Geoffrey Sharpless

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania

 

For boys follow one another in herds like sheep, for good or evil; they hate thinking and rarely have any settled principles. . . . it is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the School either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in London streets, or anything between these two extremes.

 

–Tom Brown’s School-days, 151

 

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

 

–A Clockwork Orange, 1

 

Critics conventionally position Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange within the sub-genre of futuristic dystopias without considering its nostalgia for a version of masculinity best understood as typical of the Arnoldian public school. This misprision is natural, since the Russianized argot and Dionysian “ultra-violence” of Alex the droog do not immediately evoke Tom Brown’s School-days–or any other portrait of the public school boy. Nonetheless, juxtaposing these narratives, which are separated by more than a hundred years, throws important illumination on A Clockwork Orange, and redirects critical attention to the persistence of Arnoldian masculinity in twentieth-century British literature.

 

“Arnold’s Rugby” achieved such astonishing conceptual closure over elite education that it must be considered a unique chapter in the history of Western culture. Rightly or wrongly, Thomas Arnold is usually credited with four innovations in pedagogical praxis: the introduction of competitive sports, uniform dress, and science in the curriculum, and an emphasis in schools on “moral scrutiny” or “character.” Thomas Hughes emphasizes this last feature, writing in Tom Brown’s School-days, “In no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a public school” (TBS, 151). Whether Rugby School ever existed as portrayed by Hughes, or any of his adherents, or even whether Thomas Arnold would have considered it faithfully Arnoldian is moot. The artistic, intellectual, legislative, commercial, and martial activity of its broad alliance of graduates–the ideal schoolboys of “Arnold’s Rugby”–became an unsurpassed tool by which to produce and measure masculinity and culture, as well as a means to govern their mutuality. This class of public school males succeeded, for generations, in representing its interests as the general interest in Britain and around the world–thus fulfilling a Marxian prescription for political dominance (Marx, 53).

 

Burgess’s critics might have been more alert to Alex’s matriculation in an Arnoldian program had they considered more carefully Time for a Tiger, the first piece of Burgess’s Malayan trilogy. This novel, about the difficulty of exporting Rugby-like schools to the minions in Britain’s empire, depicts an educator who abandons the Arnoldian ideal, and is absorbed by the exotic country he goes to convert. This might itself have been sufficient to establish that Burgess had an overt interest in public school pedagogy. The hero of A Clockwork Orange, however, is an unequivocal practitioner; even his resistance is characteristic. Indeed, Alex’s remarkable fraternity with the Arnoldian product suggests a complete triumph for the latter’s pedagogy. This similarity holds even for the most optimistic and influential version of the public schoolboy, Tom Brown, whose story “made the modern public school” (Mack & Armytage, 100).

 

This pairing of Tom and Alex would be unusual if only because Alex seems to be one of the most evil representations of boyhood ever forwarded popularly and Tom–for another era–one of the most virtuous. As Coleridge observed, however, opposites are but farthest apart of the same kind–and, rather than incommensurate, prove to be the two sides of the same coin. Reading Alex and Tom as twins, it does not take long to discover even in Hughes’s happy fantasy of Rugby that his Arnoldian telos of self-control, heterosexual love, moderation, and upright morality is interpenetrated with perversity, pederasty, a fetishization of style, Machiavellian management training, an interest in hand-to-hand combat and blood-letting, and, ultimately, a conviction that adult heterosexual manliness smacks of death.

 

Forgetting the debt that modern British versions of masculinity owe to Arnoldian culture has led to the consistent claim that A Clockwork Orange indicates a terrifying rupture in history. “There is something about the novel so frightening that it demanded a new language,” observes Petix (Bloom, 88). In this view, Burgess’s Jeremiad about the end of civilization is redeemed by its concomitant invitation to wage war on what Devitis calls Britain’s “socialized nightmare” (Devitis, 106). Droogery then becomes a reasonable response to the mediocritized, globalized, televisionized welfare state, where all traditional British values have been abrogated and the heroic individual exiled to the streets, as Hughes feared. Hugh Kenner, for example, reflecting on a street brawl he recently witnessed in London, seizes on the novel’s popularity as itself proof that British society has absorbed the apocalyptic “ultra-violence” of Burgess’s vision (Kenner, 242). Thus the true shock of the novel is its demonstration that a new man is already here; like Pogo’s herald, we have met the enemy and he is us. Put more formally, A Clockwork Orange compels not because it transgresses, but, like most dystopias, because its image of the future is shockingly familiar.

