The supposed uncivil drift that the British author Anthony Burgess (Harpurhey, Manchester, 1917-London, 1993) perceived among youth was what inspired him to compose his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orangepublished in 1962. Therefore, it seemed to him that something had gone terribly wrong along the way when, a decade later, headlines like “Hunting Gangsters Raping Sex” A Clockwork Orange” or “A child dies in a war A Clockwork Orange” appeared in the press.
“The misunderstanding [sobre su contenido] It will haunt me until I die. “I should not have written the book because of the danger of misinterpretation,” she said in 1985 in Life on firea biography of DH Lawrence where he compared, in one passage, the scandal that arose Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) with the controversy surrounding his famous dystopia. “If a couple of nuns are raped in the Vatican, I get a call from a newspaper. “They have turned me into a kind of expert on violence,” he lamented in another television interview. Burgess, however, was clear that his problems did not come strictly from the book, but from Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, released in 1971.
Produced by the French division of the cultural television channel Arte, the documentary Anthony Burgess, beyond A Clockwork Orange, which premiered last Friday on Filmin, delves into the conflictive relationship between the writer and the title through which, with or against his wishes, he went down in the history of 20th century literature. The medium-length film is based on a manuscript immediately after the film and found after Burgess' death: The mechanical condition, a text in which the author explained the themes of his novel and defended himself against those who accused him of glorifying criminality. “All works of art are dangerous. My little son tried to fly after seeing Peter Pan from Disney. “I grabbed her legs just as she was about to jump out of a fourth-story window,” she argued. His desire to justify himself and even vindicate himself contrasted with the attitude of resignation that Burgess would maintain in the following decade, the eighties.
Singing under the rain
Film and novel told the story of Alex, a juvenile delinquent who is fond of Beethoven who, along with his three drugs (friends, depending on the language nadsat with whom they communicate), he systematically dedicates himself to beating and raping, until he is arrested. To get out of prison as soon as possible, he offers himself an experimental treatment known as the Ludovico technique, a behavioral conditioning therapy that erases all violent impulses and capacities from him. Deprived of moral choice, he becomes a person without free will, who is insulted and humiliated by everyone around him. His title, A Clockwork Orangealludes, in the words of its author, to “the application of a mechanical morality to a living organism that overflows with juice and sweetness.”
When the harshest pages of the book were depicted in Kubrick's film, the images – in particular, a sexual assault at the pace of Singing under the rain– made a sudden impact, from heated debates about the social responsibility of art to violent episodes apparently based on the film. Kubrick himself, in response to different murder trials where the defendants explicitly alluded to his work, requested the withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom, where it could not be seen again until the director's death in 1999.
Meanwhile, Burgess had unwittingly become their spokesman. The good relationship born of that collaboration, which seemed to extend to the film about Napoleon that Kubrick wanted to make, began to deteriorate when the filmmaker left the author and the leading actor, Malcolm McDowell, alone before the media to talk of A Clockwork Orange and stand up to their controversies. Burgess even attended different ceremonies to collect awards in Kubrick's name. A public wear and tear and a marked association with the film for which it was impossible for him to get even. In the script of the 1984 stage adaptation, in case there was any doubt about the esteem in which he held his former friend, Burgess introduced a character “with a beard like Stanley Kubrick's” who, after playing the main theme of Singing under the rain with a trumpet, he was kicked off the stage.
His boredom with the phenomenon and his distancing from his own creation grew more and more. Simple and direct, in the prologue to the reissue of the book in the United States in 1986 he disdained its artistic merits and pointed to Kubrick's film as the only reason why it continued to arouse interest: “I published the novel in 1962, a period that should have been enough to erase it from the world's memory. I would gladly disown it for different reasons (…) it is highly likely that it will survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust.” And he continued: “Sitting in a dark room and composing the Solemn Missa wave Anatomy of melancholy It does not give rise to headlines or news flashes. Unfortunately my little libel attracted many because it released the miasmas of original sin like a carton of rotten eggs.”
