About
a Renaissance man
Suparna
Banerjee
The name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title ‘A
Clockwork Orange’
For this writer, it seems, these are fantastic times. After the
‘father of fantasy’ J.R.R. Tolkein, whose 125th birth anniversary was
commemorated in these columns recently, it is time to celebrate the birth
centenary of Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), another doyen of 20th century ‘Brit
Lit’, whose masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1962) is among the most celebrated
specimens of dystopia, a form of fantastic fiction.
Although
Burgess’ fame rests almost solely on this one dystopian novel, his creative
output was both varied and prolific. In addition to around 30 novels, he wrote
scripts for many films and television series. A professor of English and
phonetics—whose real name was John (Anthony Burgess) Wilson—was also the author
of many acclaimed non-fictional works, among them being a celebrated study of
James Joyce (Here Comes Everybody), a translation of Oedipus the King,
studies of the novel form, and a thinly-veiled biography of Shakespeare (Nothing
Like the Sun).
He also wrote numerous articles and reviews for newspapers,
including The Observer and The Guardian. And, In short,
Burgess was an exemplar in the modern age of what in another era would have
been called the ‘Renaissance Man’. Did this prolific writer who dominated the
English literary circuit with his powerful public speeches and his flamboyant,
almost arrogant persona, who bragged of his womanising powers—and who liked to
be addressed as ‘Dr. Burgess’—secretly identify with Dr. Samuel Johnson, the
dynamic 18th century scholar-critic whose dominance over the literary scene of
his times is legendary, and whose burly appearance Burgess resembled?
Possibly. Possibly, again, this
self-conscious Byronic-Johnsonian persona was just that, a facade behind which
the famous man of letters hid the vulnerable core of being John Wilson—whose
loveless childhood and difficulties with the Catholic faith found reflection in
his autobiography, as did his sense of failure as a musician and, his varied
life experience as a struggling music arranger and as an army man and Education
Officer in Britain, Spain, Borneo and Malay. Many critics have observed that
his two-part autobiography—Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve had
Your Time—constitutes his finest writing.
Film vs. book
Yet, in an interesting creator-creation
drama, the name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title A
Clockwork Orange, the novel whose fame turned to notoriety upon its filming
in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick. The film, which seemed to glorify riotous violence
and violent sex, was quickly banned in England. However, for thousands of
viewers in England and outside, the film succeeded in misrepresenting the
novel, which, in actuality, is a subtle probe into some of the deepest moral
dilemmas of modern life.
A study of juvenile
delinquency, the novel is set in a near future England dominated by extreme
youth violence in an ambience of unrest and inequality. However, rather than
simply condemning the cruel violence perpetrated on defenceless people by Alex,
the teenage protagonist, and his gang, Burgess brings in issues of the moral
legitimacy of a state-controlled programme of psychological rehabilitation that
converts Alex into a meek conformist and a victim of violence in turn. Alex
loses the essence of his being, thereby losing his taste not only for violence
but also for classical music that was the only noble thing that energised him.
In the end, he is shown to overcome his
conditioning and return to his violent ways, proving the ultimate inefficacy of
any coerced programme of moral uplift.
This intended ending was
later supplemented with an added final chapter, in which Alex eschews violence
and cruelty by choice. This ultimate chapter was omitted in the American
edition of the novel and, consequently, in Kubrick’s film, and this, perhaps, was
partly to blame for the way Burgess’s intention in the novel was misunderstood.Here
was a novel—reckoned by the Modern Library as among the 100 best English
language novels written in the 20th century—that posed difficult
moral-philosophical questions pertaining to the dynamics of state power and the
individual’s liberty, the possibility of nurture overcoming nature, and,
ultimately, to the nature of goodness itself. As Burgess later put it, “Is it
better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?” In
other words, how is a modern society to negotiate the difficult interchange
between individual will and society’s requirements? Does not a man cease to be
a man if he ceases to choose?
This moral earnestness of
the novel was, however, balanced by a play of lively wit, a near-perfect sense
of the comic, and above all, the linguistic virtuosity displayed in a unique
lingo—the “nadsat”—that was a blend of pure invention with elements of English
slang and the Russian language. Indeed, wit, innovation, supple prose, and
‘high moral seriousness’ always exists seamlessly together in Burgess’
work—right from his Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes (1956-59),
through the loosely autobiographical Inside Mr. Enderby, up to his later
fiction, which includes the ambitious Earthly Powers (1980).
Anthony
Burgess, the recipient of several honours, English and French, one feels, is to
be remembered ultimately as a writer whose body of work consistently
illustrates the Horacean adage that good literature combines both entertainment
and moral gravitas—that searching social critiques need not be arid, or that
erudition need not eschew wit at all.