 

Burgess’s own comments on A Clockwork Orange suggest the size and subtlety of the Arnoldian shadow cast over him. A prolific writer and interview-giver, he can be found struggling with the text’s incongruities. On one hand, he reinforces its anarchistic non serviam. In his revealing essay, “Clockwork Marmalade,” Burgess pairs his work with the dystopic 1984, and expresses his hope that A Clockwork Orange “takes its place as one of those salutary literary warnings . . . against flabbiness, sloppy thinking and overmuch trust in the state.” (Bloom, 129). Similarly, he warned in a 1973 interview in the Paris Review that “governments are what I try to ignore. All governments are evil” (Aggeler, 49).

 

On the other hand, that salutation to anarchy stands alongside his professed embarrassment over the book’s “moral simplicity.” Burgess was ahead of his critics in complaining that the book–rather than brilliantly occupying a barely-imaginable, anarchic, Nietzschean world beyond good and evil–is, if anything, too moralistic and simplistic. The point of the novel, according to Burgess and critics eager to echo his “Manichean philosophy,” is “the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice.” Burgess sees the novel as “being too didactic to be artistic” and as flawed because its message about the necessity of moral choice “stick[s] out like a sore thumb” (ACO, x).

 

Burgess’s inability to decide whether the novel is anarchistic or moralistic has appeared not only in his un- Joycean interventions in the novel’s exegesis, but in the publication of different versions of the text. As first issued, the novel had twenty chapters; conceived and written, the novel had twenty-one chapters, that number standing, in what Burgess called his “arithmology,” for the age of adulthood. In most readings the excluded twenty- first chapter is taken to address precisely the question of the story’s final moral position, as expressed in an acceptance of adulthood.

 

In the first seven chapters, Alex and his droogs are in the raptures of a criminal adolescence; the next seven chapters follow Alex’s two years in prison where he murders a cell-mate, snitches on his fellows, and jumps at a chance at early release, not realizing that he is to undergo a personality-warping conditioning. In the final third of the book, Alex is unable to commit violence. His former victims repay him by beating him repeatedly. Burgess leaves Alex to be tortured to death by music, a stimulus designed to sicken him. Deranged, Alex leaps from a window to kill himself, but does not “snuff it.” He wakes up in a government hospital, unprogrammed, and announces he is ready to return to his ultra-violence, “carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva . . . I was cured all right” (ACO, 179). So ends the shorter version.

 

The most recent Norton edition includes the twenty- first chapter. In it, Alex finds himself once again sitting around with his droogs, chanting, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” This mantra begins each of the three main sections, as well as appearing intermittently throughout– reminding readers that the droogs still drift in the currents of casual murderous impulse. But something has changed–something purposefully kept unclear and distinct from any feature of Alex’s will or choice. A biological mystery of mortality and maturation has begun to affect Alex. Bored and hopeless, he refuses to buy everyone drinks, reluctant to throw away his “hard-earned pretty polly” (183); then, caught carrying a photograph of a baby around, dreams of himself as “a very starry chelloveck . . . an old man, sitting by a fire” (186). An image of his future son comes to him and he waxes poetic.

 

Yes, yes yes, brothers, my son. And now I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plot, feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. . . . Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. (ACO, 190)

 

The difference between these two endings underscores the philosophical conflict that structures Burgess’s novel. Does Alex’s story end with chapter twenty’s return to sexual perversity, demonized youth, and validation of violence? Or should it end with Alex’s abandoning the criminal pleasures of droogery, embracing melancholy “normal” adult values, and recapitulating his own father’s petit-bourgeois condition of wife, family and household?

