Clockwork Orange, Essay Example

Like the final query preceding parliamentarian vote, Anthony Burgess’ repetitive conjecture of the phrase “what’s it going to be then, eh?” in his work A Clockwork Orange is both a cultural and customary legal proposition, that reveals the semantic supplication within public choice.[i] Differentiating between notions of ‘freedom’ and legal ‘certainty’ as prescribed to statutory legal codes, Burgess’ interpretation of law and legal authority through the lens of fictional character development is taken to its moral limits. Assertions between natural law based on a state of nature permeated by a culture of ‘ultraviolence’ and the official governance of the modern British state which Burgess subjects to incontrovertible criticism amidst what sees as a pervasive state of corruption at every level of social life, allowing a bureaucratic authoritarian state to mimic the mayhem of his protagonist Alex, his gang, the droods.

How does one approach such a work as A Clockwork Orange from a literary criticism or philosophical perspective? The discussion begins with semantic analyses of “freedom” (i.e. liberty) and “constraint” (i.e. protections), and moves toward a third term of “coercion” (i.e. force). Rather than a mere supplement to law and its enforcement, Burgess’ work has the dynamic of a supplication on its own terms. The inculcation of “meaning” in formative institutional usage of “special kinds of psychological experiences” as Bruno Leoni would have it, centralizes decision making toward the third term, so that the dominion of law overrules all other power within a society gone mad. Burgess’ work speaks to Leoni’s philosophical analysis of “lexographic” speech and the translation of words to “stipulations,” or statutory codification.[ii] It is only in the latter that enforcement of ultraviolence finds its way into the practice of law in Burgess’ text. In the UK as in other common law countries, constitutional law dictates rights based according to the ‘order of the day.’ Constitutional law is in itself unwritten law in Burgess’ terrain, and ‘the order of the day’ is dependent upon parliamentary decision. Like Leoni, Burgess sees a Weberian “process of rationalization” within the state that promulgates established rules into new formations according to what politicians think the public might tacitly consent to (i.e. will of the people) at any given moment.

The dependency of Western Law on legal writings dates back to the period of the Roman Emperor, Justinian and his Corpus Juris. Although written law is itself not always necessarily legislation the body of “existing” law is an object that carries value much like the legal tender of currency. European civil law is constituted of a dearth of written rules which, for Europeans, stand as a vestiture of freedom. As we can see in the continuity between the writing of Burgess’ novel and all foregoing analysis and criticism of the work since 1963, the efficacy of legal writing is the juncture in which law also finds its reach. On the one hand, arguments can be made about the limits of law as word construction. However, on the other, one only has to look to economics, and especially in times of dystopic crisis as the one portrayed in Burgess’ working class UK, to understand that written laws not only ensure sovereign polity, but enforce rules through application. The protagonist of the novel, Alex meets the rule of law in court upon trial for murder.

As the plot develops within Burgess’ account of a young man on the verge of living in an almost complete state of nature, the reader is drawn into Alex’s world of ultraviolence through a number of scenes dedicated to acts of criminal and tortious abuse. Indeed, the day-to-day activities of Alex and the droods are rendered with conspiratorial acts of violence. Accomplices to their own demise, the characters engage in criminal assault, battery, break and entry/burglary, mayhem, murder one, manslaughter, prostitution, rape, theft and accompanying acts of torture of their victims. In several instances misdemeanors such as grand theft auto and subsequent reckless driving, and followed by intensive sessions of violence of other citizens, as in the rape of a wife and forced observation of the husband after falsifying emergency to enter into their home.

Under common law, attendant charges pertaining to those acts also include intentional tortfeasor actions for compensatory damages responsive to intentional infliction of emotional distress for both victims, and related charges of trespass to chattels and property for personal property damage. The novel’s focus on criminal law and its due process, however, disregard the dual civil and criminal procedure typical of actual legal cases involving both types of complaint. Furthermore, the elements of law in the UK at the time of Burgess’ novel have undoubtedly changed, and the division on certain legal rules like the law of rescue on either side of the Atlantic, says much about how little Burgess’ novel may supplement knowledge of criminal law within contemporary common law system(s). Moreover, and this is where Burgess’ main critique of law and its instrumentation by states lies, is the omnipotent presence of state sponsored violence once Alex is contracted into the state under tacit consent to be convicted as a citizen whom. Once incarcerated, Alex’s violence is reconstituted in a new form through his engagement with the misconduct of law enforcement and other state actors.

