"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

In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess depicts numerous incarnations of what for the purposes of this essay we will refer to as the "pseudo-family," the dysfunctional interpersonal unit that problematizes Alex's various efforts to establish selfhood and to transcend the violent landscapes of his youth. In contrast with the family, which by its very definition attempts to provide its members with secure states of being in which to develop and thrive as differentiated selves, the pseudo-family offers only the illusion of genuine community. Lying beneath the facade of the pseudo-family is the interpersonal violence of self-indulgence that leads inevitably to betrayal and the creation of pseudo-selves, or those individuals, according to Barnard and Corrales, who remain unable to maintain any real stasis between their inner feelings and their outward behavior (1979, 85-87). Alex's destructive encounters with the pseudo-family in the novel force him to persist in various states of homeostatic equilibrium, rendering him unable to effect the process of morphogenesis that might provide him with the means for finally glimpsing a mature, fully realized sense of self.

While the first twenty chapters of Burgess's novel offer various representations of the pseudo-family-from Alex's ultra-violent gang of "droogs" and his self-serving Post-Corrective Adviser, P. R. Deltoid, to his ineffectual parents and the sadistic practitioners of Ludovico's Technique-A Clockwork Orange's restored twenty-first chapter depicts Alex's single creative act: his hopeful vision of a healthy, functional family. In dramatic opposition to the arguments of Robert Martin Adams, who perceives Burgess's narrative as "largely unconcerned with morality in any form" (1987,98), an ethical reading of A Clockwork Orange demonstrates that the very absence of any system of virtue, any code of"right conduct," actually highlights Alex's need for such a system. In order for Burgess to attempt moral satire, he must trust that his audience will perceive his portrayal of a world filled with surreal violence, sadistic sexuality, and uncontrollable drug abuse as one that calls for some moral equivalent, some sense of implicit humanity. Alex's anti-ethics-his refusal to engage in ethical deliberation, his pursuit of destructive action, his disregard for any other life-ultimately ends in exhaustion, and his ensuing vision of a potentially healthy family structure suggests the possibility for individual change rooted in a community of nurture.

Alex's lack of any functional family system in which he can interact with mature and fully realized adult selves manifests itself in his own hyper-exaggerated sense of pseudo-self, the persona that he invents in order to fulfill his desires to belong to and be accepted by the various spurious family structures that Burgess depicts in the novel. While he clearly creates a work of dystopian satire in A Clockwork Orange, Burgess nevertheless avails himself of genuine teen angst in his characterization of Alex, a fifteen-year-old at the beginning of the novel, who, like many his age, finds his sense of self precariously lost in a state of flux and moments of beguiling awkwardness. Alex responds to these feelings of uncertainty and change by trying on different costumes, behavioral modes, and verbal mannerisms in an effort to establish what he perceives to be a stable sense of identity. "The self concept is synthesized out of a myriad of interactions across the life span, and at any given time its contents or internalized roles, statuses, norms, and values are bound to be contradictory and mutually exclusive," Donald E. Polkinghorne notes. "It appears that for the major part of daily life a person's self-concept is raised, edited, and implemented preconsciously, at the prelinguistic level of emotion and 'felt' dispositions" (1988, 150). Alex's daily existence likewise consists of a series of painstaking activities-including his outrageously stylized manner of dress, his felicitous use of the Nadsat language, and his self-- indulgent abuse of drugs, music, and violence-that converge in the deliberate construction of the puzzle that comprises his pseudo-self.