A Clockwork Orange: Music and Violence

I recently finished reading a copy of A Clockwork Orange, the masterful yet controversial novel by Anthony Burgess. Brilliant? Yes. Unsettling? Highly.

When Alex is captured for his crimes, he is chosen to undergo the Ludovico Technique, a treatment meant to modify behavior. Alex is forced to watch extremely graphic and violent films while being injected with a nausea-inducing drug, so that he eventually associates violence with a feeling of sickness. Alex is a firm believer that free will should never be compromised, and when the Ludovico Technique renders him unable to choose violence, Burgess asserts that Alex becomes a mere “clockwork orange,” or something that is seemingly human yet mechanically controlled by a greater State. As an unintended consequence of the procedure, Alex loses his ability to enjoy listening to classical music. In addition to the Technique taking away freedom of choice—a fundamental human trait—it has also stripped Alex of his love of music.

“The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

While I was quite appalled by the more explicit and gruesome elements of the book, I was equally disturbed by the role of music in inciting torture. How can something that represents the purest form of humanity be used as a weapon? Classical music is an escape; Beethoven, in particular, uplifts and inspires.

“But it’s not fair on the music. It’s not fair I should feel ill when I’m slooshying to lovely Ludwig van and G.F. Handel and others. […] I shall never forgive you, sods.”

It becomes clear early on that our central character Alex is a fervent admirer of Beethoven (whom he affectionately calls Ludwig van). He particularly enjoys listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which can be interpreted as alluding to themes such as universal brotherhood and freedom of expression, according to The Atlantic. This would be fitting for Alex, seeing that he bands together with his brotherly “droogs” in wreaking havoc everywhere.

Yes, listening to Beethoven incited in Alex an insatiable desire to destroy, but it also made our protagonist human. Depriving him of his joy of music was saddening to me, and though I don’t fully sympathize with Alex (unlike many critics), I felt incredibly sorry and disgusted with the fact that the mere sound of music blasting through the walls drove him to near-suicide. In the end, the Ludovico Technique rendered him more inhumane than before by taking away both his moral choice and musicality.

“And then there I was, me who had loved music so much, crawling off the bed and going oh oh oh to myself, and then bang bang banging on the wall creeching: ‘Stop, stop it, turn it off!’

“I was like wandering all over the flat in pain and sickness, trying to shut out the music and like groaning deep out of my guts, and then on top of the pile of books and papers and all that cal that was on the table in the living-room I viddied what I had to do. . .and that was to do myself in, to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked and cruel world.”

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

The upcoming film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, so I thought I would venture into my first novel by this acclaimed British author.

Fiona Maye is a leading High Court judge who officiates family court cases.  But concealed beneath the strict and professional demeanor required of her profession is personal struggle—a crumbling marriage and private sorrow.  Each morning, Fiona busies herself with piles of court papers and families in crisis; at night, she returns home to endure her own abiding regret of childlessness and a husband who longs for an affair.

On Monday, a life-threatening case comes up: Adam is a seventeen year-old Jehovah’s Witness who has leukemia.  Due to religious convictions, he refuses a blood transfusion that could save his life, a sentiment echoed by his devout parents.  Just a few months shy of becoming a legal adult, Adam ultimately has no jurisdiction, despite his relentless determination to follow his beliefs.  Only Fiona has the power to decide his fate: survival, or sacrifice in the name of God.  A simple visit to the boy’s hospital bed informs her decision.

One of the principal arguments against the medical treatment is Adam’s superior intelligence, an indication that he is mature enough to make his own decisions—the conditions of Gillick competence.  With Fiona sitting near his bedside, Adam reads his poetry, words that praise God’s love and light.  His mind, revealed through his poems, paints an image of an innocent, delicate boy that seems excited to see the world, not leave it.  Adam then takes out a violin, boasting about the scales he’s learned before beginning to play an Irish melody, and Fiona sings along, evoking a sense of freedom and vitality away from hospital confines.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

This is not a child who is ready to go.  “To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.”

The 59-year-old Fiona looks at the beautiful boy, with his “long thin face and violet-colored eyes”, and in a way sees herself.  But Adam confuses his passion for poetry and life with (innocent) attachment to the woman next to him, yet Fiona’s dignity and long-suppressed sensitivity leaves him with nothing to hold on to.  “Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed to him.”  Awfully poignant and full of regret.

I appreciated McEwan’s prose and use of detail, from the meticulous accuracy of law and court testimony to Fiona’s intimate feelings.  Now let’s hope his screenplay meets expectations and brings even more color into this story.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

She looked at them watching her and knife-in-hand screamed at them, “What have you done to his eyes?”

Horror is the genre I get through the quickest.  Each page turn delves deeper into the dark, twisted world that the author has carved, and you can’t help but read on and hope the characters come to their senses.