The focus of Burgess’ novel on intensely moralized ground belonging exclusively to a state which has veered into totalitarian logics of a technocratic legal system that silences the freedom of individual sentience through ‘scientific cure’ of Alex’s criminal mental state draws us into the murky world of therapeutic corrections, and the methods by which the democratic state deploys bureaucratic authoritarianism as a taken for granted intervention for the ‘public good.’ Burgess is early to thinkers whom later work on this topic within literary criticism. One only has to look to Elaine Scarry’s (1985) work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, to see the evolution of scholarly inquiries into tropes of ‘civilization.’[iii] According to Scarry, asymmetrical valorizations present between political regimes and the bodies they recruit for material assertion show that modern states are equally reliant on the inequitable distributions of material objects (i.e. bodies) as they are on political subterfuges of so-called ‘barbaric’ productions of pain. The power center of those dynamics is, then, readily apprehended by disenfranchised citizens. For modern criminals, then, incorporation of the explicit methods of constraint – observed within the authority of the state constitutes a full circle rendering of the sovereign and its technologically re-empowered subjects. Where the state is found guilty of ‘economic violence’ or exposure to the reach of corruption, criminals, then, find their most powerful support as the state comes under the scrutiny of suspicion of wrongdoing.

Evidence for Burgess’ argument against the expansion of state violence, and its management of a general environment of dissent is rearticulated through a storyline that transforms the lawless into law abiding citizens as the state is revealed to be criminal in constitution. Mobilizing a standard convention of inversion, and specifically sacrifice as it is understood within anthropological theories of transformation, Burgess addresses the centrality of the Outlaw to relative maintenance of the credibility of the state. Here we see the civilization paradox at work, whereby the state is reliant upon the retraction of rights in order to stabilize its own demise. Throughout the twentieth-century the Outlaw has served as a comparative source of savagery; a categorical juxtaposition to inclusive notions of citizenship.[iv]  The concept of the outlaw in the novel fuels notions of sovereignty and moral retribution through the legal violence of state intervention. In fact, violence, rather than ethics seems to be transcendent dynamic of all political life; the mitigating factor which enables jurisprudence to exist, if not chase after the Social Contract. The acceleration and expansion of all forms of violence within the political technologies of late-capitalism simultaneously disable, reveal, and then reassert the teleological construction of the Outlaw. In the last instance, it is expressly the continuum between authoritarian and democratic formations of law, and enforcement of those rules through terror, that does nothing short of discrediting the entire modernist civilization paradigm.

Putting Burgess’ fictional portrayal of the British state into dialogue with Allen Feldman’s (1991) ethnographic account of a similar relationship on IRA prisoners incarcerated by Britain in Northern Ireland, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, we can begin to see the objectivity of his work, and specifically the core mechanism of state power: the antagonistic relationship of the outlaw.[v] Prisoner agency contributes to a dynamic of “legitimation;” one of paradox in relation to late-modern state domination. Pointing to the industrial logistics and managerial rationalities that characterize the social productions of clandestine military violence in the working-class neighborhoods of Belfast, Feldman argues that the flexible codification of what the IRA has traditionally seen as political prisoners as criminals has promoted a less static interpretation of state institutions, and particularly the British penal system. His work reveals an almost seamless conjecture within Burgess’ storyline, as new regimes of power emerge to meet untold demands by a public no longer complicit with the ‘order of the day.’ Indeed, Feldman argues that these transitions in regime are impacted by the force of inmate bodies as they are inscribed with law’s violence, from object to subject, and back again. It is precisely on the site of the body of the prisoner, that statutory law becomes fodder for rehabilitated subjects, and official rubrics of intervention.

