The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anthony Burgess · a novel in three parts of seven chapters · William Heinemann, London, 1962 · scored on Burgess’s English in the full text of twenty-one chapters, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Dystopian novel as a first-person confession; satire of the state, moral fable and novel of growth in one voice
Mythos
Fall, punishment and return, the third part a nemesis in which every wrong comes home; the clockwork man, the organic made mechanical; Augustine against Pelagius; with the last chapter, the prodigal who wants a son
Phase
From Alex at fifteen, through the State Jail and the cure, to Alex at eighteen
Presentation
Fiction; twenty-one chapters in three parts of seven, each part opened by the same question; told in the first person in Nadsat, an argot built largely from Russian roots, with no glossary in the first edition
Register
From the narrator’s confiding, vain and comic patter through the rapture of the music and the horror of the screenings to the quiet of the last chapter
Scale
One boy, his family and his gang, a prison and a clinic, and a near-future English city at night
Governing Proposition
A boy of fifteen who loves Beethoven and violence leads his gang through a city at night, is betrayed by them and jailed when an old woman dies, and is conditioned by the state until violence, and the music with it, makes him sick; released, he meets again each person he hurt, now with power over him, until the cure is reversed, and at eighteen he finds that he wants to grow up. The wager of the novel is that goodness that is compelled is not goodness, and that a narration in an invented argot, learned by the reader as Alex is conditioned, can make the reader share the pleasure of the violence and feel what is lost when the capacity for it is taken away.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“What’s it going to be then, eh?” The book opens on a question, asked among a gang of boys at night, and it will open each of its three parts with the same words. The voice that tells the story belongs to Alex, fifteen, the leader of the gang, and it is a voice the reader has never heard before. It speaks Nadsat, an argot built largely from Russian roots, bent to English inflection and mixed with schoolboy slang, rhyming slang and a mock-biblical second person. It addresses the reader as a confidant, “O my brothers”, and it is confiding, vain and very funny.
No one translates it. The first edition carried no glossary, and the reader learns the language as a child does, by hearing it used, so that by the second part words like “horrorshow”, from the Russian for good, have stopped needing a gloss. The learning is the book’s first act on its reader. The voice that teaches it is describing robbery, beating and rape, and the argot holds them at a distance from which they can be enjoyed. Before the reader has thought about it, the reader has been made the narrator’s accomplice.
The plan is strict. Twenty-one chapters, in three parts of seven: crime, cure and return. William Heinemann published the novel in London in 1962. The first American edition, from W. W. Norton in 1963, dropped the twenty-first chapter, and for twenty-three years American readers had a book that ended a chapter early; Norton restored the chapter in 1986, with Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked”. The novel is read here as Burgess wrote it and first published it, all twenty-one chapters. Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1971 is a separate work, and nothing from it is brought in.
Movement II
The first part is a catalogue of crimes, told with relish. The gang leaves the milkbar and falls on an old man carrying library books. It robs a shop. It fights Billyboy’s gang. It comes to a house called HOME, where a writer, F. Alexander, lives with his wife, and the home invasion that follows is terror delivered in a voice that enjoys it. On the writer’s desk is a manuscript with the title A Clockwork Orange, and Alex reads from it aloud. The book has named itself inside itself, in the house of a man it is about to ruin.
Between the crimes, Alex goes home to his room and his music. Alone with a symphony, the argot turns to rapture, and Burgess, a composer as well as a novelist, writes the listening as transport. Alex loves Beethoven, and the love is not a sign of a better nature waiting to be reached. It lives in the same body as the violence and feeds on the same appetite. The book does not separate the boy who listens from the boy who hurts. That is its hardest knowledge, and no character in it says so.
The part ends in betrayal. His droogs turn on him at an old woman’s house; she dies; he is arrested. The first seven chapters have built a world of almost pure appetite and handed it to the state. What the state will do with the boy, and with the music in him, is the matter of the second part.
