious problems with it.
“Nothing that is human surprises me”
We could all do anything that anyone else could do.
Even if you take it as literally as you are, having bad urges and not acting on that is anything but fucked up.
You can’t control who you are, but you can control who you become.
Controlling bad urges is a cross many of us don’t have to bare and they don’t deserve to be judged – there are unfortunately plebty who do act on those urges you can judge instead.
Who among us has not had, even for a fleeting moment, a thought about committing some crime. I take the authors note to be an admission of his inherent human weakness and that he is capable of such thoughts just as you or I are. All humans are capable of doing “evil” deeds, and those who claim otherwise are either lying to themselves or have lived sheltered lives. The author simply had the courage to say the quiet part out loud.
Not uncomfortable, no. More reassured that the author was, apparently, able to properly live inside the head of his characters and understand their feelings and motivations. Which is exactly one key role of a creative author (or any artist, or actor): to depict those who are not like them but with the same degree of credibility as if they were like them.
How’s it different to you or I taking pleasure from violent video games where we get to kill others, often brutally?
It seems a bit disingenuous to not give the entire context here:
https://genius.com/Anthony-burgess-a-clockwork-orange-introduction-a-clockwork-orange-resucked-annotated
Burgess spends a lot of time in this intro talking about how nasty and awful the characters are. And this quote is part of a point about how the book is popular because many people enjoy this kind of thing by proxy or in fantasy. Why else are slasher movies popular? Or Game of Thrones? If this quote says something bleak about Burgess’ personal character, it’s definitely not unique to him….
I write as a hobby, stories that maybe five people ever read. It’s a lot more fun to write the bad guys, and easier too. I can just hammer out their plans and schemes, come up with the bad things they’ll do to good people, write their angry dialogue and morbid jokes.
And then when I write the hero who stops them, I have to really stop and consider what they would do, how they’ll approach a hard situation, and rewrite their speeches or jokes a dozen or more times.
Its definitely occured to me a few times how fun and easy it is to write about a guy murdering innocent people, and how hard it is to write about a guy who will risk his life to save those people. I think that’s the sentiment he wanted to put out there, an introspection on how maybe he isn’t all that much different than Alex and how in a different world he could have been just as bad. But it is a pretty “raw” thing to say, and I definitely understand feeling real weird about it.
I don’t think he’s saying he would literally rape and murder if it wasn’t for him being shy. That would be pretty wild.
I think he’s just saying that fantasy, literature, and entertainment can be outlets for safely exploring the darker side of human nature.
It’s a philosophy some authors have. Not all of us, personally I’ve put characters through scenarios that made *me* upset. But I also write differently.
I don’t think it’s ever fair to *accuse* a writer of acting out their fantasies through their work, but when they come out and say it themselves there’s not much wiggle room.
It’s perfectly normal. It’s what writers do. It doesn’t mean they’re psychopaths; it means they have imagination and love to explore humanity, including its darker shade.
In my real life, I’m a gentle person. I rarely get angry or shout, I’m more likely to take a step back and start laughing. I’ve never hit anyone let alone murdered someone, and yes I did steal a pack of chewing gum in a shop when I was ten, because of a bet, then went to return it and apologize.
But as a writer… sure, I have wholesome, cool characters. But I also have characters who are thieves and burglars, drug addicts, murderers… I have characters who are abused, who were sold to slavery and consequently prostituted, by their drug-addicted parents, I have historical fantasy where the character is tortured, on scene, and has every bone in his arms and hands broken. I have characters who watch as their beloved tragically die and have to cope with it, and characters who are slowly cracking under the pressure…
I love not only those characters, and the writing, but also *research*. For the few torture scenes, I read two thick books on medieval torture practices and watched several documentaries, comparing and deciding which would be the best for my purposes and most exciting for my readers.
And so far, from the reviews I got, my readers love it, too. Or love to hate it. Because *like me*, they love to put themselves into other people’s shoes, observe those situations and emotions, without having to go through it themselves. Like me, they feel it helps them learn about people a little bit more. We’re on this trip together, me and my readers.
Burgess is said to have written the book having been told he was dying from a brain tumor, this goes towards explaining some of the intensity and rage. Later writings found him to have been a thoughtful thinker on ethics and free will. You can google his enlightening comments on his most famous book, in 1973, Published by the New Yorker under ‘The Clockwork Condition’ title. Highly recommended
Probably he meant exactly what he said, and you’re just surprised he would say it.
I don’t want to take this too literally without context, but the notion of “the only reason somebody could come up with such horrific ideas is because they have a secret desire to act on them restrained only by fear of consequence” is very…off. I doubt that’s the entirety of what’s meant, but it certainly seems to be what’s said. And it’s a tiresomely male perspective, the notion that imagining horrific acts of sexual violence could only be born out of desire rather than fear.
Though…maybe I read it as a generalisation when the author is referring specifically to himself. Seems like an odd thing to admit to, but I’m missing context.
If Burgess made you uncomfortable here, he achieved his goal.
It’s just basic honesty. Unless you don’t think Burgess had any violent/sick fantasies, which would be hard to credit given his writing. I’d say almost anyone who chooses to write that kind of twisted material in detail is exploring their own darker impulses, because otherwise they couldn’t stand to write those events at all (and nothing is pressuring them to do so). I’m sure there are people who could pass a lie-detector test about having never imagined raping or killing in their lives, but they couldn’t write A Clockwork Orange.
You can make a man behave but you can’t make him good.
Many people who have more gory, violent, or non-consensual fantasies ponder them even if they will never do them in real life. These are more common than you expect, but people don’t like to talk about them, so it never becomes mundane and accepted.
What’s to catch on to, here? He’s literally telling the reader that it was fun to write about fucked-up things and make them come to life virtually and live vicariously through his characters.
Everyone has had violent, abhorrent, or deviant thoughts- he was just talented enough attribute his own to his characters and write about them. That’s how fiction works.
Tons of writers write fiction about really fucked-up things that they’d never do in real life. That’s all he’s exposing here.
I always assumed that’s how some people feel about the law. Not everyone respects it because they’re morally aligned with it, some avoid criminal activity because of its consequences. But if the law weren’t there, they’d do it.
His use of the term “original sin” implies we all have something in common with Alex.
Throughout the book, the author is challenging the reader with whether someone must choose the right action by volition or if it is sufficient that they are forced. The priest in Alex’s prison is morally opposed to stripping a person of their free will, so we can assume the priest would argue that a person’s volition is the most important part of right action.
Here, the author is confessing the desire to commit bad actions, but he is held back by cowardice. Is it true, then, that he takes the right action by volition? You are absolutely supposed to feel uncomfortable with this confession, but if you are only uncomfortable with the *author* when you read it, then you haven’t thought deeply enough about it:
In the end, Alex is still human, just like the author is, and just like *you* are. What holds *you* back from the bad actions you desire? Are you a good person merely because you resist those impulses? Does it matter how or why you resist them?