Although the divestiture of full citizenship is of primary concern to IRA constituents even prior to incarceration, the retraction of rights is, of course, a reflection of the most punitive instruments of state violence, regardless of particular nation’s location on the continuum between totalitarian and democratic government. Quite typically we might say that for both Burgess and Feldman that a floating center of power is the norm not the exception, and that bureaucratic authoritarianism is quite explicitly the very mechanism by which politicians manifest reformative promises. Indeed, the process by which Alex becomes ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ is one where individuals classified to be still in a ‘state of nature’ become artificial or ‘civilized’ through technologies of state intervention. Alex’s prison number 6655321 replaces his legal identity and attendant legal rights as free citizen. In short, he is state property. Legal identity is not the only methodology deployed by the state in the interest of the corrective coercion on citizens. The incorporation of Science into technocratic decision making is reflected in Burgess’ depiction of the British state, and its “medicalized” model of intervention. Alex is subjected to the Governor’s recommendation for ‘behavioral correction,’ finding himself at Ludvico Hospital. The result of this ‘scientific cure’ for what is deemed to be a criminal mental state is an inversion of prior tendency to deflect violence from others to the point of suicidal ideation.

The process by which Alex’s personal identity is subject to reformation is also seen through his relationship with the Prison Chaplain. Biblical exegesis provides the explicit foundation for significant transformation Alex’s moral principles; even to the point of associating himself with Jesus Christ as a martyr, betrayed by the droogs. Following Nietzsche’s notions of power as “a metonym of doing” Feldman’s interpretation of sacred transformations inside of the state is invoked through the “deterritorialization” of sanctified signifiers (i.e. body as ‘right’) and the re-appropriation of those sacred symbols by the state in its “violent penetration of the sanctuary and the death, torture, and imprisonment of its inhabitants” (Feldman, p.39). Recognizing the fragmented traditions of Irish Catholic oral histories in the setting of Belfast, Feldman looks at the induction of confession within IRA prisoner tactics.  It is here that the transcription of political violence upon the body that simultaneously maintains the power of the state with insistence accelerates the production of agency within the subject experiencing the violence (i.e. martyrdom). The efficacy of this form of extra-legal strategy can also be seen elsewhere, as in Latin American ‘Testimonio’, where activism has moved into a quasi-official model of record of witness used in human rights trials. The politics of prison revolt in the form a continuous stream of collective consciousness about the transaction of violence, has become an important link between official and unofficial versions of ‘truth.’

Judeo-Christian models of sanctuary as practiced by the IRA, and prisoners like Alex in general, are a critical node in a system of exchange – where the radical productivity circumscribed to those sacred spaces of immunity, have in their very sustenance the seeds for the cultivation of terror. According to Feldman, the very existence of confessional space bears witness to the fact that hidden “truths” about fear and power may at any time be an invitation for further violence, and specifically, in cases where the confessional community may “emulat[e] the manner in which violence is bureaucratized and rationalized by the state” (Feldman, p.41). In spite of the fact that application and enforcement of the certainty of law in the context of the correctional institution, is met with contentious force, Alex is a murderer when he is convicted to serve at Staja 84F. He commits a second murder in the confines of the prison. As Burgess’ novel suggests, transcriptions of violence that lead to mimesis of the state and its technologies of abuse have the potential to serve the ultra-violent rather than punish dependent upon the current model of intervention. In Alex’s case it led to early release to Ludvico. Feldman’s work mirrors this perspective, as IRA prisoners performed reflective state violence, and often self-violence (i.e. “on the blanket” unclothed and unwashed) providing state coercion with a pronounced feedback loop which slowly but surely led to policy reformation and sovereign recognition of the IRA as a political party.

Much of public policy regarding criminal law, and specifically correctional practices stems from twentieth century developments within social science, and their application to other technologies of power such as existing, albeit  preceding, environmental psychology of the modern prison as an architectural space for control and intervention. In Feldman’s work he references the instrumental use of Jeremy Benthan’s Panopticon as a framework for coercion of incarcerated populations. Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic version of A Clockwork Orange leads us into the same institutional setting, and the consistency of Bentham’s model as described within Michel Foucault’s seminal work on Bentham’s prison architecture comes to life.[vi] The persistence of the prison structure’s confinement within the individual minds of the prisoners within his ethnographic study is also described through the protagonist in Burgess’ work, through relationships with the other prisoners. If public policy is the active convergence of social issues with existing statute through parliamentary or other legislative agreement, then, we must look to what exactly is of import within criminal law and its due process. How stipulated convictions turn into arbitrary technologies of force within the lives of prisoners says much about the degree of authoritarian violence administered within particular states, and defines the very point of departure for those states comparative status as democracies.