Movement III
In the State Jail the chaplain is the book’s voice for choice: a man who chooses the good, in his argument, is better than a man who has the good imposed on him. A cellmate is killed. The state has a new method for boys like Alex, and the second part brings him to it.
Ludovico’s Technique is administered by Dr Brodsky and Dr Branom. Alex is strapped into a seat with his eyes held open and made to watch violence on a screen, until violence itself makes him sick. The conditioning takes. Then he finds that the music he loves now makes him sick as well. The conditioning has taken the music with the violence. The screenings reach a real horror, and the discovery is the most painful moment in the book: the state has cured him of what was worst in him and of what was best, by one method, because they were one appetite.
He is shown before the Minister of the Interior, a citizen made safe. The chaplain’s objection, that a boy who cannot choose has ceased to be a moral creature, is the thesis of the book, stated outright: goodness that is compelled is not goodness. Behind it stands the old quarrel Burgess named, Augustine against Pelagius, original sin against perfectibility, the state that would perfect a man and the man who keeps the freedom to be bad.
Movement IV
The third part retraces the first, point for point. Released, Alex goes home and finds a lodger there; his parents, who were afraid of him, have replaced him. At the library he meets the old man he beat, now with power over him. The police are Dim, his old droog, and Billyboy, his old enemy, now in uniform. Every person he hurt comes back with power over the boy who hurt him.
Then he comes to the one house in England where he will be recognised: HOME. F. Alexander is there, and his wife has died since the night of the invasion; around him gather political friends with a use for a victim of the state. The book shows its machinery here. The coincidences are a moral pattern laid over the plot rather than grown from it, the conspirators are mouthpieces, and the reader sees the hand that set each victim in the road.
Alex tries to kill himself, and survives. The cure is reversed. The clockwork has been wound back, and the twentieth chapter ends there. If the book ended there, it would end on a state that made the boy and unmade him, and a boy who is only what the state allows.
Movement V
The twenty-first chapter opens on the same question, and Alex is eighteen. He meets Pete, one of his old droogs, now married, and finds himself imagining a son of his own, and deciding to grow up. The violence of youth, the chapter says, is a phase, and it ends not in correction but in growth. The question that opened every part has changed its meaning as Alex has changed: it was asked among a gang at night, and it is now a question about a life.
The chapter turns the book’s argument. Without it the novel is a satire with a bitter end, in which the state is the only agent and the boy only clay. With it the free creature who could choose evil is shown able to outgrow it, and the clockwork the state made of him is shown to be the one thing that could not. The tone changes, and many readers have felt the change as a change of key rather than a resolution. The book’s law is growth against mechanism, and the last chapter is where that law is completed.
For twenty-three years American readers did not have it, and the question of which book is the work has been argued since Burgess raised it in 1986. The full text is the one he wrote and first published, and it is the one read here. The novel ends on the question it began with, and the answer it gives is the only one the book allows a person rather than a clockwork: that he may choose, and so may change.