 

While a critical claim can be heard that there is, or at least should be, a consensus that the shorter version is more interesting, each ending poses a conundrum. In neither ending is evil punished, nor is Alex shown to repent or regret his atrocities. Neither ending answers whether the conscious conditioning by the state is any more or less moral than the unconscious conditioning by family, economy etc. Neither ending reveals if conditioning is better or worse that makes us peaceable or allows us to be violent, or if we can ever be more than merely clockwork. Both endings are thoroughly and equally ambivalent about the point Burgess claims the novel makes entirely too obvious–about moral choice. Similarly, the point that Burgess himself can be heard prefering the shorter ending, and that we should credit this obiter, is also dubious. Burgess calls the shorter version “sensational” but “not a fair picture of human life,” and then, undoubtedly savoring the irony, defends the longer version via Pontius Pilate’s “Quod scripsi scripsi” (ACO, xi).

 

That Burgess himself does not know whether he wants this text to end by celebrating the perverse pleasures of boyhood or the muted satisfactions of adult masculinity reflects the very contradiction that mobilizes Tom Brown. Suspended between an Arnoldian disdain for boys’ “wickedness,” and Hughes’s hopeful fantasy about the utopia of boyish pleasure, both A Clockwork Orange and Tom Brown’s School-days relate the importance of resisting adulthood, and retaining the pleasures of remaining in a timeless, childish perversity. Both versions of ACO and TBS are significantly structured by their concern, as Matthew Arnold put it, that “faith in machinery is . . . our besetting danger” (Culture and Anarchy, 10). Both texts are deeply–almost furiously–nostalgic for a moment of health and wholeness that never existed. Thus, when Alex is implicated in the Arnoldian tradition of schoolboy Eros, this does not return the narrative to a lost simplicity, because that tradition is itself subject to the contradictions that animate A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s brutal conditioning, his strange language and dress, his savage sexuality, his wickedness, cruelty, and sadism, his devious sensitivity to the ebb and flow of group power, were in fact essential to Arnold’s Rugby School, and helped catapult it into international prominence as an unsurpassed institution of man-making.

 

The Arnoldian pedagogy engages and activates the Victorian concern with the male body as a locus of political power. The nineteenth-century British schoolboy doctrine that athletic contests like rugby and football formed the character of the man derives significantly from Tom Brown. His popularity was crucial to teaching the world that the public school virtues of strong character, self-dependence, readiness, and pluck were “best learned on the playing field” (Haley, 161). Moral health, Arnoldian Victorians like Hughes believed, was profoundly implicated in physical achievement. The notion of moral health came to include physical courage: unless one was willing to assume physical risk, one could not hope to achieve moral salvation.

 

The famous aphorism that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” reveals the relation of this philosophy of athleticism to the practical exigencies of empire. The promotion of physical courage was taken as a necessity for a nation needing soldiers, and breaking a leg or rib or head in the playing-field at Rugby prepared one for the rigors of a battlefield somewhere else. “Meet them like Englishmen!” Hughes’s narrator cries to the creatures of his own imagination. Thus the narrator of Tom Brown’s School-days describes the climactic School-house match (an early form of rugby) in terms that would today be considered scandalous:

 

My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except the boys would be men, and the balls iron, but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. (TBS, 103)

 

Yet when the health of the Empire thus was seen to depend on the physicality of schoolboys, athletics acquired an importance–even a holiness–that carried indisputable moral weight.

 

The modern public school, as invented through Tom Brown’s School-days, manifested the Victorian obsession with the physical body’s perfectability and corruptibility. While Hughes repeatedly praises Thomas Arnold in the text, he also unconsciously reveals that the headmaster, in his treatment of the bodies of his students, enacted his morbid identification with Christ’s physical suffering. Hughes wishes to portray school rituals like boxing, football–and even fagging and bullying–as expressing the unalloyed joys of youthful play. Yet School-days also reveals Dr. Arnold’s abhorrence of the liminal and transgressive body of youth. The book’s textual and graphic representation of the body illustrate Arnold’s theory that to educate boys is to turn them from beasts into Christians–to re-enact the moral development of human society: moral ontogeny recapitulating moral phylogeny.

