The Ludovico Cure. On Body and Music in A Clockwork Orange

Gianfranco Marrone

The Ludovico CureOn Body and Music in

A Clockwork Orange

Translated by

Betty Marenco

New York Ottawa Toronto

marrone:08 Roberge 5/8/09 11:37 AM Page 3

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Contents

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 The Meaning of the Body 11

Chapter 2 The Storyline of the Story: Plot Articulation 25

Chapter 3 Sensorial Flowes in Burgess' Novel 53

Chapter 4 Disguises of the Hypodermic Masks in Kubrick's Movie 97

Conclusion 127

Appendix 131

Bibliographical Notes 139


Introduction

This is not a book about A Clockwork Orange, in a strict sense. It is nei-ther a literary study about Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel nor a criticalessay on Stanley Kubrick's 1971 famous movie. Certainly, it discussesboth these works at length while suggesting a textual analysis basedupon specific semantic competences. Nevertheless, it has a differentaim. Even though it looks at medicine and hospitals, therapies andmusic, and although the social construction of the therapeutic effective-ness of certain medical practices is one of its main themes, this is not abook about medical science, either institutional or alternative. It is def-initely not about music therapy. It has a distinctively differentintention.

It is not a book about body theory to add to the myriad of volumeson this topic that gather on the very loaded shelves of libraries and uni-versity departments. Certainly, the central theme of my philosophicalendeavour is given by the signification, transformation, constraint andemergency of corporeality. But my ambition lies elsewhere: drawing onthe epistemological, theoretical and methodological corpus of semi-otics and linguistics, the present book, while intersecting these issues,attempts to turn them into a distinct, complex issue, concerning simul-taneously theory and practice, philosophy and sociology, literature andcinema, interpretation and analysis. If the theme of the book relates tothe meaning of the body, and the place where this theme finds its artic-ulation is found in Burgess and Kubrick' works, the conceptual toolsneeded to tackle it come from socio-semiotic textual analysis. Withinthis framework, the link between medicine and music - conveyed bythe title - emerges as one of the main conceptual arguments of myinvestigation. No matter how incongruous or fascinating it may initial-ly appear, the connection between medicine and music evoked by thetitle becomes altogether plausible to a textually-oriented semiotic gaze.

It may be argued that, given the chosen field of analysis, the bodyI discuss here is largely imaginary, or even fictitious, a body created bythe fantasy of a writer and captured by a cinematographer, both withpredominantly aesthetic communicative goals. At stake might not bethe real body of our shared everyday experience; and not even the


objective body that experimental science has been determined for cen-turies to anatomise and to understand its functions, by dissecting itsorgans. As I do not wish to reply with a question (what does "real" or"objective" body mean?), it suffices to say that the only way that ourexperiences, bodily or not, can be accounted for and thus controlled isthrough a narrative. It goes without saying that, if left to our own cre-ativity, such a narrative is likely to be infinitely less elaborated and lesscharged with theoretical potential than that of masters of storytellingsuch as Burgess and Kubrick. As for the laboratory experiments thatcontend with the bodies of science, it suffices to remember that, beyondtheir social and political status, they should be considered as spacescreated ad hoc with the aim of verifying pre-existent hypotheses. Notonly these experiments are totally artificial; but the bodies of the labo-ratory inhabit a space which is infinitely more fictitious than that of thebodies which circulate freely in the imaginary but entirely feasibleworld of literature or cinema. If the textual analysis of aesthetic worksmight be preferred to (or eventually reach the same empirical value of)scientific experiments, it is only because the object of textual analysis,contrary to the object of laboratory experiments, was certainly notmade to be an object of analysis. Rather, these works exist in the world,they are part of the semiosphere, regardless of the semioticians whoone day (perhaps for undisclosed personal reasons) might decide toanalyse them.

In this sense the analysis of the two A Clockwork Orange texts willhave the value of a Gedankenexperiment, a thought experiment thattraverses some textual emergences to verify how, through their specif-ic narrative and filmic languages, they articulate and define the subtleand complex theoretical problem of the somatic/semantic experience,of senses and sense, of perception and signification, of aesthesis andaesthetics, of the body and sociality. If this is not a book on A ClockworkOrange, it is certainly a book that intersects A Clockwork Orange, dissect-ing it like the anatomists do with their corpses, with the aim ofproducing a philosophy of language and signification using the con-cepts and categories of socio-semiotic textual analysis.

There is no doubt that explicative analysis ends up increasinghermeneutical intelligibility. In other words, even though the maingoal of semiotic textual analysis is not interpretation, this book aims atsuggesting a possible path for reading A Clockwork Orange. Such inter-pretation places corporeality at its semantic core and in this wayexplains some aspects otherwise obscure or perhaps destined to bemisread: for instance, the title of both novel and movie; some charac-teristics of the infamous Ludovico Cure; the function of music andvision. In the following pages I will attempt to follow the threads,sometimes frail and invisible, sometimes coarse and blatant, that turn

8 Gianfranco Marrone


Burgess's novel into something more of a pamphlet in defence of freechoice, and Kubrick's movie into something different from a dazzlingfilm about cinema.

The discerning reader will have the choice to follow either the the-oretical framework that privileges corporeal signification, or thesuggested interpretation of the novel and the movie. The reader willhave the choice to weave together some parts of the book, or even toomit some. Moreover, those readers who are interested only in AClockwork Orange could simply leave out the first chapter, which dealsin depth with the subject matter of the meaning of the body. Likewise,one may read separately the two chapters on Burgess and Kubrickwithout fear of losing hermeneutical comprehension.

While keeping the rule of a rigorous textual analysis and of a broadplausible argumentation, I have preferred to sacrifice academic stan-dards to the interests of general readability, an imperative asuncompromising as it is often neglected. I have therefore reduced foot-notes; avoided quotations by other authors; eliminated the names ofthose scholars to whom I am nonetheless indebted. The bibliography atthe end of the book provides the necessary theoretical and method-ological references, as well as supplying the framework where to locatethe present book.

Introduction 9


Chapter One

The Meaning of the Body

1. After a long period of denial and despite those who still disregard it,the question of the body has taken the centre stage in contemporaryintellectual thought. The body is discussed in philosophy, psychology,psychoanalysis, human and social sciences, historical and cognitivestudies, theory of language and theory of signification. Actually, noother subject seems so intensely discussed. Besides, today the body isat the centre of a series of social practices—from the care for one’sappearance to complementary medicine, from plastic surgery to well-ness clinics, from physical culture to electronic simulations ofperception. All these practices tend to exalt and glorify the body, whiletransforming it into something artificial. At the same time, they alsohave the effect of denying it. The result is a persuasive and ephemeralfad, likely to disappear in the next season.

To keep on thinking the body beyond the current intellectual infat-uation—as it is my intention to do with the present book—means toinsist on the role that it plays in the mechanisms of thought and in themultiplicity of sites of production and circulation of meaning.Alongside the research of anthropology, the investigation of psycho-analysis, the experiments of psychology, the conceptual elaborations ofcognitive sciences, the musings of philosophy, the revealing inferencesof historical studies, we find textual analyses and the theories of lin-guistics and semiotics. For them the signification articulated anddisseminated by every language is grounded in the senses. Anchoredto specific somatic apparata, the senses have a value insofar as theyhave a meaning. There is nothing intimate, pre-individualistic orunspeakable about perception. Similarly, there is no naturality orimmediate spontaneity in the body. The living, substantial, real body ofthe human experience is always a social body, a body in action andaffected by passions; a body that perceives itself and the world insofaras it is always already world in itself; a body that is an essential com-ponent of the world with which it shares profound culturalconfigurations; a body, ultimately, that is affected by and, in turn,affects the destiny of the world.

11

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However, within semiotics, like in many other disciplines, severalstill unresolved questions persist. A brief excursus covering the mainissues debated within theories of the body may contribute to newapproaches, new perspectives and a renewed argumentative vigour.

2. The starting point of this excursus is the overcoming of any dualismthat opposes body and soul, flesh and spirit, senses and reason.Established metaphysically by Platonism, and converted in gnoseolog-ical terms by Cartesian rationalism, these dichotomies haveconsistently privileged the second term over the former, devaluatingany corporeal reality to the advantage of the pure intellectual experi-ence, autonomous from, and transcending, the somatic one. Even whenthe values have been reversed, giving a positive charge to the first termand a negative one to the second, the basic formal opposition hasremained the same: on one side the mind, on the other the body. Forcenturies this predicament has opposed calculation to passion, scienceto art, Enlightment to Romanticism, laboratories to life. More recently,even the alleged opposition between behaviourism and cognitivism,veering alternatively towards one or other of the two poles, has sub-stantially maintained the Cartesian opposition. If this thousand-yearold dualism is to be finally overcome it is therefore mandatory tounhinge the deep structure of such dichotomies and point to a possiblydifferent conceptual form.

Indeed, how to overcome the opposition body/mind has becameone of the key issues of contemporary thought in its various declina-tions. The complexity of this question is defined mainly by the fact that,no matter how many appearances this overcoming has assumed, thedichotomy has still prevailed. On one side something immediate, onthe other side something mediated; on one side spontaneity, on theother constrictions; on one side the dawning of pure experience, on theother its social transformations; on one side the primeval, on the otherthe constructed; on one side the senseless matter, on the other theworld of signification; on one side the ambivalent opening to significa-tion, on the other established codes; on one side freedom, on the otherauthority. In one word: on one side nature, on the other culture.Obviously, we are not suggesting that these conceptual couples havebeen formulated explicitly all at the same time; often they have beenelaborated in a contrasting fashion; sometimes, they simply have beennegated and thus primed to resurface, implicitly and unconsciously, inthe folds of the discourse. This happened especially when at stake washow to rethink the body, how to grant it some active and substantialrole in the worlds of both individual experience and social reality.

We can delineate three main perspectives on the body. The first one



is the ingrained positivistic naturalism according to which somaticreality is an object of the world. Specific scientific disciplines such asbiology and physiology are appointed to analyse it impartially andobjectively. Hence, when it is argued that no mind is possible outside abody, or that no thought can be of worth unless it is embodied, or thatsynesthesic corporeality is the condition for the existence of language,the somatic becomes the natural, universal and unchangeable groundfor every human experience, be it intellectual reflection or social prax-is. The body becomes a machine for the external perception of theworld, that which guarantees the first immediate contact with theworld. It is the scientific gaze which ends up exterminating the bodyby taking it into the anatomical theatre where doctors or artist-engi-neers, whose hypothesis is that the life flow is nothing but the abstractemergence of functional operations that each individual organ engageswith separately from all the others, will dissect it to probe its vitalprocesses.

The second way of thinking about the body beyond the Platonic-Cartesian dualism is radically opposed to the former insofar as itclaims the conceptual and practical primacy of corporeal vitality overany positivistic reductionism. The body is here the fluctuating centre ofcontinuous and subjective irradiations of meaning, which logically andtemporally precedes the rational construction of both established cul-tural meanings and social codes. This is the uninterrupted, mutableand primal flow of the human experience prior to the intervention ofsocial institutions and scientific disciplines, which make it functionaland channel it in logics of profit and domination.

Although in certain accounts this position succeeds in overcomingthe reductionist pitfalls of the first one (and revealing its ideologicaloutcomes too), it however reinstated its core naturalism. The phenom-enological problem of human and social experience is addressed byposing the creative energy of the living body (the renowned HusserlianLeib) as antagonistic to the deadly coldness of the corpse (Körper). Still,when the primacy of the living body is re-claimed in the terms of ananthropological primordialness occurring prior to the institution ofsocio-cultural codes, this experience ends up being stripped of its realtangibility and self-sealed in an abstract unspeakability of the bodyand is doomed to fall into mysticism. We are back to the a priori natu-ralism that we tried to avoid.

The third attempt to overcome the dichotomy body/mind retains,conversely, an anti-naturalistic tendency. Its radical call for a concrete-ness of the phenomenological experience puts into brackets notionsthat are often taken for granted (such as origins or primacy, spontane-ity or immediacy) until they lose any explicative value. In thisperspective there is no ‘before’ and ‘after’, no original opening of cor-

The Meaning of the Body 13


poreal subjectivity followed by a socially determined transformation.To think the body here means to consider it as both an element and aprocess, both inherently social, endowed with a cultural destinymarked by specific interests or values, which the body itself partici-pates in shaping and deconstructing. When we talk about the corporealroots of human subjectivity we do not mean to say that subjectivityitself is grounded upon an abstract naturality as the condition for indi-vidual and collective diversifications. Rather, it means that the subjectis continuously constituted and reconstituted through pre-subjectiveexperiences and inter-subjective instances, both of which possess a cor-poreal matrix. Between subjectivity and corporeality however there isno absolute and uninterrupted adherence, but a partial and temporary,necessarily negotiable, one: a sort of built-in unhinging that establish-es and simultaneously questions the fragile identity of individual andsocial groups. I am my own body; and, at the same time, I have a body.Even though I partially identify myself in my body, I do not entrust itthe whole responsibility of my own existence and experiences. Thus,the Leib is not the dark side of the Körper whose cruel destiny is socialfunctionalization and which insists on re-emerging at the first propi-tious opportunity—be it political or artistic. On the contrary, both Leiband Körper are always implicated in tangible human experience, oftenin conflict, sometimes in harmony with each other - except when theyemerge in specific momentary contexts.

3. Following an initial phase marked by lack of interest, or even hostil-ity, the science of signification has begun to pay attention to theproblem of corporeality. Moreover, the three hypotheses on the bodyoutlined above have quickly reproduced themselves within it. Thebody has inspired - and in some cases still does - a semiotic naturalismand mysticism. Still, the tendency that seems to be prevailing today iscertainly the third one, which, not without second thoughts, labourstoward a transformation of both the philosophical premises of phe-nomenology and the theoretical outcomes of ethnology into a theory oflanguage and signification capable of providing a methodology for tex-tual analysis.

On one hand, phenomenological thought has shown for a longtime how, by bracketing the traditional distinctions between matterand spirit, body and mind, senses and intellect, sensations, percep-tions, actions and deliberations operate in an always-alreadyintertwined way. Thus, the difference between vital corporeal energyand logical schemata is a difference of degree rather than a natural dif-ference. I can see something only if I find myself in a place from whichto see it, for some reason, with a certain aim, and only if that something



I am looking at is there for some reason too. In spite of any self-appoint-ed laboratory experimentation, keen on isolating its subjects from theircontexts in order to expose them to conditions of non habitual, ultimate-ly false, perception, the meaningful relationship between myself andsomething precedes the act by which I perceive that thing and it tendsto guide it. Looking is not grounded in seeing. Indeed, it is the opposite.The propensity to see determines the very act of seeing. In the same waythat every hearing presumes a founding act of. listening.

On the other hand, structural anthropology has found in sensoriallogics the basis of that “science of the concrete” which is allegedly char-acteristic of the mythical bricolage of the “savages”. Contrary to whatis generally believed, it has shown how the knowledge of the physicaland natural world which is distinctive of so called primitive people, isnot actually shaped by immediate practical necessities, such as sur-vival, the need to shelter from weather or to defend themselves fromenemies. On the contrary, this sort of speculative knowledge relies onlogics of the “sensible” that are remote from conceptualizations.Complex practices such as ceramics, agriculture or metallurgy wouldhave never been possible without a persistent and patient explorationof the sensible qualities of matter, of its capacity for being transformedand adapted for the sake of specifically human goals. Mythical storiesdo exactly this. They show savage thinking in action, intent on explor-ing the world through the senses and recomposing it through variable,general, explanatory hypotheses. This is akin to certain contemporaryart practices that attempt to disengage from social functionalism,granting perception an existential value before the aesthetic one.

The goal of a semiotics of corporeality however is not to resumeand translate in a different metalanguage the theoretical results of thesedisciplines. Rather, it should build explicative and productive modelscapable of articulating the savage thought that, in its many diverseforms, still survives today. Similarly it should express the paradox atthe heart of perception whereby the body is both a perspective fromwhich to experience the world and a constitutive part of it.

How do the logics of the sensible work? What is the relationshipbetween the praxis of perception and the world of signification? Howdo we move from the sensible to the significant? If the body does notresist cultural codes but contributes to their establishment; if significa-tion is already born at the stage of perception; if sensoriality is a formof knowledge of (and intervention on) the world, how can we importall this into a theory of language?

4. Briefly, we could point to at least three fields that have gradually ledsemiotics to spontaneously find appropriate answers to this sort of



question. It is not a coincidence that these three fields concern thewider issues of the construction and management of human and socialsubjectivity, both individual and collective.

The first field concerns figuration and aesthesis. The core hypothe-sis underpinning this area of scholarship is very precise. It assumesthat linguistic (and semiotic) meaning is not an intelligible element thatmust be understood by an adequately cogent mind. Or at least, itshould not be reduced to this. Linguistic (and semiotic) meaning con-tain abstract components (linked to those mind operations thatpsychologists call introceptive) as well as figurative components(which do not depend upon operations of the mind but rather uponexteroception, that is, a perception of the external world, which is bydefinition of an aesthesic nature). If, for example, I grasp the meaningof a word like “head” in every possible context in which it is found, thisis not because I have placed it in a relation of referentiality with anobject of the external world, that is, with a specific part of the body, butbecause somehow I perceive in such word some stylized visual traits,such as roundness and highness. Visuality is not only a sensorialdomain from which specific non verbal languages that use visuality intheir plane of expression originate. Visuality is actually a component ofour verbalising ability, of its plane of content, where the persistence ofsomething akin to a memory of past visual experiences influences theconstruction of linguistic meanings. This is why notorious poeticimages and rhetorical figures, possess nothing of poetry or rhetoricinsofar as they already operate within common language.

But it is not only visuality that partakes of semantics - both linguis-tic and non linguistic. If the elements that contribute to buildsignification are not only of the intellectual kind it is because they oftenregain the sensible qualities found in external reality, in other words,those properties that the subject variously perceives via his/her senso-ry apparatus making them somehow significant. Oppositions such aslow/high, sweet/bitter, rough/smooth, already meaningful in theeveryday world, are used by various systems of signification to buildtheir own plane of content. Not only do words and sentences and,above all, texts and discourses, have an abstract thematic content, moreor less cognitively intelligible, referring to more or less deep, more orless universal mental structures; very often they cover this content witha sort of figurative layer that turns it into a more realistic and moreintelligible one. Like the “savages” studied by anthropologists, we tooget to know and talk about the world thanks to our complex perceptu-al apparatus. Perhaps the difference between us and them is that ourapparatus is entwined with a complex series of pragmatic, affectiveand cognitive processes. These are as likely to hide and naturalize ourperceptual apparatus, as at times they are likely to render it insignifi-



cant. Certainly they tend to repudiate its weight.Moreover, by participating in the construction of the signification

of discourses and texts, sensorial perception allows the establishmentof something that can be defined as subjectivity and, as its repercus-sion, something that can be defined as objectivity. Subject and worldare mutually established from the starting point of perception. In orderto subsist, the act of perception has to take a position. In other words,it has to assume a perspective on the world. Similarly, it has to decideeach time which is the point of view and which is the world; who islooking (listening, tasting, touching...) what; who is the perceiving sub-ject and what is the perceived object. If this founding act of perceptiontends to be altered to the point of being almost forgotten, it is becausecollective culture or the habits of single individuals economize on per-ception while employing perceptual stereotypes which are more or lessstable, prevalent and subject to interpretation at a categorical level:visual systems—as well as auditory, olfactory, gustatory ones, etc—which individual and collective persistent usage tends to firstnaturalize (“it has always been like that”) and then to graduallyreduce, wear out and ultimately erase (“enough now!”). That is, until anew perceptual act manages to emerge from habitual usage and impos-es itself as such beyond perceptual stereotypes and appointedcognitive schemata. By deconstructing and reconstructing both subjectand the world, it imposes a new state of things, new meanings and newvalues. This is the so called saisie esthétique, a momentary and slipperyaesthetic grasp whereby the sensible comes back to impose itself sud-denly and unexpectedly beyond any intellectual act. Only afterwards itwill be grasped, when, facing a new state of things, a sense of nostalgiaand an aftertaste of imperfection will prevail.

According to this research perspective, therefore, the aestheticexperience is a non narrative transformation of everyday experience. Ittakes place when the sensible (dependent upon perceptual and mentalschemata established by use) emerges and imposes itself on the subjectand on the world, which it had established by itself. The sensible is nota primal event at the beginning of an abstract, a priori cognitive praxisof the world. And it is certainly not a dawning precondition of signifi-cation. Rather, it is something that surfaces only at the end of acognitive process, when this process, eventually worn out, loses itsvalue and can only persists if it gets resemantized. What perceptiondoes, paradoxically, is more than just establish subject and world. Itactually re-constitutes them, transforms them at the roots and rein-states them within culture and society. Human imperfection liesprecisely therein. Subjectivity—together with meaning and thanks to it—is already given. We can only hope for its sensorial resemantization,which takes place (if at all), unexpectedly. And only when this has hap-



pened we might be aware of it. No fullness of being can ever be possi-ble, just a languorous sense of nostalgia.

Let us take as an example the everyday instance of vision. No actof visual perception—either direct or through reproduced images—ispossible unless it is based upon the figurative acknowledgment of aprevious plastic configuration. If I see a lion is because I have seen aseries of lights, shapes, colours, positions in space that I have interpret-ed as that specific animal. I do not actually see the lion. Rather, I havesome visual perceptions that, once put together according to a certainprecise articulation, convince me to interpret it as such. However, thereis a problem. That is, in order to see exactly that lion, I almost have toforget that what I am really doing is extracting its image based on aprevious plastic configuration. I must presume I am seeing the imagedirectly, almost erasing the effort necessary to create it. If we ask some-one “what do you see?” they will almost certainly reply by naming theobject or the image they are looking at. Rarely will they say that theyare seeing some shapes and some colours. In order to perceive visual-ly what has actually allowed us to see, we must therefore put inbrackets the image and look directly again at the basic plastic configu-ration. We must intentionally forget the interpreted object to let the realobject of vision emerge, that is, until a real artist - or a fool - will pointit out to us, twisting our habitual perception of the world and prompt-ing us to look at the world from a different angle.

5. Corporeality is not simply something that concerns senses and per-ception. If we understood it in this way, we would persist in the old,traditional idea of a separation in principle between the sensible corpo-real and the intelligible mind. No wonder that spatiality and topologymake up the second field of investigation that has led semiotic researchto a close up exploration of somatic logics. If we go beyond an initialand naãve opposition between functional space and symbolic space,we may observe how topological structures, rooted in the somatic ones,are highly significant for humans. On one hand, space always gains ameaning beginning with the individual and collective subject that seesand lives in a particular environment. Subjects re-interpret the physicalproperties of their environment in terms of signifying articulationsbased on their own projects, actions and values. On the other hand,space itself contributes to the constitution of subjective identity insofaras it is endowed with past signifying articulations. Furthermore, itallows certain forms of action while preventing others; not only does itmanifest itself as a topological structure but as a real axiology. Forinstance, semantic oppositions such as high/low, right/left,ahead/behind, internal/external are not mere physical distinctions



that arise from somatic conformations, that is, from the fact that thehuman body has a specific shape and particular postures. Variously,according to cultures or individual texts, these oppositions end upbecoming veritable value systems. By prescribing possible constric-tions they direct the subject in the construction of his/her actionprogrammes. Body and space are therefore intimately linked. Suffice tothink about the basic experience of being contained. This is paradoxi-cal in itself insofar as it is specific of a body that not only inhabits aspace and possesses an individual spatiality, but that is also simultane-ously a container.

Finally, the third field of semiotic investigation that leads to thebody, concerns the affective dimension of signification. If the meaningof human experience, thus the construction of subjectivity, is groundedon narrative logics, these logics not only organize sequences of actionsbut also affective processes. A narration is not only a series of organ-ized actions toward certain, more or less anticipated, goals, it is also aseries of passions interlinked with actions, both provoking and endur-ing them. Actions and affects are significant here only as they areplaced in relation with each other. In other words, the point is not sim-ply to connect actions together and passions together, but also actionswith passions and vice versa. If the meaning of actions is tied up withintellectual decision-making logics (want, have to, being able, know), themeaning of passions very often finds its motives elsewhere: preciselywithin the body, in the body’s complex system of attractions and repul-sions, openings and closures, pains and deliriums, euphorias anddysphorias. Passions are mental states only to the extent to which theyare corporeal processes. Stammering, blushing, trembling, raising thevoice, crying, laughing, etc. are not the external signs of an affectivestate, which is somehow internal. These somatic behaviours, likecountless others, are passions. They establish and manifest affects; theystir them up, reorganize them, transform them and so on. Hence, ratherthan distinguishing between passions of the soul and passions of thebody as in the Cartesian tradition, semiotics recaptures a general cor-poreal component in the affective processes, a component which thedesiring imagination of mental nature is grafted upon or is dispersedwithin.

6. Current semiotic research has reached a point where it considers thesensible and, more in generally, corporeal experience as a sort of co-participant in the creation and transformation of signification. Nosemiosis, establishment or bequest of meaning can be possible outsidea body which is alive, experiences the world, enters in contractual orconflicting relationships with the world, shapes it and is modified by



it. Obviously the body has to deal with the different matters of expres-sion of different languages - aural, olfactory, tactile and so on and soforth. It contributes in a crucial way to their semiotic formation and totheir articulation in signifying substances. Besides, the body is presentin the plane of content of those very languages. Once incorporated inthem the body constitutes the “downstream” figurative level thatmakes manifest, concrete and likely any abstract thematic content. Atthe same time, the body is located “up stream” of these contents, act-ing as the ground where semantic categories and their articulation canbe established. Openings and closures, expansions and contractions,impulses and resistances, energies and matters, forces and forms, aimsand holds are each a prototypical corporeal process. They can be cog-nitively reinterpreted as states and transformations, actions andpassions, operative programmes and modes of doing, and perhapseven as adversities, contradictions, complementarities, affirmationsand negations.

Besides, the body intervenes in an even more influential way at theenunciation of discourses, leaving a trace at the moment when texts areconstructed. The instance of the enunciation is not an empty form thatproduces or is receptive to discursivity. Any instance of enunciationhas, and is, first of all a body; a body that takes up a position in spaceand in time, that establishes itself and every worldly otherness in waysthat are each time different. Similarly, the body constitutes its own Meand its own Self, its own inside and outside, its own being as mobileflesh—internal and invisible—and its own being as lived body—pro-duced and manifest. It can be suggested that not only is the bodyresponsible for discursivity but also, more profoundly, for semiosis. Itis precisely starting from the positions that the body takes up that somesort of exteroceptivity and introceptivity can be established. Ultimately,it is a matter of expression and content. Whereas previous semioticmodels regarded signification as a process which was both formal andabstract (be it as a mere equivalence or a logic supposition or a mentalinference), some recent trends in semiotic studies have attempted topoint specifically to the body as the (un)responsible engine of everyproductive relationship between expression and content, and hence ofevery expression and every content. This is a strong hypothesis, sus-ceptible to revisions but certainly deserving of interest.

7. A possible way to discuss this hypothesis is by recuperating the old,unforgotten, though rarely scrutinized anthropological enquiry intothe phenomenon of the so called symbolic efficacity. According to thisline of enquiry there may be several instances of medical therapieslinked to processes of communication which are variably complex, rit-



ualized and located within closed self-structured imaginary universes.Modern Western medicine grounds both its diagnoses and prognoseson the rationalistic principle of causality, which remains fundamental-ly foreign to the patient’s own mindset and sensibility. Conversely, theefficacy of some popular and ethnic therapies could be found precise-ly in the fact that both therapist and patient belong to a culture whoselanguages they both master, a culture rich in value systems they bothfirmly believe in and above all a culture where body and soul, matterand imagination, physicality and narrativity find their declension in asingular configuration of meaning. Whereas Western medical scientismsearches for pathogenic agents and tries to fight them with appropriatechemicals, the shaman sings mythological chants whose aim is to rein-state the existential continuity between troubled subjects and theiruniverses of reference. The installation of strongly codified rituals(within which specific languages are employed and thanks to whichstories are told with great accuracy) tends to link sick bodies and myth-ical content in a relationship of signification rather than causality.Indeed, this connection is not immediately material but eminentlysymbolic.

The renowned witch-doctor of the Central American Kuna tribewho solves cases of difficult births offers the woman in trouble theoverall somatic equilibrium that she has lost. This equilibrium is madeof pushes and counter pushes, energies and matters, forces and forms.Here, physical elements (the woman in labour, body parts, phallic fig-ures, blood etc.), physio-psychological elements (contractions, inabilityto find oneself, inner imbalance, anxiety etc.) and natural and cosmo-logical elements (wild animals, various monsters, planets etc.) aremerged. In the chant of the shaman, and therefore in the social life ofthe Kuna village too, all these elements have the value of mythical enti-ties, all equally endowed with spiritual poignancy and ontologicalconcreteness. Then, rather than bringing back the patient’s own phan-tasmatic experience to its physiological concreteness, as Westernmedicine would do, the shaman operates in the opposite way. He takesthe experience of pain back within its own imaginary theatre, and real-locates the body in the space that it has always occupied in that culturalframework. This is similar to the way in which ethno-psychiatry oper-ates on African or Asian immigrants suffering from psychophysicalailments in countries whose culture is foreign to theirs. For instance, aman from Ghana with a broken leg is unlikely to be interested in know-ing how his fall off a tree has procured him a trauma. Surely he is moreconcerned with understanding why this event happened in that specif-ic day, or why this accident has happened to him and not, say, to hisbrother. In other words, he is not looking for phisical causes. Instead,he wants to find the existential meaning of his own physical illness. He



will have a chance to do this only if the ethno psychiatric team, exact-ly like the Kuna shaman, will be able to provide him with the adequateexperiential context where that meaning exists consistently and isgiven a therapeutic value.

Setting signification against causality allows us to neutralize oppo-sitions between rationalism and irrationalism, science and magic,medicine and superstition. To speak of the symbolic efficacity of certainmedical practices—which are, ultimately, communication processes—does not mean that we should brand as magical-religious all thosephenomena that we cannot explain otherwise. It actually means to sug-gest an alternative explanation that—as always when it is a matter oflanguage and communication—is half way between rationalistic mate-rialism and mystical spiritualism, matter and mind, sensible andintelligible: the quest for a bridge that might separate and simultane-ously connect psychic and bio-physiological processes. What mightemerge from here, as has been suggested, is that Western medical prac-tices, with their causal chemical therapies, are grounded uponsymbolic processes that ensure a great deal of healing success, and inwhich the intersubjective relationship and the cultural context interactwith the administration of medication and affect the final outcomes inthe body.

As far as this book is concerned, introducing the issue of symbolicefficacity within a semiotics of the body offers undeniable advantages.First of all, it points to the transformative capability of communicativephenomena that complement, and perhaps transcend, the delicatequestion of belief. It suffices to think of any occurrence of rhythm and,more generally, of musicality, both performing irrespective of any con-scious assignment of meaning (the shaman speaks a languageunknown to the woman in labour); or else, at the inlaying of the thera-peutic context within the textual context (the song tells first of the taleof the witch-doctor himself who is called by the concerned midwife,who arrives at the woman’s house, and starts singing...); at the inextri-cability between communicative and textual situations (the gesturesexpressed and the objects used in the ritual are captured by the contentof the song). Furthermore, and above all, the question of the symbolicefficacity allows us to clearly—if not definitely—enunciate a theoreti-cal hypothesis: the body that acts as a mediator between expressionand content, that gives rise each time to exteroceptivity and introcep-tivity, to the sensorial and the categorical, to aesthesia andargumentation, is a body utterly devoid of the naturalistic surplus stillpresent in many recent semiotic scholarships. What is at stake here is abody taken on board by a specific community; a body made up andtransformed by a specific culture: that is, a social body. No allegedly“pure”, basic and universal physiological process could in itself take



position in, and upon, the world. It could not establish culturally deter-mined possible meaningful relationships in ways which are differenteach time, especially with regard to their performative and affectiveoutcomes. The road is paved then for a renewed assessment of the cru-cial question of signification, of how to understand that relationshipbetween signifiers and signifieds, expressions and contents, constitu-tive of every type of language, a road where philosophicalconsideration and socio-semiotic analysis, conceptual elaboration andfield experimentation, theory and praxis constitute a unique and hope-fully effective scientific enterprise.



Chapter Two

The Storyline of the Story: Plot Articulations

1. A title designates at least two things: a text (insofar as it is an objectof the world) and its content (insofar as it is an imaginary universe). So,when we discuss the events of A Clockwork Orange we may refer to twodistinct levels of reality. On one hand we have the editorial history ofBurgess’s novel, troubled from the very beginning, the success (andmisfortune) of Kubrick’s movie, the subsequent interweaving of thesetwo works and of those emerging from them. On the other hand, thestory told by the novel and the movie, what we call the plot. The prob-lem is that these two levels of reality are interlocked and mixed to thepoint of creating a series of curious mirroring effects and an alienatingmise en abyme.

Firstly, there exist two different versions of the novel that tell a storywith almost opposite endings, one actually written by the author, pub-lished for the first time in Great Britain in 1962 and advocated by himas the authentic and correct version (the multilingual translationsworldwide, including the Italian one, are based on this version). Theother version was acquired by the American editor, printed in the sameyear and has been available in US bookshops until 1988, and is very wellknown to the English speaking audience. The plot reflects what hap-pened editorially: whereas the authorial version has a transformativelinear structure (the protagonist of the story grows up and changes), theAmerican one, where the last chapter is missing, has instead a cyclicalstructure (the protagonist goes back to the initial situation).