Act III · The Twelve
The book is short and its plan is strict: three parts of seven, crime, cure and return, and the third part retraces the first point for point, so that each victim comes back with power over the boy who hurt him. Remove the old man with the library books in Part One and his return in Part Three has nothing to answer; remove the chaplain and the question of choice has no voice inside the prison. The parts are required by the argument, and the last chapter is required by Burgess’s argument as he wrote it. What holds the axis is the mechanism of Part Three: the coincidences that bring Alex to the library, to Dim and Billyboy in uniform, and to the one house in England where he will be recognised are a moral pattern laid over the plot rather than grown from it, and the conspirators around F. Alexander are thinly made.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: goodness that is compelled is not goodness, and a state that removes the capacity for evil to make a citizen safe has removed the person it claims to reform. The book adds a harder truth that its argument does not need and is braver for: Alex’s violence and his love of Beethoven live in the same body, so art does not civilise, and the aesthetic and the cruel share an appetite. The Ludovico chapters carry it, since the conditioning takes the music with the violence, and no character states that discovery; it is shown. The full text adds a third, that the violence of youth is a phase that ends in growth rather than in correction. Held at the bar because the central thesis is spoken more than discovered: the chaplain and F. Alexander state it, and the reader is told what the experiment means as well as shown it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The heights here are dreadful and comic more than grand. The home invasion at HOME is terror delivered in a voice that enjoys it. The Ludovico screenings, Alex strapped in with his eyes held open, reach a real horror, and the moment when he finds the music he loves turned to nausea is the book’s most painful. The warm height is Alex alone in his room with a symphony, the argot turned to rapture, which Burgess, a composer as well as a novelist, writes as transport. These rise more than once, but the voice that carries them is a performance, cocky and confiding, “O my brothers”, and its comedy keeps lowering the ceiling it builds. The last chapter’s elevation, the son Alex imagines, is gentle rather than high. A book of repeated sharp peaks, none of them at the height of the summit.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The pattern is old and partly built. The three-part shape is fall, punishment and return, and Part Three is nemesis made literal, each wrong coming home in the person of its victim, as in a morality play. The title carries a built emblem: the clockwork man, the organic made mechanical, which the state performs on Alex and which F. Alexander’s manuscript within the book names. Behind it stands the old theological quarrel Burgess himself named, Augustine against Pelagius, original sin against perfectibility, built into the plot as two views of the criminal. With the last chapter the shape becomes the prodigal’s: the son who wants a son. What holds it below the bar is that the archetypes are argued around Alex more than embodied in him; he is a type of youth and a case, and the myth sits in the scheme more than in the boy.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is the English dystopia of Wells, Huxley and Orwell, the novel of the state that remakes the person, and Orwell had already made language an instrument of control. The turn is that Burgess gave the language to the victim and narrator instead of the regime, and told the whole book in it: the reader must learn Nadsat by immersion to read the book at all, so the dystopia is not described from outside but spoken from inside by its most dangerous citizen, witty, musical and monstrous. Newspeak is described in an appendix and never narrated in; here the argot is the narration. The stake was real: a first-person narration in invented argot risked being unreadable, the first edition carried no glossary, and a narrator who enjoys rape and murder risked the book’s being taken for what it shows. Held at the bar because the dystopian frame and the conditioning plot are inherited, and the departure lives in the voice.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Nadsat is the instrument of the argument: the reader is conditioned into a vocabulary by repetition, as Alex is conditioned into nausea, and the argot holds the violence at a distance that lets the reader enjoy it, which is the complicity the book wants the reader to feel before the cure arrives. Told in standard English from outside, the book would be a case history and would know less. The first person makes the question of the self concrete: the voice that tells the story is the self the state tried to remove, and its survival in the telling is part of the answer. The symmetry of three sevens, with Part Three retracing Part One, is the form of nemesis. Held off the top by the mechanical joinery of Part Three, where the form shows its hand.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: more than sixty years of return have not exhausted it. The dispute over the last chapter has kept critics working since Burgess raised it in 1986, and it is a real question about what the book is: the text of twenty chapters is a satire with a bitter end, the text of twenty-one a novel of growth, and the reader must decide which the work is. The invented language has been studied for its own sake. The theological reading, the reading of art and violence, and the question of the reader’s complicity in enjoying the narration all keep yielding. Held below the top because the central argument is lucid and stated in the book, so that a first reading takes most of what it means, and the yield on return lies more in the argot and the ending than in a widening of the thought.