Ironies and inversions: the art of Anthony Burgess - Cover Story

Commonweal, Feb 11, 1994 by Suzanne Keen

In Joyce, Burgess found a Catholic writer he could take seriously. (Reading A Portrait of the Artist when he was a teen-ager, he was temporarily terrified back into the church, but Joyce's writing meant more to Burgess as a novelist than as coreligionist. Studying Finnegan's Wake was a lifelong project.) Of the great English Catholic modern writers he writes with less admiration, "The converts can look back to a family history graced by the economic rewards of Protestantism and to the advantages of an education provided by a Protestant establishment. They converted in a cool time." Although readers will see themes (such as guilt) in common, Burgess does not recognize his faith or culture in Graham Greene's or Evelyn Waugh's fiction. He attributes this to class prejudice: "It evidently hurt Waugh deeply that his typical fellow-worshipper should be an expatriated Irish laborer and that the typical minister of the church should be a Maynooth priest with a brogue." Yet Burgess rails elsewhere against the church's prevailing tackiness--"debased Baroque, debased Rococo...the small church with its incense, with its horrible little paintings, and horrible little statues"--as if aesthetic outrage accounts for his own disaffection. In any case, Burgess's family background and childhood experience gave him an acute sense of being an outsider in his own land, even though he lived abroad most of his adult life. Many of his characters, through temperament, ancestry, immigration, or accident, find themselves in similar situations; it is one of Burgess's accomplishments to have developed his "outsiders" from stock figures (e.g., the colonial abroad; the working-class man with a brain) into vehicles for examining our appalling century.

Burgess returns frequently to the contrasting world views of Pelagianism and Augustinianism to structure his fiction. Often, one misguided character represents the former, while the narrator or main character represents, or comes to see the truth of, the latter. Pelagianism, based on the opinions of the British heretic Pelagius, denies the necessity of grace, putting instead too much faith in human beings' capacity to exercise free will for the good.

In Burgess's view, liberals take the Pelagian wrong turn, failing to recognize that education, individual effort, and government oversight cannot correct the world's problems. The Augustinian view, perhaps closer to Burgess's own, insists that Original Sin leads humans inevitably into evil. Pelagian and Augustinian come into conflict, and in The Wanting Seed (1962), into alternating periods of rule over a state over-burdened with citizens. In this novel, a satirical "Malthusian strip-cartoon," the state combats overpopulation by rewarding infanticide, punishing the fertile, waging wars against imaginary enemies, encouraging homosexuality, and condoning cannibalism. The tactics vary according to the view that has come into the ascendancy: in the "Pelphase," optimism ultimately justifies a police state in which disappointment at human failings leads to repressive measures; a chaotic "Interphase" results from the relaxation of sanctions; and the "Gusphase" follows, its philosophical pessimism to be undermined by the surprising fact that people behave better than they ought to, given their innate depravity. Burgess writes, "We tend to Augustinianism when we are disgusted with our own selfishness, to Pelagianism when we seem to have behaved well. Free will is of the essence of Pelagianism; determinism...of Augustinianism." Round and round we go, with no way out, and no solution, especially as we will never know how free we really are, given Original Sin.