Secondly, the famous cinematic version of the book translates andinterprets the fictional story, freely adding and removing all sort of nar-rative, discursive and textual elements. Also, by choosing the plot thatBurgess opposed between the two possible editorial alternatives avail-able in the market, Kubrick offers a sort of second validation of thestory, which ended up becoming the most well-known by the main-stream audience. The transposition into film, moving away from theinitial text, tells its own story, which is itself authorial. To no avail didBurgess remonstrate several times - in interviews, articles, prefaces and

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even a theatre piece (A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music) and a newnovel (A Clockwork Testament)—attempting to reclaim his own person-al and original interpretation of the story.

Thirdly, it happens that some of the experiences lived by the pro-tagonist of the story coincide and get confused with experiences livedby the empirical recipient, if not of the novel, certainly of the movie. Aswe will see A Clockwork Orange is also the story of how the movie hasbeen received, and of its various and intense effects (cognitive, prag-matic, affective, somatic) on the audience. Alex, the protagonist, isprofoundly manipulated and altered by watching some movies.Something similar has happened to the real audience of Kubrick’smovie, in some cases spurred on to carry out violent and vandalisticacts similar to those perpetrated by Alex. The story told by the moviehas provoked, and perhaps still can provoke, specific effects on audi-ences. The consequence of this is that the interpretation offered by theaudience reverberates on the editorial and cinematographic events. Allsort of polemics and critiques: Burgess disavowing Kubrick’s movie,Kubrick preventing English cinemas from projecting his movie, hugemedia success of the whole textual configuration and the productionapparatus that has sustained this phenomenon.

Finally, going back to the textual content, the title A ClockworkOrange is part of the imaginary universe of Burgess’s novel (but not ofKubrick’s movie). The character of the writer F. Alexander—partialalter ego both of Burgess and Alex and point of conjunction betweenthem—is writing a book titled, A Clockwork Orange. Alex destroys thefirst draft of this book at the beginning of the story and reads it whenit is published towards the end. It is a classic mise en abyme:Alexander’s book tackles the same ethical issues of the Burgess’s bookin which it is inserted. What changes is the literary genre: it is a politi-cal pamphlet not a novel. We shall soon see how the book has a veryprecise semantic role within the story.

In order to unravel this sequence of conjunctions and deferments,a sort of chain of Chinese boxes in which the concrete experience ofreception and the imaginary universe of the work end up with overlap-ping and blurring together, we must trace, one after the next, all thelevels of meaning hereby implicated, as well as the translative process-es that allows us to move from one to the next. If a text has within itselfa series of strata of signification that convert from one to the next, thealleged context where the text exists—in other words the semiospherethat had made possible the existence and the circulation of the text -must be studied in turn as a complex entity structured on many levels.The image of the series of Chinese boxes that we have found in ourobject of analysis becomes the theoretical and methodological modelthat will allow us to proceed ahead with our reflection.



2. Given this series of textual, intertextual, contextual and cultural lev-els that refer one to the next, enframing each other, the starting point ofour analysis is comparatively irrelevant. No matter the starting point,one invariably ends involving all the others. It is for a mere conventionthat we have chosen to begin the analysis of this configuration from theplot of the novel.

Burgess’s novel has a very clear-cut outline, it is divided in threeparts, each with seven chapters, and an explicit communicative aim, toshow the moral importance of free will. These two aspects, expressionand content, are in perfect agreement and they mutually motivate eachother. Indeed, the triadic narrative structure is not merely a literaryconstruction conveying a philosophical message. Rather, it must beseen as a sort of dialectic process whereby two opposite elements ulti-mately find a superior synthesis. The first part of the book tells thestory of Alex (a-lex), a young man obstinately devoted to hooliganismand “ultraviolence” who is also, unlike his peers, an enthusiastic con-noisseur of classical music. The second part describes how socialinstitutions try to manipulate his conscience in even more violentways, inducing him to feel disgust for every form of evil deed. Thethird illustrates the consequences of this manipulatory treatment, theeffects it causes on the protagonist’s life, the ways in which he managesto get out of difficult situations and his final development. On onehand we have individual violence, on the other society’s own, then thealliance of these two components and the assimilation of the former inthe latter. This formal and thematic geometry (that inscribes Burgess’sbook within the genre of the philosophical novel) does not occur to thedetriment of the aesthetic value of the ouvre, which on the contraryemploys a wide range of narrative tactics and literary devices to sup-port, moderate, raise and problematize the key ethical thesis.

Let us trace first of all the main moments of the story, as retold inthe first person by the protagonist in a sort of curious youth jargoncalled nadsat (of which more later). In retelling the story we will offera first interpretation.

3. The story, set in a future England, begins in medias res, in one of themany occasions in which fifteen year old Alex and his gang (George,Pete, Dim) are just about to embark on a rowdy night out. They meetat the Korova Milkbar, a nightclub where drugs are diluted in milkglasses. While the other clients knock back synthetic substances withimprobable names that make them lose their sense of self, Alex and hismates take a non-specific substance (called “milk with knives”) whichsupplies instantaneous energy and intensifies physical and psychicalpowers. More than merely exciting or charging them up, this drug

The Storyline of the Story 27


functions to justify the violence they are about to unleash: a thrillingway of spending the evening, a pastime that could be anything (nowonder that the rhythm of the story is marked by the refrain “what’s itgoing to be then, eh?”) which offers an ironic counterpoint to the themeof the free will. Then, once out in the streets, the sequence of their actsof vandalism begins, all the more terrible for being disengaged fromany practical aim. They beat a professor to a pulp on his way out fromthe library and tear away his books; they rob and burn down anewsagent; they punch a drunk who is singing at the top of his voice;they embark on a ferocious knife fight with Billyboy’s rival gang; theydo a raid on an out-of-town cottage in a stolen car, and beat the writerwho lives there, destroy the manuscript he is working on (A ClockworkOrange) and rape his wife. When, now tired, they are back at theKorova, Alex has a quarrel with Dim who scorns the improvised operasinging of a young woman in between one pop tune and the next. Thedifference in musical tastes between Alex and his mates becomes theindex of their character and cultural distance, and marks the beginningof the conflict within the group. Alex returns back home on his own,eats the drab dinner his mother had prepared for him and goes to bedto blissfully listen to some pieces of classical music.

The following day Alex decides to stay in bed and to miss school.He receives a visit from a social worker, P.R. Deltoid, from whom welearn that the protagonist has already spent several years in juveniledetention and is now on a sort of probation. Deltoid suspects that Alexis responsible for the acts of violence which occurred the night before,and anxiously advises him to be careful: one more time and it willmean jail for real. The problem of youth violence and its causesemerges here: while Deltoid does not understand its motives, Alexkeeps quiet and laughs to himself. And he keeps on laughing evenwhen, by now alone, he reads in the newspapers a series of articles dis-cussing the possible causes and potential solutions of this socialepidemic. For the boy things are very simple indeed: if good has nocause why should evil have one? Both good and evil—Alex thinks—depend upon individual conscience. The “great institutionalmachines” (“they of the government and the judges and the schools”)try precisely at all costs to fight and repress the requests of the singleindividual. Thus, in his own way, Alex has very clear ideas. The realproblematic opposition, for him, is not between those who do goodand those who commit evil, but between individual and society; anopposition that ends up setting itself up as a conflict between theyouth, still eager to express their joy de vivre, and the old, subjected tothe tight fabric of the social organization. Such a conflict has, like everyconflict, a contractual aspect: the two factions involved fight each otherand yet, somehow, find an agreement in sharing, for instance, the



organization of time: whereas old people and institutions dominate theday, the youth control the night. Within such a framework, clearlyinfused with a romantic flavour, there must be a place for music. Thisart, for Alex, does not have a pedagogical value, nor does it lead theyouth towards socialization, as the media declare. Quite the contrary:great classical music is a sort of dispenser of energy, it helps one tobecome more dexterous and lively, it makes one feel very much likeGod, a bit like the “milk with knives” dished at the Korova. Televisionand the media—all those “gloopy worldcasts” that old people goinggaga watch during the night locked in their homes, and also popmusic, whose success is a clear symptom of the general decay of con-temporary civilization—are a poor substitute for art.

This neat distinction between classical and pop music emergesvery clearly in the following scene, where Alex, all dressed up, goes inhis habitual record shop in the town centre to pick up a special versionof Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that he had booked a few days earlier.In the shop he meets two young girls busy snooping around for the lat-est hits by those pop singers with unlikely names that Alex profoundlydespises. He takes the girls home with the excuse to play the recordsthey have just bought and, after getting them drunk, rapes them bothto the sound of Ode to Joy. After sending them off, he falls asleep for theentire afternoon.

On waking he meets his parents, who are dismal petty bourgeoisfigures to whom he regularly hands some of the money he has stolenduring the night. Going out for a new evening of violence, Alex findsthe three “soma” of his gang unusually waiting for him at the door.Disgruntled about the quarrel with Dim they intend to question hisleadership and above all they wish to impose a new regime: no longergratuitous and casual violence but projects aiming at earning a greatamount of money. Even though he is in the minority Alex has no inten-tion of giving up nor does he share their idea of instrumentalizing hisown actions. He can grab everything—money, cars, sex, records—whenever he wishes. What would be the point of more money?Initially, he pretends to agree with the three “soma”‘s plan; but when,suddenly, in the street, he hears Rossini’s music blasting from a carradio, he throws himself against his mates and embarks on a knife fightslashing first George and then Dim. Once the hierarchies are restored,Alex acts all magnanimous with his now acquiescent comrades, and heaccepts the plan that George had previously suggested. That very nightthey will go to rob a rich old lady that lives alone in a suburban houseand get hold of a lot of cash.

However, “soma” George’s plan is actually a ploy to hand Alex into the authorities. Alex goes alone inside the house where the old ladylives surrounded by a multitude of cats and tries to restrain her. He



twice trips in the cats’ milk dishes and in their tails, loses his balanceand falls. He stands up again, but while he is beating the woman upwith a silver statuette, he hears the police siren getting closer. Hedecides to run away, but as soon as he opens the door Dim blinds himwith a chain blow to the eyes. Betrayed by his mates, he is arrested andlocked in a filthy cell in the police headquarters. Here, threatened bythe other prisoners, beaten by the police, insulted by Deltoid, Alex isforced to confess the long series of his wrongdoings. And the worst isyet to come: the news arrives that the cats’ lady had just died in hospi-tal as a consequence of the violence suffered at Alex’s hand. The firstpart of the novel concludes with the end of his freedom. Alex is nolonger a mere hooligan, but a murderer, as Deltoid had predicted, andjail now awaits him.

The whole second part of the book is set in jail. Condemned tofourteen years in prison, Alex is locked into a small and very crowdedcell and, thanks to his artistic competences, is given the job of choosingthe music to be played during the religious functions celebrated in theprison chapel. So the young man spends his time reading the Bible(amusing himself with the scenes of violence that it contains) and grad-ually becomes the chaplain’s confidant. After a couple of years thereare rumours of a new, extremely fast treatment for the redemption ofcriminals that allows one to get out of jail in a few days. Alex asks thechaplain about it and the chaplain expresses his scepticism for the lackof choice that—from what it is known—this “Ludovico Cure” wouldimply.

Events precipitate when in his already overcrowded cell a seventhdetainee arrives who makes sexual advances to Alex and picks fightswith the others. Beaten to a pulp during the night he dies and Alex isaccused of being the one responsible of his death. This is the momentof utmost misfortune of our protagonist, twice betrayed and twicedeclared guilty of murder. The following morning his salvation arrivesin the form of a visit by the Interior Minister looking for a guinea pigfor the Ludovico Cure. Under the spotlights because of the previousnight events Alex is selected to undergo the new redemptive treatment.He listens to the doubts of both the prison’s director and the chaplain,but keen to be released immediately he signs the papers and voluntar-ily accepts the treatment.

Thus, exactly in the middle of the novel, the Ludovico Cure begins.Alex is transferred to a white building at the rear of the prison. He issettled in a comfortable room, fed and lavished with many attentionsand concerns over his health, while kept under strict control by a teamof doctors and nurses. Among them there is doctor Branom, the assis-tant of Brodsky, the treatment’s inventor, who tells Alex that it will onlybe a matter of viewing a few “special” movies in the space of just two



weeks. Alex proclaims his eagerness at becoming good, but once againhe laughs to himself at the thought of his imminent release.

In reality things are slightly more complex. Every morning Alex isgiven an hypodermic injection of (allegedly) vitamins contained in achemical compound also called Ludovico; he is carried on a wheelchairto a sort of cinema lounge at the bottom of which there is a series ofstrange contraptions; he is tied up to a chair and some sensors areapplied; his head is fixed in position and his eyelids are kept perma-nently open so that he is forced to watch whatever is projected onto thescreen. It is an uninterrupted sequence of acts of violence, beginningwith some that are very similar to those that Alex loved to carry out inthe first part of the novel, but they become increasingly appalling,cruel, ferocious and horrible: rapes, tortures, cruelties of every kind,perpetrated by common delinquents, Japanese soldiers, Nazis crimi-nals and the like.

At the beginning Alex is having fun but he soon starts feelingunwell. He feels continually nauseous, he needs to throw up, he hasheadache, pains everywhere, and he assumes it is because of the foodhe has eaten. He soon realizes though (and Branom confirms this tohim) that it is the substance contained in the hypodermic that inducesthese terrible effects. In other words, he is submitted to a classicPavlovian mechanism. The injected substance makes him feel sickwhile he watches violent scenes; he is therefore compelled to correlatehis sickness to what he is watching and not to the injections. In thisway, in a short span of time, not only will he be conditioned to beunable to commit evil, but also to be unable to witness it, and even toimagine it. It is all as expected, and there is no way out. Alex suffersenormously. He would rather go back to jail than undergo more ofthese torments but he has signed the papers giving his consent and sohe will have to succumb to the entire treatment. From tormentor he hasbecome victim, from single individual who was willingly choosing thepath of evil he is about to be transformed into a machine devoid of anyfreedom to choose. A fake human being: a clockwork orange.

However, the absolute precision of the mechanism activated by theLudovico Cure stumbles on an issue that its creator did not expect: themovies’ soundtrack. For Brodsky, who declares himself useless when itcomes down to music, music functions only as “emotions intensifier”;for Alex on the contrary music is much more than this, it is somethingthat incites him to violence, that operates deeply in his body grantinghim energy and a willingness to act, while also romantically represent-ing the ecstatic detachment from social mechanisms: celestialbeatitude. Thus, when the soundtrack to a Nazi documentary isBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Alex reaches the height of his suffering;he cannot bear to see “Ludwig van” mistreated in such a way and ends



up vomiting without restraint.Nevertheless, the Cure moves on undeterred until the end. Alex

feels worse and worse to the point of wishing his own death. Finally,once the set period is over, it is time to test him. Alex is taken to the pro-jection room and, even with no hypodermic, he suffers all the same; hetries to beat up a nurse but he is forced to desist because of the intensi-ty of the pain he feels. Finally, in the presence of the minister, the prisondirector, the chaplain and other authorities, he is put through the defin-itive trial. Provoked by a he-man he is unable to react and he evenapologizes; tempted by a stunning naked girl, rather than forcing him-self on her as he would have done in the past, he declares his love forher in an almost courtly manner. The cure is successful indeed. The min-ister proudly announces that, thanks to it, soon all the jails will be muchless crowded, Brodsky is glorified and Alex is released on the spot.

The third part of the book mirrors the first. Alex goes back to theplaces he used to hang out at and finds them profoundly changed.Programmed to be a victim, his previous victims will now become histormentors. On his release from jail newspapers and televisionsdescribe him as the guinea pig of this successful Ludovico Cure exper-iment, a source of enormous pride for the government. However, theyalso describe his sufferings and his present condition. Alex, who usedto hate the media, has become their typical hero for a day. But in gen-eral it is the world that has now changed: relations of power, conflictsbetween generations, roles and symbols - and our protagonist will sooncome to realize this at his own expense.

Alex’s via crucis in the world outside jail (and as we shall see thisis not merely a metaphor) begins at home where his room has been dis-mantled, as his father tells him, to support and feed the old lady’s catsand where, to top it all, his parents have now taken in a lodger whothey treat like a son. Alex understands that he has been replaced withan average lad form the suburbs who would not harm a fly.Furthermore, this sort of well-behaved alter ego of himself stands up todefend his parents and throws him out of the house without his fatherand mother intervening to protect him, and he is unable to reactbecause of the instant pain he suffers. Wandering around town he endsup in the record shop, enters a cubby-hole to listen to some Mozart butquickly scuttles away because the music triggers far too much pain. Hethen goes to the Korova Milkbar where he is served up the synthetichallucinogenic that makes one totally lose their sense of self. In thisstate he takes the definitive decision to die. It is only a matter of find-ing a non violent way of doing it.

He then goes to library where he bumps into the same person thathe had treated to the “old boot-crush” in the past. The man recognizeshim, attacks him furiously helped by everyone else in the library until



a librarian comes to his rescue followed by the police. The hostility ofthe world towards Alex increases exponentially until it reaches aparoxystic pitch. He has a better look at the two policemen that haverescued him and he realizes that they are Dim and Billyboy who, giventhe recent exacerbation of the war against youth crime, have chosen toswitch sides. Deep down, however, they are still the same. In short, itis out of the frying pan and into the fire for Alex. The pair decide totake revenge for the “old soma”‘s abuses against them. They take himin the open countryside where they beat him to a pulp and leave himin a pool of his own blood.

And the coincidences are not over yet. When he finally manages tostand up, Alex wanders around the countryside until he turns up at thehouse of the writer whose wife he had raped and whose manuscript ofA Clockwork Orange he had destroyed. As soon as he gets in Alex rec-ognizes him immediately. The writer however does not recognize Alexbecause during that night of “ultraviolence” Alex and his mates werewearing carnival masks. The writer (whose name is also Alexander)welcomes him, cares for him, nourishes him and asks questions abouthis misadventures. We learn that he is a political representative criticalof the government in power, and therefore against methods of socialrehabilitation such as the Ludovico Cure. For Alexander, Alex is a vic-tim of a sick society that he knows only too well: his wife died shortlyafter the terrible violence she suffered. Alex is also the victim of anunscrupulous and repressive government. The string of misfortunesthat struck this young man on his release from jail is the best evidenceof how dangerous these methods are, of what it means to be no longera human being but only a choiceless machine.

While Alex spends the night snuggled up in a cosy bed, finding acopy of A Clockwork Orange and reading some pages, Alexanderdecides to utilize Alex’s troubles for political ends by involving partycolleagues and journalists. He also pens an article-statement signed byAlex (“the common people must know”) and gathers in his house agroup of trustworthy friends. On resuming his conversation with Alex,the writer begins to pay attention to his glossary and his figures ofspeech which remind him of those he heard during that terrible nightof violence. He begins to suspect that Alex is responsible and a desireof revenge starts to stir within him. Alex is entrusted to three friendswho take him to a city apartment very similar to his parents’ one andlock him there while reassuring him about what is going to happen.Alex accepts because he has only one desire: to go back to his formerself, free from the conditionings of the Ludovico Cure. But this is theumpteenth betrayal. At some point he hears through the wall somemusic at full blast, and inevitably he begins to feel sick. He screams,cries for help but nobody replies; he tries to escape from the flat, but



realizes he can no longer go out. At this point he resolves to end it alland throws himself out of the window.

Miraculously he does not die. When he wakes up in the hospitalafter a week-long coma he receives the visit from Alexander’s threefriends and learns that he is once more on the front page of the news-papers, this time not as the first individual subjected to an efficacioustreatment of redemption of criminals, but as the exemplary victim ofrepressive methods of the state. He throws them out. He also throwsout his miserable parents who pay him a visit and ask him to comeback home. During his stay in the hospital, a large group of doctors andnurses look after him with real concern, treating him and nourishinghim with great care. After only a few days, during a psychologist visit,Alex starts talking about violence again with great gusto. It seems thatnot only has he overcome the shock of the fall but also the manipula-tion of the Ludovico Cure. The familiar minister of the Interior does notlet this opportunity slip. All smiles, he approaches Alex to shake hishand in front of dozens of photographers and video cameras. Oncemore Alex lets things happen, claims to be his friend and receives inexchange a new stereo and a great amount of records. Needless to say,he immediately decides to listen to the Ninth, enjoying it blissfully.

We then arrive at the last chapter of the book (the one missing inthe American edition used by Kubrick as the subject of his movie)which begins with a scene apparently akin to the first one of the novel.Alex is sitting at the Korova Milkbar with his gang of “soma”, he isdressed in the latest fashion and is drinking the “milk with knives”. Wehave come full circle. But soon we realize that this is not true. Alex hasa normal job, he is tired and bored, he wonders how to spend his timeand no drug seems able to offer a suitable solution. He has evenbecome careful with money, and rather than the great symphonicorchestras he used to enjoy once, he would now rather listen to cham-ber music. Disaffected, he drifts into the night and when it comes to themoment to commit acts of violence he would rather stand back andobserve his mates having fun. Eventually one evening he tells his gangmates that he does not fancy any violence and he sets off walking thestreets by himself. He goes into a bar and, as a last coincidence, hemeets his old friend Pete completely transformed, sitting there with hiswife sipping a drink. Pete tells him about his bourgeois life, all work,family and harmless evenings with friends. Alex puts it down to aquestion of age and Pete replies that, being older now, he had (andwanted) to change his lifestyle.

The last scene of the book unfolds from here. Alex takes a walk byhimself in the streets at night and questions his feelings. He asks him-self why he no longer wants his previous life and, above all, why healso feels the desire to start a family and have kids. It is, precisely, a



question of age. He has changed because he has grown up and now heunderstands that the values he believed in must be turned around; it isnot true that youth fight euphorically to keep their own individualityagainst the “great social machines” that want to repress them; they arelike small machines that act without thinking and it is the world that islike an enormous orange, no matter how dirty and disgusting.

4. How to make sense of this kind a story? Obviously it is possible toread it from many different points of view, each pertinent in its ownway. For instance, we could begin, as often has been done, from thebiographical data, noting how Burgess’ own wife was raped by a gangof thugs a few years before he wrote the novel; or how the writer him-self was astonished, on coming back to his native country after a longtime spent in Asia, by the strong media-influenced transformations ofBritish society; or how he was a great music lover as well as a compos-er. It is also worth noting (and not merely to add some anecdotalflavour) how this story about alleged brainwashing has been writtenby a man who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour (laterfound to be misdiagnosed). Another trail to follow might be the his-toric-artistic one: certainly A Clockwork Orange has a place within thewell established English literary tradition of the satirical-fantasticnovel and, perhaps, widening our viewpoint, within the eighteen cen-tury genre of the European Bildungsroman. It has also been oftenobserved how this book takes up the theme of so called “dystopias”(otherwise called anti-utopias or negative utopias), whose main nine-teen century exponents are Aldous Huxley with Brave New World(1932) and George Orwell with 1984 (1949). The allegorical structure ofthe narrative set-up and the lack of verisimilitude of several scenes arejustified precisely within this framework.

What is most interesting for us however is to sketch some analyti-cal elements that will allow us to understand better and in more detailthe link between the explicit communicative aim of the novel and itsinternal textual form, to grasp in other words how Burgess’ novel—beyond the explicit intentions of his author—does theory by its ownmeans, which are, precisely, those of literary textuality. The book is anovel with a thesis, reiterated several times by Burgess in a paratextu-al way in various interviews and interventions.

In technical terms we may say that there is a thematic level of thenovel that can be positioned approximately in the middle of a complexhierarchy of textual stratifications with decreasing complexity and con-creteness, as little by little we move from the decidedly linguisticsphere to that of a full-blown narrative. The point is to see how—through language, figurative and enunciative choices, and the



underlying narrative strategies and value systems—the novel gives astructure to those themes that we have encountered when we retold theplot: the question of violence and evil, free will and political-ideologi-cal conditionings, the social problem of youth gangs, the conflictsbetween the young and the old, the opposition between arts and themedia, the influence of the media on widespread social behaviours, therelevance of visual experience, the theme of music and catharsis and soon and so forth.

5. In relation to the plane of linguistic surface, the relevance of the socalled nadsat (Russian term roughly translated as teenager), a linguisticmicrocode specifically invented by Burgess for his novel has often beenremarked upon. More than a real language it is rather a lexicon ofabout two hundreds terms coined by lifting words from different lan-guages (especially Russian, but also French, Italian, German, Spanishetc.), mixed with elements of babytalk, onomatopoeic sounds fromcomic strips, cockney twists and antique Elizabethan expressions. A lit-tle bizarre glossary whose rhetorical effect is the same as an everydaystreet slang, a “dialect of the tribe”—as Brodsky will say1—with no ref-erence to any existing parlance and, for this reason, not subject to thepremature ageing so typical of this type of social microcodes. It is aplayful and carefree expression, childish and violent, rough, creativebut ultimately redundant: a perfect calling card for the protagonist ofthe novel.

Many have remarked upon the alienating effect created by the per-vasive and continuous use of this slang employed by Alex (as theexternal narrator that recalls his story when it is finally over) and byhim and his “droogs” (as characters of the novel). Burgess himselfspoke of his linguistic invention as a kind of “protective mist” betweenthe story told and the reader, a sort of filter between the dark Dionysianuniverse of his invented characters and the world of daily experiencenormally inhabited by the readers. This means that, like any initiaticcode (both linguistic and non linguistic), the nadsat triggers a doublemovement of exclusion-refusal and inclusion-acceptance. Initially thereaders feel that the novel they are about to read is rejecting them; theydo not understand the slang, feel excluded from that world and tend towholly refuse it. Little by little, however, if they persist in reading, thesituation reverses. By gradually grasping the meaning of the fewwords that compose this slang and the general sense of the eventsdescribed, the readers are sucked in Alex and his “droogs”‘s world,they understand their language and, more in general, their rules and


1 p. 91.


their principles. More than moralistically protecting the reader fromAlex’s ultraviolence, the nadsat performs rather the opposite functionby creating a sense of inclusive participation, of initiatory identificationbased not so much on the ethical sharing of values but on an aestheticsense of belonging to a group where “we get on with each other”because the same slang is spoken.

6. In relation to the deeper textual level, what we can call the semanticarmoury of the text, it is easy to notice the typical procedure of mythi-cal narration in which the given topical content is preceded by the samecontent, only inverted. In other words, if—beneath the triadic structurein which the book is divided—we take into account the semantic con-tents of Burgess’ novel, we realize that the element considered aspositive (the freedom of choice) is obtained by overturning the nega-tive ones (violent behaviour, conditioning toward the good) shownpreviously. If the amputated version of the last chapter seems toresume the initial situation, or at least to leave open a series of interpre-tative ambiguities (more on this later apropos Kubrick’s movie), in thenovel Alex’s final position is radically different from his initial one. Ifwe take the modal category being able to define the character’s compe-tence, we realize that Alex moves from a can-do (he is free to chooseevil) to a cannot-do (he is unable to make any choice) to reach finally acan-not-do (he decides to not commit evil deeds regardless of his con-ditioning). At this textual level the causes of such psychologicalchanges matter little. What matters is rather the double logical passagefrom a content to its negation, and from this to the affirmation of a con-tent which is the opposite of the initial one. In this sense Burgess’ workhas something mythic about it.

Things turn out to be even more complex if we consider the cate-gory of wanting. Seemingly, this modality, which participates to theconstruction of the personality of the character, goes through the sametwo logical operations that we have just described. Alex wants to doevil, then he does not want to do it, finally he wants not to do it.Clearly, this raises some problems. Firstly, not-wanting-to-do is linked toa state of powerlessness that precedes it, in other words, a not-being-able. When Alex does not want to do evil, the reason is that he cannotmaterially do it, as to perform evil (or just to think about it), wouldmake him physically sick. Hence, the not-wanting is linked to a somat-ic condition more than a cognitive one. Secondly, are we certain that thefirst and the second wanting have the same nature, or else, that both theAlex of the beginning and the Alex of the end have the same capacityfor choice? Clearly, this is not the case. What is actually different is thatAlex makes this choice consciously. This awareness is lacking at the



beginning, but exists at the end. It is not a simple willingness to do butrather something prior to that, in other words, it is wanting-to-want. Theinitial Alex is a non-subject, a pure force that acts only on the ground ofhis own pleasures, and who, for this reason, needs substances likedrugs and music that intensify his destructive energy. When his matessuggest functionalizing the violence (in order to make money) Alexreplies that he has no need to connect with a “modal object” (i.e.money). If he wants something he just grabs it. He does not need themediation of a tool to seize what he wants. His actions, in this sense,are the absolute negation of any practical valorisation of things. Rather,they are accomplished in the name of a ludic-aesthetic valorisation. Atthe end of the novel, on the contrary, Alex is utterly and completely asubject who takes conscious responsibility for his own choices andactions. Not only does money become important to him, but he earnsit by working, he does not part with it lightly and he uses it to create apersonal space, a life project, a future. He shifts to a vision of the worldassociated with a supposedly utopian valorisation. The true oppositionis no longer between good and evil, between desiring good and desir-ing evil, but between a conscious wanting-to-want (given content) and apure wanting as an end in itself (inverted content). At this level of thetext we may therefore argue that Burgess would have had all the rea-sons to keep the last chapter of the novel. Without it, Alex wouldessentially have reverted to his previous self, a non subject who wantsspontaneously, but who does not want, ultimately, to want. The pointis rather to understand—by interrogating different textual levels—what the motives of the American editor (and Kubrick’s ones) couldhave been by staging the story without Alex’s conscious decision to bea wanting subject.

7. The narrative level of the text represents its deep semantic armour.To this many other levels are superimposed which complexify andmake more subtle our general theoretical argument. If we consider theintermediate, discursive strata of the text, we appreciate how theybuild a dense series of references, with evident parallelisms and asmany u-turns. Not only does this series of references enrich the literaryqualities of the text and aesthetically connote the central theme of thebook concerning the problem of evil and free will; its main role is tobuild a complex battery of additional associations and a strong seman-tic density that makes the core thesis even sharper as well as moreproblematic. In other words, textual rhetoric produces its own dis-course and communicates it with its own specific means.

For example, with regard to enunciation, it suffices to think of theimplicit communicative contract between author and reader or



between the figures (inscribed in the text) of the narrator and the narra-tee. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the text builds asort of seamless line between these two figures thanks to some interme-diate characters present in the textual enunciate who play the doublerole of producers and receptors of discourse: Alex himself, but alsoAlexander, Deltoid, the chaplain, the director, the minister and so on.

To begin with Alex is simultaneously a character and narrator, andtherefore a figure of both enunciate and enunciation. He talks abouthimself and the world he inhabits, to the extent that all knowledge thatreaches the reader is filtered through his words. His word is chargedwith the full expressivity of the nadsat which filters and interprets real-ity by its rhetorical games of condensations and semantic shifts.Moreover, it exists as a statement first and sermon after. Alex is the onewho takes the floor and in so doing he emerges as the subject who pro-duces a discourse with very specific aims (to recount the adventures of“Your Humble Narrator And Friend”, as he is fond of repeating) in anintersubjective relation as specific as those aims, a relation with the“brother” readers with whom he seals a strong pact of mutual compre-hension (in the double meaning of the word). Facing Alex there isalways a narratee, an imaginary reader with specific knowledges,affects, beliefs and values, whom the narrator addresses not only to beknown, but also to be judged and justified. The more the narrateeenters in a conflicting relation with the rest of the world, where nobodyis interested in hearing Alex’s story (and certainly not in grasping itsprofound meaning) the more he becomes important. The world ismade of victims and tormentors, it is a place of brutal conflicts andhypocritical pacts. The readers whom Alex addresses exist beyond thisworld, they are those “brothers” that Alex has sought three times andwho three times have betrayed him: his gang “soma”, the prisoners inhis cell, Alexander and his party comrades. An accurate reconnaissanceof all the textual sites where this communicative relationship betweennarrator and narratee emerges may confirm this reference to a universeof ‘other’ values and passions, one other than that described and com-mented upon in the narrative enunciate. Alex’s autobiographicalstance does not corroborate the narrated content, almost as if it was aconfession or an intimate reminiscence tending to seal the discoursewithin the autonomous and fictional sphere of the narrating Ego. Theautobiographical data has rather an opening function: it proposes oncemore the fundamental contrasts present on the communicative axis, itamplifies and re-launches them, finally immersing the readership in it,engaging it as an integral component of the narrated universe or—which is the same—projecting such a fictitious universe in the world ofhis concrete, lived or at least probable, experience.