Rosemary’s Baby is not so much scary as it is dark.  Rosemary and her budding actor husband, Guy, have just moved into the Bramford, an old apartment building in New York City with an ominous past and mostly elderly tenants.  After Rosemary becomes pregnant (and subsequently sick), their neighbors, the Castevets, take a strange interest in the new couple, winning them over with thoughtful acts of kindness.  Watch out, though—everything is not what it seems.

This classic suspense novel disguises evil behind the most innocent mask.  Levin crafts a distressing but ingenious tale in two hundred or so pages complete with detail, from the interior of their home to the small but notorious tannis root necklace.  It’s chilling and utterly blasphemous that a normal life with such quotidian interactions can so suddenly be consumed and destroyed by deviltry.  The horror in this book lies in the humiliation of Rosemary as a woman by the absolutely abhorrent people surrounding her, their (quite literally) hellish actions at first concealed, but ending in complete betrayal and selfishness.

That said, I really detest the ending.  Without giving anything away, I find it so upsetting and unsatisfactory.  It leaves the reader disgusted at the supporting characters and the overall situation, which I guess is what Levin wanted.

I have not yet seen the 1968 film adaptation by Roman Polanski, but from what I’ve heard, the two go hand in hand.  Just make sure to be wary of your neighbors, look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary, and listen to confidants when they say a certain building is cursed.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is perhaps the most poignant novel I’ve read in recent memory.  I will proceed to give a short synopsis of the main storyline, leaving out some pivotal events in the book, as anything else would do it injustice and tarnish the complex mystery that lies at its core.

Kathy H., the 31 year-old narrator, is a “carer”, someone who tends to the “donors” at a recovery center before they “complete”, usually after the third or fourth donation.  Set in the late 20th century, Kathy and her closest friends Ruth and Tommy are raised at a sheltered, prestigious school in the English countryside called Hailsham, where they are isolated from the outside society and brought up with the belief that they serve a special purpose in the world.  Set in three parts, the novel progresses as Kathy reflects on her past idyllic years in school, soon unraveling the path to the present-day.  It is revealed that the students at Hailsham are clones, bred to fulfill a sole destiny: to have their organs harvested before they reach middle age.

Despite what it sounds like, in my mind, this story is not science fiction, nor is it truly dystopian in the well-known sense.  Rather, Ishiguro portrays the realism of living souls struggling to hold their grasp onto love even when they fully understand the fragility and brevity of their life.

Never Let Me Go explores the idea of humanity in a rapidly changing world—how children can be raised to perform such a selfless act of humanity for a society they can never belong to.  “Poor creatures.  I wish I could help you.  But now you’re by yourselves.”

Even in the midst of such somber subject matter, Never Let Me Go is written in a simple style and remains stunningly real.  We are transported into the narrator’s mind and we develop sympathy for her and the other characters who will never have the chance to experience lasting, fruitful lives.  Kathy spends her days looking back instead of ahead, cherishing priceless memories of the short time spent at school, at the Cottages, and as a carer for her dear friends before her time to donate comes along.

“But then again, when I think about it, there’s a sense in which that picture of us on that first day, huddled together in front of the farmhouse, isn’t so incongruous after all.  Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable to quite let each other go.”

 

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The opening sentences set the tone for the rest of this novel: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”  After the narrator questions whether this ability is a talent, he concludes, “After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you.  The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.”  Proves to be quite true.

The unnamed narrator/Captain is a communist double agent during the Vietnam War.  He relocates to America with the South Vietnamese after the Fall of Saigon, secretly reporting back to the Viet Cong.  This novel—a thriller intertwined with deep personal reflection—is written in the form of a confession after the narrator is captured.

I’m not one to read historic novels about the Vietnam War, but I was intent on finding out why this breakthrough novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  The Sympathizer actually spoke to me much more than I had anticipated an espionage novel would.  Being a half-Vietnamese, half-French illegitimate child, the narrator grapples with his identity in America; although he speaks English perfectly (having grown up in America), he is still viewed as an outsider, a foreigner.  Through the detailed depiction of the filming of a movie about the war (resembling Apocalypse Now), we see the narrator’s frustration at the dehumanization and careless casting of the Vietnamese characters as they are continuously portrayed as racist caricatures, helpless victims inferior to the whites.  Nguyen effectively gives a voice to those who have been shut out from the propaganda in not only Hollywood but our society.

In addition, having just read George Orwell’s 1984, I saw the resounding parallels between these two novels.  In short, the narrator is captured and sent to a communist reeducation camp, where he is “reformed” —much like Winston in 1984—and admits that he did nothing when a fellow communist agent was being tortured.  “Doing nothing” is the message his communist comrades want him to comprehend, and his confession of this eventually sets him free.  Under interrogation, the narrator goes mentally insane, and realizes that a revolution for which he fought so hard and sacrificed everything amounted to nothing.  Despite this despair, he concludes, “We still consider ourselves revolutionary. . .We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”  Doublethink, no?