 

Where Hughes differs from Arnold is in his attitude towards boyhood. Arnold sees boyhood solely as a condition to be mortified and overcome; Hughes agrees that in the end it must be left behind, but relishes the opportunity it offers for maximizing the pleasures of the body. Without reference to any moralizing process, he concludes his paean to rugby with a remarkable claim about the proportionate value of sport to everyday life:

 

This is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a half-hour worth a year of common life. (TBS, 106)

 

The interpretation of the school’s physical harshness as a source not only of mortification but also of ecstasy has, according to Hughes, deep roots in English culture and history. He makes this point explicit in an important episode placed in a country fair, a “veast.” Here, the narrator delights in a brutal contest called backswording that involves two men trying to draw blood from each others’ scalps with cudgels. “The weapon is a good stout ash stick,” Hughes tell us, “the players are called ‘old gamesters’ . . . and their object is to break one another’s heads.” The game is over when the blood flows “an inch anywhere above the eyebrow” (TBS, 40). The climacteric is pleasurable for all: “‘Blood, blood!’ shout the spectators as a thin stream oozes out slowly from his hair” (TBS, 41).

 

Hughes goes on to regret the passing of this event, and ends with a disquisition on the relationship of the body of the boy to the body politic, including a discussion of class conflict, reform and capitalism. He observes that such violence is essential to reformers, who won’t

 

really lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which hasn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country 'veast'; something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, to make them rejoice in their strength. (TBS, 46)

 

The rage for “bloodsports” that comes to dominate British education for a hundred years begins here. Hughes asserts that this is part of moral reform–in effect that such violence is in the service of molding martyrs for the state. But his pleasure in physical violence is not far from a sheer carnivalesque interest in the grotesque body that characterizes the popular reading of A Clockwork Orange.

 

Though Hughes periodically reminds us that violent play is good for the state, Tom Brown loves it for its own sake. Alex’s passion for “the old ultra-violence,” while notched higher in damage inflicted, reflects the same celebration of the pleasures of the incoherent body that characterize Tom Brown’s matches in the mud and blood of the close. Alex never tires of detailing the propensity of adult vecks to turn into porous gore and blood when beaten. The droogs describe blood as “our dear old droog”; “red-red vino on tap and in all the same places, like it’s put out by the same big firm” (ACO, 22); “Then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful” (ACO, 7); “A fair tap with a crowbar . . . brought the red out like an old friend” (ACO, 10); and “then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy rot. Then we went on our way” (ACO, 14).

 

These separate confirmations that bodies are never discrete entities, but oozing, porous and liminal, precede a gang-fight that culminates in a glorious extrusion of blood. Having enhanced the ecstasy of this bloodletting by taking “milk with knives” to “sharpen” his sensations, Alex’s success in piercing the body of the other droog makes him rhapsodic:

 

[Billyboy] was a malenky too slow and heavy in his movements to vred anyone really bad. And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz--left two three, right two three--and carve left cheeky right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. (ACO, 17)

 

Reversing the direction of our analysis about the culture of Rugby School and the managed violence of the playing-field, we can locate the culture at work in this scene of droogish anarchy: we can not only find the violence in the gentleman; we can find the gentleman in the violence. The “curtains of blood” in the above passage do not herald the apocalypse, but evoke a sportsman’s appreciation for the results of good technique that borders on the aesthetic. We hear Alex’s pride in his team–the captain’s sense of the players’ movements around him. He details with pleasure his own movements, and the violence softens into a gentleman’s dance, with the expert’s assessment of the opponent’s weaknesses, and of proper footwork.

 

The measured cadences of sporting play-by-play include a dramatic cataloguing of the players’ skills and equipment. For this particular fight “Dim had a real horrorshow length of oozy or chain round his waist, twice wound round, and he unwound this and began to swing it beautiful in the eyes or glazzies. Pete and Georgie had good sharp nozhes, but I for my own part had a fine starry horrowshow cut-throat britva which, at that time, I could flash and shine artistic” (ACO, 16). The cutting and the bleeding do not provoke Dionysian horror in Alex or in the reader. Neither does Alex’s confrontation with the grotesque pig-like body of the other signal the devolution of man into beast. Instead, an appreciation of the sportsman’s style, cool observation, and a studied ability to execute with grace materialize under the pressure of battle.