Alex is not the only discursive filter existing in the text. A funda-



mental enunciative role belongs to Alexander too, who is partiallyAlex’s alter ego (“he is another Alex”, the protagonist comments whenhe sees his name on the book cover),2 but also the author’s obvious del-egate within the text. This is so not only because, like Burgess (as weknow from extra-textual information) the Alexander character has awife who is raped by a gang of thugs, but also because he writes a booktitled A Clockwork Orange (in which he illustrates a thesis in favour offree will similar to the one expressed in the book in which he exists asan imaginary entity). This thesis is, in principle, analogous to Burgess’in saying that although men are “turned into machines” [...] “they werereally” [...] “more like a natural growth like a fruit.”3 Alexander’s bookhowever shows several differences with Burgess’. It is part of it, there-fore it ought to be linked with all the other components that give it aspecific meaning. For example, it is written twice. The first version isdestroyed while still at a typescript stage by Alex himself during thewild night recounted in the first three chapters of the novel; the secondversion—we may assume—is drafted, completed and published whileAlex is in prison, which is also the time when Alexander loses his wife(who dies from the shock of the rape), a time when the mourningwriter loses his lucidity. In short, Alexander writes a book that sociallyjustifies violence soon after the thugs have killed his wife, in a moodthat—as we see from his behaviour towards Alex, who is first wel-comed in his house and then pushed towards suicide—is ambivalent tosay the least, if not utterly ambiguous, unresolved and erratic. Forinstance, when Alex holds the book, he immediately notices that it is“written in a very bezoomny like style, full of Ah and Oh and that cal”;4

and thus he comments: “I didn’t like the shoom of this at all, O mybrothers, and wondered how bezoomny this F. Alexander really was,perhaps driven bezoomny by his wife’s snuffing it.”5 This commentought to be connected with what Alex thinks in the first part of thenovel when, recalling the title of the book that he had just destroyed(“the name was about a clockwork orange”), is sorry not to “have tol-chocked them [Alexander and wife] both harder and ripped them toribbons on their own floor.”6 Burgess’ thesis is taken on board withinthe book by a character whose word is devalued, at any rate problem-atic, questionable, suspicious and surely a bit pathetic. The same occurswith the other character who expresses the same thesis, the chaplain ofthe prison, who is the only actor who, by repeating the refrain various-

2 p. 1243 p. 1244 p. 124 5 p. 1246 p. 30



ly disseminated by the narrator Alex during the story (“what’s it goingto be then, eh?”), seems to want to emulate its enunciative act.7

However, not only is the chaplain a coward and treacherous individualwho for career reasons does not hesitate to become an informer of theprison director and to reveal the prisoners’ intimate secrets; he isalways stinking of alcohol, he is constantly drunk, even when, duringthe Sunday sermons, he embarks on confused rambling speeches aboutthe freedom of choice that would characterizes human beings.8

Finally, it should be remembered, with regards to the enunciativestrategies, that not only is the thesis in favour of free will made ques-tionable because of the weak persuasive authority of the people whoare defending it, but it is also questioned by other possible theses con-cerning youth violence and the meaning of evil. It suffices to look atDeltoid (who does not understand the causes of juvenile criminalbehaviour),9 at the articles in the newspaper that Alex reads (dividedinto supporters of the guilt camp and the innocent camp),10 at the direc-tor of the prison (who prefers the moral of “an eye for an eye”),11 at theminister (who is only concerned with clearing out the prisons of ordi-nary inmates to fill them with political prisoners),12 at Alexander’sfriends (who exploit Alex’s misfortunes and exacerbate them only toshow off).13 So, rather than exposing a specific philosophical thesis,Burgess’ book seems to bring to the fore an unresolved problematic issuebetween two opposed ethical perspectives, one that—as Burgess hasclaimed several times and as many critics have restated—relaunchesthe well-known predicament between the Augustinian point of view(man is born evil because of the original sin) and the Pelagian one (manis born good and then becomes evil because of the world).

8. The enunciative dialogism within the novel is supported by the artic-ulation of the figurative plane of the text, where the textual machine ofparallelisms and u-turns is continually at work. It is mainly at this levelthat Burgess shows his mastery as a writer, transforming an abstractphilosophical thesis into a veritable literary artefact, and managingwith great care the dense series of images evoked in the course of thenarration in a relentless game of echoes that is striking in its calculatedprecision. Not only has this imaginary geometry the role of providing

7 p. 628 p. 769 p. 3310 p. 3511 p. 7412 p. 73



the artwork with a semantic density capable of revealing its aestheticvalue, but it also builds “figurative logics” that double up, confirm orquestion the explicit themes of the argument. Rather than pointing torhetorical artifices individually (i.e. metaphors, allegories, simili-tudes...etc.) that link some concepts and some images in a relationwhich is often only lexical, it is better to assess the way in which the fig-urative plane is spread along the entire text, beginning from someexplicit pertinences (called isotopie) emerging from it.

These isotopie (sometimes justifying and sometimes producing theunderlying thematic level) are present in almost any strata that com-pose the figurative level. First of all there is the visual aspect (whichKubrick will obviously develop to a great extent), where for instancethe basic element of the light (and the opposition day/night) has itsown meaningful value, and where chromatisms are set up with greatcare (white and red, assigned respectively to negative and positive ele-ments, are mutually opposed). There is the figurative aspect, forinstance the one concerning clothing, meticulously described in the dif-ferent stages of the story with relevant forms of opposition andcomplementarity (it suffices to think of the look of the Korova Milkbarhabitués). There is the aspect more properly perceptual, whichinvolves the whole sensorial apparatus beyond vision; it suffices tothink of the role that taste plays (for example in the opposition betweenhome-made food and prison food); linked to this is the theme of theexpulsion from the body of food as vomit; moreover, there is the roleplayed by smell: almost every environment, person or thing has a spe-cific odour; without mentioning hearing which, thanks to the music,pervades the whole story. We will discuss all this more extensively inthe next chapter when we will address the issue of corporeality.

9. Some figurative elements implicitly distributed along the text rein-force the thematic argument, sometimes making it even more refined.For instance, the dialectic between individual and society cannot beresolved in the terms of a simple opposition between individual andcollective. On a closer inspection, two types of individual subjects arefound in the book (simple numbers or individuals) and two types ofcollective subjects (the small group and the society as a whole). Alex’sstory is not so much the story of an individual subject fighting againstthe whole world, as the story of a variable figurative entity that travelsthrough a series of stages which represent as many aspects of his indi-viduation. At the beginning there is what we may call a partitive totality,that is, a group formed by a series of similar individuals. It is Alex’sgang that acts as a freestanding entity against other subjects, be themsingles (the professor with the books, the drunk man) or other groups



(Billyboy’s gang, the writer and his wife). However, within the groupthere is always a very clear hierarchy, an internal differentiation thatleads to the isolation of one member from all the others. Alex is notsimply a gang member. He is also endowed with some specific quali-ties (musical tastes, the awareness of his social role) that turn him intoan integral unity. It is the prison that reverses him into just a number;he loses his proper name, he is now called 6655321 and the only role heplays is that of a person whose contribution is of being a partitive unitthat fills the already overcrowded cells of the national jails. The next,and final step, is that of the integral totality; little matters from this pointof view if such a totality has the features of the family he longed for ina mature phase of existence (as the complete version of the book pro-poses), or rather of the society that welcomes him hypocritically in itsbosom (as the cut-short version of the last chapter recounts).

10. By connecting some apparently minor figures distributed along thetext we may allow thematic elements otherwise unnoticed to emerge.This is the case for example of the Christian isotopia (not immediatelyobvious in the novel but picked up and amplified by Kubrick) thatallows us to read Alex’s adventures as a Passion analogous to the evan-gelic one. First of all, Alex reads the Gospel in the prison chapel,although in the beginning he is not interested in it as much as in the OldTestament because it “is more like all preachy govoreeting than fightingand the old in-out”.14 Prompted by the chaplain to meditate on it, Alexshows particular interest in the Passion scenes (“I read all about thescourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch”15)until, encouraged by the music, he identifies with the tormentors ofJesus: “while the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazziesand viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchock-ing and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighthof Roman fashion”.16 Furthermore, in one of the films shown during theLudovico Cure, some soldiers are crucified to trees by their Japanesetormentors.17 It will not be long however before the roles of tormentorand victim are overturned. Alex will be betrayed three times, aban-doned and subjected to terrible tortures. During the Cure, when heattempts to fight back against the umpteenth hypodermic, a nurse sticksa needle in his hand “real brutal and nasty.”18 A few days later he real-

14 p. 6415 p. 6416 p. 6417 p. 8418 p. 93



izes that the Cure is working when, beaten up by the same nurse, hewould rather “get the hit than give it” thinking: “if that veck had stayedI might even have like presented the other cheek.”19 Brodsky uses simi-lar words to show the Minister how effective his Technique is: “He willbe your true Christian [...], ready to turn the other cheek, ready to becrucified rather than crucify.”20 In the light of all this, the failed suicideattempt might be interpreted as a sort of Resurrection.

11. Another significant isotopia that circulates in the novel, one that wehave already partially hinted at and that we will encounter again at theend of the next chapter, concerns the bookish universe. As we know,Alex inhabits a world dominated by images and vision; he is first andforemost a seeing and perceiving subject, a body/flesh in action.Rather like in Huxley or Bradbury’s dystopian novels, for him, theworld of books has an utterly negative connotation. Not only does hedestroy them with spectacular and inveterate vandalism, but anyonewho, in one way or another, has something to do with books willbecome a potential enemy. This occurs both when Alex plays the roleof tormentor and when he plays the role of the victim.

The first person to be beaten up in a violent episode is an old gen-tleman, a “schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open”,simply because “he had books under his arm” and “was coming roundthe corner from the Public Biblio.”21 Even before treating the “olderbourgeois type”—guilty in their eyes of being “a filthy-minded oldskitebird”—to “the old boot-crush”, Alex and his droogs destroy thebooks he is carrying with manic rage. “This is sheer wantonness andvandal work”, the unfortunate man tries to remonstrate. In so sayinghe uncovers the deeper motivations of the four degenerates, that is, tooffer a spectacle of their destructive skills by taking it out precisely onthose objects they cannot handle very well, but which they confusedlyperceive as something belonging to a world that is utterly other.Similarly, the treatment Alexander suffers draws on the fact that hischaracter belongs to the universe of books: “there was [...] thischelloveck [...] with horn-rimmed otchkies on him, and on a table wasa typewriter and all papers scattered everywhere, but there was one lit-tle pile of paper like that must have been what he’d already typed, sohere was another intelligent type bookman type like that we’d filliedwith some hours back, but this one was a writer not a reader.”22 In this

19 p. 9620 p. 10121 p. 822 p. 20



case too, before taking it out on people, hitting and raping them, Alexlashes against the books. He destroys the typescript copy of what isdestined to become for him a crucial text, even if for no other reasonthan its title A Clockwork Orange. Again, the reactions of the “bookish”type are immediate and furious: “Then I started to tear up the sheetsand scatter the bits over the floor, and this writer moodge went sort ofbezoomny and made for me with his zoobies clenched.”23

Tellingly, one of the most evident signs of the transformationimposed on Alex during his confinement in jail consists in the fact thathe becomes a reader of the quintessential Book, even though he makesof the Bible what we might define as a productive use. He enthuses forthe scenes of sex and violence, and imagines taking part in them.24

When in the third part of the story the situation is turned around, it isthe world of books that strikes him with violence and determination.He is assaulted in the “Public Biblio” by a bunch of readers includingthe “older bourgeois” that he had treated to “the old boot-crush” at thebeginning of the story. While he is savagely beaten up by Dim andBillyboy, who are now policemen, the driver who escorts them readsimpassively a “malenky bit of a book” and does not lift his eyes fromthe pages until he reaches the last one.25 Alexander, a writer, pusheshim to commit suicide. And even the nurse who should look after himduring his stay in hospital keeps herself occupied by reading “somebook that was all very dim print and you could viddy it was a storybecause of a lot of inverted commas.”26 The turnaround that occurs atthe moment of his attempted suicide, when two book covers show himthe path for his ultimate liberation, is therefore particularly significant.

12. The figurative isotopia we are mostly concerned with right now,however, is the one grafted upon the title of the novel, one which is, bymise en abyme, also the title of a book present in the novel. The rarecockney expression “clockwork orange”, as Burgess has made clear inseveral occasions, was used in the post-war period in London in sen-tences such as “queer as a clockwork orange” to describe an eccentricperson or an odd situation. If the trait d’union between the image of theorange and the clock is surely the roundness of both figures, we mayassume that what differentiates them is, more than the colours, the tac-tical sensations of softness and rigidity that characterize, respectively,the fruit and the machine. Thanks to this double movement of conver-

23 p. 2124 p. 6425 p. 11826 p. 132



gence and differentiation, the most evident property of a clock (to havean internal precision mechanism of time scanning) ends up being takenon board by the orange, which, although maintaining its visual aspect,must lose its own most evident quality (to be an organic natural prod-uct). What emerges is a very specific effect of signification, one of beingqueer, odd, bizarre, eccentric perhaps even slightly ridiculous.

By using this expression as the title of his novel, Burgess seems towant to recapture not only the final effect of meaning as the wholesemantic process that has produced it. In so doing, he takes quite liter-ary the cockney expression, turning a mere comparison (odd like aclockwork orange) into a much stronger causal relationship (oddbecause a clockwork orange). Not only is Alex a queer being, but he isqueer precisely because he undergoes a process of transformation fromthe organic to the artificial without, however, losing the exterior fea-tures of the human being. Alex is portrayed as something natural thatis made to work in a clockwork way, with the mechanical precision ofa clock. In short, the clockwork orange becomes the figurative manifes-tation of an oxymoron, of a contradiction in terms, which, in the theoryof signification, is called a “complex term”: something that synthesizesin a single entity two opposite elements. These are the elements thatboth book and movie criticism has described as the organic and themachinic, the possible and the necessary, the freedom and the constric-tion, pulsions and civilization, unconscious and conscience, nature andculture and so on. However, it must be said that this series of opposi-tions that intuitively emerges in an initial reading of the novel is likelyto impoverish it and create misunderstandings.

13. A more careful analysis of the text, capable of taking into accountthe whole discursive configuration in which the clockwork orange isplaced, calls for a greater interpretative consideration. Our swift recon-struction of the enunciation strategies has already highlighted how thethesis in favour of free will (i.e. in favour of a “non mechanizedorange”) is presumed in the text in a way that is anything but apodic-tic. We may imagine the same thing occurring to the cockneyexpression and to the oxymoronic figure that sustains it. For instance,from the beginning this expression is problematic for the protagonist.During the raid in the writer’s home, Alex reads the title of the manu-script the writer is working on: “Then I looked at its top sheet, andthere was the name—A CLOCKWORK ORANGE—and I said: ‘That’sa fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’”.27 Theincomprehension about the meaning of the title induces an obvious

27 p. 21



bewilderment at the emphatic tone of the book and indirectly at its con-tent. Alex reads out loud some of its passages, passages which discussthe “sweetness” of man as divine creature upon whom are forciblyimposed “laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation”—while Dim makes “the old lip-music” as a commentary.28 Later on,while he listens to Bach back home, Alex begins to understand themeaning of that title and he regrets not to have beaten Alexander andhis wife with an even greater violence.29 If incomprehension led toscorn, comprehension leads to frustration and the desire to hit evenharder. However, when in the second part of the novel the situation isreversed, Alex uses the same expression to describe the pitiful condi-tion he finds himself in. He shouts to the audience who, after the Cure,amuses itself by watching him perform various tests that show histransformation: “Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into allthis? Am I like just some animal or dog? [...] Am I just to be like a clock-work orange?”.30 Once again the cockney expression reveals its entireefficacy: “I didn’t know what made me use those slovos, brothers,which just came like without asking into my gulliver. And that shut allthose vecks up for some reason for a minoota or two”. Finally, in thethird part of the book the expression comes back again as the title of thebook that Alexander has had to rewrite “in a very bezoomny style”which now has been published with the original title. Recognizing thewriter, Alex thinks: “A Clockwork Orange, that had been it. It was funnythat that stuck in my mind.”31 And when soon after he announces tothe writer to “have heard of A Clockwork Orange before”, the writerbegins to have suspicions about the past identity of his protégé.32 Inshort, for Alex, the expression in question becomes much more than astrange linguistic artifice that creates the effect of meaning: “strange-ness”. It possesses specific performative values, insofar as it does notdescribe states of the world, but it rather transforms it, provokingactions and reactions, affections and disaffections.

But what are the characteristics of the machine that, grafted upon theorange and its characteristics, can modify its essence? The surface text ofthe novel tells us very little about this. Contrary to what one may expect,the text offers neither a detailed phenomenology of the machine, nor anaccurate explanation of why it should be considered negatively forhuman beings. What the characters of the chaplain and the writer repeatis only the profound ethical difference between being able to choose (typ-

28 p. 2129 p. 3030 p. 10031 p. 12032 p. 121



ical of human beings) and not being able to choose (typical of machines).The chaplain explains the question in these terms: “the question iswhether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comesfrom within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man can-not choose he ceases to be a man.”33 The only explicit pronouncement ofthe link between the impossibility of choice and a mechanical device isvoiced by Alexander. Speaking to Alex, who he is welcomed and lookedafter with kindness, he says: “You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punish-ment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you intosomething other than a human being. You have no power of choice anylonger. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machinecapable only of good. [...] A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.[...] To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not,surely, be seen as any triumph for any government.”34 Clearly the entireanalysis is carried out through a series of logical operations that wemight reformulate as an inference of this kind: a man is not a man if hecannot choose; a man who cannot choose is a machine. The text does notsay anything else about men or about machines. The indirect corrobora-tion of this is offered by the jargon spoken by doctor Branom who (eitherfrom bad conscience or from genuine belief) describes the Ludovico Cureby employing the opposite polarization: “Life is a very wonderful thing.[...] The processes of life, the make-up of the human organism, who canfully understand these miracles? [...] What is happening to you now iswhat should happen to any normal healthy human organism contem-plating the actions of the forces of evil.”35

14. On closer inspection, however, things seem to be even more multi-faceted. Even though the image of the orange appears simply as acompound term that links the two opposite entities (the organic andthe artificial), these two figurative elements engage in meaningful rela-tionships with other figurative elements present in the same discursiveconfiguration. This is already clear in the description of the drug expe-rience at the Korova Milkbar. If the “milk with knives” “would sharpenyou up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one”,36 synthet-ic substances such as synthemesc, drencrom or vellocet produce aradically different effect. They make one “to get in touch with God”,but at the price of losing “your name and your body.”37 One starts star-

33 p. 6734 p. 12235 p. 8636 p. 537 p. 7



ing at objects such as a shoe or a boot where extremely vivid and fan-tastic universes are perceived, and ends up becoming inhuman, adownright thing. This is how Burgess describes a “chelloveck” “in theland” on synthemesc: “It was probable that this was his third or fourthlot that evening, for he had that pale inhuman look, like he’d become athing, and like his litso was really a piece of chalk carved.”38 And whenDim amuses himself by stamping on his foot, he does not feel anythingbecause he was “now all above the body.”39

On the other hand, the “milk with knives” produces an unadulter-ated vital energy that intensifies somatic capacities, increases thefeelings of euphoria and generates the nightly “ultraviolence”.Whereas Alex, lover of elegance and art connoisseur, experiences thisdeployment of violence in a ‘creative’ way, a simple and brutish beinglike Dim ends up externalizing it in a destructive way, exactly like ananimal that hits with staggering force and foolishly laughs at the suf-ferings he is inflicting upon the unfortunate victim. Dim is alwaysdescribed as a ludicrous beast: he is a “clowny animal”40 that lets off a“dog-howl” or an “old guff”;41 he has a “great big horsy gape of agrin”;42 he is a “bolshy bezoomny animal,”43 a “doggie,”44 a “sheep.”45

Moreover, it is no coincidence that, from this point of view, the “veck”that replaces Dim in the band that Alex reorganizes in the last chapteris called Bully.46 Nonetheless, the epithet of animal is not given to thischaracter simply because he is stupid. The novel is full of charactersthat deserve the title of animal. When Alex is arrested the police cararrives “with a filthy great dropping siren-howl, like some bezoomnyanimal”;47 the police cell is full of “real oozhassny animal type vecks”;48

the prison is repeatedly described as a “stinking grahzny zoo”49 wherethe inmates go “marrrrre and baaaaaa like animals”50 that behave “likean ape”;51 after the first session of the Ludovico Cure, Brodsky “wad-

38 p. 2439 p. 24.40 p. 2441 p. 25-116 42 p. 4243 p. 4544 p. 4545 p. 4546 p. 14047 p. 5348 p. 5849 p. 63-6150 p. 65 51 p. 65



dled out” and Branom has a “very droogy [...]smile”;52 the bystandersat the suburban bar eat “going wolf wolf wolf”;53 Alexander is “veryalert like some skorry animal.”54 And with no mention of the real ani-mals, such as the cats the old lady loves to surround herself with, whoare the main culprits responsible for the misadventures of the protago-nist. It is to support them, once their owner is dead, that the judgedecides to sell Alex’s beloved sound system.

Animals and objects, as much as men and machines, should not tobe taken as simple qualifying elements ascribed to some characters andnot others. They are rather figures that maintain their own relativeautonomy and are assigned to different characters in specific circum-stances. Alex himself is sometimes called an animal, for example by thetwo young girls that he takes home after having been at the recordshop; but also when, at the beginning of the book, he yelps “like a dog-gie”55 instigating his mates to recklessly seize the night; and especiallywhen, soon after the Cure, he is “howling,”56 is an “animal or dog,”57

and “snarled doggy-wise.”58 Only once he is “a thing”, but only toDeltoid’s eyes soon after the police beating59 and, curiously, not whenhe comes back to the Korova and mistakenly takes milk with syn-themesc.60

The text inserts all these elements in a discursive configurationendowed with a precise internal structure. Although the enunciativedialogism strategically built by the text itself leads to a multiplicationof perspectives (Alex/Deltoid, Alexander/Brodsky, Alex/Alexander,Alex/Dim...but also Narrator/Character) which problematizes anydefinite attribution of meaning to the different figurative emergencies,it is possible however to outline a series of logical relationships amongthe figures, as well as a series of transitions and transformations fromone to the next. For instance, a relation of contradiction between menand objects clearly emerges. Even prior to the machines, it is things thatoppose men, insofar as things are the inhuman effects of a process ofnegation of humanity and of absolute seepage from the body.Machines, in turn, are placed in a relation of contradiction with ani-mals, pure vital energy that is manifest destructively (in the instance ofDim) or as a state of simple passivity towards events and external sit-

52 p. 8553 p. 10354 p. 12455 p. 756 p. 9957 p. 10058 p. 14259 p. 5760 p. 111



uations (in the instance of the inmates). Besides, between objects (puremateriality) and animals (pure organicity) we grasp a relation of oppo-sition. Two different areas are thus delineated. On one hand, we findmen and animals (the sphere of the living, organicity, corporeality) in arelation of complementarity; on the other, in the same relation of com-plementarity, we find machines and objects (sphere of the non-living,materiality, objectivity). In between them we have zones of overlap-ping, transition and synthesis, thanks to the presence of external agentsthat induce a series of figurative transformations: synthetic substancessuch as synthemesc or vellocet that transform men into things; the“milk with knives” that gives energy to animals and leads them to per-form a choice (hence approaching humanity); the Ludovico Cure thatdeprives humans of their possibility of choice, turning them into amachine. As we will see shortly, music has a far more complex role

.

15. Going back to the image with which we have begun, the clockworkorange, it seems clear that it is not so much a static element that syn-thesizes the two opposite terms of men and machines, as it is rather asite where a series of processes of transformation are carried out. In thebook these processes are so many, so complex and so multidirectionalto raise the suspicion that it may exist more than one way to interpretthe meaning of the clockwork orange (or clockwork oranges?). There isindeed an image that we have neglected so far and that we have addedimprecisely to the sphere of the living. It is the image, or better theseries of images, of the body. As the next chapter will illustrate, thebody is the specific site where all the transformations feasible withinthe configuration of the clockwork orange may occur. An orange ismore or less mechanical thanks to its corporeality and its expressiveand meaningful potentialities. Likewise, the opposite is also true. Amechanism may be more or less ascribed to an orange only by way ofthat complex and ambiguous organism which is rooted in the somatic.This is why the economy of signification in Burgess’ novel cannot beascribed, as many have believed, to the mere opposition betweennature and culture. The body has nothing natural about itself. It isalways already a social entity whose culturally constructed images (theorganism, the machine, the flesh, the envelope, etc.) mutate one intothe next and in doing so establish the body as a semiotic entity. Thedeep narrative transformations that occur within the novel are nothingbut this: translations among images of the body.



Chapter Three

Sensorial Flows in Burgess’ Novel

1. A careful reading of Burgess’ novel that wished to explore the roleplayed by corporeality would reveal the impossibility of consideringthe somatic dimension in the same way as one of the many other iso-topias that traverse the text (such as the bookish or the Christian one).Nor will it be possible to interpret such a dimension as a mere figura-tive element capable of generating further thematic developments. Thebody is this, yes, but also much more. It is a theme of the book, but alsothe site of production and communication of its meanings. It is an enti-ty with its own peculiar logic different from other logics. It is anelement that enters in a relation with other similar elements, yet in turnits constitutive parts can be disassembled, its processes of activationand transformation highlighted, its dimensions measured, its positionsidentified, its external and internal movements observed. As we haveseen at the end of the previous chapter, in order to be properlyexplained and understood, the figuration of the “clockwork orange”,built and distributed along the text, needs to be entirely reviewed byintroducing the somatic element. This chapter will show how this inser-tion of components is not without consequences, insofar as it implies areformulation of the configurative structure we have previously sug-gested and ultimately a new, original reading of the novel. Ourhypothesis is that in A Clockwork Orange the body is a fundamental andcomposite flux that can be experienced at several levels of significationand that ought to be taken as a privileged perspective from which to re-interpret the whole story. It is as if the tension between explicit thematicargumentation and implicit narrative, enunciative and figurative argu-mentations (that we have reconstructed earlier) was doubled up byanother meaning-producing element (the body), which simultaneouslyfounds it and destabilizes it. The body is both obstinate and paradoxi-cal, difficult to circumscribe and to define once and for all, but alsosomething which is constitutive of the network of meanings and themechanism of Chinese boxes that, to start with Burgess’ novel, ends upaffecting all its receptions and translations.

53


2. First and foremost, the body is the condition of possibility (or impos-sibility) of perception, as well as the site of its multiple implement-ations. It suffices to think of the visual experience, so constitutive andcrucial to the novel if for no other reason than here vision is different-ly modalized. In the course of the story the visual exploration of theworld through the eyes of the autobiographical narrator, i.e. the protag-onist, who is endowed with a basic being-able-to-see, reoccurs veryoften. No wonder that “viddy” is one of the most recurrent verbs in thetext. Also, one of the main objectives of the violence deployed by the“droogs” is to occlude vision, to drive their victims into not-being-able-to-see. The first “veck” who is treated to “the old boot-crush” by Alex’sgang and who is carrying a book on crystallography has first of all hisglasses shattered.1 One of Dim’s main forms of amusement is to slamhis beloved chain into the eyes of unfortunate victims to blind them, atreatment that he keeps in store, for example, for Billyboy’s “droogs.”2

Alex will suffer the same fate when, betrayed by his mates, he becomesa victim himself.3 In the third part of the book, Alex often keeps his eyesclosed when he is abused by his former victims. This is why when heis beaten up in the library he does not see anything.4 And the situationis again the same during the bashing at the hands of Dim and Billyboyin the open countryside.5 Opposed to this is the violence exercised bythe medical-prison institutions that force Alex to watch the movies ofthe Ludovico Technique, and plac him in the similarly unpleasant con-dition of not-being-able-not-to-see. Finally, there is a fourth instance: thebeing-able-not-to-see, i.e. to decide to suspend the daily visual experi-ence and to be able to do this preventatively. A positive moment ofincredible bliss that induces a sort of ecstatic state with closed eyes dif-ferent from the numerous dreams recounted in the book. It suffices tothink about Alex’s visions when he “shuts the glazzies” to better listento the music. His are visions of extraordinary and fanciful violence wellbeyond the violence he acts out for real.6

We may trace a similar series of possibilities and obstacles withregard to other sensorial pathways: hearing, smell, taste, touch andeven internal sensomotricity or visceral and muscular sensitivity. Morethan listing a series of case studies concerning different sense organstaken in their own traditional (and culturally determined) distinctions,it is more interesting to observe the ways in which the various sensor-


1 p. 92 p. 163 p. 53 4 p. 1155 p. 118 6 p. 29-64


ial processes are presented in the book in the terms of a primarysynaesthetic concoction made of interweavings and substitutions,overlappings and blendings between vision and hearing, smell andvision, taste and touch, hearing and visceral sensations, and so on andso forth. When for example Alex decides not to look, and closes hiseyes, he does so in order to better listen;7 similarly, to be forced to seeleads to a simultaneous modification of the listening conditions, amodification that in turn produces a series of effects on the generalplane of internal bodily sensations. But in the course of the book thereare also overlappings and mutual influences among the other senses(smell, taste, touch). For instance, the police cell where Alex is lockedup when he is arrested is described as a “very bright-lit whitewashedcantora, and it had a strong von that was a mixture of like sick andlavatories and beery rots and disinfectant” where “you could hearsome of the plennies in their cells cursing and singing.”8 Similarly, thelocation where the Ludovico Technique takes place is describedthrough sensorial overlapping of this type: “This was a very new build-ing and it had a new cold like sizy smell which gave you a bit of theshivers”;9 and also the hospital where Alex finds himself after hisattempted suicide is described in similar terms: “Where I was when Icame back to jeezny after a long black black gap of it might have been amillion years was a hospital, all white and with this von of hospitals youget, all like sour and smug and clean.”10 From this point of view the syn-themesc experience is exemplary as it makes one “viddy it all right, allof it, very clear”, but at the same time it makes the voices bounce aroundthe room provoking a curious sensation of internal shuddering.11 Thus,Alex’s body does not operate according to the usual way of the senseorgans, i.e. each one distinct from the other, only very occasionally com-ing together to create the notorious, poetic and temporary feelings ofsynesthesia. Rather, this is a kind of phenomenological “common sen-sorium” through which the perception of the self and the world isexercised, of the self in the world, of the others and with others, givingbirth (depending on instances, moments, local pertinences, strategicobjectives etc.) to sensorial dominants, sometimes visual, sometimes audi-tory, sometimes olfactory and so on. For Alex, the distinction ofsensoriality in some specific channels is not crucial, and certainly notnatural. Rather, it is constituted as the effect of specific perceptiveorganizations, where cognitive processes, behavioural attitudes and

Sensorial Flows in Burgess’ Novel 55

7 p. 298 p. 559 p. 7710 p. 13211 p. 7


intersubjective relationships have an active role as they interact with,orientate and rebuild perception. This is what will emerge more clearlywhen we will analyse in detail the Ludovico Technique and its figura-tive variables as they appear throughout the text.

3. To say that the body does not concern only the sphere of the sensiblebut includes also the intelligible in all its forms (cognition, praxis, inter-subjectivity etc.), is to say that it exceeds meaningful perceptualactivity, and that, in itself, it becomes significant, beginning with itspostures as they are described and thematized in the novel. Alex is notonly shown standing (his feet enveloped by “horrorshow” boots, pow-erful offending weapons that are always present regardless of fashiontrends); in some situations we find him laying down (when he sleeps,obviously, but also when he is confined in the cell camp bed or whenhe listens blissfully to the music in his own room...); in other situationshe is not standing, that is, he is sitting (the compulsory posture duringthe Cure); in others still he is not laying down (as a victim he often endsup crawling).

Alex’s body possesses a complex dynamicity. It takes on differentforms and positions. It occupies specific portions of space around itself,radiating in the surrounding environment its own capacity to producemeaning. This implies that the body acquires (and produces) meaningsin relation to the space where it is located, be it the spatiality it occu-pies or the one it is constituted by. On one hand, the body is alwayssituated within one or more spaces that contain it and the way that itperceives the world it is from the standpoint of its location within a cer-tain environment. On the other, however, this same body, preciselybecause it occupies a worldly environment, possesses its own dimen-sions, a spatiality containing in itself something else. Alex’s body is atthe same time contained and container. So, the schema that opposesinside to outside is redoubled. Alex is encompassed by a space and inturn encompasses other substances within him. What is generated hereis a sort of uninterrupted dimension where the vertiginous image ofthe mise-en-abyme and the progressive Chinese boxes that we havefound at the beginning of the chapter in the relationships between thetext and its alleged contexts re-emerge. There is an environment whichcontains Alex’s body, which in turn contains something else.... Morethan the clothing (despite how pertinent it is to the construction ofmeaning) it is the skin—its suppleness, its porosity, its orifices—whichplays the role of mediator between inside and outside and makes thebody both a container element and a contained element.



4. The issue of how the body is situated in space is of crucial impor-tance, its experience of being somewhere, of being somewhere, ofbeing, ultimately, contained. It is as if Alex was always inscribed withinan external envelope, or rather, in a series of external envelopes thatcontain him, now protecting, now oppressing him. Among themoments of, so to speak, positive enclosure, it suffices to recall whenAlex, once back home, takes refuge in his “little room” where he listensto his beloved classical music and where he lives the experience ofbeing locked in a “cage of silk” made from the sounds that surroundhim.12 The return home after a night of ultraviolence is meticulouslydescribed as a progressive crossing of thresholds toward placesincreasingly closed and less dysphoric.13 The edifice where Alex’s fam-ily lives is a glaringly Orwellian suburban high-rise building,“Municipal Flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonway”.Alex crosses the entrance “with no trouble” and he find himself “in”;he traverses the lobby with its frescoes of “very well developed vecksand ptitsas” ruined by filthy graffiti and words done “by the malchicksliving in 18A”; he tries to take the lift but it is out of order; climbing upten stories, he “cursed and panted”; he opens the front door and final-ly he is home. After a pause in the kitchen where he drinks a glass ofthe “old moloko, with no knives or synthemesc or drencrom in it”, hearrives in his “den” to begin the “orgy of music” he has been lookingforward to during the entire journey.

