"O my brothers": Reading the anti-ethics of the pseudo-family in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

College Literature, Spring 2002 by Davis, Todd F, Womack, Kenneth

As novels are about the ways in which human beings behave, they tend to imply a judgment of behavior, which means that the novel is what the symphony or painting or sculpture is not-- namely, a form steeped in morality.

Anthony Burgess

In 1987, W. W. Norton and Company emended the American edition of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) by publishing the novel's missing twenty-first chapter, previously only available in British and other international editions of the book. The introduction of the excised chapter into the American literary and critical mainstream prompted a number of debates regarding the artistic and thematic efficacy of its inclusion in Burgess's narrative. In "A Clockwork Orange Resucked," his introduction to the unabridged American version of his novel, Burgess summarizes the significance of the twenty-first chapter: "Briefly, my young thuggish protagonist grows up," Burgess writes. "He grows bored with violence and recognizes that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction" (1987b, vii). Despite what appears at first glance to be a positive, life-affirming conclusion to Burgess's novel of linguistic terror and "ultra-violence," critics continue to register a variety of different responses to the publication of A Clockwork Orange in its entirety. Michael Gorra, for instance, argues that the original British version seems "far darker than the glibly apocalyptic American version" (1990, 641).While Deanna Madden recognizes the marked differences between the abridged and unabridged versions of Burgess's text, she dismisses A Clockwork Orange-with or without the twenty-first chapter-as a continuation of the protagonist's misogyny in "true patriarchal fashion" (1992, 306). Finally, John J. Stinson calls the excised chapter "problematic," contending that "the truncated ending, which leaves the reader with a stark presentation of unregenerate evil, surely carries more impact" (1991, 59).

Yet each critic neglects to consider the tremendous ethical import of A Clockwork Orange's twenty-first chapter as a rejoinder to the vacuous moral and family systems that fail Alex, Burgess's teen-aged protagonist, as he attempts to achieve selfhood. In spite of what appear to be Alex's obvious attempts to establish and participate in various family structures throughout the novel-indeed, to search for some form of "HOME"-critics continue to ignore the role of the family as a substantial narrative force in Burgess's text. An interdisciplinary reading of A Clockwork Orange using recent insights in ethical criticism and family systems psychotherapy demonstrates not only the necessity of the twenty-first chapter as the fruition of Burgess's moral vision, but also the centrality of family structures as catalysts for interpersonal development and as ethical foundations for individual change. In Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Martha C. Nussbaum illustrates the nature of ethical criticism's recent emergence as a viable interpretive paradigm: "Questions about justice, about well-being and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life-all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency" (1990,169-70). In addition to functioning as a self-reflexive means for critics to explain the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances that often mask literary characters, ethical criticism provides its practitioners with the capacity for positing socially relevant interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well and flourishing. In this way, ethical criticism evokes the particularly "human character" of literature that Tobin Siebers praises in The Ethics of Criticism (1988, 10).1

The contemporary practice of ethical criticism finds its origins in the reader-response theories of Louise M. Rosenblatt, as well as in the moral philosophy of such thinkers as Nussbaum and Bernard Williams. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Rosenblatt devotes particular attention to the notion of "efferent" reading, an interpretive methodology in which readers primarily interest themselves in what will be derived materially from the reading experience (1978, 23-25). According to Rosenblatt, efferent readers reflect upon the verbal symbols in literature, "what the symbols designate, what they may be contributing to the end result that [the reader] seeks-the information, the concepts, the guides to action, that will be left with [the reader] when the reading is over" (27). The reflective nature of efferent reading underscores the interpretive power of ethical criticism as a means of literary critique, especially as a tool for addressing the moral and interpersonal qualities in novels such as A Clockwork Orange that consider a host of dystopian and ethical imperatives. Moral philosophy often provides ethical critics with intellectual insight into the most vexing issues inherent in human experience, moreover, from the nature of selfhood and love to the often divergent qualities of goodness, evil, and commitment.As Williams notes in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, "Critical reflection should seek for as much shared understanding as it can find on any issue, and use any ethical material that, in the context of the reflective discussion, makes some sense and commands some loyalty. The only serious enterprise is living," Williams adds, "and we have to live after the reflection" (1985, 117).