A Clockwork Orange

Hello, my lovelies,and finally I have managed to get something on the blog about this novel, with the useful links, I hope. It is an amazing text, not just because of the incredibly inventive use of language, but because of the ways in which it is constructed-one of the best novels to look at in terms of overall structure, and very good for AO2 as a result...

Anyway, here's the Amazon link for copies as cheap as 1p (plus P&P which makes it more expensive) so do rememebr to get a copy (or ask for one for Christmas). Don't forget the charity shops, which often have excellent bargains--Oxfam Bookshop in St Giles is especially good, but also the Summertown ones are helpful, and often have surprising bargains.

If you are interested in the music that we were thinking about in the lesson, here are the youtube links, though of course it's probably better to buy the album, and listen peacefully to the whole thing in your own time...

Anyway, if you want to listen to Mozart's Jupiter (symphony 41) get a taste of the first part of it here conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. Wonderfully subtle. Here's the second part and you can probably find the rest yourself from that.

Other music mentioned is, of course, Beethoven's ninth symphony. The one we listened to in class (performed in front of Pope Benedict) is,. I think, the finest avilable on this medium, but please tell me if you fnd a better version. Here is the one conducted by Bernstein, which I like as well.

Here is something even rarer--A version conducted by Toscanini in 1948. Which version do you prefer, and why?

I've just had a chat with an expert on Burgess, and asked him for something to add to the blog... He commented:

'Burgess was himself a composer, and had a deep understanding of the Western musical tradition. In A Clockwork Orange he may be not only critiquing the world of Mods and Rockers, but also commenting on their musical taste...

Though Burgess's stylistic experimentation reflects his reverence for the work of James Joyce ( in particular Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) he was in many ways a conservative cultural thinker (in the best sense of conservative) hence he throws into prominence here the iconic works within the western musical tradition.

Burgess himself wrote critical works explicating the difficult works of James Joyce for the common reader. He particularly admired Joyce's love of wordplay and pun; Joyce's sense of the poetry of language and also his sense of the games that can be played with it. It is these things that we see manifest in Burgess's own games with language in A Clockwork Orange.

In some ways, some rather starkly expressed theological ideas underlie the whole drift of A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess sees it, freedom and free will are crucial to the full dignity of a human being. To be reduced to an automaton, a person automatically obedient, is to cease to be fully human. One might think of Paradise Lost here. Milton portrays Satan as a fallen angel--both the adjective and the noun needing to be given equal weight. Satan is charismatic, courageous and ingenious, all excellent qualities deriving from his status as an angelic being made by God, but he is now fallen, so that these admirable qualities are now given over to selfish and destructive ends. But Satan is vibrantly alive: he is still free (in some sense) to choose his actions.

In the same way, at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange Alex displays a certain kind of life and vitality, a quality of leadership, a certain verve, even though these things are deployed to violent and evil ends. When, however, Alex is conditioned so that he no longer has free will, his humanity is neutered, made pale and unreal: he loses the capacity for evil, but he also loses the capacity for good, and the perception of beauty. He is now shut off from the kind of transcendental uplift to which the great music of the Western tradition gave him access. As far as Burgess is concerned, Mozart and Beethoven embody the highest reaches of the human spirit. Their works point towards the transcendent dignity fon what it means to be human, the divine spark in all of us. When Alex is shut off from this it is a terrible deprivation and a terrible torture. He would, paradoxically, be more human by having the freedom to be more evil.

He makes some good points here, I think--read the novel over the break, and let me know if you agree with him or not.

Tony Harrison again

Look at this interview with Harrison on radio 3--the transcript you can find here says some interesting things about his schooldays, including a close description of the generation of 'Them and [uz]'. What do you think?

Robert Frost

Great poet; but you need some background detail. Try looking at these sites about his life and work. Poetry of Robert Frost gives you, as it suggests, texts of many of the major poems, and links to some important criticism as well. Fun stuff. There's also a concise biography at online Literature, which you might find interesting.

If you're looking for more detail in terms of biography, try the timeline I mentioned in class, which you can find here.

While you are choosing which courswework piece to do, you should really comtemplate 'The Road not Taken', don't you think? Written in 1916; still resonates today.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



Frost apparently wrote this thinking of his friend Edward Thomas; the friend who went off to war he mentions here:

"One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference August 1953

Look at Thomas's own poem 'The Signpost'. It makes a fascinating comparison!

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hill-top by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: "You would not have doubted so
At twenty." Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: "At twenty you wished you had never been born."
One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post. "You shall see,"
He laughed -and I had to join his laughter -
"You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall.
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall be freely given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, -
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, tha land and the sea,
Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring, -
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?"

Edward Thomas