But Alex is also somebody who “cannot bear to be shut in.”14

Among the circumstances of oppression (negative containment), themost obvious is the prison where the protagonist finds himself for twoyears and which he would do anything to escape from, even to submitto the terrible Ludovico Technique. The huge distress that Alex and theother inmates experience in there is described in strong terms by theprison chaplain who, especially in this circumstance, seems to speaklike the narrator using the well-known opening expression. “‘What’s itgoing to be then, eh?’ said the prison charlie for the third raz. ‘Is itgoing to be in and out and in and out of institutions, like this, thoughmore in than out for most of you, or are you going to attend to theDivine Word [...]? I know, I know, my friends, I have been informed invisions that there is a place, darker than any prison, hotter than anyflame of human fire, where souls of unrepentant criminal sinners likeyourselves [...] scream in endless and intolerable agony [...] their skinpeeling and rotting, a fireball spinning in their screaming guts.”15

12 p. 2913 p. 27-2814 p. 3415 p. 63



Inside the prison, however, there are two different spaces with oppo-site values. On one side the Wing Chapel, an ultimately positive place,where Alex retreats to read the Bible, listen to music and talk with thechaplain;16 on the other hand, the utterly negative place of the cell, an“old waterhole” “intended for only three” but where “there were six ofus there, all jammed together sweaty and tight.”17 The overcrowding inthe cell is one of the several causes of the incident that will lead Alex toexperiment the Ludovico Technique. As soon as a seventh inmate isbrought in to the cell, the already unliveable environment ends upexploding. Not only is the unfortunate man killed during a brutal fightin the night, but Alex himself will be dragged out of the cell to be sub-jected to the Cure.

5. The sermon of the “prison charlie”, despite given under the influ-ence of alcohol and accompanied by the inmates laughter, contains animportant truth. Being locked up in jail is the best way to reach hellwhere a “fireball” spins in the “screaming guts”. From the containedbody we then move on to the container body, so that not only is thebody in space becoming meaningful but its spatiality too. In the novelwe find several passages where the body is described as an envelopethat (barely) conceals its different substances. If the prison-hell is por-trayed by the chaplain as the place where guts are tormented by aceaselessly spinning fireball, at the end of the story, when Alex, by nowgrown up, decides to be good and to start a family, the existential trans-formation is described as an internal, almost automatic, event: “It waslike something soft getting into me and I could not pony why. What Iwanted these days I did not know. [...] There was something happen-ing inside me, and I wondered if it was like some disease.”18 Thenarrative transformation doubles up as an internal somatic metamor-phosis, a series of minute sensomotor activations that take place in the“mobile flesh” contained within the body-envelope. From this perspec-tive the awful nauseas induced by the Ludovico Technique are theclearest example of a whole series of interior movements upon whichsome of Alex’s behavioural choices depend. For example, in the sceneof the rape of the two girls picked up at the record shop, we read: “I feltthe old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two young ptitsas.”19

Similarly, when Alex begins to realize that he is deconditioned from theCure, he swears at his parents who are visiting him in the hospital, and


16 p. 62-6717 p. 67-68 18 p. 14419 p. 39


observes: “saying that made me feel a malenky bit better, as if all likefresh red red krovvy was flowing all through my plott.”20 No wonderthat in a story of incessant violence, either imposed or suffered, bloodis present in a hypertrophic manner, to the point of prompting odd syn-tactic u-turns when it manifest itself as an element embracing the entirebody from the outside. For example, when the umpteenth vulgarity ofDim makes him nervous, Alex says: “I felt myself all of a fever and likedrowning in redhot blood.”21

In general, however, the substances that stir the flesh are notalways and necessarily guts, blood and the like. According to the socialworker Deltoid, who tries to understand the cause of violence, Alex has“some devil that crawls inside”22 him; something repeated by some ofthe newspapers that Alex reads.23 To our external narrator, on the con-trary, it is especially the music that lives in the body, interacting withinterior sensomotricity, now stimulating it now superseding it. Whenhe is locked up in the cell soon after the police have taken him into cus-tody, Alex falls into a deep sleep and dreams of Beethoven; when hewakes up he is not sure where he is and says: “the tune of the Joy odein the Ninth was singing away real lovely and horrorshow within.”24

Although he is constrained in a cramped and noisy space, he has some-thing inside that keeps him euphoric. And even when he is draggedaway by a policeman to be interrogated the music stays inside him.“This rozz [...] pushed me out of the filthy snoring cell, and then alongcorridors, and all the time the old tune Joy Thou Glorious Spark OfHeaven was sparking away within.”25 This scene might be associatedwith the punching of the drunken man during the first rowdy night ofAlex’s gang.26 The wretched soul is described as “a burbling old pyah-nitsa or drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers andgoing blerp blerp in between as though it might be a filthy old orches-tra in his stinking rotten guts” Thanks to the rickety orchestra thatplays both music and noise in his guts, the old drunk sings and burpssimultaneously. Both noises are strongly obnoxious to young Alex’srefined ears. The only way to make him stop is to transform the natureof the substances that the old drunk discharges: “beer vomit” first ofall, because of the beating taken (“we cracked into him lovely”), andthen one more time the “krovvy”: “and then it was blood, not song norvomit, that came out of his filthy old rot”.

20 p. 13521 p. 2522 p. 3323 p. 3524 p. 5925 p. 5926 p. 14-15



By exploiting an aporia typical of Western culture, the inside of thebody is sometimes confused with the interiority of the subject, so thatwhat resides in its guts is not always and only the flesh but its exactideological opposite: the spirit. If on one hand, the social workerDeltoid tries to understand what demon might be “crawling inside”violent youngsters like Alex, and the prison chaplain talks about hell asa “fireball spinning in the screaming guts”, this latter character is alsothe one who with regard to the Ludovico Technique, says: “Goodnesscomes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen”. Whenwe recreate the mechanisms of introjection and expulsion of varioussubstances from the body, we must remember this point. It is Alex’scapacity to choose, the exquisitely human goodness that alone can tellhim apart from the automatisms of the machines, which also enters inand departs from his body.

6. The bodily envelope is indeed anything but impermeable. Most ofthe time it is porous, thus allowing different substances to enter it andthen ooze out of it transformed. The bodily orifices that act as points ofentry and discharge of these substances are mainly two: the mouth(which is most of the times kept wide open),27 and the eyes (alternate-ly open or shut according to the circumstances). Alex, for example,listens romantically to the music with his eyes closed. It is not a coinci-dence that in those moments his wide open mouth acts as a point ofentry for the sounds within the body-envelope. On the contrary, dur-ing the Cure, his eyes are kept forcibly open. This coerces Alex to watchviolent movies, but it also allows the music to penetrate in his bodythrough an unorthodox path. It is the permeability of the body thatgives rise to continuous processes of insertion and expulsion, and it isthese that might be now independent now simultaneous. There issomething that enters the body (food, alcohol, drugs, various medi-cines, sounds), something that leaks out of it (sperm, vomit,excrements, urine, blood, guts, screams); above all there is somethingthat penetrates while something else is thrown out. When, soon afterhis attempted suicide, Alex is admitted in a coma to hospital, hedreams that he is recovering and he thinks: “I had this idea of mywhole plot or body being like emptied of as it might be dirty water andthen filled up again with clean.”28

This continuous movement of penetration and expulsion of sub-stances in and from the body—a sort of paroxystic accentuation of thefeeding and digestion process—is certainly the figuration prevailing in


27 p. 8-18-2128 p. 134


the majority of the violent scenes. We have seen this earlier with thebeating of the old drunk, when the music (made of sounds and burps)comes from the inside of the body thanks to a small orchestra installedin his guts, and when the violence perpetrated by Alex’s gang ends uptransforming these unpleasant sounds into vomit and blood.Something similar occurs during the clash with Billyboy’s rival gang,where the knife fight allows Alex to “slit the platties” of Leo, who is thegang’s number one, and to slash Billyboy’s face, leaving him with “twocurtains of blood [that] seemed to pour out.”29 The apex of the ultravi-olence of Alex and his mates takes place during the night raid inAlexander’s house, where the moment of the rape of the writer’s wifeis complemented by a dense series of supplementary penetrations andexpulsions.30 To start with, the “surprise visit” of the gang to the househas to be seen as a sort of forced insertion of one element into anotherwith a familiar and intimate quality (it is not surprising that this placeis called HOME). Alex knocks on the door pretending to ask for helpfor a friend in need nearby. Alexander’s wife, “a youngish devotchka”half-opens the door and, moved to compassion, goes to fetch a glass ofwater. In the meantime Alex is “putting in the old rooker” whileunbolting the door. Next, “the four of us then went roaring in”, whilethe writer shouts: “How dare you enter my house without permis-sion”. An increasingly unrelenting movement of penetrations andconcomitant expulsions is established. The four youths enter the roomwhere the writer is busy at the typewriter. Alex reads and destroys thetypescript on the desk while Dim makes “the old lip-music”.Alexander protests, he “went sort of bezoomny”, is beaten up, and herecomes “our dear old droog the red” which stains the carpet. The wife“started letting out little malenky creeches, like in time to the likemusic of old Dim’s fisty work”. Pete and George go in the kitchen andcome back with their mouth full of food “munching away” and “youcould see bits of what they were eating”. At this point the rape takesplace while the blood trickles down and makes the writer’s “litso allpurple” and “the devotchka [who] was still creech creech creechingaway in a very horrorshow four-in-a-bar”. Alex “ripped away” at thewoman’s clothes and “plunges” first, followed closely by his threecomrades in violence “going haw haw haw”. Meanwhile the writer,forced to witness the scene, is “coming out with slack sort of slovos likehe was in the land in a milk-plus bar”. Once the horrific ritual is over,the calm is restored. But it is not all over yet: “we were full of like hate,so smashed what was left to be smashed [...] and Dim, it was typical ofold Dim, watered the fire out and was going to dung on the carpet,

29 p. 1730 p. 19-22



there being plenty of paper, but I said no. ‘Out out out out,’ I howled”The scene ends symmetrically to its opening with the gang exiting thehouse.

This scene explains well how processes of penetration and expul-sion must be multiplied insofar as they affect not only the body as acontainer but also the contained body. To get in or out of places issomewhat equivalent to ingesting or expelling substances from thebody. The prophecy of the chaplain (the second narrator of the story)comes true twice. Not only is the continuous movement from the insideto the outside and vice versa given between physical spaces such as thejail and the street, but concerns also more intimately the inside and out-side of the body. This doubling engenders different forms ofparallelism and twists. It might happen that two bodily leakages occursimultaneously, like when the song of the young woman at the KorovaMilkbar is echoed by Dim with “a lip-trump followed by a dog-howlfollowed by two fingers pronging twice at the air followed by a clownyguffaw.”31 Moreover, it may even happen that somebody departingfrom a given place follows the expulsion of something from the body,like when the same-old “lip-music” of the same-old Dim is followed bythe policemen exiting from the Duke of New York bar.32

A reoccurring dynamic is thus established in the story. There is aseries of spaces boxed each one within the next, the last of whichentraps in somebody or something that must be expelled, either bymetaphorical substitution (for instance in the form of another sub-stance) or by synecdochical restriction (when the part stands for thewhole). In this regard there are several examples. We shall mentiononly some of the most significant. At the beginning of the novel Alex isat the Korova Milkbar and he is sitting on a “long big plushy seat thatran round three walls.”33 He is in a place boxed in within another place.He is drinking his favourite energy drug, the “milk with knives”, whiletaking a look around. At some point he feels inside “the knives in theold moloko starting to prick” and suddenly he decides to go out in thestreets to begin his night of ultraviolence: “now I was ready for a bit oftwenty-to-one. So I yelped: ‘Out out out out!’ like a doggie.”34

Obviously it is the drug that begins to take hold and to prompt himinto action. We might however read this minor passage in another way.The synthetic substances in the drug demand to leave the body, but itis the body as a whole that, by means of metaphorical substitution,makes its exit. In parallel, we may mention a scene in the third part


31 p. 2532 p. 1433 p. 634 p. 7


where Alex, just released from the hospital, goes downtown to hishabitual record shop to listen to a Mozart symphony. Inside the “disc-bootick” a shop assistant invites him to settle into a “malenky boxwhere you could slooshy the discs you wanted to buy.”35 However, assoon as he begins to listen to Mozart, Alex feels sick, nauseous and hasto vomit; so he dashes “out of the shop”. He is twice locked up (in theshop and in the cubicle). As soon as the nausea hits him and he feelsthe need to vomit (that is, to expel something out of his body), we haveagain the same metaphorical substitution. It is Alex that goes out, fromthe cubicle first and from the shop after, to recover a proprioceptiveequilibrium between inside and outside.

7. In A Clockwork Orange the body is not simply an intimate, personal,even a pre-subjective entity, a site of continuous creation and re-cre-ation of the individual identities that belong to the subjects at play, bethey the protagonist Alex or the other characters of the story; but it isalso, as these continuous slidings between the physiological and thetopological dimensions have shown, a social being, an element that ismanifest and acts in a institutionalized collective and cultural sphere.Far from preceding the constitution of subjectivity the body is consti-tuted through it. It operates in relation to other bodies in a sort of basicintercorporeality (violence, after all, is nothing but this); it is forced inthe tight fabric of social institutions that tend to repress it and to con-form it to the complex of shared norms; it bursts to escape theboundaries imposed upon it and clashes with the whole world; andeventually it adapts to the world by establishing more or less weak andtemporary forms of negotiation.

The general process of narrative transformation invests preciselythis shift from an initial conflict between body and society, subjectivityand intersubjectivity, to their final contract. As we have seen in the pre-vious chapter, at the beginning of the book Alex seems to have a veryclear idea of the socio-cultural meaning of the “ultraviolence” he car-ries out each night. There is a basic conflict between single individuals(“brave malenky selves”) that want to express and act out their desires,and the social institutions (“they of the government and the judges andthe schools”) that repress them. Within this conflict another one is thenestablished, between the young, who express their own individualityspontaneously (not surprisingly during the night), and the old people(to whom the day is assigned) who are by now resigned to the normsof civilised living. “And is not our modern history”—Alex tells his“brothers” readers—“the story of brave malenky selves fighting these

35 p. 110



big machines?”36 However, at the end of the book Alex’s positions haveundergone a symmetrical u-turn. Now grown up, he sees things froma different perspective. The real machines are not so much the molarinstitutions that repress molecular bodily energy but the bodies them-selves, small technological devices that function automatically withneither existential aims nor shared values: “Yes yes yes, there it was.Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might bean animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being likeone of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like lit-tle chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then awinding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr andoff it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight lineand bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it isdoing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.[...] And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round andround and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like oldBog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning andturning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.”37 ABildungsroman journey emerges here. At the beginning the great insti-tutional machines transform individuals-oranges into automatedmechanisms; at the end, on the contrary, the world becomes an orangein the hands of a god, where the young puny machines toss about with-out aim or direction, and without the least understanding of the fullmeaning of things.

Again, we find here the multiplication of interpretations that canbe given to the expression “clockwork orange”. Different readingsappear to be equally valid. On one hand the clockwork orange is theimage of Alex who, transformed by the Ludovico Technique, has losthis capacity to choose between good and evil. This is the position thatBurgess himself has over and over again reiterated—together with somuch of the literary criticism. The protagonist’s laments at the end ofthe treatment (“Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”) confirms thishypothesis. On the other hand, through the voice of the protagonist-narrator, the text seems to suggest another reading. It is the worldwhich is like an orange full of tiny machines, a divine organism thatmust try to control these foolish automatons by waiting for them togrow up and to understand, or at least for them to conform. Supportingthis second interpretation is the fact that the initial project of the novelenvisaged, next to the verbal component, some illustrations—appar-ently Burgess had drawn the image of an orange on the verge ofopening up, so that all sorts of cogs and mechanisms within it could be


36 p. 3437 p. 148


glimpsed. (A bit like Pete and George’s half open mouth, during thatterrible night of violence, showing the food that they are boorishlyswallowing).

Which one of these two readings should we choose? The pes-simistic hypothesis (the State turns men into machines) or theoptimistic one (sooner or later men stop being machines and becomehuman beings)? The Pelagian perspective—man is born good and iscorrupted by the world—or the Augustinian one—man is born into theoriginal sin and is redeemed by divine grace? As they are both upheldby the text and the paratext, how should we proceed? How can we besure that they will not tip over one into the other, that is, that pes-simism will not be tempered by optimism, that Pelagian naturalismwill not ultimately lead to social Augustinism? Is the orange drawn upby Burgess simply opening up or is it rather on the edge of bursting -like the overcrowded cell where Alex is locked up? If this was true theworld would be an orange that, having forgotten the presence of god,actually risks exploding: a gloomily apocalyptic message, perfectly inline with the literary genre of dystopias where A Clockwork Orange maybe situated canonically. Literary criticism has discussed these possiblealternatives for a long time. Conversely, the textual analysis that we arecarrying out here seems to suggest the possibility of a new hermeneu-tical direction.

This additional possible reading of the book, which encompassesand rearticulates the previous ones, points to thematizing the body asa site of production and irradiation of meaning; a body simultaneous-ly machine and organism, culture and nature, a sort of abstractmachine that becomes concrete, now in sensorial and physiologicalprocesses of exquisitely somatic and presubjective dimension, now inthe social investments that it receives from social and political institu-tions, now in the processes that shift from the former to the latter andvice versa. The clockwork orange, in this sense, rather than an oxy-moronic element capable to problematically and violently synthesizeopposite terms, must be intended as the whole of the processes ofsomatic transformation and the resulting inevitable conflicts. From thispoint of view the Ludovico Technique turns out to be not only the cen-tral hinge of the entire story but also the tip of the iceberg where theabstract machine of corporeality finds its most visible realizations. Letus take a closer look at it.

8. The accurate description of the Ludovico Technique found inBurgess’ novel cannot help but bring to mind Huxley and Orwell’s sci-ence fiction dystopias. As has often been observed A Clockwork Orangedepicts a world and a future society that symmetrically overturn any



utopian imaginary creation. As such, the novel is placed in a well estab-lished Anglo-Saxon literary tradition that finds its roots in JonathanSwift and its best 20th century examples in Brave New World and 1984.Huxley, as well as Orwell and Burgess, conceive their dystopianworlds mainly as a reaction against the mass culture that was takinghold in Europe between the ‘30s and the ‘50s. In step with contempo-rary theories of mass media, they point to the media as the main culpritfor the conditioning of conscience. While the main theme is advertisingin Huxley and information in Orwell, in Burgess it is the image—cine-ma and television—which is targeted. All three novels confront theissue of media conditioning and behaviourist psychology that alleged-ly supports it from a theoretical and practical perspective.

The main theme of Brave New World is the issue of the conditioningof human subjects by state institutions, both by way of genetic manip-ulation that aims at producing individuals rigorously differentiated in“biological castes” and by way of hypnopedia that reinforces in all con-sciousnesses a sense of this forcibly naturalized social hierarchy. Inparticular, in the second chapter there is a passage where some chil-dren are subject to a “neopavlovian” treatment whose aim is toeliminate any possible future interest that they may cultivate towardsnature and books. When the children stroke a flower or flip through thepages of a book they are assailed by harsh noises and electric shocks;after a few repetitions of this treatment, the problem is solved. Fromnow on their mind will always associate both selfless nature and intel-lectual culture with nuisance or even with pain, and they will neverfeel the desire to take a walk in the park or to visit a library. Once thesepreventive measures are completed, in the New World imagined byHuxley, everyone is free to do what they are programmed to do: to takea State-provided drug that grants a state of perpetual euphoria (signif-icantly called “soma”); to devote themselves to physical love with norisk or desire of procreation; and above all to consume the goods thatthe capitalistic system of production offers perpetually in apparentlynovel forms.

Although very different in the way it imagines the future world asa society made of beings physically oppressed by the incessant propa-ganda that Big Brother broadcasts via the ubiquitous TV screens,Orwell’s 1984 describes conditioning techniques quite similar to thosefound in Huxley’s novel. More than to Pavlov, however, the polemicalreference here is to the famous Skinner cages. Defying Big Brother’sdictatorship, Winston Smith is submitted to extensive and atrociousphysical tortures that disfigure his body to the point that he becomesunrecognizable and loses his mind. According to O’Brien’s philosophythe only way to assert power upon a man is to make him suffer:“Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure



that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting painand humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and put-ting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. [...] It isthe exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopia that the old reform-ers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world oftrampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not lessbut more merciless as it refines itself.”38 For Winston however physicalmortification is not enough. He continues to love Julia and to hate BigBrother. He is nursed, fed and looked after in every way until hisphysique is completely healed and he is capable again of using hisbody and his intellectual faculties at their best. At this point, when hissomatic sensations and cognitive competences are perfectly working,he is submitted to the worst possible torture, one which is simultane-ously physical and intellectual as it works on the face (“if you want apicture of the future—O’Brien says—imagine a boot stamping on ahuman face—for ever”39). Here we find clearly a critique of theAmerican psychologist. Whereas Skinner conducted his experimentswith rats in a cage, in Orwell’s novel the horrible animals threatenWinston, forcing him to betray his lover. Winston’s suffering, in thisinstance, is quite different from the previous one. He no longer per-ceives his own body (the screaming, the groans, the visions, the smellsseem to arrive from the outside), until he feels he has been totally emp-tied out, devoid of somatic substance and therefore perfectly modifiedin his soul. From this moment on he will be conditioned to sponta-neously love Big Brother and only him, hating the rest of the world.

The thematic analogies between these two novels and A ClockworkOrange are obvious. No less evident are the figurative similarities in thepsycho-physical treatments described in the three books. What is strik-ing, however, is an obvious u-turn. While in Huxley and Orwell theconditioning techniques turn out to be effective (Delta children willnever open a book or smell a rose again; Winston Smith will love BigBrother for the rest of his life), in Alex the Ludovico Technique is effec-tive only up to a point. At the end of the novel he reverts to hisprevious wicked and violent self, until he spontaneously decides (inthe notorious 21st chapter) to grow up and change his life. The noveldoes not provide explicit explanations of this transformation, leaving aclear ambiguity about a key issue of the story. Appraising the fleetingsensation that Alex feels when he is half asleep (“I had this idea of mywhole plot or body being like emptied of as it might be dirty water andthen filled up again with clean”), clearly a caricature of brainwashingtechniques, some critics have argued that the protagonist has been

38 G. Orwell, 1984. London Penguin Books 1987 p. 27939 ibid. p. 280



deconditioned by the same government that had previously condi-tioned him. However, the plot does not seem to be able to sustain thissimplistic hypothesis. What is more likely is that perhaps the condi-tioning treatment did not work perfectly. Is there something that gotstuck? Is there something in the dreadful mechanism created by doctorBrodsky that did not run properly? Or is it perhaps Alex who, thanksto his capacities, has managed to defy the psycho-physical violence hehad been subjected to, to the point to free himself of the conditioning?As we shall see, it is both. What is certain is that in the end, as he stateswith satisfaction, “I was cured all right”;40 he is cured because,although he fell out of a window, he is still alive. He is cured because,in the end, he resolves to change his life. Ultimately, he is cured fromthe Ludovico Technique conditioning. He is cured dialectically fromthe treatment that had been imposed on him.

For this reason A Clockwork Orange turns out to be a very peculiardystopia, not only because it is far less dark and pessimistic of the pre-vious ones (which still implicitly and explicitly evokes), but mainlybecause it seems to extend towards other literary genres. First and fore-most, there is the fairy tale. We might actually think that theunsuccessful suicide has something of the miracle. Alex survives hisjump out of a window. We might also think that the question we havejust asked (what did not go according to plan?) is superfluous in a textwhere plausibility and narrative coherence are not constitutive of thefantastic genre it belongs to. Our hypothesis is different. Rather than tothe category of fables and the discourse of fantasy, we could try to alignA Clockwork Orange with an (implicitly) philosophical genre of novel,and to consider it as a text that puts forward as a theoretical issue a con-ceptual dispute between empiricism and phenomenology (andtherefore two notions of corporeality), within a narrative conflict. Onone hand, the objectified body of science, the body-corpse of the med-ical gaze, the body-machine that assumes for each one of its organs oneand only one biological function, the body functionalized by powerand social institutions. On the other hand, the living body of the sub-ject, prismatic and paradoxical, as it is both a point of view on theworld and at the same time a being in the world, a contained and a con-tainer, a constitutive non coincidence between physicality and identity,a body that produces meaning, that works by metaphors andmetonyms, by analogical shifts and variations of intensity, by syntacticorganizations of sensorial processes and their synesthesic reconfigura-tions in different substances.

In Burgess’ novel the body becomes the site of a negotiation and aconflict which are first and foremost theoretical rather than practical.

40 p. 139



To return to a well known distinction, on one side we have the empir-ical notion that sees the body as Körper and on the other there is thephenomenological idea of the body as Leib, a living body and as suchsite of continuous investments of meaning. Whereas Brodsky conceiveshis technique on an empirical ground, and considers the body as a con-crete machine, Alex’s own body will not respond to this image until theend, acting instead as an abstract machine manifest in different guisesand through different substances. The Körper tries to impose itself uponthe Leib: this is the first trajectory of the clockwork orange. But in theend it is the Leib that has its reprisal, turning out to be more powerfulof any possible instrumental and political objectification of itself: thesecond trajectory.

9. This theoretical conflict between two opposite philosophies of thebody finds its place within the narrative thanks to a series of charactersin charge of representing now one, then the other perspective. On onehand, we have doctor Brodsky (the inventor of the Cure) together withall those other characters who, no matter if supporting or opposinghim, share the same objectified image of the human body. On the other,the protagonist Alex who, subjected to the violence of the Cure and toits devastating practical effects, experiments firsthand with his ownbodily reactions, a body that loves and thinks, feels emotions, planspossible solutions, acts out potential reaction strategies. Moreover, thiscontrast within the narrative has a specific discursive articulation. Itshould not be forgotten that the story is told by the protagonist in thefirst person, with the subjectifying filter of his own eyes and his ownstory-telling skills, thus with all the youthful superficiality of a “tinymachine” that only in the end will he realize he had. In other wordsAlex lives the direct experience of the Cure, ‘live’, with no particularreflections and conceptualizations, and with only one simple aim: toget out of jail and to resume his carefree nights of ultraviolence. Alex,does not have, and does not want to have either, a “pure theory” of theCure. He lives only its immediate application, he experiences it on hisown body and he describes it to his “brothers readers” as soon as suchan experience is effectively experienced, moment by moment, day byday, with no preparatory anticipation and without any extra narrativecommentary.

This means that what the reader knows about the Cure coincideswith what the protagonist gradually experiences. Alex also shows verylittle interest in knowing the nature of the Cure and the theory uponwhich it is based. He is only interested in gaining its social effects: thatis, to get out of prison. The narration of the Cure is therefore distrib-uted alongside two contrasting enunciative instances that overlap the



narrating first person and that tend to offer two different versions. Onone side there is what the various characters, from the chaplain to thedirector, from the minister to the doctors, say about it. On the otherside, there is what Alex feels about it directly, which is shown withoutthe preventive mediation of a know-how. The two different philoso-phies of the body appear to be taken on board by two differentdiscourses: the political-medical discourse, that opts for an objectifyingempiricism; and the direct and immediate discourse of the body, thatexperiences phenomenologically instant by instant the real and pro-found meaning of the Cure. Empiricism is verbalized, perhaps evenverbose; phenomenology is, literally, phenomenological. It works onthe things themselves, putting in brackets any possible previousknowledge and their sociocultural valorisations.

Let us see how this multiple contrast—philosophical (empiricismvs. phenomenology), narrative (Brodsky vs. Alex), enunciative (to sayvs. to show), discursive (media-political instance vs. somatic instance)—is rendered in the thick fabric of the textual network. Ultimately, it isa veridictory contrast, where the plane of appearance subsumes amuch more complex plane of being.

10. Apparently, the Ludovico Technique is nothing but an applicationof the Pavlovian theories on conditioning and the Skinnerian ones onhow to influence the treatment of criminals. Rather than keeping themlocked up in jail, where they can only get worse, the political lobbyimagines a possibility of intervention on them with an adequate thera-py that could eliminate the willingness to commit violent deeds, andthat may actually lead criminals to feel disgust for any form of vio-lence, not only perpetrated but also suffered. A nausea-inducing“medicine” is introduced in the body of the subject unknowingly tohim; he is subjected to images of violence; because of the medicine thepatient feels nausea; thanks to the frequent repetition of the treatment,the subject is induced to feel nausea, no longer because of the medicine,but because of the violence. During the therapy administered to Alex,however, the vision of violent films is accompanied by music which,according to doctor Brodsky, had been placed there as “emotionalheightener”. It is by mistake therefore that Alex becomes sensitive notonly to the images but also to the music and feels nauseous every timehe happens to hear it, to the point that he attempts suicide when he isforced to listen at full blast to a symphony he knows.

But is it truly a mistake, or has the music had an active role in thetransformation of the subject, a transformation which maybe can bereversed? Is the Ludovico Technique a mere application of behaviouristautomatism? If we shift from the plane of appearance to the plane of



being, and to textual analysis, we may think that the music conditioningcannot simply be the banal effect of a planning error and that theLudovico Technique is more idiosyncratic and more significant than amere unscrupulous, literary dystopic use of Pavlovian or Skinnerianmethods.

First, there is the clue given by the name of the Cure, Ludovico, asin the Ludwig van (Beethoven) so adored by Alex, and whose musicintervenes in the topical moments of the story. The Cure has profound-ly to do with music. By synecdoche, this name rebounds from thetreatment as a whole to one of his components, the unidentified “med-icine” injected in Alex, of which—given the subjectifying point of viewof the narrator/protagonist—we, readers, never know anything.Doctors describe it as vitamins. Even when Alex begins to realize thatthis is far from true, Brodsky restricts himself to refer to it vaguely as“this stuff of Ludovico,”41 a definition that Alex resumes shortly there-after in his slang as “this Ludovico veshch.”42

The text seems to give us precise indications as to the role (far fromsecondary) played by the music within the context of the Cure. We maysuspect that the music’s purpose is not simply to intensify the violentimages, as Brodsky43 claims and as even Alex ends up thinking.44

Actually, the music participates actively in the somatic transformationof the subject. It induces a chain of distinctive behaviours whereby themusic becomes a sort of active subject that invades and penetratesAlex’s body, only to exit, transformed, under the guise of different sub-stances. This would fit with the widely acknowledged inversion ofsyntactic roles typical of the aesthesic experience. If medicine and musichave the same name, it is just because they behave in a similar way or,better, because they borrow each other’s competences. Whereas musicpenetrates the body like medicine, medicine transforms the bodythanks to music. The intense nausea felt by Alex, and whose cause ini-tially he cannot explain, is induced simultaneously by a chemical andby an auditory substance, by the latter through the former.

By following the folds of the text in the second part of the novel, itbecomes clear that the Ludovico Technique is not leading to a banalassociation between visions and sickness (as Brodsky reiterates: “theoldest educational method in the world.”45 Rather, it is a way of puttingbody and music in an efficacious relationship, as long as the lived bodyis thought of as an abstract machine, and the music is thought of as

41 p. 9142 p. 9343 p. 9044 p. 11045 p. 91



acquiring substance by performin a series of activities.

11. To better understand these passages which at first sight appearincongruous and paradoxical, we must put in brackets everything wealready know, from the book or the movie, about the story and thetreatment that Alex is subjected to. Instead, we must position ourselvesin the specific perspective that Alex assumes in the second part of thenovel, approximately between the end of the second chapter and thebeginning of the third. Also, we should not forget that he accepts this“treatment for the redemption of criminals” without knowing exactlywhat it is about. The little that he (and the reader) knows about theLudovico Technique is provided by a series of “informers” that limitthemselves to talking about it in a negative way, trying in vain to pre-emptively scare him. There are four characters that in the course of thestory have this informative and terrorizing role of gatekeepers. First,there are the rumours about the “new thing they’re talking about”, thenew way to get out of jail in a few days: “this new like treatment thatgets you out of prison in no time at all and makes sure that you neverget back in again.”46 Secondly, the prison chaplain who, withoutexplaining the nature of the “Ludovico Technique” (here named for thefirst time), states his doubts47 insofar as it eradicates forever the possi-bility of choice. “The question is whether such a technique can reallymake a man good. [...] Goodness is something chosen. When a mancannot choose he ceases to be a man.”48 Then, there is “Minister of theInterior”, who suggests that the new pedagogical methods for commoncriminals might get them out of jail as soon as possible to make roomfor political prisoners. His words: “Common criminals like thisunsavoury crowd [...] can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis.Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all”49 seem to echo Skinner’s own. Finally,the prison director, who claims to be “in theory” against the new treat-ment and instead affirms the old principle of an “eye for an eye,”50 aprinciple that will turn out to be, in hindsight, antiphrastically prophet-ic. The Cure will impose on Alex images whose violence is (at least)similar to the violence Alex forced his victims to suffer. When Alexthanks the director for having been selected, the director clarifies thatthe treatment “is far from being a reward.”51 At last, we hear again the

46 p. 6647 p. 6748 p. 6749 p. 73-7450 p. 7451 p. 75



voice of the prison’s chaplain, who now absolutely drunk, restates hisethical doubts about the Cure and warns Alex (“you are passing nowto a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power ofprayer”52) and essentially reinstates that spatial isotopia that we knowto have so much weight in the story.

On entering the building where the therapeutic treatment is goingto take place, Alex is practically unaware of what is really going to hap-pen to him. The apprehension that the four informers had wished tostir up affects the reader more than him, who is actually quite glad tohave found a fast and safe way to leave the prison. As soon as hearrives in his new cell, he says to himself “So I had a real horrorshowinner smeck at that, thinking I was really a very lucky malchicki-wick”;53 while the new warden with ill-concealed irony stresses: “Well,Alex boy, little 6655321 as was, you have copped it lucky and no mis-take. You are really going to enjoy it here”. Even during the differentstages of the Cure Alex is never informed in advance of what is goingto happen to him, other than by vaguely reassuring suggestions: “Wejust show you some films”, Branom, one of Brodsky assistants, says tohim adding in passing: “we shall be giving you a shot in the arm.”54

“Vitamins, sir, will it be?” Alex asks. “Something like that,’ he said,smiling real horrorshow and friendly. ‘Just a jab in the arm after everymeal”. And Alex again thinks: “They were giving another like chance,me having done murder and all, and it would not be like fair to getloveted again, after going to all this trouble to show me films that weregoing to make me a real good malchick. I had a real horrorshow smeckat everybody’s like innocence.”55

The implicit pact between Alex and his doctors is twice as hypo-critical. Whereas the protagonist declares himself ready to be cured,thinking he is actually making fun of them, they tend to put in perspec-tive the violence of the therapy with a series of litotes that soundvaguely sinister. This loss of intersubjective connection, based upon asort of “double dealing” that tends to vaporize the social truth, ensuresthat the entire therapeutic treatment is felt by Alex as a direct experi-ence, an exceedingly somatic experience in conflict with thereflexive-cognitive one. No wonder then that the initial stages of thetreatment are marked by pre-emptive reassuring and therefore euphor-ic verbalizations from doctor Brodsky’s team, followed by Alex’s directcorporeal dysphoric experience, one that he struggles to understand.

