"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

While Alex demands loyalty and security from his nuclear family, he expects nothing but derision or indifference from his extended family, opting instead to pummel them into submission. With his institutional family, Alex-still under the spell of his pseudo-self-assumes that the impersonal structures of the government and his community will consider his welfare in their dealings with him. Like a child, Alex naively believes the Minister of the Interior when he says,"I and the government of which I am a member want you to regard us as friends. Yes, friends" (Burgess 1987a, 177). Yet such "friends" inevitably betray Alex, even as he prepares to betray and manipulate them. When Alex hopes, for example, that his Post-Corrective Advisor will defend his character against the accusations of the police, Deltoid responds by spitting in the teenager's face. Later, as Alex attempts to avail himself of the trappings of religion to expedite his release from prison-even going so far as to study the Bible and to participate in the administration of chapel services-he succeeds only in frustrating his own desires for freedom. When Alex requires the assistance of the police, whom he believes to be there to serve and protect him, he finds himself in the custody of Dim, his old droog, and Billyboy, a rival gang member. After they beat Alex senseless and abandon him in a deserted field, he expresses his disillusion with the institutions that fail him, wondering "where was I to go, who had no home and not much cutter in my carmans? I cried for myself boo hoo hoo" (151). Once again prostrating himself before an institution, Alex wins his early release from prison after agreeing to undergo Ludovico's Technique, a series of ultra-violent films accompanied by a classical-music soundtrack and designed to purge the young hoodlum of any desire to commit evil acts.8 Yet the process-which successfully rids him of any violent compulsions and causes Alex to experience severe nausea when confronted by scenes of brutality and aggression-renders him unable to enjoy his beloved Beethoven: "Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It's a sin, that's what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!" he cries, as the Ninth Symphony causes him to reel in abject pain (Burgess 1987a, 113). In each instance, Alex's blind faith in the implicit goodness and charity of government and its institutions rewards him with disillusionment and hopelessness.

Finally consumed by his despair, Alex decides to explode the homeostasis that marks his youth and his interactions with the pseudo-families of his past by attempting suicide. After glimpsing a booklet with a window on its cover and the words, "Open the window to fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of living" (Burgess 1987a, 168), Alex opts to "snuff it."While his attempt to kill himself fails, the act itself prepares the way for the cataleptic impression in A Clockwork Orange's controversial twenty-first chapter that will make possible the morphogenesis that ultimately changes his life. When Alex awakens in the hospital, he finds himself deprogrammed of the effects of the Ludovico's Technique-free once more to exert his ostensible free will, as well as to enjoy the pleasing strains of classical music: "Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum," he exclaims (179). After being discharged from the hospital, Alex quickly assimilates into a new pseudo-family of droogs-Len, Rick, and Bully-although now he seems uninterested in frequenting the Korova Milkbar and pursuing violent activities. A withdrawn Alex laments that "more and more these days I had been just giving the orders and standing back to viddy them being carried out" (182). In contrast with the "Uncle Alex" of old who enthusiastically molests his "nieces," Alex registers dissatisfaction with his return to his old droog life. His inattentiveness-manifested as apathy toward the ultra-violent acts and sexual perversity he once feverishly embraced--conveys his exhaustion with his old way of life and, ultimately, suggests his potential for change. No longer fascinated by his droog "play," Alex begins to look elsewhere for possible fulfillment. In this context, perhaps surprisingly, we find Alex yearning for a genuine family. We witness an astonishing shift in his affections from exploits of visceral brutality to a photograph of a "dear little itsy witsy bitsy bit of a baby ... gurgling goo goo goo" (184) that he has recently taken to carrying in his pocket.