 

The emphasis on style–even in the middle of marked danger–would seem to sharpen the subversive point of Alex’s pleasure in flouting the conformity expected of the Arnoldian male body. Like Oscar Wilde’s dandy–another response to the certitudes of public school masculinity– Alex uses style as a declaration of independence. Thus, when Alex recalls his fight scene with Billyboy, he remembers that his droogs looked marvelous; Alex proudly observes that his droogs were “dressed in the heighth of fashion” (ACO, 2). For Alex, his clothes assert that he controls his own body, and he uses the image he presents to the public as a “semiotic guerilla warfare,” in Eco’s phrase.

 

By reducing male physical difference to nothing but broad shoulders, garish neckties and odd crotch-protectors, Alex’s fashion statement displays his ironic relation to normative masculinity. The droogs wear “waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (‘pletchoes’ we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that.” They wear “off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud.” Most noticeably, however, they wear a pair of “very tight tights with the old jelly mould” on the crotch which draws attention to their genitalia (ACO, 2).

 

Alex’s personal style of dress seems at first to indicate his resistance to power. But when Alex appropriates fashion as a means of asserting his identity he is building a new temple on the site of the old. Instead of forwarding himself as a new man, his preoccupation with style and taste above all else renders his portrait as an “old boy” strikingly clear: Alex disdains those who do not follow his idea of fashion.

 

That Alex, in insisting on irony and rebellion, is merely recreating a conformist world in microcosm, appears most readily in his confrontation with Dim. For example, “Poor old Dim” does not know or care that Alex’s ostensible punkishness engages a high-culture seriousness toward aesthetics yoked to his own political ambition. Alex approves of the genital designs of his droogs Pete, who has a hand, and Georgie, a flower, on his groin, but finds himself in a perplexing spot for an anarchist when he finds Dim’s choice of a clown’s face in bad taste–evidently too close to naming “the clown he was” (ACO, 6). Such an overt image lacks the tension and irony Alex requires to see himself and his droogs as beings of superior taste. Alex feels demeaned by his association and fellowship with such a philistine as Dim. This conflict is the first suggestion that Alex’s idiosyncratic style, which at first seems to be a marker of his resistance to British culture, has roots in the traditional mechanisms of class.

 

The antagonism brought on by Alex’s conviction of his own superiority to Dim increases throughout the novel’s first section. Noting the lost opportunity that Dim’s name–like the symbol on his jelly mould–affords for an ironic or subversive gesture, Alex regretfully observes that “Dim really is dim.” This includes Dim making a display of proving he can read, a gesture which Alex finds distasteful (ACO, 7). Dim’s lack of moderation, too, marks him as no proper droog of Alex’s–or of Tom Brown’s. He “goes too far, like he always did” (ACO, 6). When he fights he always gets “dirty and untidy, like a veck who’d been in a fight . . . you should never look as though you have been” (ACO, 11). After a break-in, Dim is “going to dung” on the carpet, and Alex stops him; though amused by bleeding, Alex does have a standard of bodily purity that, for example, forbids scatological transgressions. Later, Alex finds he smells bad, “which was one thing I had against old Dim” (ACO, 26).

 

Alex’s conflict with Dim recasts a class distinction central to the ideology of Tom Brown’s School-days. Certain readers, noting that the emotional peaks of the novel involved athletic prowess, used the term “muscular Christianity” to accuse Hughes’s hero of excessive interest in the physical body. The writer responded, in his sequel Tom Brown at Oxford, by offering to distinguish his protagonist from the debased “muscleman.” He writes that “the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him . . . Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians . . . does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he” (Hughes, TBO, 113). Alex shows a muscular Christian’s disdain for Dim, a mere muscleman.

 

Alex would have had no trouble following Hughes’s lesson. Alex’s exquisite sensitivity to class distinctions would have made him at home at Rugby, where an entire social hierarchy could be constructed upon the most minute sartorial propriety. When Arnoldian reform implemented uniform dress codes, they became, ironically, an important medium for schoolboys to express and control their own lives. Refusing to allow uniforms to reduce their individuality, as well as class difference, the boys instantly re-deployed them for their own use. Within the officially prescribed regulations, they developed a complex code for proper attire. Often as subtle as showing a bit of a handkerchief, or leaving a button undone, these points of style, self-enforced, became a powerful way to indicate and control the hierarchy of schoolboy life. Thus style–even when used against a totalitarian standard–did not promise a liberation; rather it facilitated a transference of power that guaranteed the authoritarian lesson. The older and more powerful boys themselves found they had a stake in enforcing the Arnoldian principle that the ruling class must control semiotics.