52 p. 7653 p. 7754 p. 7855 p. 78-79



12. The more the truth based on the social link thins out, the more wewitness a gradual emptying of the body itself. Alex’s body is restoredafter the hardship of the prison, it is well fed, looked after, properlyrested (a little bit like we have seen happening to Winston Smith in1984). At the same time, however, it is also weakened, made feeble bythe “hypodermic” that contains that “Ludovico veshch” which isinjected into him before each projection. He is totally unaware of whatis happening to him, and ascribes his weakness to the leftover effects ofthe prison food: “And indeed, O my brothers, when I got off the bed Ifound myself a malenky bit weak. It was the under-nourishment likeDr Branom had said, all that horrible prison pishcha. But the vitaminsin the after-meal injection would put me right.”56 Because of his bodilyweakness Alex is dragged in the projection room on a wheelchair. Oncethere his body is made utterly unable to perform even the smallestmovement and, grafted on a laboratory machine, it becomes a pure see-ing machine.

Let us retrace this transformation step by step. After the first injec-tion and the misleading conversation with Branom, Alex is taken in awheelchair to a “Filmdrome” where “there were stereo speakers stuckall over” and “like a dentist’s chair with all lengths of wire running fromit”, to reach which he has to “crawl” helped by a sort of “male nurseveck in a white coat”. He realizes that this place is not a normal cinema.As well as the dentist chair and a “bank of all like little meters”, there isa wall at the end with an opaque glass behind which he catches aglimpse of some shadows.57 Here we have once more a site (the projec-tion room) within another space (the white building behind the prison)within which there is another, even smaller, space (the backstage behindthe glass wall). This peculiar spatial conformation ensures that Alex, aswell as acting as a spectator, will also be the object of a spectacle for ananonymous viewer hiding behind the opaque glass at the back of theroom (they will be more noticeable at the end of the chapter, when, inresponse to his pleas for mercy somebody “smecks”—that is, laughs athim—in one of those systematic prospective u-turns that characterizethe entire book). Alex sees and at the same time is seen. He watches theviolence on screen while the doctors watch the violence they are inflict-ing on to him “live”. The comparison between these two violences—very dear to Burgess—clicks almost automatically in the reader.While the first type of violence is illusory, it is on a screen, it is a matterof images made of light, the second, on the contrary, is real, is inflictedon the body and the mind of the subject who suffers for real, screamingand praying for mercy his tormentors in the medical team.

56 p. 7957 p. 80



Let us resume the description of the scene. The preparation of thefirst projection is told in totally dysphoric terms. Alex has no desirewhatsoever to “viddyare” the movies. He feels “very limp” and theonly thing he wishes for is to sleep. This negative corporeal experiencebegins to produce the first cognitive alterations. Whereas just amoment before he had suggested that perhaps the prison food was thecause of his weakness, he now locates it within the overall change ofthe nutritional regime: “I put that down to changing over from prisonpishcha to this new rich pishcha and the vitamins injected into me”. Acrucial undertone this one, that accounts for the gradual shift from atraditional causal argumentation of the empiricist kind (given x, theny) to a wider theory of the symbolic efficacity of phenomenological ori-gins (x means y). The causes for the transformations of the subject, asthey are manifest in and through the lived body , do not have empiri-cal causes but depend upon peculiar and specific semantic“influences”. In this instance, for example, the weakening of the bodyis the signified of a signifier identified as an excess of care opposed toits earlier shortage.

But the proper intervention on Alex’s body has still to take place.A nurse, whilst singing a “vonny cally pop-song” (cue the oppositionbetween modern and classical music), ties him up to the armchair,arms, legs and “gulliver”. He does not understand the meaning ofthese constrictions and remonstrates by claiming his own willpower:“‘What’s this for?’ I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his likesong an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me lookat the screen. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I want to look at the screen. I’ve been boughthere to viddy films and viddy films I shall.’ And then the other white-coat veck [...] had a bit of a smeck at that. He said: ‘You never know.Oh, you never know. Trust us, friend. It’s better this way.’” The ficti-tious pact between Alex and the medical team is here reiterated. If thelatter asks to be trusted while asserting its own authority, the formercan only think about freedom, while stating is readyness to cooperate:“It seemed a bit bezoomny to me but I let them get on with what theywanted to get on with. If I was to be a free young malchick again in afortnight’s time I would put up with much in the meantime, O mybrothers”. At this point, the nurse completes his task by fixing Alex’seyelids with some clasps to prevent him from closing his eyes even fora fraction of a second: “One veshch I did not like, though, was whenthey put like clips on the skin of my forehead, so that my top glazz-lidswere pulled up and up and up and I could not shut my glazzies nomatter how I tried. I tried to smeck and said: ‘This must be a real hor-rorshow film if you’re so keen on my viddying it.’ And one of thewhite-coat vecks said, smecking: ‘Horrorshow is right, friend. A realshow of horrors’. But the preparation is not over yet: “I had like a cap



stuck on my gulliver and I could viddy all wires running away from it,and they stuck a like suction pad on my belly and one on the old tick-tocker, and I could just about viddy wires running away from those”.The mechanism in the orange is here manifest in its utmost glory.

The last image that Alex perceives from the real world before theprojection begins is doctor Brodsky entering the “Filmdrome” sig-nalling the official start of the first session: “He was a malenky veck,very fat, with all curly hair curling all over his gulliver, and on hisspuddy nose he had very thick ochkies. I could just viddy that he hada real horrorshow suit on, absolutely the heighth of fashion, and he hada like very delicate and subtle von of operating-theatres coming fromhim”. This is of course a very ambiguous description. If on one handthe eminent doctor has figurative properties that identify him as Alex’sperfect antagonist (corpulence, glasses, smell of medications), on theother hand he shows some obvious analogies with the protagonist (notonly is he dressed in the latest fashion but his curly hair echoes theimage of the helmet full of wires that Alex is wearing). This is a mani-fest indication of the duplicity of role that doctor Branom playstowards Alex. He is his helper, as he will soon make his release possi-ble, but he also is his enemy, as that freedom will be paid for at theprice of infinitely more grim and painful constrictions.

From that moment onwards, the only perceptions Alex will beallowed to feel outside of the screen are of the auditory type. As hishead is blocked towards the movies, he cannot see what is happeningaround him, and he can only gradually grasp the movements of thepeople through their voices and background noise: “‘Everythingready?’ said Dr Brodsky in a very breathy goloss. Then I could slooshyvoices saying Right right right from like a distance, then nearer to, thenthere was a quiet like humming shoom as though things had beenswitched on”. (my italics) The preparation is finally complete. Alex’sbody is blocked and constrained on the chair, his eyes are kept forciblyopen towards the screen, any other visual field is hindered, he has noconnection whatsoever with the people around him. He has became aseeing machine, full of anxiety and terror— but also, indirectly and sig-nificantly, an empty body, hence a flesh, all intent on listening.

13. The section of the novel where the projection of the first movie isannounced has a syncopated rhythm, signalled by the triple repetitionof the temporal indicator, this time introduced by a simple conjunction(“and then”), that doubles up on the linguistic plane everything that ishappening on the plane of the narrative content: “And then the lightswent out and there was Your Humble Narrator And Friend sittingalone in the dark, all on his frightened oddy knocky, not able to move



nor shut his glazzies nor anything. And then, O my brothers, the film-show started off with some very gromky atmosphere music comingfrom the speakers, very fierce and full of discord. And then on thescreen the picture came on, but there was no title and no credits” (myitalics). Each of these three segments introduced by the same “andthen” has however a different function.

The first segment is a sort of Proppian Lack concerning the subjectpredisposed to the vision, which confirms what we have alreadyobserved in the course of the laborious preparation. Sensomotoryactivity is completely repressed (the lights are off, the eyes immobi-lized, Alex cannot do anything), intersubjective relations are repressed(he is alone), the affective disposition utterly negative (he is scared).The second (crucial) segment contrary to expectations describes notimages but a sound mixed with noise that spills out of the screen viathe speakers (the original text says “music coming from the speak-ers”58), inducing an utterly dysphoric affective reaction. The sound thatspreads in the room and the negative affective disposition that per-vades the subject suggest continuity with what had just happened inthe real world, where the auditory sense had risen at the forefrontaccompanied by a general feeling of rejection. On the other hand, thedominance of auditory sensation of dysphoric kind introduces whatwill happen during the course of the projection, where auditory sensa-tions and psycho-physical negative reactions will continue to have akey role.

Finally, the third segment introduces the image arriving after themusic and freezing on the screen (“on the screen the picture cameon”59). Whereas the sounds pour out of the screen into the room mix-ing with the real ones, the images on the contrary remain filmic images,devoid of any possible verbal anchoring that could frame them in a his-torical context, a filmic genre or a type of text. They are pure images,with no credits, but nevertheless similar to the visions that Alex hadoften had when, with his eyes closed, he listened with abandon to hisbeloved classical music, for real or in dreams.

14. The narration of the filmic projection has an extraordinary geomet-rical precision. It is made of five different scenes of violence in whichwe always find, although in different sequences, five different forms ofviolent action, the corresponding subjects who perpetrate it, the objectssuffering it, the visual and auditory sensations of the spectator, histruthful comments, his physical sensations of discomfort, the final

58 p. 8159 p. 81



sanctions of his behaviour by Brodsky. The unfolding of this composi-tional geometry shows a table like the one found (see other files) atp.80-81.

About these passages, much critique has insisted on the similaritybetween the violence portrayed in the movies and those that Alex hadinflicted on his victims in the first part of the novel (the beating of theold drunk man, the rape of Alexander’s wife, the fire at thenewsagents). However, by painstakingly piecing together their compo-sitional geometry, we find in them something else. If we compare thefirst scenes (real) to the second (filmed) what emerges is a clear parox-istic intensification of violence.

First of all, the elements repeated in the five scenes form a similarsequence that accounts for the double circumstance of reception thatwe have outlined above (Alex is watching some movies and he is at thesame time being watched). In this sequence we have a precise moment(Alex’ own sufferings) which has a different function according to theperspective from which it is viewed. The forms of violent action, thesubjects that perpetrate them and the objects that suffer them might bethought of as fundamental elements of the narrative content enunciat-ed in the movies watched by Alex. Visual and auditory sensations haveto do with the moment of the reception of these movies, a receptionoften inscribed in—and therefore prescribed by—their enunciated con-tent. When for instance it is said that “the film jumped right away” ona girl, or that there were “malchick[s] leering and smecking”, it meansthat it is the individual movie that induces in the spectator a compul-sory receptive attitude, be it visual or auditory. In other instances thesesensations are prescribed by the concrete situation of reception externalto the filmic enunciate, hence external to the communicative arrange-ment expected by the therapy, where the body of the spectator sufferssome very intense constrictions, such as when it is said “I could notshut my glazzies”, or “I had to go on viddying”. Thus continuity is cre-ated between the moment of textualized enunciation and that ofreception. Concerning the truthful comments, we might say that theyalso operate between textual contents and their reception, insofar asthey concern the question of the discursive genres and the level ofbelief required, given the lack of credits. On the contrary, physical dys-phoric sensations have a double status. On one hand they are the resultof the visual-auditory sensations of the spectators and of the degree oftruthfulness that they confer to the various scenes (they fall within areception which is partially expected, partially external to the text); onthe other hand however these sensations turn out to be the enunciatedcontent of the spectacle that Brodsky and the medical team are watch-ing. So, the final sanctions uttered by Brodsky in guise of exclamations(“promising”, “excellent”) change Alex from a spectator capable of



judging movies into an object of spectacle who performs some actionsand who, in turn, is judged by his spectators on the ground of theactions he performs.

15. Let us consider more in detail the individual elements that composethe sequence found in all the fives scenes of violence. As for the formsof violent action, not only are they much more intense than those thatAlex performs against his victims, but also (if read in the vertical col-umn that concerns them) they show a marked escalation in intensity.There is a progression from the beating of an old man to a collectiverape, from a face slashed and torn to bits to an old lady set on fire, untilwe reach a series of crucifixions and beheadings during a militaryJapanese torture session, something that Alex, no matter how wicked,had never been able to perform. No wonder, then, that if the protago-nists of the first four scenes are “malchicks” like himself, in the finalscene it is Japanese soldiers who commit violence. Rather than insist onthe similarities between the violence shown on the screen and thatexperienced by Alex’s victims, it is preferable to insist on their differ-ences, in other words, on the gradual autonomization of the cinematicrepresentations from real life.

The intensification is present in almost all the columns of the table,in a paroxistic crescendo that certainly makes these pages the mostpowerful and memorable of the entire book—to the point thatKubrick’s filmic transposition will necessarily weaken its spectaculareffect and emotive weight. The number of subjects who perform vio-lence increases: two in the first scene, six or seven in the second, anindeterminate number in the third, many in the fourth, and one wholebattalion in the last one. The degree to which visual perception is con-stricted in terms of modality increases too. While before the beginningof the projection Alex had declared his willingness to watch themovies, he then gradually attempts to avert his gaze from the screen,he cannot do it, and he is therefore forced to watch. There is a shift fromwanting to do (“I want to look at the screen”) to not-being-able-to-do(“I could not shut my glazzies” = I could not not watch) to arrive athave-not-to-do (“I had to go on viddying”), followed at the end by animplicit constrictor subject (“I was like forced to viddy”).

Moreover, the degree of truthfulness of the cinematic imagesincreases too. They become less and less cinematic and more and morerealistic until they become utterly real. At the beginning Alex, afternoticing the lack of credits, remarks how nevertheless “it was a verygood like professional piece of sinny”, he finds the screams and groans“very realistic”, and insists on the illusory fascination of the mecha-nism of the cinematic mimesis: “it’s funny how the colours of the like




forms of violent action

assault with fists,boots, etc

collective rape

cut in pieces with aknife, tooth pulledwith pliers

kicks to the woman,destruction and arsonof the shop,beating and burningthe woman

Japanese torture, cru-cifixion, beheading

object that suffers it

old “starry veck” indark street at night

“young devotchka”

human face

old lady with shop

soldiers, rolling cuthead with body thatkeep on running

subject who perpetrates it

“two malchicksdressed in theheighth offashion”

six or sevenmalchicks

and smecking”):the explicit sub-ject is absent; bycatalysis as aboveit could be somemalchicks

a lot of malchicks

Japanese

visual sensations

“you viddy”, “youcould viddy”,“there was theclose- up”, “whenyou viddy”

“concentrating onthe next film”,“came on at once”

“we shot straightinto anotherlomtick of film”, “Icould not shut myglazzies”, “I had togo on viddying”

you could viddy”

“I was forced toviddy”, “you evenviddied”



auditory sensations

“the music bumpedout, very sinister”,“you could slooshyhis screams andmoans […] andeven get the likeheavy breathingand panting of thetwo tolchockingmalchicks” , “crackcrack crack”screams of the girlwith the “verypathetic and tragic”music, “malchick[s]leering and smeck-ing”, “slooshy thegoloss of this DrBrodsky”

“I had to go on […]hearing the mostghastly creechingscoming from thislitso”, “rip rip rip”,“the creeching […]were terrific”, “Islooshied this […]goloss of DrBrodsky”

“very gromkylaughter by a lot ofmalchicks”, “flames[…] roaring”, “youcould slooshy themost gromky andagonized and ago-nizing screams thatever came from ahuman goloss”, “Iheard a like smeckcoming from thedark”“there was veryvery loud laughterfrom the Japanese”

truthful comment

“it was a very goodlike professionalpiece of sinny”,“screams andmoans, very realis-tic”, “the colours ofthe like real worldonly seem really realwhen you viddythem on the screen”

“this was real, veryreal, though if youthought about itproperly you could-n’t imagine”, “itmust have beenvery clever whatthey call cutting orediting or somesuch veshch”“I knew it could notreally be real, butthat made no differ-ence”, “red krovvyshot on to the cam-era lens”

Brodsky (ironic):”Imagination only.You’ve nothing toworry about”

“they all seemed tobe coming out of thescreen”

dysphoric physicalsensation“I was beginning toget very aware of alike not feeling allthat well”

“pains all over”,“felt I could sick upand at the same timenot sick up”, “Ibegan to feel like indistress”

“I was sweating amalenky bit with thepain in my guts anda horrible thirst andmy gulliver goingthrob throb throb,and it seemed to methat if I could notviddy […] I wouldperhaps be not sosick”, “I was heav-ing away but couldnot sick”“I knew I had to sickup, so I creeched: - Iwant to be sick”

“the pains I felt nowin my belly and theheadache and thethirst were terrible”

Brodsky’s sanction

“Reaction abouttwelve point five?Promising, promis-ing”

“Dr Brodsky going: ‘Excellent, excel-lent, excellent’”

“I heard a likesmeck coming fromthe dark”

“And he and theothers smeckedquite loud”


real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen”.Already from the second scene his attention is no longer focused on thefiction but on the verisimilitude, actually, the perfect, almost excessive,truthfulness, until he doubts that it is a scene shot ad hoc to be shownin the course of the therapy: “This was real, very real, though if youthought about it properly you couldn’t imagine lewdies actually agree-ing to having all this done to them in a film, and if these films weremade by the Good or the State you couldn’t imagine them beingallowed to take these films without like interfering with what wasgoing on”. In the third scene the epistemic attitude changes one moretime. Even if it is all fiction, it no longer matters. From the point of viewof the pragmatic effects it is as if it was all true: “I knew it could notreally be real, but that made no difference”. In the fourth scene theproblem of cognitive recognition of the fictionality of the image isentirely solved, to the point that it is Brodsky who feels obliged (ironi-cally) to intervene by saying: “Imagination only. You’ve nothing toworry about. Next film coming up”. Eventually the movie capturesreality, leaves the screen and reaches out in the projection room not asimages but as their somatic effects: “The pains I felt now in my bellyand the headache and the thirst were terrible, and they all seemed to becoming out of the screen”.

We realize here that this increase in the degree of truthfulness ofthe movie is not so much a gradually expanding cognitive awarenessderiving from an aesthetic evaluation, rather it is a gradual shift fromintellectual judgement to the more material corporeality. In otherwords, this transformation of the truth statements should be read inparallel to the intensifications indicated in the column of the physicalsensations: from the cognitive and affective we move towards the pure-ly somatic. Similarly the initial experience of feeling not “all that well”becomes “pains all over”, twisting guts, need to vomit, stomach painand headache. If we compare the intensification of the forms of violentactions to the intensification of Alex’s physical dysphoria, we under-stand the reason why the cinematic scenes become increasinglyautonomous if compared to the violence inflicted in reality by Alex onhis victims. The violence that Alex witnesses acts directly upon hisbody, so that from a tormentor he now becomes the victim, which is,unsurprisingly, the “therapeutic” intent that Brodsky aims at. On acloser inspection however this intensification of the physical dysphoriahas another characteristic. It is as if there was a movement from theoutside to the inside of the body and again from here back outside. Itis as if there was something pushing until it manages to get in andagain persisting in the opposite way to get out. Initially there is ageneric sense of discomfort (“I was beginning to get very aware of alike not feeling all that well”), attributed however to an internal lack,



the undernourished stomach. Then, “pains all over” occur, associatedto a certain difficulty in the proprioceptive management of the bodyand its internal movements (“I could sick up and at the same time notsick up”) that for now produces only a bland affective result (“I beganto feel like in distress”). Later on, the guts make their appearance(“pain in my guts”) with a series of other precise internal sensationsconcerning first insufficiency (“a horrible thirst”) and then excess (“mygulliver going throb throb throb”). Then, the opposite movementbegins. At first there is something that from the inside reaches the skin(“I was sweating a malenky bit”). The repressed need to expel some-thing then appears (“I was heaving away but could not sick”). And theexpulsion occurs in its own way, thanks to that metaphorical displace-ment from body to space that we have learnt to recognize in variousother points of the novel. The physical pains increased by the impossi-bility to vomit are initially localised in specific areas of the body (belly,head) but then they “seemed to be coming out of the screen”. As it can-not get out of the body, the pain comes instead out of the screen.

What has actually entered into the body envelope? What kind ofsubstance is it? We know in what form this substance wants to comeout (vomit) and we also know where it came from (the screen). But thetext does not tell us its nature. At least so it seems. To find a possibleanswer we must check another column of our table and look for some-thing that, perhaps, has disappeared somewhere else. Indeed, if weread carefully the two columns not yet taken into account—the objectsthat suffer violence, the auditory sensations—something has actuallydisappeared. Both columns are actually counteracting the others.Rather than intensification, they show a decrease. Concerning theobjects that suffer violence, they become closer to the spectator, in otherwords the visual field is progressively restricted, enlarging the humanfigure until it almost disappears. In the initial scene the background isdescribed first (“what came on was a street”) and a human figure thatenters it is only described afterwards (“then you could viddy an oldman coming down the street”). In the following scene the backgrounddisappears and a whole human figure is visible (“the film jumped rightaway on a young devotchka”). In the third one the movie camera iseven closer and brings into focus the face of the victim (“this time itwas of just a human litso”). In the fourth one it is as if the camera hadretreated to a wider shot, but the human figure has almost disappearedin the fire that surrounds it (“you could viddy this poor starry ptitsatrying to crawl out of the flames”). In the last scene the visual fieldresumes its fullness. We see crucified soldiers, whole human figureswith very specific postures. However, it is no longer an individual, anintegral victim of violence, but an indistinct series of people with noindividualizing property, a veritable partitive totality (“soldiers”). It is



as if the identity—visual first then social—of the represented victimbecomes less and less important. This can be explained by the fact that,in parallel, it is Alex who clearly becomes the true victim. After all, inthe end it is him who begins to “creech” above the screams of theJapanese’s victims.

Even more interesting it is the column of the auditory sensations,which play a key role in the course of the entire Ludovico Technique—as they are the only ones that allow continuous relays between theexperience of the real world and the one on the screen. Indeed, from thethird scene onwards, the noise and sounds coming from the screentend to mix up with the voices and noise coming from the room. Alexlistens to what is happening in the movie and at the same time he hearsBrodsky’s comments and smug laughter. The final laughter that Alexhears—symmetrical and inverted compared to his initial ones—occurat once. While “there was very very loud laughter from the Japanese”,behind Alex’s back, Brodsky and the others “smecked quite loud”. Ifwe observe the relationship between sounds and noise in the movieswe realize that the music tends to fade allowing noises and voices toemerge in the foreground. Initially “the music bumped out, very likesinister” and above it “you could slooshy [his] screams and moans” ofthe victims; then the girl’s screams are perceived at the same time as a“very pathetic and tragic music”; from the third scene onwards themusic disappears completely and Brodsky’s comments and laughtertake over. This sequence can be explained empirically. The music is thesoundtrack, it is off screen, hence it is a component of the cinematicenunciation that, like all markers of fiction in the filmic text, tends towear out. Sounds and noises are instead elements of the narrative con-tent, they are on the screen and, like everything that is represented,become increasingly more realistic until they are considered true.

From the perspective of the textual network on the whole we oughtto underline however the disappearance of the musical element assuch. This allows us to identify precisely in the music the substancethat we were looking for, what has entered Alex’s body and is trying toexit in the guise of retching. After all, it is the text itself that stresseshow this substance is now within the body: there is something resonat-ing in the protagonist’s head, there is “my gulliver going throb throbthrob”.

16. The rest of the session follows the structure that we have meticu-lously described so far. Alex has by now the official role of the victim,he shouts his head off in order to cover with his own voice the horrify-ing noises of the violence shown on the screen. Conversely, Brodsky isthe tormentor, the worst possible one: “this Dr Brodsky and Dr Branom



and the others [...] must have been more cally and filthy than anyprestoopnick in the Staja itself. Because I did not think it was possiblefor any veck to even think of making films of what I was forced toviddy.”60 The most interesting thing is that at the end of the sessionAlex’s head cannot stop throbbing “like a bolshy big engine that makespain”;61 and also that, once freed from clasps and straps, the firstinstinct of the boy is to close his eyes “with the pain and throb in mygulliver”. This makes us presume that the entry point of the music, bynow installed in the head and belly, had been through the eyes. It is asif a synesthetic channel had been established between music and eyes,between the external and the internal rhythm of the body, betweennoise and visions. The music has penetrated the “gulliver” through theeyes, goes “throb throb throb” therein, and to shut them up is the onlyway to stop listening. (Further proof of this is the fact that, when in hismoments of happiness Alex listened blissfully to the music in his“den”, he used to keep his eyes well shut).

Once the session is over, Alex is taken back to his “malenky bed-room” where he receives Branom’s visit. Looked after, he begins to feelbetter and to try to understand what exactly had happened to him. “Itwas horrible” he says to the doctor. “‘Of course it was horrible’ smiledDr Branom. ‘Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learn-ing now. Your body is learning it.”62 Needless to say the body inquestion is not Alex’s living, subjective, personal body, but rather thebody objectified by the scientific gaze. “Well, by my calculations youshould be starting to feel all right again. Yes?” he actually asks Alex.And Alex thinks to himself: “I did not quite kopat what he was gettingat govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting better from feel-ing bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing to do withcalculations.”63 This lack of understanding between them is caused bythe different reference that each of them has in mind. Whereas Branomthinks about the foreseeable effects of the medicine, Alex thinks abouthis own ability to deal with the pain that the music provoked and thatnow is within him. This difference, which however refers to an objectwith the same synecdochic epithet, is a clear manifestation of the philo-sophical conflict that we have already encountered between theobjective body and the subjective body, between Körper and Leib.

Imprisoned in an institution that wants to objectify him by fillinghim up with pain-inducing machines, hence turning him into an auto-matic mechanism that operates by stimulus and response, Alex


60 p. 8461 p. 8462 p. 8563 p. 85


nonetheless keeps his previous somatic experiences active, adaptingthem to the new context. In the evening, he falls asleep and he dreamsas usual. He has a nightmare, where scenes very similar to those he hadwitnessed in the afternoon are replayed. This time though Alex doesnot simply watch from the outside but becomes an integral part of thesituation of violence as a tormentor. Here the well-known boxing up ofspaces re-emerges: “a dream or nightmare” he says “is really only likea film inside your gulliver, except that it is as though you could walkinto it and be part of it”. Alex is locked inside a building, which con-tains a room whose “door was locked” and which has “bars on thewindow”, within which there is himself with a dream in his headwhere he appears again.64 The double condition that we have alreadyencountered is here reiterated. Alex is the protagonist of an event (he isdreaming) and at the same time an object of spectacle (he participatesin the narrative content of the dream).

The description of the stages of the Cure resumes with the samewords with which it had stopped (“stop it, stop it, stop it”), the samethirst and the same head banging (“the throb and like crash crash crashin my gulliver”65). At a certain point, however, a movie unlike all the oth-ers begins. Here the issue of mimetic verisimilitude no longer applies asthis is a sort of amateurish documentary (“it was a very blobby and linyand crackly film you could viddy had been made by the Germans”),where the Nazi symbols of the eagle and the swastika alternate with exe-cutions, destructions and every type of violence. The peculiarity of thismovie is however a different one. Unlike the five scenes described above,where screams and noises dominate the auditory field, here the cries ofthe victims are totally absent. What dominates here is the musical sound-track, which Alex recognizes as Beethoven’s own: “Then there werelewdies being dragged off creeching though not on the sound-track, mybrothers, the only sound being music, and being tolchocked while theywere dragged off. Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness, whatmusic it was that like crackled and boomed on the sound-track, and itwas Ludwig van, the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, and Icreeched like bezoomny at that”. At last “this stuff of Ludovico” appears.No longer the “sinister” or “very pathetic and tragic” music that pene-trated the body in the first session and hit inside the “gulliver” withoutfinding a way out, but true music, the one that gives energy, individualstyle, fullness of being and willingness to act. With Beethoven (sound-track to Nazi barbarity) we reach the utmost intensity. Indeed, the bodilyreaction is much more assured and devoid of any possible hindrance:“And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the


64 p. 8865 p. 89


shape of like a kidney”.What has happened exactly? Let us summarize some of the obser-

vations made so far. What appears to be the peak of a situation ofphysical distress, caused by a banal Pavlovian association between vio-lent images and the injected “medicine”, it is actually a deeper somatictransformation, underpinned by syntactic and obviously formal rules,hence comparatively indifferent to the substances involved and thesensorial channels activated. Alex’s sensomotory capacity has beenblocked, his visual disposition has been constrained while his auditorydisposition has been, indirectly and unexpectedly, allowed to be free.This induces a situation of experiential continuity between what ishappening on the screen and what is happening in the room, betweenthe violence portrayed in the movies and the one experienced by hisspectator insofar as he is a victim of the spectacular arrangement set upby the medical team. Images with no name appear on the screen wherethey remain without the subject being particularly involved in them.As far as the music is concerned, however, there is a genuine penetra-tion of the perceived object into the perceiving subject, thanks to thesyntactic inversion that we have previously suggested. Sounds enterthe body following the more obvious channel, perhaps the most com-fortable one, surely not the conventional one: the channel of the eyeskept forcibly wide open. Once inside the body sounds perturb the vis-ceral sensoriality inducing continuous nausea and persistent beats.When their intensity increases, thanks to Alex’s unexpected recogni-tion of the musical soundtrack, they virulently exit through the act ofvomiting and take up the semblance of an internal organ (the kidney),as an evidence of their origins in the deepest carnal entrails.

The identification of Beethoven, by the way, is not of the cognitivekind. Rather, it is linked to an entirely somatic experience. In the origi-nal English text we actually read: “I noticed, in all my pain andsickness, what music it was.”66 We have a sort of symbolic-musicalstomach pump or, better, a strongly ironic reversal of the materialisticcatharsis, of purification as the expulsion of humours from the body—“catharsis” comes from “catarrh”—that philosophical aesthetics hasvariously thematized since its first reflections on the Greek tragedy.Similar to the old drunk man “tolchocked” at the beginning of thenovel, who had a small orchestra in his guts and expelled it as bloodand vomit provoked by the “droogs”‘ beatings, when Alex finally man-ages to vomit he expels the music that entered his body giving him allsort of distress. As soon as Ludovico himself turns up, that “Ludwigvan” composer of the nine symphonies so loved by Alex, the Curereveals the truth that ironically bore in its own name: to be an extreme,


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visceral and totalizing receptive experience, one that transcends everyreassuring mimesis or harmonic aesthesis in the name of a much moreradical, transformative catharsis. Like tragic catharsis, the LudovicoTechnique might be listed among the emblematic instances of that sym-bolic efficacity that anthropologists have for a long time observed in agreat number of magical-religious rituals existing in so-called “other”cultures and that, similarly, psychoanalysts find in some moments oftheir therapeutic work on the unconscious (starting with transference).“Goodness comes from within” the prison chaplain had said. AndAlex’s own flesh, rejecting it, has ironically transformed it into some-thing else.

But the cure is not over yet. It will continue for twelve more terri-ble days so that the music will have plenty of time to insinuate itselfwithin Alex’s body, provoking nausea, disease and a much strongerand lasting pain than the ones felt until this very moment after that hewill be declared “healed”. At the fist hint of violence—either perpetrat-ed or suffered, experienced in one way or another—a cluster ofincessant unbearable visceral sensations re-emerge. Doctors, politi-cians, journalists and even Alex’s parents will believe that doctorBrodsky’s therapy was successful, implicitly corroborating the empiri-cal hypothesis that sees the body as a machine, as an automatonfunctioning by stimulus and answer, associations and overlapping. Therest of the story will show that the opposite is true.

17. In order to appreciate this process and to individuate the mainphilosophical conclusions of the Ludovico Technique, we ought to re-enact its outcomes and to place it in relation to other auditoryexperiences lived by the protagonist in the course of the novel. In sodoing we will realize that these scenes reveal an extraordinary series ofsimilarities and differences, of analogical parallelisms and systematicinversions. We might even be able to grasp a more subtle transforma-tion going on, and be able to rebuild the pieces of a story within thestory, or better, of a musical isotopia that, interweaving and mixing upwith other textual isotopias, strongly maintains a defined interpreta-tion of the apprenticeship years of the young Alex.