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the English novel of the early 1960s, and the dystopian novel in English. The force: the book made an invented language the medium of a whole narration rather than a curiosity within one, and it put the teenage delinquent, a figure of the newspapers of its decade, at the centre of a philosophical novel about the state and the will. That reorganised from the inside what the dystopia could do. Discounted: a large share of the reach runs through Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1971 rather than through the text, and the book’s influence on the novel itself is narrower than its fame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became one of the standard dystopias in English, taught beside Huxley and Orwell, and its argot passed into later fiction in invented dialects and into the vocabulary of popular culture.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty-four years, and on the text. Form: the work survives whole, but for twenty-three years the American public read a truncated text that lacked the chapter which turns the book’s argument, a real charge on the form as it was present, lifted since the full text was restored in 1986 and became the standard one. Presence: continuous and wide; in print throughout, translated widely, taught, and adapted for the stage by Burgess himself. Part of that presence is the film’s, and popularity is presence, not proof. Fabric: Nadsat was made so that the book would not date, and it has not; the slang of 1962 would have aged, and the invented argot has not. The figure stands above the usual for presence, and below the widest, held there by the history of the text and by how much of its presence the film carries.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Burgess’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. Nadsat is built with a linguist’s and a composer’s control: Russian roots bent to English inflection, “horrorshow” from the Russian for good, schoolboy slang, rhyming slang and a mock-biblical second person set in one voice, kept consistent across the book and learnable from context, so that by Part Two the reader has the vocabulary without a glossary. The rhythm is musical, and the question that opens each part, “What’s it going to be then, eh?”, is used as a composer uses a returning theme, its meaning changing as Alex changes. The narrator’s tone, confiding, vain and comic, never slips. Charged: Part Three’s plotting is mechanical and its coincidences visible; F. Alexander and the conspirators are mouthpieces; and the Minister is caricature.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gleeful violence of the first chapter, “the old ultra-violence”, and the quiet of the last, Alex at eighteen imagining a son. One law governs them if the book’s law is growth against mechanism: the free creature may do evil and may outgrow it, and the clockwork the state makes of him can do neither. Read so, the last chapter completes the law rather than breaking it, and the plan of three holds the satire of the state, the prison and the home in one physics. The near-future world is consistent and lightly drawn. What costs the axis is the turn of tone in the last chapter, which many readers feel as a change of key rather than a resolution, and the coincidence engine of Part Three, which bends the world to the scheme.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders are present and some are held. A consciousness, rendered from within. The family: parents cowed by their son, who replace him with a lodger while he is away. The state: its prisons, its science, its ministers and its politics. Religion, in the chaplain. Art, in the music. The city at night. Youth as a social order. They pass through one narrator in a short book, and most are sketched rather than inhabited: the state is a minister and two doctors, the family a few scenes, the city a set. Nothing exceeds Alex. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself, a short novel told by one voice, which holds more of the state than most books of its length and less of any one order than a long novel; the figure records the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.7. Sixty-four years in print, taught and translated, in an argot made so that it would not date; a form in which the reader is conditioned into a language as Alex is conditioned into nausea, and the voice the state tried to remove tells the story; and a language built with a linguist’s and a composer’s control, kept consistent and learnable across the book.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the state, the family, religion, art and the city pass through one narrator in a short book, most sketched rather than inhabited, and nothing exceeds Alex. Below the rest of the twelve, The Sublime at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1: heights that are sharp and repeated but lowered by the comedy of the voice that carries them, and a myth of fall, nemesis and return argued around the boy more than embodied in him.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Swerve meet it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, published by William Heinemann, London, in 1962. It is scored as the novel as Burgess wrote and first published it: twenty-one chapters in three parts of seven, the last chapter included. The first American edition (W. W. Norton, 1963) dropped the twenty-first chapter; Norton restored it in 1986, with Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked”. The shortened text is not scored, and its circulation is weighed only on the work’s survival. Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1971 is a separate work with its own page; it is not scored here, and it is named only to keep the novel distinct from it and where the novel’s reach and presence pass through it. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Burgess’s English, with no translation between; Nadsat is part of that English and is judged with it. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the question that opens each part, the narrator’s address to the reader, one word of Nadsat and one phrase of the first chapter. Facts that could not be verified, among them the compiler of the glossary later added to American editions, the book’s length in words, Burgess’s later account of the number of its chapters, the later novels said to descend from it and the last words of the shortened text, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.