Chapter 21
Both that prologue and the recently released documentary place the point of conflict with the film not so much in its representation of violence (“Kubrick turns violence into farce. He puts you in the position of wondering if you should laugh,” declares one of the interviewees. , writer Will Self) as in his omission of the final chapter, chapter 21, where Alex truly reforms. The absence of that fragment of narration was due to an intervention by the American editor, who eliminated the chapter considering that the outcome proposed in the previous pages was more suggestive. Kubrick thought so too. In the film and in the literary version on the other side of the ocean, Ludovico's effects were reversed and Alex, after his ordeal, could go back to committing crimes at will. But in Burgess' full text, an encounter between Alex and one of his former drugs, married and with his own apartment, led him to reflect on his life and choose to abandon violence to start a family. A symbolic achievement of maturity that, as an episode, numerically coincides with the age of majority (21) at that time.
“Anthony Burgess was an established man, conservative in many of his beliefs, his social, religious and political values. With that ending, he was putting the middle class as the savior against authoritarian states,” Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, professor of English literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, explains to ICON. “The problem of free will is the philosophical concept that the novel articulates and that he sees as the space where youth develops. But when he begins to explore it he realizes that there is a huge burden of the influence of the State on that free will. His way of understanding good and evil in the novel is political, not metaphysical or moral in the classical religious sense. The authoritarian State penetrates the psyche of the individual, the self.”
The triggering incident for Burgess's novel took place in 1942, when the writer's first wife was assaulted and brutally beaten in London by three deserting American soldiers. She lost the baby she was expecting and, as a result of continued internal bleeding, she died years later. It is not difficult to find the reflection of the event in A Clockwork Orange: the husband of the woman who is raped by Alex and his drugs is an author who, in fact, is finalizing a manuscript also titled A Clockwork Orange. The documentary tells how, after his return to England after working in the British colony of Malaysia and the protectorate of Brunei, the writer found himself in a climate of alert due to the growth of juvenile delinquency. The rebellious subculture of the so-called teddy boys and the concern for an importation of the American lifestyle and values crystallized clearly in the book, which found its definitive ingredient in the behaviorism studies published by the Pennsylvanian psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner.
Kennedy, Nixon and Warhol
Before Kubrick, in 1965 Andy Warhol filmed his own adaptation of the novel, Vinyl. Composed practically of just one frame over the course of barely an hour, Warhol's version was nourished by the same imaginary that Burgess relied on: the rise of a challenging adolescent aesthetic, in line with the incipient figures of rock. & roll, by Marlon Brando The law of silence (1954) or James Dean's Rebel without a cause (1955). Warhol formulated a subversive discourse, different from that of Burgess, about the deactivation of youth and difference by authority, whose homoerotic motives made the Ludovico technique also refer to conversion therapies.
In both Kubrick's novel and film, for its part, the author's character and his acolytes were caricatured in their role as opponents of the government, as intellectuals more concerned with instrumentalizing Alex than in helping him. A disbelief towards the political sides that, again, was nuanced in the final chapter. “My book was kennedian and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted [en la versión estadounidense que eliminó el capítulo 21] it was a book nixonian without a thread of optimism. Let evil strut to the last line and laugh at all inherited beliefs (…) and that humans can become better,” Burgess reproached in 1986.
“Kubrick used to say that the best adaptations came from bad novels or novels with flaws. Perhaps Anthony Burgess bought that speech and began to think that his novel was defective,” believes Professor Eduardo Valls, regarding the writer's disenchantment with the popularity of the book. “But, for my taste, the distortion that the film makes is not significant. The problem with adaptation is that it is much more essentialist, although it is not derivative, but rather stands on its own. I like to say that they are two different masterpieces.”
Related to A happy world (1932) and 1984 (1949) as a reference work of the British dystopia of the 20th century (not in vain, Burgess was a deep admirer of George Orwell), A Clockwork Orange It was an experiment in its author's canon, although, in Valls' opinion, not necessarily an orphan novel: “It deviates from its line, marked by thoughts about the colonial world or his experience during his stays in Southeast Asia, but “The problems that have to do with the definition of good and evil are inherent to his own work.” Nor something that can be easily denied. “What surrounded the film did not sit well with him, I think it was a subjective reaction. It is a novel that has become a popular and cultural phenomenon that undoubtedly transcends the author. Ask around, see how many people can give you another Anthony Burgess title.”
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