The music that Alex listens to in the course of the story often inter-venes on the pragmatic plane as a stimulus for his actions. He listens toa woman singing at the Korova Milkbar and has an argument with hisgang; he hears some music coming from a car radio and he takes hisrevenge on one of the “droogs” who wants to rebel against his leader-ship; he listens to Rossini and this unleashes his violence against an oldlady; and so on and so forth. A little bit like the “milk with knives”drunk at the Korova Milkbar, but much more preferable to the young



aesthete, music provides Alex with a sort of supplementary energywhich is simultaneously corporeal and mental, and which functionslike a sort of symbolic and somatic integrator of his artistic tendencies.The prevalent opinion—from the ancient Aristotelian text to contempo-rary mass media—assigns music a pedagogical and ultimately politicalvalue. This is what Alex reads laughing in the morning papers: “I hadto have a smeck, though, thinking of what I’d viddied once in one ofthese like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth wouldbe better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encour-aged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quietenModern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized.”67 Andhis comment is: “Civilized my syphilised yarbles”. For the young ultra-violent thug things are quite different. Music does not necessarilyproduce good. Actually, it may go together with violent and brutaldeeds that overcome any aesthetic self proclaimed pure dimension aswell any socially autonomous claim. This is the well-known Adornianmoral. Nazi tormentors delighted in listening to great 19th centuryromantic music, just as in the movie Alex is forced to watch scenes ofHitlerian barbarism with a Beethoven soundtrack. “Music”—explainsAlex—“always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made melike feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner andblitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha hapowe.r”68 Far from integrating youth within society, music enters intothe “syphilised yarbles” (hence in the body), where, as Deltoid claims,69

the demon of senseless violence is “ferreting his way into like younginnocent flesh”70 as Alex acknowledges. This is exactly why music canmake one god-like.

Furthermore, in several scenes of the book listening to music doesnot accompany the actions of the story, but emerges directly as a free-standing thematic element, as a veritable moment of aestheticreception. For example when Alex comes back home after the long nar-ration of the first night of ultraviolence; when he meets the two younggirls at the record shop and engages them in a extremely violent orgy;during some of his dreams; while he reads the sacred texts in the prisonchapel; in the scene of the attempted suicide; when in the hospital he isgiven as a present a new sound system, etc. Because of their evidentsimilarity all these scenes might be considered as a sort of thematicinvariant “refrain” that, akin to what occurs in fairy tales or myths,gains its meaning only when it is embedded in its own specific narra-


67 p. 3568 p. 35-3669 p. 3370 p. 35


tive environment. Depending on the different contexts where thetheme of listening to music is found, its meaning and value change.The classic “poetic” mechanisms of parallelism and inversion areestablished on the planes of the signifier and the signified, so that whatis repeated changes meaning and, vice versa, what is transformedkeeps the same semantic function.

Let us try to reassess some of these insertions of the theme of musiclistening within a specific narrative environment by comparing thescene of the Ludovico Technique analysed so far (found in the secondpart of the novel) to two others, antithetical to each other from thepoint of view of their affective investments: the one of ecstatic listeningin the close space of the “den” in the first part and the one of the sui-cide attempt prompted by the physical impossibility to bear the musicin the third part.

18. When in the first part of the novel Alex comes home after the longnight of ultraviolence he locks himself in his room and blissfully listensto a record chosen from his plentiful collection. He is already savour-ing this moment while he climbs the stairs of the building 18A: “Iwanted music very bad this evening, that singing devotchka in theKorova having perhaps started me off. I wanted like a big feast of itbefore getting my passport stamped, my brothers, at sleep’s frontierand the stripy shest lifted to let me through.”71 Music constitutes a sortof borderline between sleep and wakefulness, but somehow it operatesalso as a stimulus to move from one to the other, to overcome that“stripy shest” that cannot but remind us of the experience of jail - antic-ipating it textually while inverting its meaning. After all, the soundswill be described soon as a pleasant “cage of silk”.

This nightly desire for a “big feast” of music, according to the nar-rator, is motivated by what had just happened at the Korova Milkbar.A young woman, in between pop records “suddenly came with a burstof singing” inducing, in turn, Dim’s inelegant reaction, Alex’s irrita-tion, and the consequent argument between them.72 It was a brief andrather intense moment characterized by a double movement of up anddown, as if something had tried to take off, nevertheless falling heavi-ly back to the ground. At the beginning, “it was like for a moment [...]some great bird had flown into the milkbar”; at the end it is “like alomtick of redhot meat plonked on your plate”. Each of these twomovements induces a different reaction in Alex and Dim, respectively.If in the “clowny animal” there is a pseudo-musical explosion from the


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body (his usual “lip-trump”) that rhymes with the analogous move-ment of the flesh falling into the plate, for the protagonist things aremore complex. “I felt all the little malenky hairs on my plot standingendwise and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards andthen down again”. Something happens on the skin, neither to theinside nor to the outside of the body but on its surface pictured herelike a proper envelope. Dim’s “lomtick of redhot meat”73 is opposed tothe lizards that go up and down Alex’s body, caressing it and givinghim goosebumps, in other words something that, like the knives of thedrugged milk, tries to find a way out of the body.

The scene of music listening in the room holds the memory of theexperience in the Korova Milkbar, recapturing its essential elementsand accomplishing the process of aesthetic reception brutally truncat-ed by Dim’s gracelessness. Indeed, if at the Korova the musichappened like a sudden explosion “in the like interval [...] before thenext one [record] came on”, at home the situation of ecstatic listeningis organized in every detail. Taken by surprise, Alex had perceived themusic at the surface of his skin in the form of goosebumps. However,when the body is carefully prepared as a true competent listener, themusic will not encounter any obstacle and will flow along a precise andcomplex path, penetrating into the guts and exiting in different ways.

Let us re-enact the stage of the preparation. First, the place wherethe listening occurs and the posture of the body therein are thematized.Alex goes in the building 18A where he lives with his parents, entersthe flat and, after popping in the kitchen, he locks himself in his “den”.Once here, the series of spatial Chinese boxes continues: “The littlespeakers of my stereo were all arranged round the room, on ceiling,walls, floor, so, lying on my bed slooshying the music, I was like net-ted and meshed in the orchestra”. The body contained in the space isalso, as we know, also a container. Before abandoning himself to themusic, Alex is in the kitchen where he “ate growling” the dinner thathis mother had carefully left out for him, recapturing with amused sur-prise the “innocence” of the “old moloko, with no knives orsynthemesc or drencrom”, an innocence re-doubled by the habitual actof undressing (“easing off my platties”) and being naked during theentire experience of listening.

Once a record is carefully chosen (“what I fancied first tonight wasthis new violin concerto by the American Geoffrey Plautus, played byOdysseus Choerilos with the Macon (Georgia) Philarmonic”), musicseizes Alex who is quivering in anticipation, his body arranged in themost minute details: “I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on myrookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the


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sluice of lovely sounds”. The ecstatic encounter between the music andthe listening subject acquires a peculiar configuration. It concerns a“gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh” (flesh,74 not Dim’s redhotmeat) that emerges from the encounter between—on one hand—thebody laying prone in bed, naked, with the eyes tight shut and themouth wide open and—on the other hand—the flow of sounds thatensnares it and make it completely passive. From this momentonwards the actions described in the text are performed by the musicalone, while Alex’s body can only appreciate the effects of the musictowards and within itself. The different musical instruments act oneafter the other (trombones, trumpets, kettledrums, solo violin, otherstrings, flute, oboe), each coming from various points of the roomwhere the speakers are located (under the bed, behind the head, nextto the door, around the bed) and each producing, metonymically,metallic, precious and redundant substances (gold, silver, platinum).This well structured operative sequence is traversed by some particu-lar movements that modify its basic rhythm. First of all, thekettledrums perform the double movement that we already know:“rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder”;and Alex ecstatically comments: “Oh, it was wonder of wonders”. Theviolin recaptures the image of the bird hovering in the air that hadmade its appearance at the Korova, only this time the lack of gravityprevents any downfall: “a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or likesilvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came theviolin solo”. Finally, the flute and the oboe, perform a manoeuvre ofpenetration into a “thick thick toffee gold and silver”, that we mightinterpret as the head of the subject or even as his body-envelope.

Only at this time cognition takes place. Alex knows that he will notbe disturbed by his parents, who, stuffed with sleeping pills, are asleepbeyond the walls of his room. Moreover, together with this awarenessthe images also come into play, mixing with the music: “As I slooshied,my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better that any syn-themesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures”. Images with closedeyes then, imagined images and not really perceived, visions indeed,whose content is however rather predictable. They are about “ultravi-olent” scenes similar to those that Alex will watch during the course ofthe Ludovico Technique, they are beatings and rapes that allow him,whilst he is still listening to the enveloping and penetrating music, toreach the apex of pleasure. Little matters that this is such a banallyonanistic pleasure: “when the music, which was one movement only,rose to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my bed withmy glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and


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spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it”. What is remarkablehere is the fact that the apex of ecstasy coincides with the expulsion ofthe music (previously penetrated into the body) even if in the guise ofthe more common substance of bodily pleasure. While beingenveloped by the music, however, Alex was also in the “cage of silk” ofthe strings. This is the reason why the act of expulsion is immediatelypreceded by the act of bodily disintegration. The body is torn to piecesin order to find, somehow, a liberating way out of the orchestra inwhich it was “netted and meshed”.

The rest is pure reiteration, with Mozart first and Beethoven after-wards, accompanied by the narrative event par excellence, that is, therecognition. It is precisely at this point that Alex begins to grasp themeaning of the title of Alexander’s book—A Clockwork Orange—that hehad destroyed that very same evening, and he regrets not havingbehaved wickedly enough against the unfortunate writer and his wife.

19. If the scene that we have just analysed ends with the protagonist’ssleep, the one we shall consider next sets off with his awakening. Weare now in the third part of the novel, when Alex—by now conditionedto suffer because of the violence and the music—is entrusted by thewriter Alexander to a group of anti-government activists who, with theexcuse of protecting him, plan to exploit his misfortune for propagan-distic ends. In many ways this scene is similar to the previous one as itoccurs within the confines of a room, “into a flat like all the flats of allthe flatblocks of the town”, “not really all that distant from what hadused to be my own flatblock or home.”75 The flat is very tiny but has apeculiarity that will turn out to be crucial. It is packed with books,“papers and ink and bottles and all that cal.”76 Taken there and lockedinside, Alex is “all on my oddy knocky”; he throws himself on the bedthis time fully clothed, only “with my sabogs kicked off my nogas andmy tie loose”77 and, pondering the uncertain future that expects him,eventually falls asleep.

Like in the Korova, the music seizes him suddenly, invades himand wakes him up.78 He opens his eyes. Unlike the previous scene ofecstasy when the speakers were located in every corner of the room,now the sounds are coming only from the wall on the left side, corre-sponding to the one behind which, in the other situation, his parentswere silently asleep. It is a symphony that Alex knows well (“the


75 p. 12976 p. 129 . 77 p. 13078 p. 130 see ap. p. endix, 4


Symphony Number Three of the Danish veck Otto Skadelig, a verygromky and violent piece, especially in the first movement”), but thathe has not listened to for a very long time. And after just two secondsof “interest and joy”, enough to appreciate it and to acknowledge itsaesthetic value, the physical distress that invades him well inside hisguts comes rampantly. “Then it all came over me, the start of the painand the sickness, and I began to groan deep down in my keeshkas”. Hisreaction is immediate. He leaves the bed and with great effort crawls tothe wall. If in the ecstasy scene he was lying down with the musicenveloping and penetrating him; if in the Cure one he was forced on awheelchair and the sounds were reaching well within his body, now itis him going towards the music. He begins “creeching” against themusic the same words repeated during the Cure (“stop, stop it, turn itoff!”), replicating the same desperate gesture of the victims in themovies whose screams of pain would prevent him from listening to thebackground music.

The screams are accompanied by a revelatory gesture (that his par-ents refrained from doing during his night-time ecstatic listening). Alexpunches the wall vigorously and repeatedly, “till my knuckles were allred red krovvy and torn skin”. More than the manifestation of the bloodof the victim, what is significant here seems to be the skin graduallyshedding, as if to reveal, beneath the bodily envelope, the mobile flesh(responsible for the turbulent sensomotory events) that uncomfortablyinhabits the envelope and looks in vain for a way out. No wonder that,thanks to this parallelism between corporeality and spatiality, in this pre-cise circumstance Alex abandons the wall, against which he had thrownhimself, goes towards the door with the intention to get out of the flat buthe finds it thoroughly locked. In the impossibility of escape, he tries toprotect himself. “And all the time the music got more and more gromky,like it was all a deliberate torture, O my brothers. So I stuck my little fin-gers real deep in my ookos, but the trombones and kettledrums blastedthrough gromky enough”. The realization that there is a tormentorbeyond the wall, responsible for “more and more gromky” music thatkeeps on penetrating him, prompts Alex to perform a defensive andcuriously self reflexive gesture. He points to the place where the pain iscoming from, but at the same time he penetrates himself, by inserting hisfingers in his ears. In vain, because this is not the path that trombonesand drums follow to pierce him. The pain indeed continues, and with itthe hopeless attempts he makes to alleviate it. He keeps on shouting tostop it, he hits the wall with a hammer, and goes “like wandering all overthe flat in pain and sickness, trying to shut out the music”. The fingers inhis ears were to no avail.

The solution has something of the miraculous. Alex turns to the“Bog in Heaven” and he “boohooed” so. He has become the perfect



sacrificial victim, literally a scapegoat. And the divinity replies to himthrough a very precise medium, exactly the one that Alex had alwaysopposed with violent determination, that is, books. “And then on topof the pile of books and papers and all that cal that was on the table inthe living-room I viddied what I had to do and what I had wanted todo until those old men in the Public Biblio and then Dim and Billyboydisguised as rozzes stopped me, and that was to do myself in, to snuffit, to blast off for ever out of this wicked and cruel world”. Even beforebeing filled with bookish contents, the message from God stronglymanifests its own superior nature. It comes under the sign of the must-do, of the undisputed authority, rather than under the sign of anindividual will-to-do.

When actually had this individual will-to-do become real? Atwhich precise moment did the project of self-destruction start? If we goback a couple of chapters we may find the answer. After leaving hisparents house disconsolate, Alex arrives by chance at the KorovaMilkbar79 where he is served by “no veck [he] knew” not the usualenergising milk with knives but the other “synthemesc” drug that—aswe may recall—brings you closer to God while at the same time turn-ing you into a thing. This emerges clearly from the long description ofthe hallucinatory state experienced by the protagonist. He stares at a bitof silver paper (silver like the precious metals produced by the brassduring the musical ecstasy) and little by little this useless tiny objectexpands until it becomes the whole world; then some statues thatresembles God and the angels turn up; and at this point Alex seems toexpel everything and to feel good (“I felt I had got rid of everything—platties, body, brain, name, the lot—and felt real horrorshow”), but thestatues laughing tell him that that moment is yet to come. Back to astate of awareness he finds himself alone, staring at his empty glassand he decides that the only solution is to commit suicide. He then goesto the library to find a non violent method of killing himself, but herehe bumps into the old people that will persecute him...and the storytakes the turn we know well.

We understand the reason why that individual will-to-do, that self-destructive project could not have lead to any successful result. It wasillusory, insofar as it had manifest during a situation of hallucinatorytrance, in a state in which the subject is nothing but a thing, in otherwords, on the side of the inorganic, where no real willingness can be pos-sible. Better indeed is the role of the animal—the scapegoat that bleats at“Bog in Heaven”—that is, on the side of the organic, where a programmeof action under the sign of the “must-do” is perfectly feasible. Once acredible figure of authority is identified, the Addressee (that in every

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story gives the subjects of action the reason to act) the curious form inwhich the divine message is expressed, whereby Alex finds a solution tohis troubles can unfold. “What I viddied was the slovo DEATH on thecover of a like pamphlet, even though it was only DEATH to THE GOV-ERNMENT. And like it was Fate there was another malenky bookletwhich had an open window on the cover, and it said: ‘Open the windowto fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of living.’ And so I knew that was liketelling me to finish it all off by jumping out”.

Although he is in a state of absolute bodily distress, or perhaps pre-cisely because of it, Alex turns into a fortune-teller, the speciousinterpreter of a cryptic message that he pieces together in a way that ismore like a puzzle than a mystery. After all, for him the productive useof the texts—from listening to classical symphonies to reading the Bible—has always been the rule. To begin with, he only takes notice of thebooks’ covers, and not of their real content. Secondly, depending onwhat message he is piecing together (and assuming it as the most like-ly from the beginning), he decides what to make pertinent and what toeliminate among the various and protean textual elements that he isdealing with. He then takes a word from the title of a tome (“death”),giving scarce importance to the rest (“to the government”). He stares atthe cover image of a sort of pamphlet (“an open window”) and placesit in a meaningful relationship with the imperative expression thatoverlaps it (“open the window...”). At his point he articulates it all andmakes explicit the content of the divine message that had leaded himto the resolution of this incongruous riddle-sentence. It “was liketelling me to finish it all off by jumping out”.

Ending it all is a clever idea that allows Alex to achieve the objec-tive he has been longing for. To free himself from the terrible music thatinvades him and makes him sick and also to relieve himself from theterrible effects of the Ludovico Technique (“Do I find myself able toslooshy the old Choral Symphony without being sick once more?”80, hehad often wondered). Better dead than to keep on suffering. And thesolution is clear. It suffices to perform a ‘poetic’ shift from the somaticexperience to the spatial one and to expel the lived body from theclosed room in the way in which the music could have been expelledfrom the guts. With a minimal but resolving figurative relay, the bodycontainer becomes body contained, the somatic envelope becomesflesh of the world and “finishes it all off”. Now the body is free from alltroubles, especially from the arrogant Pavlovian conditionings of theLudovico Technique, while at the same time restoring the phenomeno-logically paradoxical domain of the living body upon the brutishempiricism of the machinic one.

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Chapter 4

Disguises of the Hypodermic in Kubrick’s Movie

1. Why in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is the writer characterat some point forced into a wheelchair?1 Intuitively the answer canonly be because of the abuse inflicted by Alex and his gang of “droogs”at the beginning of the story.2 His body is disabled, he has lost the useof the legs and he needs protection against other possible attacks aswell as around the clock care. The beefy man by his side, engaged inintense physical exercise while the writer, undeterred, continues towrite, performs this double role. He can defend him from new attackswhile taking his wife’s place. He sits where she used to sit, he goes toopen the door as she had done before, he carries the writer around thehouse and helps him with the domestic chores. The wheelchair is anindicator of the transformation of the character. Whereas in the novel itwas a matter of a cognitive transformation—“[I] wondered howbezoomny this F. Alexander really was, perhaps driven bezoomny byhis wife’s snuffing it”—Alex thinks, now the worst consequences of theviolence suffered happens to the body, to the point of affecting its phys-iognomy.

On closer inspection, however, the image of the wheelchair wasalready present in Burgess’ book. When Alex goes into the“Filmdrome” to begin the Cure, he is taken there on a wheelchair, istransferred into a “dentist’s chair” for the entire length of the treat-ment, and then he goes back to his “malenky bedroom” on the samevehicle he had arrived on. As we recall, his body is weak because of thehypodermic containing the “Ludovico veshch”, so it cannot walk byitself; it is almost emptied of what it contains, a pure envelope ready tobe filled with different substances. This is why, if we compare the bookto the movie, the shift of the wheelchair from one character to the otheris highly significant. Kubrick’s writer acquires a characteristic thatbelongs to Burgess’ Alex, so that the two characters—narratively antag-onistic—tend to physically resemble each other more and more by

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being both victim and tormentor of the other. Although in the moviethe writer is no longer associated with the protagonist via thepatronymic name (Alexander/Alex), the pair exchange a white and reddressing gown that they wear in the moment when that are just aboutto suffer violence at the other’ s hand.

Several film critics have observed how the wheelchair is actuallypresent in at least two other Kubrick’s movies. The protagonist ofDoctor Strangelove played by Peter Sellers is immobilized in one, as wellas one of Barry Lyndon’s secondary characters. This suggests that in theimaginary universe of the American director (a series of masterpiecesvery different in terms of genres, themes and styles), the figuration ofthe paralytic man whose body is one with the machine, although per-mutated in different contexts, still produces similar meanings. Thiscluster of an underlying network of intertextual references found in theAmerican director’s various works contributes to homogenize them ina coherent corpus of texts. For instance, the “spaceship[s]” that Alexrefers to during his musical ecstasies operate in the same way.3 Eventhough this image is present in Burgess’ text exactly in the same pointin the story, as soon as it becomes part of the movie it cannot fail to beput in relation—as indeed many critics have done—with 2001 SpaceOdyssey. Even Alex’s body posture during the clash with Billyboy’sgang may be related. What in the novel was a bloodthirsty knife fight,becomes in Kubrick a fight with batons,4 as if to underline the analo-gies between the violent metropolitan “droogs” and the prehistoricapes of 2001 Space Odyssey. What is missing is the blood gushing out,one of those somatic processes whose semantic implications we nowcan decode. Instead, an intertextual reference is grafted here to producea new meaning that does not rest either in the former element or in thelatter text, but rather in their actual relationship.

Who is right? Is it more accurate to recall (as serious philologistsmay do) how the wheelchair was already present in Burgess, or ratherto indicate (as attentive film buffs might) similar instruments inKubrick’s other works? Is the literary text the primary reference pointin the interpretation of its cinematic adaptation (so that the spaceshiplives foremost in Alex’s teenage fantasies), or rather is the movie awork in itself which partakes of an imaginary, exquisitely cinematicuniverse (where the spaceship lives its spatial odysseys to the sound ofa waltz)? Obviously, aside from preconceived opinions, this is a matterof pertinences. Nobody is right or wrong in themselves. It is rather amatter of different gazes on the same object that end up producing dif-ferent, even contrasting, meanings. The same figurative element (the


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wheelchair, the spaceship, the baton, the knife) can alter its meaningaccording to the perspective from which it is viewed, according to thelevel of pertinence in which it is inserted, on the condition that the cho-sen pertinences are spelled out and that both explicative reasons andhermeneutical objectives are declared.

All this to say that, when we shift from analysing Burgess’ novel toanalysing Kubrick’s movie, the intertextual perspective expands expo-nentially. In analysing a single text, we had found the image of a seriesof Chinese boxes that created a paradoxical uninterrupted line betweenthe narrative content of the book and its alleged cultural context. Whathas emerged was a series of intertextual references to other works (lit-erary, scientific, philosophical, religious, political...), an invitation toexplore other textual realities that allowed us to better explain andunderstand the text we begun with. However, when we attempt tocarry out a comparative analysis of the two texts, we are faced with twotextual universes that, interweaving with each other, produce a third,bigger and more complex one with a series of internal connections that—akin to the chair where the sinister writer is immobilised—may evenbe in conflict. In this third textual universe the corpus of Burgess’works (novels, theatre pieces, prefaces, critical essays, interviews, state-ments, letters to editors...); the corpus of Kubrick’s works (where atleast his precious verbal declarations ought to be coupled with hismovies); the tradition of literary dystopias and cinematic science fic-tion; the texts of the behaviourist psychologists whose work is referredto by both authors (not always the same ones, for instance, the famousSkinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, quoted by Kubrick during aninterview, which was published a few months before the movie cameout); the enormous quantity of reviews and articles that have stirred upthe polemics about instigation to violence by the time the moviereached the screens; a series of other works that more or less directlyquote parts of the movie (such as some music videos); not to mentionthe fact that, thanks to the success of the movie, “clockwork orange” isby now in several languages an expression of journalistic jargon thatdescribes the action of young thugs that provokes terror in those whohave to witness it, all these elements cohabit and merge.

All these texts are inevitably in dialogue with each other. Besides,the intertextual network that connects them is not a mosaic representa-tion (and certainly not a diachronic one) of an external social world.Instead, it is part of the same world, acts in it and merges with theactors and the forces that constitute it. Each textual element of the net-work is a (counter)reply to a previous text, to which a further text willtactically reply and so on and so forth. For example, irritated by thesuccess of Kubrick’s movie, in which he saw a glorification of violenceas an end in itself, Burgess in 1987 writes a theatrical version of his

Disguises of the Hypodermic 101


novel titled A Clockwork Orange: a Play with Music. At the end of the per-formance a Kubrick look-alike enters the stage and plays Singin’ in therain (the song that Alex sings in the movie several times and that reap-pears in the credits) on the trumpet, and is rudely chased away by theother characters. Moreover, in a 1974 novel titled A Clockwork Testament,Burgess himself had translated in literary fiction his disappointmentwith Kubrick and, more in general, towards cinematic transpositions ofnovels. In this novel, the poet Enderby writes the screenplay for a shortpoem by Hopkins which is transformed by a cynical movie directorinto a pornographic and sensational piece of work. When the movie isreleased Enderby is asked to appear on television to defend it and, notwithout difficulties, he finds himself in a talk-show having to explainthe substantial differences between the original text (that he had effec-tively written) and the cinematic one (that does not belong to him, butthat nevertheless is a great audience success).

We will traverse and reorganize the intertextual network producedat the intersection of the novel and the movie, and give it internalcoherence, from the starting point of a single, precise criterion of perti-nence, the same one that we have already employed in the analysis ofthe novel. Clearly, this concerns the issue of corporeality, of both inter-nal and external perceptive processes that graft themselves onto afigurative level via specific rhetorical expedients and that, in doing so,end up affecting the fundamental level of the text, its whole intelligibil-ity. The choice of this specific interpretative key, in sidestepping thepolemics that had met the movie since its very first screenings, allowus to better clarify the sense of some aesthetical choices made byKubrick (such as the elimination of the 21st chapter, the overall ironicand metaspectacular tone of his work, the emphasis on the Christianisotopia, the erasure of the bookish one, but also the gaudy décor andcostumes, the introduction of pop elements and cartoonish images, theelectronic distortions of the soundtrack and so on). All this startingalmost from scratch, that is, from a swift discussion of the old-fash-ioned, often aprioristic question of the cinematic transposition ofnovels.

2. How does Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange face the issues that we haveidentified in Burgess’ text? Does the movie slavishly retrace the themesof free will and violence embedded in social conditionings that Burgesshas pointed out many times? Or is it perhaps an autonomous creationthat, as the English writer declared with patent irritation, “transformsthe reclaiming of free will into an exaltation of violence”? Or, as wewould like to show, is it perhaps a work that penetrates in depth,revealing and accentuating those textual mechanisms of the novel that



transcend such explicit themes, highlighting instead the complex con-figuration of corporeality and the paradoxical logics beneath it?

Every cinematic version of a literary text is the audiovisual trans-position of a pre-existing verbal matter, with all the opportunities andall the risks that this substitution of expressive substances unavoidablyinvolves on the plane of the signified contents. The transformation ofthe signifying matter produces some sort of modification of the seman-tic matter. Now, the peculiarity of the situation that we are addressing(where we will encounter once more the figuration of the mise-en-abyme) is given by the fact that a great deal of the contents found inBurgess’ book concerns what is by definition the expressive matter ofcinema: images projected on screen, accompanying sounds, theirmeaningful relationships, the cognitive and affective effects theyinduce in the spectator, the consequences of such effects on the subse-quent behaviour. If A Clockwork Orange is the story of a cinematicprojection, a movie that tells this story cannot but be self reflexive. Inother words, a piece that talks about itself, about the matter it is madeof, about the modalities of its textual articulation, about the semanticeffects that such an articulation produces, about the final pragmatic by-products. As it has often been remarked, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orangeis a metamovie aware of being a metamovie. It is a text that does notshun the inescapable knot of signifiers and signifieds that constitution-ally characterizes it, but that actually faces up to the issues recountedin the novel, emphasising its spectacular aspects to the detriment ofother possible isotopias. Because of this—and despite the plentiful anddocumented critical appraisals it has received and the many correctiveinterventions by the author himself—the best interpretation of Burgess’novel is without doubt the cinematic transposition offered by Kubrick.

Our starting points are therefore given by the metalinguisticaspects of Kubrick’s movie. It is rather obvious that this is a movieabout cinema. What is more interesting is trying to understand whatthis movie says metalinguistically about filmic matter, which ideas itexpresses on cinema through cinema. To point to the metalinguisticquality of a certain text does not mean to exhaust its range but to indi-viduate its signifying structure, which, once made explicit, remains tobe analysed both in its expressive technique and in its contents. Suchan individuation allows us to regain (and double up) the network ofissues we are examining. Whereas Burgess expressed in words hisopinions on images and music, Kubrick expresses through images andmusic his own ideas about images and music. It is up to us, the audi-ence, not to confuse the expressing images with the expressed images,the speaking music with the spoken one, even in those cases where theplane of the signifier and the plane of the signified tend to merge. Aproblem arises when, for instance, we confuse whether to attribute a



certain melody to the narrative content of the movie (music on screen)or to its extranarrative accompaniment (music off screen); or whetherto define a certain sequence of images as objective or subjective, as thecounter-shot of a dialogue or speech directed to the audience. Onething is Rossini’s Gazza Ladra utilized as euphoric background music tothe fight of the rival gangs of Alex and Billyboy.5 Another isBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony voluntarily listened to by Alex when hearrives back home.6 The audience perceives both of them as moviesoundtracks, yet the distinction between what composes the filmic dia-gesis and what does not is clear. The situation is similar with regard tothe images. What is seen by the characters (for example, the paintingsin the house of the cat lady7 or the Ludovico Technique movies8) andwhat is seen directly by the spectator (for example, the protagonist ashe is arrives in prison9) has a very different enunciative value, subjec-tive in the former case, objective in the latter. One issue remainsunresolved, however. Very often, due to the editing process, these dis-tinctions tend to fade away, for example when the audience listens tothe William Tell that accompanies Alex’s orgy with the two young girlspicked up in the record shop.10 Here the audience can consider it an off-screen music which provides an external passionate accompaniment tothe events it is witnessing. However, given the fact that, in the previoussequence, Alex had persuaded the two “young ptitsas” to go back tohis house to play some records together, it can be assumed that this isthe music that resounds in the room during their ensuing, excessive,hasty intercourses. The scene is a caricature, not only for us spectators(who are watching speeded up images and listening to electronicallydistorted music), but also for the narrative characters who, like manySkinnerian mice, seem to be tossing around in bedlam.

3. To make even more clear the intrigue of the planes of signifier andsignified, upon which Kubrick plays persistently by assigning it a fun-damental function in his work, let us consider one of the most famousand most reproduced frames of the movie: the one in which Alex, turn-ing to the writer whose wife he is about to rape, says: “viddy well,brother, viddy well”11(image 1).


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Image 1

If we consider this image from the point of view of the narrativecontent, we can consider it as a subjective shot: the spectator sees whatin that moment the character of writer is seeing, precisely from hispoint of view. In the frames immediately before and after (image 2 and3) we see that Alexander is pinned down on the floor (by George), hismouth kept shut and his eyes bulging with rage. In both images he islooking up at Alex who is wriggling, in the first obliquely on the left,in the second slightly on the right, with a gaze that is never in the cen-tre and never looks into camera. It is him, Alexander, forced to watch,that the protagonist addresses saying with obvious, irritating euphe-mism “viddy well, brother”.

Image 2

Image 3



What is the writer watching? What is he supposed to “viddywell”? In the foreground he sees on the right Alex turned to him (squat-ting and wearing a phallic mask that hides his face) while in thebackground on the left he sees Dim (Bamba’s original name kept in theItalian version of the movie) who is holding his wife by now strippedbare and about to be raped. The woman, as a subsequent frame reveals,has her mouth kept shut as well and closes her eyes with shame. Unlikein the book, where she is “creeching away” during the whole rapesequence, here she is forcibly voiceless. The only “soundtrack” of thescene that the writer is witnessing is the song that, in between a kickand a thrashing, Alex is singing, Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the rain knownto the audience because it is the (screen) music of a famous Hollywoodmovie - notoriously metafilmic in itself.

Placed within the communicative axis that interweaves the narra-tive sequence, what used to be a subjective from Alexander’s point ofview becomes Alex’s direct gaze into the camera (image 4). In otherwords, the movie character directly interpellates the spectator behindthe screen. The “brother” who is invited to look well the scene of therape is not from this perspective another character in the story but anextranarrative actor, a receptive instance of the enunciation who, in thispeculiar circumstance, acquires a fundamental trait of the character ofAlexander: being a spectator-victim coerced to watch dreadful scenesof violence. Nevertheless the sequence ends here. The rape is located in

the diegetic ellipsesand does not appearexplicitly. The intenseperceptive discontinu-ity provided by thefilmic gap and by thesudden cut to the sceneof the Korova Milkbar(where the four findshelter soon after),while perhaps reassur-ing the spectator-critic,leaves an unavoidable,immensely powerfuluneasiness in the spec-tator-victim.

Image 4



It seems clear that this image—in which the narrative level of thesubjective and the communicative level of the interpellation overlap tothe point of blurring—is a synecdoche of the cinematic dispositive ingeneral, at least according to Kubrick’s metalinguistic filmic narration.Alex, simultaneously watched and watcher, is a sort of tragic chorusthat mediates between screen and cinema room. He invites the specta-tors to watch while actually denying them the possibility of doing it.Not only does he relegate the violence in the narrative ellipses prevent-ing its vision, but he hides himself behind a mask, making a potentialrecognition of his real identity impossible. In short, he forces us to seebut he does not want to be seen. If for us this image has a crucial func-tion it is because it anticipates the arrangement of the LudovicoTechnique, where Alex, again both watcher and watched, will take upan inverted role. He will be forced to watch the violence in the movieswhile being the object of spectacle for his tormentors, badly disguisedby the little reassuring mask of the medical uniform that they show offwith chilly haughtiness.

