What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Meet Alex. He’s the nightmare of both citizens and governments, the first because they are afraid of him and the second because they don’t know what to do with him. Alex, you see, is a-lex, outside the law, from the Latin. He and his friends mug people, loot stores and invade homes, liberally dishing out extreme violence and routinely indulging in gang rape. And to think he’s only fifteen. When he’s caught, he rots in a juvenile home for a while until he’s let out—and then what? Well, why stop when you’re having such a good time? He gets back to the fun of “ultra-violence”. Welcome to the world of A Clockwork Orange, a brilliant short novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), published in 1962.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” That slightly bullying question appears at the beginning of each of the novel’s three sections. It is asked not only of one or another of the story’s characters; it is asked of us. What’s it going to be with Alex then, eh? What are we to do with him? A Clockwork Orange, despite the great violence in it, in fact, because of it, is a morally preoccupied work.

When Alex is caught after his latest bout of thuggish mayhem, the authorities try a different approach. They try conditioning. If a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell tinkling, why can’t a boy be conditioned to reject violence? Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Method, in which he is given injections that make him feel deathly nauseous at the same time as he is being shown extremely violent films. He thus learns to become sickened by violence, literally. Unfortunately, because of the soundtrack of some of the reels he is forced to watch, Alex is also accidentally conditioned to feel revulsion upon hearing classical music. This aggrieves him greatly because our Alex, despite his brutal tendencies, is a music lover (sounds historically familiar, doesn’t it?).

A minor matter, the Minister of the Interior feels. Our main problem is solved. Now, when our boy sees violence, when he merely entertains thoughts of violence, he falls over helplessly, clutching his stomach and retching. If he also keels over when he hears Beethoven, so what? That’s just a little collateral damage.

But if goodness is elected not by free choice but as a self-defence mechanism against nausea, is it morally valid goodness? “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him?” the prison chaplain asks at one point. Burgess’s answer is unequivocal: he chooses goodness as a free choice. And the reason why this answer is correct is given in the novel’s key words, coming from Alex, dropped nearly casually in the middle of a long sentence:

I was still puzzling out all this and wondering whether I should refuse to be strapped down to this chair tomorrow and start a real bit of dratsing with them all, because I had my rights, when another chelloveck came in to see me.

I had my rights. Indeed, Alex does have his rights, as we all do. Ignore those rights, and the essential is lost: “When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

A group of intellectuals opposed to the government decides to make use of Alex. They lock him in a room next to which they play loud classical music. Alex takes the only exit they’ve left him, an open window. The room is in an apartment block, several floors up. Alex plummets to the sidewalk—and straight into the hearts of citizens indignant at the brainwashing he’s been subjected to. An election is in the offing and the Government is nervous about its prospects. At the hospital where he is recovering from his serious injuries, Alex’s conditioning is hastily reversed. Alex is very happy about this. In the last scene of the penultimate chapter of the novel, we find him lying back, listening with renewed delight to Beethoven’s Ninth. “I was cured all right,” he says.

That line, if it were the last line of the book, would be fiercely ironic. Good that the boy’s ears have been restored, but so has his moral compass. Its fine, trembling needle can now, once again, point as freely towards good as it can towards bad. Does that mean we citizens should start to tremble too? No worries, says Burgess in the last chapter of the book, Chapter 21. Alex’s ordeal has eaten up over two years of his life. He’s now eighteen and has matured. The joys of rape and pillage just aren’t what they used to be. Alex is now more in the mood to find himself a nice girl, settle down and start a family. The novel ends with a softer, mellower Alex pining for a mate.

A weak ending, I’d say. Burgess successfully makes the case for the imperative of freedom at the level of the individual when making moral choices. But what are we to do at the level of a society? What choices does a society have in the face of citizens who are a-lex? Each of us must be free to be fully ourselves, granted, but how should a society balance the freedom of the individual with the safety of the group? Burgess avoids this difficult question by having Alex suddenly discover the peaceable joys of family life. To a social problem Burgess gives only an unpredictable individual solution. What if Alex had decided to continue with his life of violence?

The American edition of A Clockwork Orange was originally published without the last chapter. This editorial cut, which Burgess opposed, does throw the construction of the novel off balance. Nonetheless,  Alex’s uncertain claim at the end of Chapter 20 that he is cured is, I think, an ending more consistent with the material that has come earlier. It is this truncated version that Stanley Kubrick used to make his celebrated movie. He too clearly preferred a conclusion that wasn’t so facilely optimistic.

What I’ve said so far may make you think that A Clockwork Orange is a blandly pious work, reducible to a few moral bromides. That’s not the case. Just as a hockey game can’t be reduced to its score, so a work of art can’t be reduced to a summary. What makes A Clockwork Orange incompressible is its language. Alex and his friends speak a most peculiar English. Here’s a sample, taken at random:

I did not quite kopat what he was getting at govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting better from feeling bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing to do with calculations. He sat down, all nice and droogy, on the bed’s edge…

A mixture of English slang and words derived from Russian, delivered in cadences that sometimes sound Biblical, at other times Elizabethan, it is this language, Nadsat, that makes A Clockwork Orange an enduring work of literature. It is the juice in the orange. The context makes the meaning of most Nadsat words clear, and the occasional befuddlement is not unpleasant, but I include a Nadsat glossary for your reading convenience (App-Cra, Cre-Gra, Gra-Lom, Lov-Ooz, Ora-Raz, Roo-Snu, Sob-Yec, Zam-Zvo).

Canadians go to the polls tomorrow. I offer you A Clockwork Orange the day before for a good reason. There’s an element in the novel that is eerily familiar. The government under which Alex lives is democratically elected, yet it has recourse to policies that undermine the foundations of democracy. We have seen these kinds of policies for eight years now in the United States, a country morally bankrupted by its current president. You claim to have a solution for what to do with Alex. The experts disagree with you, as do the courts and the people; certainly the people in Quebec are resisting your ideas. But you think you know better.

Are you sure, Mr. Harper, that what you have up your sleeve aren’t so many Ludovico Methods?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Have you seen Kubrick’s classic adaptation? It’s one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the book. I’ll try to find a DVD copy. When I do, I’ll send it along.

encl: one inscribed paperback and a Nadsat glossary

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