 

Tom Brown’s first encounter at Rugby emphasizes that violating standards of style and taste carries an ineffable–even an unthinkable–danger. During Tom’s first day at school, his cicerone, Master East, glances at Tom and immediately begins the necessary indoctrination:

 

'This'll never do--haven't you got a hat?--we never wear caps here. Only the louts wear caps. Bless you, if you were to go into the quadrangle with that thing on, I--don't know what'd happen.' The very idea was quite beyond young Master East, and he looked unutterable things. (TBS, 87)

 

Like Tom, Alex has to come to the very end of his narrative before he thoroughly grasps the political lesson of this difference: inevitably, fraternizing with those beneath one’s class drags one into trouble. At first Alex tolerates Dim, who, “for all his dimness was worth three of the others in madness and dirty fighting” (ACO, 15), but Alex, after “slooshying and viddying Dim’s vulgarity,” finally excoriates him. Exploding in the idiom of the Arnoldian schoolboy, Alex strikes Dim and says, “Bastard, filthy drooling mannerless bastard” (ACO, 28). When Alex’s right to deliver such a remonstrance is questioned, he defends his authority, like a praepostor facing a schoolboy insurrection. “Dim has got to learn his place,” Alex says, “There has to be a leader. Discipline there has to be. Right?” (ACO, 29). The mutinous answer he receives is not the one he hopes for, and leads to his ruin: Dim beats Alex and leaves him for the police.

 

Understanding how richly both Alex’s and Arnold’s traditions are invested in disciplining their subjects through semiotic codes of dress and fighting allows us to re-appraise the text’s distinctive language, Nadsat. The decadent flavor of this invented language, though reminiscent of the playful ambiguity of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” has been taken to signal the end of civilization as we know it. Certainly Burgess’s work on Joyce substantiates the modernist inclination to prove that one linguistic knot can derange our normal concept of identity. Thus, in A Clockwork Orange, Alex is “a law” or “a word” but also “without law” or “without word”; “horrorshow”–via a Russian root–means good. Placing this Freudian interest in the antithetical meaning of words alongside the infantilisms of “appy polly loggies,” “skolliwoll,” “purplewurple” (for apologies, school and purple), suggests Nadsat’s antic linguistic inventiveness is related to Alex’s repetitious interest in rape and murder. The suggestion is that Alex’s refusal to grow up into normal or healthy morality expresses itself in a macaronic verging on a criminal glossolalia.

 

Reading Alex as an Arnoldian schoolboy, however, helps to correct the interpretive error that Nadsat signifies postmodern chaos and anarchy: in fact, the words always have a direct and obvious referent. The teen dialect through which Alex refracts his developmental narrative is not designed to make the reader accept that the apocalypse is already upon us, nor does it confirm “the break-down of consensus in the post-war period” (Hebditch, 17). On the contrary, Alex is the most determined of literalists, whose bid for linguistic authority leaves him operating, however paradoxically, in the positivist Arnoldian tradition his slang ostensibly replaces. He does not speak Nadsat because the modern youth of the day don’t know any better. His use of Nadsat is a cultural achievement in the same sense that his fashion statements are: both enhance his own authority. He does not just narrate the story, but authors himself as the subject who knows. The reader, by contrast, becomes the cultural exile. If you cannot figure out what Alex means, your existence–at least as a reader–is marginal.

 

Recognizing the power of language, Alex has learned to talk very well indeed. He is a student of different dialects of his society, and notices when words are alien; he remembers the words of an older prisoner’s slang he cannot fathom, and makes sure to point out that this superannuation has made the speaker powerless. He hears two younger girls in a record shop “who had their own way of govoreeting” (ACO, 50), and immediately gets the idea to seduce them. He comments on this encounter, which consists primarily of Alex’s sadistic sexual attacks, that “they must still have their education. And education they had had” (ACO, 54). His familiarity with the allusive patterns that determine appropriate speech can become quite humorous; here, in an ironic improvisation, he speaks a Shakespearean language of the duel: “How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou” (ACO, 15). He also believes that he can shift his shape through the proper words, and, when trying to get out of prison, he imitates a sycophantic “gentleman”: “‘Sir, I have done my best, have I not’ I always used my very polite gentleman’s goloss govoreeting with those at the top. ‘I’ve tried, sir, haven’t I'” (ACO, 81). Even the lyrical idioms of traditional Eros are accessible when he needs to escape the nausea he is programmed to feel when experiencing violent impulses towards women:

 

O most beautiful and beauteous of devotchkas, I throw like my heart atyour feet for you to like trample all over. If I had a rose I would give it to you. If it was all rainy and cally now on the ground you could have my platties to walk on so as not to cover your dainty nogas with filth and cal. (ACO, 128)

 

To celebrate Nadsat as verging on a perverse interior gibberish misses that Alex demands that language be meaningful enough to free him from an inner exile. Nadsat represents a rupture with “normal” teleologies only if you ignore its conventional referentiality. Similarly, even the intermittent triumphs of Alex’s perversity, whether linguistic or physical, do not manage to forestall his inevitable graduation into an Arnoldian version of adult health–at least in the longer version of the book.

 

The final destination for Alex’s narrative sublates the book’s beginning, which details the droog’s first attack, on a “starry school-master type veck.” That this elderly pedagogue is carrying books about science recalls that introducing science into the curriculum was one of the innovations with which Arnold was credited. The victim is also carrying sweet love-letters, whose sentimentality harkens back to a different ethos of manliness. They accuse him of sexual perversity and filthiness, tear up his books, steal and mock his letters, yank out his false teeth and crush them, kick him in his “pot,” and strip him to his underwear. From the droogs’ point of view, he has so little money–or capital, one might say–that they do not even steal it–they just throw it in the street.

 

Though in the opening the droogs mock his “teacher- type goloss” (speech), the schoolmaster gets the last word; his losses are temporary and his triumph final. After being programmed to sicken at violent impulse, Alex again comes across this doddery veck. This time, along with his fellows in a library, the old man beats Alex severely, and turns him over to the police. The punishment Alex suffers as a result of his youthful transgression against this pedagogical authority hasten Alex into adulthood–at least in the longer version–as Dr. Arnold justified floggings to “hasten” his schoolboys out of youthfulness. That the narrative restores the schoolmaster’s power to punish, even after Alex’s attempt to disempower him, reflects Burgess’s enrollment in the Arnoldian ideal of manliness. In effect, both versions of Clockwork portray a world that has become a globalized Rugby School. Britain has not declined, but become rarified, more clearly itself: a state machine producing itself in and through its males. As Alex’s conglomerated language reveals, the imperial machinery of man-making has overcome antiquated national boundaries. Alex has not been interpellated as Euro-trash by “enemy” culture–the Russian of the cold war. Instead, he is a star pupil of an international macaronic, and his mastery of it enables his personal imperialism. The longer version–Burgess’s original conception–confirms the Arnoldian narrative even more persuasively, as the temporary reign of droogish play and perversity gives way, harmlessly and naturally, to the traditional image of the gentleman.

 

The irony of Burgess’s ambition to replace the droog with the Arnoldian schoolboy is that they have always been thoroughly integrated; Alex’s wickedness and cruelty are as much the stuff of empire-building as is the Arnoldian gentleman’s phantasy of morality. In effect, though Rugby’s classrooms are now called Correctional Schools, State Jails, and conditioning laboratories, and the playing fields have become the London streets, Alex’s education terminates in the same phantasized ideal of adult masculinity that Tom’s does. Burgess has not overturned a public school idea of proper masculine development, but fulfilled Thomas Arnold’s ambition to write his pedagogy across the face of the world.

 

[I would like to thank Eric Rabkin for his generous comments on this essay while in progress.]

 

Works Cited

 

• Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1979.
• Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Chelsea House, 1983.
• Bloom, Harold., ed. Anthony Burgess. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
• Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: Norton, 1986.
• Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1978.
• Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School-days. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
• —. Tom Brown at Oxford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
• Kenner, Hugh. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
• Mack, Edward C., and W.G. Armytage. Thomas Hughes. London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1952.
• Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. Ed. C.J. Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.