4. Shown to the spectator in a plethora of sequences, the “ultravio-lence” recounted in A Clockwork Orange is much more intense in themovie than in the novel. Even though it is subdued in quantity andquality compared to Burgess horrific literary descriptions, the effect itproduces on the audience is explosive. It is also the reason behind thecensorship and ensuing controversy, as well as behind the negativeinfluence that according to many the movie has had on the youngeraudience, eager to imitate Alex and his gang of “droogs” antisocialdeeds. As far as we are concerned the display of violence on the cine-ma screen makes corporeality immediately present, visible andtherefore fundamental. Pure destructive energy or victim of indescrib-able cruelties, the body - whole and in pieces, able and disabled, nakedand clothed by outlandish costumes, stimulated by drugs or massagedby the vibrations of a car, organism or machine - seems to be the main,true protagonist of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

The violence of (and on) the body is present in the cinematic text atdifferent levels. We find it first and foremost at the level of the enunci-ate. A Clockwork Orange is a story of violence inflicted and sufferedreciprocally by the two narratives sides at stake. On one hand, there isthe single individual, the protagonist Alex, who lacks a real pro-gramme of action apart from that of ultraviolence as an end in itself,without the aim of gathering money or of obtaining other forms ofprofit, but based on generic collective tendencies such as juvenilismand counterculture as well as on a cartoonish and mediatic imaginationinclined toward vandalism. As a “vandal”, Alex does not act on the



basis of negative social values. Instead, he tends to destroy axiologiesas a whole and to question their profound values. On the other hand,there is society with its institutions, violent in themselves and violenttoward the protagonist. Every programme of action implemented bythe social institutions to fight Alex and his ultraviolence turns out to beeven more violent, until we reach the paroxysm of the LudovicoTechnique which is both the plot pivot and the filmic deconstruction ofevery possible reception of cinema - a technique of conditioning con-sciences via a forced intrusion of Power into the body of the subject.This is Burgess’ fundamental thesis, one which Kubrick keeps onlypartially in his work. The violence of the conditioning of the consciencecarried out by the Ludovico Technique is certainly more extreme thanthe one perpetrated by Alex. The elimination of free will is ethicallyreprehensible and this is demonstrated by seeing it acted out, notagainst an “any” man, and certainly not against a good man, butagainst a wicked one. Yes, Alex is evil, but this does not make theLudovico Technique any less violent.

The problematic cluster of the story is thus staged. It concerns theviolence that political philosophy, for instance, has been debating for along time. It concerns the link between individual violence as aggres-sion and the excessive use of force by Power. Is violence necessary toassert sociality? Is violence a foundation of the community? Is it thelesser evil whose goal is to defeat intrinsic human aggression? Mostly,it seems that the Christian topic of free will explicitly thematized byBurgess is surreptitiously transformed by Kubrick into a position sim-ilar to our anthropological notions about the scapegoat. Let us recallthe last scene of the movie, when Alex’s own “expressive” violence (anend in itself, pure dépense with no other aim than to expend physicalenergy and assert individuality) and Power’s “instrumental” one (rep-resented by the minister who cultivates his specific objectives) end upas allies.

As well as in the narrative enunciate there is also violence in thereal enunciation, that is, on the plane of the concrete communicativeprocesses. It is well known how, even during its first screenings,Kubrick’s movie provoked a heated debate and was censored becauseit was considered capable of instigating in its audience reactions as vio-lent as those depicted. Several critics have even accused the movie ofbeing fascist, a pure aesthetization of, hence instigation to, violence.Indeed, it seems that for several months in some areas of Great Britainseveral youth gangs dressed up like Alex’s “droogs” (white overalls,boots and bowler hats) took up acts of extreme violence against objectsand people while singing Singin’ in the rain.



5. In this double level of violence there is a peculiar inversion. Thefilmic enunciate is concerned with taking Alex, via the vision of somemovies, to a forced “non violence”, that is, to a not-wanting-to-do and,above all, a not-being-able-to-do. In real communication, on the contrary,the vision of the movie leads to the committing of violence, hence to awanting-to-do and a being-able-to-do. In other words, the aim of the text,as it is debated by different characters (the writer, the prison chaplain,the director and the minister), is to criticise the Pavlovian techniques ofconditioning for the rehabilitation of the criminals, techniques whichare considered more violent than the violence of the young urbanhooligans. The pragmatic consequences of the text are however theopposite. They concern the positive use of the vandalistic programmeof ultraviolence, hence an identification with what the protagonist isbefore the Cure rather than what he becomes at the end of the story,after the narrative transformation.

This is the classic hermeneutic problem of the good or bad identi-fication between spectator and character. How is it possible that a textthat explicitly sets out to achieve specific cognitive objectives can pro-voke opposite reactions, not only on the cognitive plane but also on thepragmatic one? Is there something that did not work out within thetext or, perhaps, at the moment of its reception? Should we ask thisquestion at the level of interpretation (as expected by the text) or at thelevel of use (which transcends it)? Here the core question emerges.How could the violence represented in a text lead to real violence?From the hermeneutics or aesthetic of reception we arrive at a classictheme of the sociology of media, the notorious, anonymous, hyper-debated hypodermic theory according to which the media impact theaudience like syringes that penetrate the body and the mind of thereceivers. This is what, literally, happens to Alex during the Cure.Penetrated by a hypodermic, he is injected a substance that (if we readcarefully the small bottle framed in the foreground) seems to be called“Serum 114” (a name that, if read in its initials, gives CRM 114, a fur-ther reference to the bullet theory).12

Here we find once more, even more clearly, the delicate issue of thesymbolic efficacity of texts. First and foremost a cognitive and prag-matic efficacity, but also affective and somatic one. Anthropologyteaches that it is possible to treat phenomena that involve the recipientin a ritual or other communicative situation not so much in the posi-tivistic terms of a material or simulated influence, but rather as aproper language. In this sense the relationship between the text and itsconsequences is analogous to the one, internal to the sign, between sig-nifier and signified. In technical terms the symbolic efficacity is a

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semantic, rather than pragmatic, issue. This is also confirmed by sever-al ethno-psychiatric studies that rethink the notion of (medical)influence no longer in terms of causality (“you will heal because youtake this medicine”), but in terms of signification (“you will healbecause your body enters in harmony with the universe of meaningthat you had lost”). It is within the filmic text that the reasons for its“success” have to be found, and, in this case, the reason for the inter-pretative drift from the intentions of its author and some of its internalspokespersons. If the receiving subject (in his/her different dimen-sions), as anthropologists argue, has to be taken as the “signified” ofthe movie, we must identify first of all what, in the movie, functions asits “signifier”. Prefiguring the outcomes of our analysis, we shall saythat this signifier is Alex’s own body, the organic-phenomenologicalbody fighting the mechanical-empirical one, the body subjected to amythical therapy that tends to transform it, and against which it oppos-es strong resistances. Furthermore, it is necessary to find out how,thanks to the mediation of the plane of the enunciation, it may be pos-sible to re-enact some sense of continuity (however simulated) betweencharacter and spectator or, even better, between the body of the charac-ter, subjected to a cure that is also a spectacle, and the body of thespectator, guided to re-enact an experience of spectacular receptionwhich, in itself, is also a form of therapy.

6. Let us first of all pose the question in the classic terms of aesthetictheory, in order to ponder on the possible processes of identificationbetween spectator and character. To do so, what must be considered,following the classic Aristotelian dictate, is the articulation of theactions in the story. At this level it is very problematic to talk aboutidentification between character and receiver from which a genuineliberating catharsis might erupt.

Let us go back for a moment to Burgess’ novel. Which kind of nar-rative transformation does it offer? As we may recall, the book isdivided in three parts of seven chapters each, on the whole in twenty-one chapters. The true transformation of the character occurs,suddenly, only in the twenty-first chapter when Alex, by now grownup, decides to stop the practice of the ultraviolence to which he haddevoted himself again after his attempted suicide. He now intends tochange life, even wishes to start a family and have some kids. Theproblem is that this transformation is not motivated by any previousnarrative moment, or by any overcoming of (pragmatic or cognitive)trials. Far from being a consequence of something, it is only linked onlyto age. It turns out to be rather questionable, a sort of moralising clo-sure extrinsic to the whole set up of the novel where, on the contrary,actions and passions follow one another according to precise logics.



The situation is different in the movie. Here the last chapter is elim-inated and a different story emerges, one that is not linear-transformative but cyclical, a story that ends with Alex more evil thanever. Once the attempts to turn him into a subject conditioned to dogoodwill have failed, the protagonist goes back to how he was at thebeginning of the book. If a transformation occurs, as Kubrick has wellunderstood, it is under a totally different sign. Alex is transformed inthe sense that he is no longer an isolated and antisocial subject but isnow allied with the Power, a Power that he somewhat accepts and bywhich he is in turn accepted. Individual and social violence becomeone and the same thing. It is difficult, in these circumstances, to identi-fy first with the character and then, at the moment of histransformation, to detach from him. If there is identification, it is onlywith the socially negative character, the romantic and nihilistic onewho exercises his “expressive” ultraviolence and who becomes first avictim of the society and then manages to save himself.

Thus, if the identification is problematic it is for a different reason.As some critics have observed, this is a movie that is anything butAristotelian. It rather resembles a kind of Brechtian drama, utterlyintent on the estrangement and detachment of the spectator from theevent, which is experienced more as a metalinguistic spectacle than asa story to identify with. It is as if the movie was told, and thereforereceived, at the second degree. Never, so to speak, ‘live’ but always byhighlighting the fact that this is the spectacle of a spectacle. Charactersand circumstances are grotesque, if not downright ridiculous, and atevery level irony surfaces. As for the protagonist, more than being rep-resented as a bad, dangerous and antisocial subject, what is stressedrather is his infantilism, directly linked to a diffused mediatic imagi-nary, closer to great Hollywood cinema or cartoons rather than noir orsocial realism. Even Alex’s passion for great classical music (which inthe novel turns him into an erudite connoisseur and a refined aesthete),is reduced by Kubrick to a sort of dull admiration for Beethoven,whose music is often reproduced in an electronic version that effective-ly alters its meaning. Above all the theme of representation is to befound in several instances: in the initial scene of the fight againstBillyboy’s rival gang that takes place in a disused theatre to the soundof Gazza Ladra;13 in the sequence of the demonstration of the efficacy ofthe Ludovico Technique that takes place in a sort of preview lounge forcritics;14 in the explicit demands of the cinematic gaze; in the subjectiveclose-up of the writer; not to mention the Ludovico Technique15 itself,

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where it is often the screen that looks at the room. Someone hasremarked how the Cure (in Burgess the technique) is translated byKubrick as treatment, which also refers to the “treatment” in the cine-matic sense of the word. Finally, in the last scene the representation ofviolence returns but in the unmistakable form of the Hollywood spec-tacle.16 The examples are countless. A Clockwork Orange is not a moviethat represents the violence of, and in, the world. Rather, it representsits staging or, even, its spectacularization. It is a metamovie whosenature should deny any form of identification. Unless, of course, theempirical spectator—as has probably happened—fails to grasp thisironic level that underlies the entire movie and is inclined insteadtowards a literal interpretation of the story.

7. The question takes up quite another aspect if we double up the levelof the narrative intelligence in the text and, as we have done with thenovel, we consider the levels of its figurative and aesthesic logics. Inthis case it is no longer a matter of debating the possible identificationsbetween protagonist and spectator that could be experienced on a cog-nitive or affective plane external to the text, but rather a matter ofseeing if and how the body can break down the plane of the narrativelogic and begin to activate its own logics, to create a continuity ofmeaning between the subject of the enunciate and the subject of theenunciation.

At a thematic level the body is present in the movie in behaviouristSkinnerian terms as a sort of machine that should respond automatical-ly to a series of given stimuli. In fact, the Ludovico Technique, evenbefore being shown within the enunciated story, is spoken of by differ-ent characters that highlight its technical-scientific nature. According todoctor Brodsky and his team, the “treatment” that Alex is subjected toconsists precisely in educating the body to reply to certain stimuli, byinjecting it with a medicine (the Serum 114) that induces nausea and allsorts of spasms while the body is simultaneously forced to watch asequence of violent images. In this way the discomfort provoked by themedicine is attributed by the subject to the vision, making it unbear-able for him to watch any violent image. When Alex, pain stricken, saysthat he has understood the extent to which ultraviolence is antisocial,that he has grasped cognitively the effects of his own actions, Brodskyand his team reply that his body has to learn it, not his mind. The vio-lence of the Ludovico Technique rests exactly in this simultaneouslymaterial and pedagogic seizing of Alex’s body, a body which is treatedas if it was an automaton—a clockwork orange—which reacts with

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determined answers to determined stimuli.This is precisely the “talked” body which is assumed within a sci-

entistic ideology of the behaviourist kind. The body experienced by theprotagonist and shown to the spectator is quite different. No longer thebody objectified by the scientific gaze but the subject’s lived body, a par-adoxical instance that acts and thinks since the moment of perceptionand which, like a chiasm, is inherent to the world, a world that phan-tasmatically assumes the role of a container absorbing the body withinitself. Alex’s body escapes the violent impositions of the medical treat-ment precisely because it cannot be brought back to be, and reduced to,a thing. In this sense, the image of the clockwork orange in the title maybe interpreted in a different way and with a different meaning. Not ahuman actor who becomes a perfect automaton (the traditional readingwhich covers only the first half of the story), but an automaton whoreveals itself as an organism, a machine with a body and a flesh (as thewhole final part of the story shows). The double movement present inthe movie highlights even more what we have already captured in thenovel. The adventure of a Leib that is transformed into Körper, of abody-organism that becomes a body-machine, to go back again to be aLeib, an organic being inherent to a subject and to his inter-world.

8. To understand this philosophical passage, that is, to read Kubrick’smovie also as a story of a philosophical dispute, we shall examine indetail how the Ludovico Technique operates. In the previous chapterwe have analysed the scene of the Cure found in the novel, emphasiz-ing the crucial link between the violent images Alex is forced to watchduring the therapy and the music that accompanies those images. Thisscene has been compared with other two textual fragments in whichthe protagonist listens to some music: a euphoric moment when hecomes back home after his night of ultraviolence and locks himself inhis room to listen to Beethoven and a dysphoric moment when he islocked inside a room and forcibly made to listen to the music. Theanalysis of the text of the novel has shown how in these three scenesthere is a series of parallelisms and inversions that underlines how, atthe moment of listening to the music, what is synesthesically engaged,more than the simple auditory apparatus, is actually the whole ofAlex’s body.

In the scene of the Ludovico Technique Alex arrives in the treat-ment room utterly weak. He cannot walk and the only thing he wantsto do is sleep. Between him and the doctors there is a sort of doublymendacious pact. When he enters the room his somatic functions arenot good and he is lacking those social relationships that could makehim into a subject. He is predisposed to be a pure watching machine.



During the Cure he is tied up to an armchair with his eyes kept forciblyopen. He describes the movies he watches as a series of images thatlinger on the screen (at first explicitly fictional, then increasinglyverisimilar) and of sounds (totally realistic) that seem instead to seepout of the screen. Alex is both spectator and object of spectacle. Afterwatching the movies, he feels a continuous resounding in his head. Itis as if the music, which penetrated him through the eyes, hadremained inside him. As soon as he hears Beethoven used as thesoundtrack of a Nazi documentary he vomits and only then does hefeel much better. He had succeeded in cathartically expelling Ludwig,the name of both the medicine and the music.

In the scene when Alex listens to the music in his own room, he islying on the bed with the eyes closed and the mouth open. The musicreaches him from the six sides of the room, even from under the bed.While listening he has a series of visions and masturbates reaching anerotic-aesthetic ecstasy. In this scene the same mechanism is playing.Music penetrates from the orifice left open, the mouth, and is expelledas a different substance from another body orifice.

The third scene immediately precedes the attempted suicide. Thereis another room where Alex is locked against his will; from one of thewalls music comes to him, but he cannot stand it because of theLudovico Technique. He screams on top of his voice, cannot find a wayout and is overwhelmed by nausea, his head hurts because of thesounds booming inside. This time too the music has penetrated himfrom his screaming open mouth, with the difference that he cannot acti-vate any orifice to expel it. So he does the only thing he can. He decidesto throw himself out of the window. In this way the same sequence ofpenetration and expulsion is reaffirmed, but with a substantial trans-formation. The body is no longer a container but becomes contained. Itis the body that exits, allowing the recovery of the subject, his salvation.Suicide is configured thus as the cure of the Cure. It is the gesture of theexpulsion of the body from the window, symmetrical to that of theexpulsion of the music from the body, that allows Alex to free himselfof its conditioning and to go back to be what he was at the beginning.

How are these scenes translated in the cinematic plane? Althoughat the level of the deep narration the movie modifies profoundly thesense of the novel, opting for the version without the twenty-first chap-ter and inserting the metafilmic isotopia, at a aesthesic level, thetransposition operated by Kubrick reveals itself to be extremely close toBurgess’ text. Indeed, it is almost a corroboration, a translation/inter-pretation perfectly in line with what we have observed in the previouschapter. Even a superficial viewing of the movie would reveal the greatamount of insertions and expulsions of substances from the body. Forinstance, it suffices to think of the milk oozing out of the nipple of the



female sculpture in the Korova Milkbar, at the denture in the glassDeltoid drinks from, at Dim and George who fall inside the tub in frontof Alex’s house, at Deltoid spitting, at the prisoners burping during thechaplain’s sermon, at the injection done by Branom, at Alex’s headforced inside the bathtub by Dim and George, at the minister that feedsthe protagonist in the final scene, and so on. This is also confirmed bythe comparative analysis of the three scenes that we have discussed inwhich Kubrick seems to grasp the series of parallelisms and inversionspresent in the fictional text, returning it basically unaltered in cinemat-ic form, and even supplying it with new figurative solutions and newmetaphorical figurations. It is not a coincidence that, unlike in thenovel, where the music Alex listens to is quite eclectic, Kubrick usesonly Beethoven’s Ninth in these three scenes—the only symphony thatwill be forbidden to Alex after the Cure. This allows Kubrick to put thethree different episodes of the story in unequivocal relation, in spite ofthe fact that they are quite distant from each other. It is also well-known how Beethoven has been electronically altered (by Walter/Wendy Carlos), so that even the music partakes of the general opera-tion of estrangement and metacinema that constitutes the essentialsignature of Kubrick’s movie. What is most interesting here however isthe way in which the cinematic screen transposes the synesthesic rela-tion between body and music which in the novel performs a key rolein its narrative and semantic economy.

9. Prior to the sequence in which it is portrayed, neither the audiencenor Alex knows anything about the Ludovico Technique. Actually, inthe previous scene, there is a dialogue between Alex and the prison’schaplain (perfectly sober, unlike in his fictional version where healways stinks of alcohol), in which the latter warns the protagonistabout the dangers of the Cure: “it’s only in the experimental stage”,“it’s not been used yet [...] not in this prison”, “[the director] has gravedoubts about it”—all statements that cast a vague dysphoric feelingupon the treatment but which Alex does not seem to pick up on.17

The scene of the Cure is made up of four different sequences, twodialogues between Alex and Branom (who, unlike in the book, is awoman), and two sessions in the cinema lounge. We have first a verbal-ization and then a direct representation of the Cure, with thepeculiarity that everything that is said by both speakers about it inthese two dialogue scenes is plainly a lie. On one hand, Alex claims thathe wants to give up ultraviolence, while we know he just wants to bereleased. He is condescending to the medical team for an objective that

17 ACO movie 8



is radically opposed to the Cure’s own. On the other hand, doctorBranom, Brodsky’s enthusiastic spokesperson and maternal interlocu-tor of the protagonist, offers a mitigating version of the Cure (“we justshow you some films”) and hides the real essence of Serum 114 (framedin the foreground exclusively for the enjoyment of cinema buffs, butnever observed directly by the protagonist), which will be injected intoAlex’s body.

The first sequence of the dialogue is where the fictitious commu-nicative pact between the protagonist and his tormentors is drawn up.This doubles up the Cure in a plane of appearance, where the medicalisotopia and a consequent mechanistic vision of the body (within theSkinnerian epistemology we have discussed earlier) dominate, and aplane of being (where at stake are intersubjective relations dominatedby simulation and contrasting passions). It is precisely within thisplane of being that Alex’s body is prepared for the treatment with cin-ematic images, as well as, crucially, with the music, which howeverBrodsky did not foresee.

The first sequence of the Cure happens in a room which is obvious-ly a caricature of a real cinema where the point of view of the screenalternates with the point of view of the audience. On one hand, there iswhat is happening on the screen (violences similar to those perpetrat-ed by Alex). On the other, there are the empirical spectators, that is, themedical team that observes everything from the back of the room, sur-rounded by unspecified scientific instruments. And in the middle thereis Alex, a spectator forced to watch the movies to the end, yet in turnan object of vision himself and object of spectacle for the medical team(image 5). A spectator-victim. Although the voice-off of the Alex-narra-tor informs us about what the character thinks and somatically feelsduring the vision, his body strapped to the chair, his eyes kept forciblyopen (eyes that are not able to see), tell us something about its state oflack. The body has become a passive receptacle of sensations withoutany disposition to channel them reflexively. Alex’s body is configured

Image 5



like an empty body, a negation of any flesh-content, ready to be reaf-firmed as a body envelope, the abstract container of anything whichmay find a way to penetrate it or seep out of it.

On the screen two scenes happen one after another. The protago-nists are actors very similar to the droogs of Alex’s gang and commitviolence on an elderly bourgeois man and on a young woman sportinga pink wig. The images are in colour, shot with a hand held camera,that is, in the same way in which those images in the first part of themovie, where Alex’s gang commits acts of violence, were shot. In thebackground is a relentless, intense and persisting beat, mixed withshrill music, and the moans and screams of the victims. The voice-offof the narrator offers a comment concerned with the effect of reality,insisting first on the realism of the sound (“very horrorshow”) andthen on the realism of the colours. However, Alex’s sanction is of theaesthetic kind. It refers to the movie that he is watching, not to the rep-resented scenes. He is enthusiast not so much because he sees bloodbut rather because he sees “the old krovvy”, that is, something in itselfcinematic; and he says: “it’s funny how the colours of the like realworld only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen”.There is, we might say, the awareness of a referential illusion thatsomehow detaches Alex from what he sees reproduced. For him, thereis no violence, but only its cinematic representation.

What is relevant here is the figure of the medical assistant who,impassive and silent during the entire projection, keeps on insertingeye drops (Kubrick’s own invention) into eyes which are kept forciblywide open. As in the book, the music comes from the screen and goes“throb throb” in the “gulliver”, that is, it penetrates Alex’s body follow-ing the path of the eyes. Similarly Kubrick makes us hear this relentlessbeat and shows us Alex’s eyes being penetrated by another substance:eye drops, rather than music. We therefore witness yet another pene-tration. [image 6].

Image 6



The proprioceptive situation of the protagonist is echoed by a sci-entific comment by Brodsky who, until that moment, did not have anydirect dialogue with Alex. Talking with his team Brodsky says that thesubject “will [...] experience a death-like paralysis with deep feelings ofterror and helplessness”, as well as a sense of “stifling” (privation ofsomething that has to enter the body, which concerns respiration) or“drowning” (vice versa, a state of excessive fullness, concerning nutri-tion). It is Brodsky, the creator of a behaviourist therapy that considersthe body as a machine, who, with his metaphors, conceptualizes Alex’sbody as an envelope now filled up, now emptied, either excessively orinsufficiently. This poses the cathartic problem that most concerns ustextually, that is, the “valuable identification” between the experienceof receiving the images and the events happening on the screen (i.e.between the enunciation and the enunciated).

In the second sequence of the dialogue between Alex and doctorBranom, the latter takes up the role of an excited and exciting observ-er, only partially adhering to Brodsky’s (who, as we know, is workingfor the politicians) principles. Branom endorses the situation of vio-lence we have just witnessed (“violence is a very horrible thing”) andverbalizes the meaning of the Cure (“that’s what you are learningnow”). It is not enough that Alex acknowledges verbally what he hasunderstood. It is necessary that he learns it “so”, that is, through theobjectified body of the medical science.

The second sequence of the Cure begins directly with Beethoven’sNinth that accompanies a silent black and white documentary onNazism. The contrast with the movies of the first session is stark. Thereis no soundtrack, only the music. It is no longer a Hollywood movie (orrecognised as such), but a documentary. In short, it is no longer some-thing verisimilar, but something true. Alex’s reaction is quite differenttoo. On recognising the Ninth, he yells: “[it’s a sin] using Ludwig vanlike that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music”.Violence is perpetrated on violent individuals (as himself and his vic-tims) not on the innocents. The acknowledgement of this “crime”, theuse of Beethoven as a soundtrack of the Nazi documentary, provokesin him powerful somatic sensations. Not only does he feel a vaguesense of nausea, he must actually vomit. This however does not hap-pen (unlike in the book) but it produces instead a desperate andrelentless scream from a gaping mouth [image 7]. It is in the form of ascream, then, that what had entered via the eyes as eye drops finallycomes out, allowing Alex to rebalance his organism and to bear thosefurther fifteen days of torture that separate him from freedom.



Image 7

10. This mechanism of penetration of the body-envelope by the music(manifest as different substances) and the consequent liberating expul-sion (as additional substances) produces effects of reality if theLudovico Technique sequence is placed in relation with the other twoscenes of listening to Beethoven, one euphoric and the other dysphor-ic. In these too the same mechanism is present and turns out to benecessary for the overall “health” of the protagonist.

Image 8

Image 9



In the first scene18 Alex has just come home after his wild night. Hegoes in his bedroom, places the booty of the evening in a drawer,inserts an audiotape of Beethoven’s Ninth in the tape recorder and lieson the bed to listen to it. The whole scene is scattered with penetrationsand expulsions of all kind, which, although seemingly accidental, arestriking in number. Besides, many of these movements seem to be jus-tified only by Kubrick cinematic translation. For example, whyinserting an audiotape in the tape recorder slot rather than placing arecord on a deck? Why is there a snake coming out of a drawer? Evenif the sexual isotopia explicit in the novel is less evident here, we couldlist a long series of penetrations and expulsions, with Beethoven(whose face is framed in the foreground in the poster on the wall[image 8]) standing as the observer of the entire event. Among the pen-etrations we have: the money thrown inside the drawer, the insertionof the tape in the recorder, the snake that slides near the vagina of awoman portrayed in another poster, the flesh of the four dancingChrists pierced by nails and by the crown of thorns, the trapdoor thatopens up and the hanged woman framed from below. Among theexpulsions we have: the erupting volcano, the stones falling fromabove, a second volcano erupting flames which closes the scene. Allthis is interspersed by a commentary of the narrator who, with a tonethat falls between romantic and cartoonish, says (with words similar tothose in the book): “Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! It was gorgeousnessand gorgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heavenmetal. Or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsensenow. As I slooshied I knew such lovely pictures...”. Here we have, ulti-mately, the appearance of mobile flesh within the body, a fleshwandering in the air with no force of gravity. We also have the visionsconjured by Alex which possess an obvious cinematic Hollywood ori-gin. In other words, something analogous to the movies of the Cure.

The suicide scene19 opens with a close-up shot of Alex with his eyesclosed and his mouth open [image 9]. Here too the music finds animmediate entry point, different from the one of the Cure and opposedto the one of the euphoric listening in his bedroom in the parents’home. Alex struggles to stand up, reaches the door with great difficul-ty but finds it firmly locked. For the entire sequence he is on his kneesor bowed on the window ledge. His body is strained, hindered andconstrained to assume incongruous postures. He is now a prisoner,with the music reaching him from the floor (in the novel it is from awall). A game of double directions begins, upwards (the music) anddownwards (his fists on the floor), with the gaze upward (the writer’s

18 ACO movie 219 ACO movie15



towards the ceiling) and downward (Alex’s gaze towards the floor).There is a penetration too: the snooker balls falling into the holes, apure invention by Kubrick, which otherwise (like the audiotape) willnot have any semantic functions [image 10]. And there is one expul-sion: the body that throws itself out of the window, no longer containerbut contained and one that returns to the beginning, to the flesh stage,moving from the negation of the body container, that is, the body-punctum. The narrator says: “Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do andwhat I had wanted to do. And that was to do myself in. To snuff it. Toblast off forever, out of this wicked, cruel world”. In this perspectiveeven the double shot of the fall becomes pertinent: first from belowupwards, then from above downwards. The gravity that was missingin the euphoric scene so that the flesh hovered ecstatically in the air ishere utterly present and tremendously operative. The body falls downand a black shot marks the cut to the following scene, where a hospitalbed welcomes a flesh ready to be reborn, insofar as it is “healed” fromthe noxious effects of the Ludovico Technique.

Image 10

The symmetry among the three scenes is evident to the mostminute detail. In all three it is a matter of listening to Beethoven thatpenetrates into the body through different paths and then seeps outfrom different body orifices. During the Cure, Alex is forced to watch aseries of images of violence, but what acts at a deep somatic level is themusic. Only when Beethoven appears does the young man reaches theapex of suffering and tries, in vain, to fight back. In the bedroom sceneAlex, thanks to the music, has visions of violence that give him pleas-ure. In the suicide scene it is as if he is already so full of music that hecould ingest no more. If the violent images are missing is because hehas become the icon of the victim, the exemplary image of violence suf-fered, until, to eliminate his sufferings, he must eliminate himself. Inthis third scene the music is finally manifest in all its enduring ambiva-lence. Initially, it becomes one with Alex who, by now, is a sort of living



music in himself, one that must depart the body-world (compared towhich he is mobile flesh). This music has to be eliminated from hisbody because it does not adhere completely with its presumed, impos-sible identitarian subjectivity, operating instead as a negative instance,as an impulse to self destruction. It is not a coincidence that the visualmanifestation of the writer in this scene (stuck on the wheelchair, com-pletely dishevelled, with his gaze turned up towards Alex’s ownscreaming, quivering with pleasure) is a dead copy of the icon ofBeethoven reproduced in the poster hanging on the wall in Alex’s bed-room. There is an extraordinary resemblance between these twocharacters [images 8 and 11]. After all, both play the same role. Theyboth witness, respectively, the beatitudes and sufferings of the socialbody—Alex’s body. They are both observers, and yet also guarantors ofthe ambivalent nature of Beethoven’s music, of the metamorphoses ofvalue of this hypodermic injected, for better or for worse, into theyoung man’s body.

Image 11

If we put these three scenes into a logic-temporal order, we realizehow Alex’s story is also the unfolding of a precise semantic categorythat articulates different figures of the body. The starting point is theeuphoric scene in the bedroom, where the pleasure of listening to themusic is figuratively manifested as flesh. This flesh is devoid of gravityforce and hovers in the air. From here a series of logical movementsdepart. First of all, there is the negation of the flesh, the shift to theempty body and the basis for the beginning of the Cure. Secondly, thereis the assertion of the body envelope, the receptacle of a music made sub-stantial. Thirdly, there is the negation of the body envelope, whichbecomes contained by a bigger container (hence body punctum). Finally,there is the reaffirmation of the flesh, this time heavy and subject togravity, and from here there is a paradoxical return to a euphoric situ-ation: the healing of the body. The circle is closed, but the journey has



not been in vain. If the suicide stands for the resurrection of the body,the cure of the Cure has been a sort of via crucis and the image of Alexwith the helmet of electric wires on his head must be linked to Christwith a crown of thorns ready for martyrdom [image 12] - the sameChrist who, in the euphoric bedroom scene, was happily dancing to thesound of music.

Image 12

11. We may take this outcome as a perfect instance of the symbolic effi-cacity that doubles up the narrative logic towards a further somaticmeaning. On this plane two issues are still left pending. One concernsthe reception of the movie and the other concerns a possible identifica-tion of the spectator with the protagonist (not only with the protagonistof the first part of the text but with the text as a whole). Could whathappened in the movie happen in reality? Is there a link between thepsychical processes of reception and the bio-physiological processes inthe receiving body? It is difficult to say. We might assume that this tex-tual simulation of the transformative somatic experience throughmusic acts also on the spectator. Several critics have insisted on thispoint claiming that the spectator is led to live through an experiencesimilar to the one lived by Alex during the Ludovico Technique. It hasoften been said that the cinematic experience has something ritualisticabout it, that it is an experience somehow similar to a hypnotic onewhere the viewer is affected somatically. Our analysis can corroboratethis hypothesis by showing how between the body of the empiricalspectator and the body of the enunciated characters a continuity andanalogical overlapping are established, thanks to both a series ofimages recalling each other, and to a series of technical expedients thatproduce and sustain these very images and relationships.

Let us recall the scene of the Ludovico Technique. On one handthere is the medical team that considers brainwashing as the practice ofa typically behaviourist somatic conditioning where the body is pure



materiality objectified by the anatomical gaze of the doctor. On theother hand there is the peculiar configuration of the therapy, whichconsists of showing the subject violent movies accompanied by musicapt to intensify their emotions. This therapy is truly a veritable decon-struction of the receptive experience lived by the cinematic spectator.This is not merely a representation, but an accurate, methodical de-structuring that, by highlighting the signifying articulation of thetherapy, points to its pragmatic outcomes and, ultimately, to its socialvalue and its ideological weight. Indeed, of the movies he watches,Alex appreciates not only the mimetic value (what they represent of theexternal world), as much as their specific filmic make-up and theirmateriality (variously composed of images and sounds), their being, inshort, editing effects. Unlike in other circumstances when he performeda subjective and creative use of texts (listening to a certain music orreading the Bible) in this situation Alex experiences the movie essen-tially as the product of an expert and accurate editing of images andsounds. It follows that what is violent is not the world that thosemovies represent, but the movies in themselves, artful and ambivalentstimuli of a complex audiovisual experience.