Alex is alone in his incarceration. In his engagement with other prisoners, an altercation with another prisoner results in an aggravated battery leading to manslaughter. As in the murder case that led him to prison, Alex’s acts meet the requirements for the criminal liability in both the actual cause, and in proximate cause. Note, that in Burgess’ storyline, Staja F84 institutes no further conviction. He is not mandated back to trial for a second offense. The variance in this retraction of criminal charges for violating other prisoners is unduly vested in the jurisdiction of the state or region where the prison is located. Alex experiences what other convicted murders who are already serving long-term sentences experience, a prisoner-victim with no right to complaint.

In the United States, the original charge would have fallen under the felony murder doctrine, which determines that intention to commit another felony is just cause for consideration of murder charges, even if only resultant in second degree or felony manslaughter. As we see in the British legal system, at least through the interpretive storyline of Burgess’ work, that despite mutual common law legal systems on either side of the Atlantic, the U.S. legal system is far more punitive in terms of convictions. Alex’s case could have sustained a court decision of up to capital punishment in many states (i.e. the death penalty).

Further distinction in Burgess’ work is leveraged with some accuracy in regard to due process in Britain. Here, little knowledge of the framework for consideration of violent crimes where an insanity defense or therapeutic recommendation by UK courts is involved, nor release provision for rehabilitation. In both contexts, commitment of a guilty party to hospitalization rather than continuous punishment must be substantiated on one of several tests for insanity. The original rule for purposes of such a defense, stems from a case in the UK, and is also the most used form of assessment based on “complete cognitive capacity,” the M’Naghten Test.[vii]  The M’Naghten rule follows a protocol that frames insanity as: 1) disability; and 2) result of the disease of mind (not including altered states accorded to ingestion). Common law courts have often warned that the rule should not be confused with evil or malicious intent or passionate response to circumstances. In Alex’s case, the M’Naghten test did not apply, and the decision to prompt his hospitalization post penalization was one of policy that paralled a more recent version of insanity test, the ‘Irresistible Impulse Test’, whereby the felon is considered for therapeutic intervention even when volitional acts take place if those events include: 1) and “irresistible and uncontrollable” impulse; 2) a lack of discernment between right and wrong; and 3) his will was destroyed to the point that his actions were beyond his control.

Consensus building strategies are not formed under authoritarian principle. The tensions between the authority of the state in the form of scientific correction and Alex’s original pursuit of religion to negate sin coalesce in a post release identity that mirrors the docility of an inner ‘Christ.’ Alex is tortured as a matter of public policy. His indoctrination into a Christian moral framework similar to the one that has informed ‘natural law’ and by proxy legislative and statutory foundations within his country, only serves the hegemony that would promote modern philosophers such as Bruno Leoni to ask are we back to the “spontaneous law making process” dating before the enactment of codes and constitutions of the nineteenth century.

By and large, renunciation of the state is akin to treason. Even seditious thought within the culture of the outlaw is one of absolute blasphemy. If heretics have no upright consciousness, then Alex’s insistence that he is “not a common criminal, sir, and not an unsavoury” is adequately met by the eye for an eye retort of Chief Chasso, who argues then “should not the State, severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not also hit back?” “What’s it going to be then, eh?” however, is a public policy of “shut your hole you filthy scum” for Chasso. And with it Western civilization is uncovered, and so too the use of torture for uncovering ‘hidden’ truths is the nexus between the democratic past and present.[viii]

[i] Burgess, Anthony (1962). A Clockwork Orange. London: William Heinemann Publisher.

[ii] Leoni, Bruno (1961). Freedom and the Law. Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund.

[iii] Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Cambridge & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[iv] Foucault,Michel, (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 1977.

[v] Feldman, Allen (1991). Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago& London: The University of Chicago Press.

[vi] McDougal, Stuart Y.& Andrew, Horton (2003). Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University

[vii] LaFave, Wayne R. (2000). Criminal Law, Third Edition. St. Paul: West Group.

[viii] du Bois, Page (1991). Torture and Truth. New York & London: Routledge.