Alex’s reactions to the movies are, in sequence, three. The first timehe notices the realistic nature of the film (“a very good like profession-al piece of sinny”); the second time he feels a strong sense of disgust (“Iwant to be sick”); the third he associates the body’s dysphoric pressurewith a sort of ethic-aesthetic judgement (“[it is] very sick. UsingLudwig van like that”). Each of these reactions is a consequence of adifferent way of perceiving the composite flux of images and soundsthat reaches and penetrates his body. At the beginning the images andthe sounds are described separately. First the auditory experiencearrives (“very gromky atmosphere music”) and only after there is thevisual one (“it’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seemreally real when you viddy them on the screen”). After that, it is as if itwas the filmic representation that directly performs the violent action(“this time the film jumped right away on a young devotchka who wasbeing given the old in-out”). Finally, the images of the Nazi documen-tary, mute and with the Ninth as a soundtrack, appear on the screen asif it was a subjective shot without the mediation of the protagonist-nar-rator. We do not see (or hear) Alex who watches (and listens to) themovie, but we watch directly (and listen to) the movie with him,through his own eyes, his own ears, his whole body. While the docu-mentary images are streaming, with the Ninth asserting itself at anincreasingly louder volume, the narrator voice-off (that until thismoment had been commenting the receptive experience) is no longerpresent. Both the experience of the character and that of the spectatorare now in perfect coincidence. Both character and spectator are forced



to watch the spectacle, one that simultaneously they enjoy and suffer.If Alex (as has often been reiterated by Kubrick and others) representsthe unconscious, this must undoubtedly be a text-book unconsciouswhere the principle of pleasure and the death drive are mixed up to thepoint of blurring. The aesthetic conjunction, called saisie esthétique, hasfinally taken place leaving behind a sense of nostalgia and an aftertasteof imperfection. It is a matter of a few, intense moments of conjunctionbetween character and spectator who live the same beatitudes and thesame sufferings, only to return afterwards to their own institutionalpositions.

These moments, however, do not remain without outcome. Whenthe protagonist goes back to what is his competence (being an objectrepresented on the screen watching other objects represented on therepresented screen), we do not see his whole figure, but only meaning-ful fragments in very near close-up. First the eye forced to see by theclamps that lock the eyelids in place, then the wide open screamingmouth [image 7]. It is a classic case of a body in pieces, a machine thatfunctionally combines a series of organs of perception that follow oneanother at the zenith of cinematic reception. The final re-compositionof the image of the body is only possible after an inversion of meaning.As soon as we see the couple Alex/nurse again, the shot is central,from the point of view of the screen, as if to underline the fact that Alexhas now become in every sense (insofar as he is a spectator, at least) thesacrificial victim.

What about the spectator? Could we say that, after those briefinstances of full identification with the protagonist, the spectators cango back to the ranks of their proper jurisdiction? After having experi-enced Alex’s musical experience, do the spectators go back unchangedto their institutional role of external observer? Obviously it cannot beso. The spectator is also, by now, intimately transformed. This was nota mundane everyday experience, but an intense aesthetic cathartic one.Because of this experience the spectator’s subjectivity will never be thesame again. Not only have the spectators experienced the sufferings ofthe protagonist. They have experienced also his beatitudes. They havesimultaneously grasped the constitutive ambivalence that the editingreveals and hides at the same time. They are involved not only in thisbrief aesthetic sequence, but in the whole movie, which is a “total edit-ing”, a “spectacular sum” that tends to reveal its nature as compositeobject, as textual construction capable of provoking all sorts of sensor-ial and somatic processes. Reverse dollies with fixed cameras,obsessive use of wide-angle lens, relentless destabilising subjectiveshots, spectator interpellations, excessively accelerated sequences,slow-motions that border on kitsch, incongruous ballets, distorted orexaggeratedly mournful music, quotations from Hollywood cinema,



insertions of pop and cartoon images, garish dÇcor and costumes, etc.which are all cinematic translations of the nadsat, relentlessly questionthe “normal” reception of the movie. They make the spectators uneasy,prevent a distracted, automatic perception, provoke and urge them,and turn them now into victims now into accomplices, and even intoan indignant critic of the movie or of the author himself. Like Alex dur-ing the Ludovico Technique, the spectators experience the compositenature of the movie for its entire length, they are forced in a Brecht-likeway to disengage from themselves, to question the sense of every cin-ematic reception, the sense of feeling forced to feel pleasure or - whichis the same - to feel pleasure in spite of the aesthetic disgust or the eth-ical perplexities toward the object of such pleasure.

One may object that, whereas Alex is tied to the chair with his eyeskept forcibly open, the audience does not experience the same kind ofconstriction, because they have willingly decided to watch this movie,like any other. It is the movie itself that replies to this objection, at leastin two points. When Alex yells and pleads to stop the movie with theBeethoven’s soundtrack, Brodsky sadistically replies: “You must takeyour chance, boy. The choice has been all yours” Literarily, the doctoris remanding poor Alex that he had signed some papers in which hewillingly agreed to undergo the new “treatment for the redemption ofcriminals”. What he is actually saying is that a way out is no longerpossible, and that this is the only path that might give him back theillusory freedom he is yearning for. Brodsky does this precisely in themoment when he is depriving Alex of any possible future free will. Theopposition between freedom and constriction, deliberate choice andsubmission is utterly neutralized. Just as Alex has chosen the Cure, sothe spectator has decided to go to the cinema and watch the movie.This is reiterated by the frame we have discussed at the beginning ofthis chapter [image 1] when Alex invites the spectator (whom he calls,mockingly, “little brother”) to “viddy well”. This is however a doublyironic invitation. Not only is the spectator (embodied by the writer)immobilized and gagged, forced to witness the imminent rape.Furthermore, Alex is wearing a mask and the ensuing gap prevents theself-righteous from having to watch explicit sexual violence. Thus, notonly do we find in this image a condensed anticipation of what will beexpanded upon in the four sequences of the Ludovico Technique, butalso of the movie as a whole. We are forced to see what we want to see.We take pleasure in our own suffering and we suffer for our own pleas-ure, while morally condemning what, at a different level and more orless secretly, utterly fascinates us.

One may ask whether Kubrick’s sly and nihilistic gaze could beread as a beginner’s lesson in consolatory psychoanalysis, or (morelikely) whether his intention was to mock it and, shrewdly and tragi-



cally, keep his distance from it. Not only is Alex our unconscious; he isalso the caricature of the unconscious, exactly like all the other charac-ters are obvious caricatures of the dramatic roles they should beplaying. Their own constitutive inadequacy (from the father to thesocial worker, from the grotesque warden to the ridiculous minister) isthe perfect antithesis of the protagonist’s own ardour. It is as if therewas a constant displacement, a discrepancy, a rift - sometimes inexcess, sometimes as a lack - between the represented and the repre-senting, the figure and the meaning, the image and the thing: adiscrepancy analogous to the one occurring between the lived bodyand the identitarian subject. This is, ultimately, the real theme of boththe novel and the movie.



Conclusions

According to phenomenology the body is a paradoxical entity. It is ourpoint of view on the world, yet also an active component of the worldwe see. The body perceives something it is inherent in. It dwells, actsand operates precisely where the things and the events it senses occur.Every perception takes place within one of those existential programsthat the body possesses a great deal of, prior to any conscious reflectionthat may intervene to rationally organize them. Perception, action, pas-sion and reason are mixed up from the very beginning. This inherenceof the body to the world is such that the body is not a datum exam-inable from the outside with the objective gaze of the anatomist, butrather a being simultaneously ideal and real, spiritual and material,psychological and physical that inhabits society. This is the lived bodyof each of us as cultural subjects. A body that, more or less in silence,submits to our projects, our affects and our intellectual acts, while con-tributing fundamentally to their formation. A body that is also the fleshof the world, the constitutive alterity of our Ego, the brute materialitywhich we try to escape in disgust.

All this raises some problems. Which relationship occurs betweenmy own body and my own self? Do we perfectly adhere one to theother or is there perhaps a surplus, now from the side of the Ego, nowfrom the side of the body? Can I say that I recognize myself complete-ly in my own body? Besides, what is actually this body of mine? Is itonly what I see in the mirror and care for with trepidation, or is it alsoeverything that is contained within, that mass of guts, blood, muscles,bones we would rather not have any empirical experience of? Why,then, am I actually annoyed in front of those internal body organs thatconstitute me? And why do I feel disgust for what I expel from mybody, for something that until a few second earlier belonged to me andwas part of me?

There is an unavoidable chiasm between myself and the world,and this chiasm is what characterizes the lived body. The body is theboundary between subjectivity and the world. This is, however, a vari-able boundary, constantly renegotiated, reestablished, codified, andthus ready to be crossed, disowned and confounded. As some psycho-analysts explain, the skin is the site of the Ego and all sexuality passesthrough orifices. But who is in charge of this skin and these orifices?Who decides which are the thresholds between the inside and the out-side of my body? The constant redefinition of the limits between

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outside and inside, the complex management of the movement ofinsertion in, and expulsion from, the body, the frequent renegotiationof the relationships between subjectivity and corporeality is the causeof many semiotic phenomena. They all produce meaning, they codifyit, they diffuse it, and they continuously transform it. Located at theorigins of the relationship between life and death, between nature andculture, the body is the ground for any semantic category, an elusive,desultory, yet dynamic ground.

The alleged paradoxicality of the body is not a matter of literaryfictions but of daily life. After all, we know how the concrete experi-ence of the body and the image that we build, far from being twoseparate entities, are continuously interwoven to the point of blurring.It suffices to think of the well known psychological problem of the cor-poreal schemata, the suture between the physical and the psychic thatexplains otherwise incongruous phenomena such as the phantom limb.One may also think of the many instances of ethnological research,which repeatedly show the inseparable nexus between metaphoricalproduction and physiological activity. Not to mention psychoanalysis,that has highlighted the direct influence of the phantom anatomies ofsubjects in their processes of unconscious elaboration. Finally, as wehave tried to show here, literary texts offer their contribution to nullifythat common sense which, by relegating complex phenomena to thefield of the paradox, often hinders the development of knowledge. Thestory of Alex, a Nietzschean boy fighting against free will, seems toconfirm the phenomenological hypothesis concerning somatic and per-ceptive realities that the science of signification has been debating for along time in its search for formal paradigms for textual analysis. Thestory recounted in A Clockwork Orange portrays the fragile andunspeakable space that mediates between continuous production ofmeaning and its articulation into signification. To examine its folds, itsdetails, its deep features may reveal reoccurring themes and graspsomatically efficacious pertinences on the plane of communicativeprocesses (for instance, it makes the image of music penetrating thebody through the eyes and being rejected through the mouth less par-adoxical. In addition, it allows us to accept the notion according towhich to expel something from one’s own body can be formally akin tothrow the whole body out of a window.)

This book did not want to be a conceptual translation of a theoret-ical hypothesis pre-existent in a neighboring discipline. Rather, itaimed at individuating some elements (narrative, enunciative, figura-tive etc) of sense that could be employed as tools in further textualanalyses, as well as as concepts for a more in-depth reflection on thelink between body and signification, perception and culture, aesthesia



and sociality. In this regard, one may recall the schema drawn in thethird chapter to organize what happens in the horrific literary descrip-tion of the Ludovico Treatment (the forms of violent actions, the objectsthat suffer it, the subjects that perpetrate it, the visual and auditory sen-sations of the protagonist with the consequent commentary, the bodilysensations of the dysphoric type, Brodsky’s final judgment). Thisschema may be generalizable, albeit with some revisions. It revealsmore than the simple articulation of meaning within that specificsequence which describes Alex’s perceptions, affects and suffering atthe hand of the medical institution and the political mob. It contains acertain number of “stages” that must be considered pertinent, if notactually necessary, to the description of every perceptive event or, bet-ter, of the constitutive intrigue (as phenomenology argues) amongperception, action, passion and reason. Let us briefly retrace them.

First, the perceiving body is not originally or naturally predisposedto be such. Rather, it is socially predisposed, even forced into this kindof experience. The body is extrapolated from previous existential andsocial routines to be directed towards specific sensorial attitudes.Alex’s body arrives at the projection room purposefully deprived ofenergy and with a general sense of malaise, to the point that he is takenthere by a member of the medical team—with whom he entertainsmerely conventional, even false, relationship. The objective of the Cureis to turn the subject into a pure seeing machine that during the visionwill feel a series of utterly unbearable physical experiences. The onlyproblem is, corporeality cannot be reduced to a pure clockwork mech-anism. The body in itself escapes from this type of constrictions. Itfollows personal paths of sense. It lives experiences of otherness.

The visual sensations are framed by elements that they themselvesconstitute and that at the same time are constituted by. Downstreamthere is the “perceived thing”, which is not the brute data acknowl-edged by a visual sensorial apparatus, but a precise meaningfulprocess. These are the scenes of violence, which are highly meaningfulfor Alex, if nothing else because he had been (as he wants to be again)their euphoric protagonist. The perceived thing has meaning because itmanifests a precise syntactic articulation: the subject that performs theaction, the object that submits to it, the action in itself. Then, upstream,there are the intersubjective outcomes of such perceptive act, which isat the same time a worldly practice. There is someone who watchesAlex while he watches and suffers, and who also judges his perform-ance (“excellent, excellent!”). In short, visual perception develops fromthe starting point of a previous meaning and produces a new meaning.It is a process internal to processes bigger than itself.

It is not however a matter of “pure” visual perception. First of all,perception is charged with a series of modalities (want to do, cannot

Conclusions 129


not do, must do) that are chained each to the next on the ground of theintersubjective relationships lived by the perceiving body. Alex wantsto watch the movies, yet he is forced to do it, so that, even when he nolonger wants to do it, he must do it against his will. Besides, the visionis accompanied by the auditory sensation, which soon ends up over-coming the former. This leads the subject to a materialistic catharsis,which is at first temporary (he vomits into a kidney-shaped receptacle),then definitely liberating (he throws himself out of a window). Finally,the interweaving of visual and auditory sensations produces twoapparently opposite outcomes, yet truly consecutive and consequen-tial. On one hand, it is as if the subject activates a series of cognitiveresistances to the emergence of the body as such. By watching theimages and listening to the noises, Alex begins to ask himself questionsconcerning the effects of reality he is witnessing. He assumes he is notlooking at the world but at its cinematic reproduction. This issue ishowever overcome by the facts (“that made no difference”). The coales-cence of vision and listening ends up equally provoking a series ofinternal sensomotory reactions that touch the mobile flesh of the sub-ject and, more and more internally, his guts. It is therefore the body asa whole that is involved in the perceptual experience. It is not the objec-tive body that according to the medical team would have had certainmechanical reactions (“by my calculations you should be starting tofeel all right again”); it is rather the lived body of the subject, the onethat keeps on evading scientific logic (“getting better from feeling bol-noy is like your own affair and nothing to do with calculations”). It isthis body that attributes to the music the surplus value that will leadthe Cure towards outcomes unforeseen by his boorish inventor.

Here we find the neat articulation of a perception event which isplainly a phenomenon of symbolic efficacity (or perhaps, in-efficacity).Kubrick’s movie, translating this with his own expressive tools, hasdone nothing but recapture and reinterpretate it, conveying its signifi-cance on the plane of empirical reception. It should not be too difficultto find several instances where this event and this articulation are bothclearly identifiable. It is at this concluding point that we can and wantto advance our proposal as follows. This type of perception event canenrich established scholarship on the meaning of the body. It offers amodel which can be generalized for further research. Like all models,it is questionable and open to revision, yet it is no more imaginary ormore artificial than so many laboratory experiments, whose nature itactually helps to expose.



Appendix

Text 1

Where I was wheeled to, brothers, was like no sinny I had ever viddied before.

True enough, one wall was all covered with silver screen, and direct opposite

was a wall with quare holes in for the projector to project through. and there

were stereo speakers stuck all over the mesto. But against the right-hand one

of the other walls was a bank of all like little meters, and in the middle of the

floor facing the screen was like a dentist’s chair with all lengths of wire run-

ning from it, and I had to like crawl from the wheelchair to this, being given

some help by another like male nurse veck in a white coat. Then I noticed that

underneath the projection holes was like all frosted glass and I thought I vid-

died shadows of like people moving behind it and I thought I slooshied

somebody cough kashi kashl kashl. But then all I could like notice was how

weak I seemed to be, and I put that down to changing over from prison pishcha

to this new rich pishcba and the vitamins injected into me. ‘Right,’ said the

wheelchair-wheeling veck, ‘now I’ll leave you. The show will commence as

soon as Dr Brodsky arrives. Hope you enjoy it.’ To be truthful, brothers, I did

not really feel that I wanted to viddy any ifim-show this afternoon. I was just

not in the mood. I would have liked much better to have a nice quiet spatchka

on the bed, nice and quiet and all on my oddy knocky. I felt very limp.

What happened now was that one white-coated veck strapped my gulliv-

er to a like head-rest, singing to himself all the time some vonny cally

pop-song. ‘What’s this for?’ I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like

song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the

screen. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I want to look at the screen. I’ve been brought here to

viddy films and viddy films I shall.’ And then the other white-coat veck (there

were three altogether, one of them a devotcbka who was like sitting at the bank

of meters and twiddling with knobs) had a bit of a smeck at that. He said:

‘You never know. Oh, you never know. Trust us, friend. It’s better this

way.’ And then I found they were strapping my rookers to the chair-arms and

my nogas were like stuck to a foot-rest. It seemed a bit bezoomny to me but I

let them get on with what they wanted to get on with. If I was to be a free

young maichick again in a fortnight’s time I would put up with much in the

meantime, O my brothers. One veshch I did not like, though, was when they

put like clips on the skin of my forehead, so that my top glazz-lids were pulled

up and up and up and I could not shut my glazzies no matter how I tried. I tried

to smeck and said: ‘This must be a real horrorshow film if you’re so keen on

my viddying it.’ And one of the white-coat vecks said, smecking:

‘Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors.’ And then I had like

a cap stuck on my gulliver and I could viddy all wires running away from it,

and they stuck a like suction pad on my belly and one on the old tick-tocker,

The Meaniong of the Body 131

131


and I could ust about viddy wires running away from those. Then there was

the shoom of a door opening and you could tell some very important

chelloveck was coming in by the way the white-coated under-vecks went all

stiff. And then I viddied this Dr Brodsky. He was a malenky veck, very fat,

with all curly hiair curling all over his gulliver, and on his spuddy nose he had

very thick ochides. I could just viddy that, he bad a real horrorshow suit on,

absolutely the heighth of fashion, and he had a like very delicate and subtle

von of operating-theatres coming from him. With him was Dr Branom, all

smiling like as though to give me confidence. ‘Everything ready?’ said Dr

Brodsky in a very breathy goloss. Then I could slooshy voices saying Right

right right from like a distance, then nearer to, then there was a quiet like hum-

ming shoom as though things had been switched on. And then the lights went

out and there was Your Humble Narrator And Friend sitting alone in the dark,

all on his frightened oddy knocky. not able to move nor shut his glazzies

nc~t’anything. And then, O my brothers, the film-show started ~off with some

very groinky atmosphere music coming from the speakers, very fierce and full

of dis cord. knd then on the ‘screen the picture came on, but there was no title

and no credits. What came on was a street, as it might have been any street in

any town, and it was a real dark nochy and the lamps were lit. It was a very

good like pro fessional piece of sinny, and there were none of these flickers and

blobs ‘you get, say, when you viddy one of these dirty films in somebody’s

house in a back street. All the time the music bumped out, very like sinister.

And then you could viddy an old th’an coming down the street, very starry,

and then there leaped out on this starry veck two malchicks dressed in the

heighth of fashion, and it was at this time (still thin trousers but no like cravat

any more, more of a real tie), and then they started to filly with him. You could

slooshy his screams and moans, very realistic, and you could even get the like

heavy breathing and panting of the two toichocking mal-chicks. They made a

real pudding out of this starry veck. going crack crack crack at him with the

fisty rookers, tearing his platties off and then finishing up by booting bis nagoy

plott (this lay all krovvy-red in the grahzny mud of the gutter) and then run-

ning off very skorry. Then there was the close-up gulliver of this beaten-up

starry veck, and the krovvy flowed beautiful red. It’s funny how the colours of

the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get very aware of

a like not feeling all that well, and this I put down to the under-nourishment

and my stomach not quite ready for the rich pishcha and vitamins I was get-

ting here. But I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which came

on at once, my brothers, without any break at all. This time the film jumped

right away on a young devotchica who was being given the old in-Out by first

one malchick then another then another then another, she creeching away very

gromky through the speakers and like very pathetic and tragic music going on

at the same dine. This was real, very real, though if you thought about it prop-

erly you couldn’t imagine lewdies actually agreeing to having all this done to

them in a film, and if these films were made by the Good or the State you



couldn’t imagine them being allowed to take these films without like interfer-

ing with what was going on. So it must bave been very clever what they call

cutting or editing or some such veshch. For it was very real. And when it came

to the sixth or seventh malchick leering and smecking and then going into it

and the devotchka creeching on the sound-track like bezoomnY, then I began

to feel sick. I had like pains all over and felt I could sick up and at the same

time not sick up, and I began to feel like in distress, O my brothers, being fixed

rigid too on this chair. When this bit of film was over I could slooshy the

goloss of this Dz Brodsky from over by the switchboard saying: ‘Reaction

about twelve point five? Promising.’

Then we shot straight Into another lomtick of film, and this time it was of

just a human litso, a very like pale human face held still and having different

nasty veshches done to it. I was sweating a malenky bit with the pain in my

guts and a horrible thirst and my guiliver going throb throb throb, and it

seemed to me that If I could not viddy this bit of film I would perhaps be not

so sick. But I could not shut my glazzies, and even if I tried to move my glaz-

bails about I still could not get like out of the line of fire of this picture. So I

had to go on viddying what was being done and hearing the most ghastly

creechings coming from this litso. I knew it could not really be real, but that

made no difference. I was heaving away but could not sick, viddying first a

brltva cut out an eye, then slice down the cheek, then go rip rip rip all over,

while red lcrovvy shot on to the camera lens. Then all the teeth were like

wrenched out with a pair of pliers, and the creeching and the blood were ter-

rific. Then I slooshied this very pleased goloss of Dr Brodsky going:

‘Excellent, excellent, excellent.’

The next lomtick of film was of an old woman who kept a shop being

kicked about amid very gromky laughter by a lot of maichicks, and these mal-

cliicks broke up the shop and then set fire to it. You could viddy this poor

starry ptitsa trying to crawl out of the flames, screaming and creeching, but

having had her leg broke by these maichicks kicking her she could not move.

So then all the flames went roaring round her, and you could viddy her ago-

nized litso like appealing through the flames and then disappearing in the

flames, and then you could slooshy the most gromky and agonized and ago-

nizing screams that ever came from a human goloss. So this time I knew I had

to sick up, sol creeched:

‘I want to be sick. Please let me be sick. Please bring some thing for me to

be sick into.’ But this Dr Brodsky called back:

‘Imagination only. You’ve nothing to worry about. Next film coming up.’

That was perhaps meant to be a joke, for I heard a like smeck coming from the

dark. And then I was forced to viddy a most nasty film about Japanese torture.

It was the 1939-45 War, and there were soldiers being fixed to trees with nails

and having fires lit under them and having their yarbies cut off, and you even

viddied a gulliver being sliced off a soldier with a sword, and then with his

head rolling about and the rot and glazzies looking alive still, the plott of this

soldier actually ran about, krovvying like a fountain out of the neck, and then

Appendix 133


it dropped, and all the time there was very very loud laughter from the

Japanese. The pains I felt now iii my belly and the headache and the thirst were

terrible, and they all seemed to be coming out of the screen. So I creeched:

‘Stop the film! Please, please stop it! I can’t stand any more.’ And then the

goloss of this Dr Brodsky said:

‘Stop it? Stop it, did you say? Why, we’ve hardly started.’

And he and the others smecked quite loud.

Text 2

‘Stop it. stop it, stop it,’ I kept on creeching out. ‘Turn it off you grahzny bas-

tards, for I can stand no more.’ It was the next day, brothers, and I had truly

done my best morning and afternoon to play it their way and sit like a horror-

show smil ing cooperative maichick in the chair of torture while they flashed

nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen, my glazzies clipped open to viddy

all, my plott and rookers and nogas fixed to the chair so I could not get away.

What I was being made to viddy now was not really a veshch I would have

thought to be too bad before, it being only three or four malchicks crasting in

a shop and ifiling their carmans with cutter, at the same time flilying about

with the creeching starry ptitsa running the shop, toichoking her and letting the

red red krovvy flow. But the throb and like crash crash crash in my gulliver

and the wanting to be sick and the terrible dry rasping thirstiness in my rot, all

were worse than yesterday. ‘Oh, I’ve had enough’ I cried. ‘It’s not fair, you

vonny sods.’ and I tried to struggle out of the chair but it was not possible, me

being as good as stuck to it.

‘First-class,’ creeched out this Dr Brodsky. ‘You’re doing really well, lust

one more and Lhen we’re finished.’

What it was now was the starry 1939-45 War again, and It was a very

blobby and liny and crackly film you could viddy had been made by the

Germans. It opened with German eagles and the Nazi flag with that like

crooked cross that all mal-chicks at school love to draw, and then there were

very haughty and nadmenny like German officers walking through streets that

were all dust and bomb-holes and broken build ings. Then you were allowed to

viddy lewdies being shot against walls, officers giving the orders, and also

horrible nagoy plaits left lying in gutters, all like cages of bare ribs and white

thin nogas.

Then there were lewdies being dragged off creeching though not on the

sound-track, my brothers, the only sound being music, and being tolchocked

while they were dragged off. Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness what

music it was that like crackled and boomed on the sound-track, and it was

Ludwig van, the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like

bezoomny at that. ‘Stop!’ I creeched. ‘Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It’s

a sin,, that’s what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!’ They didn’t

stop right away, because there was only a minute o two more to go — lewdies

being beaten up and all krovvy, thei more firing squads, then the old Nazi flag



and THE END. But when the lights came on this Dr Brodsky and also Dr

Branon were standing in front of me, and Dr Brodsky said:

‘What’s all this about sin, eh?’

‘That,’ I said, very sick. ‘Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to

anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.’ And then was really sick and they had

to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.

Text 3

I opened the door of 10-8 with my own little klootch, and inside our malenky

quarters all was quiet, the pee and em both being in sleepland, and mum had

laid out on the table on malenky bit of supper — a couple of lomticks of tinned

sponge-meat with a shive or so of kieb and butter, a glass of the old cold

moloko. Hohoho, the old moloko, with no knives or synthemesc or drencroni

in it. How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

Still, I drank and ate growling, being more hungry than I thought at first, and

I got fruit-pie from the larder and tore chunks off it to stuff into my greedy rot.

Then I tooth-cleaned and clicked, cleaning out the old rot with my yahzick or

tongue, then I went into my own little room or den, easing off my platties as I

did so. Here was my bed and my stereo, pride of my jeezny, and my discs in

their cupboard, and banners and flags on the wall, these being like remem-

brances of my corrective school life since I was eleven, O my brothers, each

one shining and biasoned with name or number: SOUTH 4; METRO COR

SKOL BLUE DIVISION; THE BOYS OF ALPHA.

The little speakers of my stereo were all arranged round the room, on ceil-

ing, walls, floor, so, lying on my bed slooshying the music, I was like netted

and meshed in the orchestra. Now what I fancied first tonight was this new

violin concerto by the American Geoffrey Plautus, played by Odysseus

Choerilos with the Macon (Georgia) Philharmonic, so I slid it from where it

was neatly ified and switched on and waited.

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the

ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in

bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gor-

geosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and

behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverfiamed, and there by the door

the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder.

Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heaven-

metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now,

came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a

cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like plat-

inum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my

brothers. Pee and em in their bedroom next door had learnt now not to knock

on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now

they would take sleep-pills. Perhaps, knowing the joy I had in my night music,

they had already taken them. As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in

Appendix 135


the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely

pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the

ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding

my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching

against walls and I plunging like a shiaga into them, and indeed when the

music, which was one movement only, rose to the top of its big highest tower,

then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my

gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so

the lovely music glided to its glowing close.

After that I had lovely Mozart, and there were new pictures of different

litsos to be ground and splashed, and it was after this that I thought I would

have just one last disc only before crossing the border, and I wanted something

starry and strong and very firm, so it was J. S. Bach I had, the Brandenburg

Concerto just for middle and lower strings. And, slooshying with different

bliss than before, I viddied again this name on the paper I’d razrezzed that

night, a long time ago It seemed, in that cottage called HOME. The name was

about a dockwork orange. Listening to the J. S. Bach, I began to pony better

what that meant now, and I thought, slooshying away to the brown gorgeous-

ness of the starry German master, that I would like to have tolchecked them

both harder and ripped them to ribbons on their own floor.

Text 4

When I woke up I could hear slooshy music coming out of the wall, real

gromky, and it was that that bad dragged me out of my bit of like sleep. It was

a symphony that I knew real borrorshow but had not slooshied for many a

year, namely the Symphony Number Three of the Danish veck Otto Skade hg,

a very gromky and violent piece. espedally in the first movement, which was

what was playing now.! slooshied for two seconds in like interest and joy. but

then it all came over me. the start of the pain and the sickness, and I began to

groan deep down in my keeshkas. 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 L’ But It

went on and it seemed to be like louder. So I crashed at the wall dli my

knuckles were all red red krovvy and torn skin, creeching and creeching,

but the music did not stop. Then I thought I had to get away from it, so I

lurched out of the malenky bedroom and ittied skorry to the front door of the

flat, but this had been locked from the outside and I could not get out. And all

the time the music got more and more gromky, like it was all a deliberate tor-

ture, O my brothers. So I stuck my little fingers real deep in my ookos, but the

trombones and kettledrums blasted through gromicy enough. So I creeched

again for them to stop and went hammer hammer hammer on the wall, but it

made not one malenky bit of difference. ‘Oh, what am I to do?’ I boohooed to

myself. ‘Oh, Bog in Heaven help me.’ 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 what! had

wanted to do until those old men in the Public Biblio and then Dint and

Billyboy disguised as rozzes stopped me, and that was to do myself in, to snuff

it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked and cruel world. What I viddied was

the slovo DEATH on the cover of a like pam phlet, even though it was only

DEATH to THE GOVERN MENT. And like it was Fate there was another

malenky booklet which had an open window on the cover, and It said:

‘Open the window to fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of living.’ And so

I knew that was like telling me to finish it all off by jumping out. One moment

of pain, perhaps, and then sleep for ever and ever and ever.

The music was still pouring In all brass and drums and the violins miles

up through the wall. The window in the room where I had laid down was open.

I ittied to it and viddied a fair drop to the autos and buses and walking

chellovecks below. I creeched out to the world: ‘Good-bye, good-bye, may

Bog forgive you for a ruined life.’ Then I got on to the sill, the music blasting

away to my left, and I shut my glazzies and felt the cold wind on my litso, then

I jumped.

Appendix 137


Bibliographical Notes

The bibliography on the body, as it concerns a great number of disciplines,fields of enquiry and directions of thoughts, is very extensive. For a firstapproach to the issues connected to this topic see: J. Gil, “Corpo”, inEnciclopedia, vol. III, Einaudi, Turin, 1978; U. Galimberti, Il corpo, Milan,Feltrinelli, 1983, 2000; D. Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité, Paris,Puf, 1990, 20012; Id. L’adieu au corps, Paris, Métailié, 1999.

The naturalistic hypothesis, concerned with how to overcome the body/minddichotomy is currently the one in favour, within the cognitivist field, as well aswithout. Among the authors who have discussed it in depth see: A. Damasio,Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York, Grosset-Putnam, 1994; Id., The Feeling of what happens. Body and Emotion in the making ofConsciousness, New York, Harcourt, 1999; M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind. TheBodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago, Chicago UniversityPress, 1987; G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, New York, Basicbooks; F. Varela, E. Thompson e E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Scienceand Human Experience, Cambridge (Mass.), Mit Press, 1991.

For a discussion of the mystical hypothesis see: Galimberti, above.

On the anti-naturalistic hypothesis the obligatory references are to E. Husserl’sworks (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologischen Philosophie, vol. II, KluwerAcademic Publishers B.V., 1952; Id., Cartesianische Meditationen und pariserVorträge, 1931, in Husserliana 1, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1950; and M.Merleau-Ponty’s (Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945; Id., Levisible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964.

In the psychoanalytical field, crucial to our discussion is also D. Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, Paris, Dunod, 1985. See also the observations, in between psychology andphilosophy, by B. Pradines, La fonction perceptive. Les racines de la psychologie,Paris, Denoâl-Gonthier, 1981. In the antrophological field see M. Mauss, “Lestechniques du corps”, in Journal de psychologie, XXXII (3-4), 1936; Cl. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962. Relevant also is the reflection onsensoriality and foundation of culture by paleontologist A. Leroi-Gourhan, Legeste et la parole, vo. 2, La memoire et les rythmes, Paris, Michel, 1965.

On the issue of figurativity in the semiotic field see D. Bertrand, Précis de sémi-otique littéraire, Paris, Nathan, 2000, which sums up well the problems inherentto this field of study. On figurativity and visuality see J.-M. Floch, Petitesmythologies de l’œil et de l’esprit, Paris-Amsterdam, Hadäs-Benjamin, 1985; Id.,Sémiotique, marketing et communication, Paris, Puf, 1990; Id., Identités visuelles,Paris, Puf, 1995.

An anthology of essays that deal with these issues is L. Corrain (ed.), Semiotichedella pittura, Roma, Meltemi, 2004. On aesthesis, the necessary reference isAlgirdas J. Greimas, De l’imperfection, Périgueux, P. Fanlac which opened thedebate on these themes. Further interventions are: I. Assis da Silva (edited by),Corpo e sentido, São Paulo, Edunesp, 1996; U. Eco, Kant e l’ornitorinco, Milan,

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Bompiani, 1997; P. Fabbri, “Introduction to the italian” ed. of De l’imperfection,see above; Id., La svolta semiotica, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1998; E. Landowski,Présences de l’autre, Paris, Puf ; Id., Passions sans noms, Paris, Puf, 2004; E.Landowski and A.C. de Oliveira (edited by), Do intelígivel ao sensível, São Paulo,Educ, 1995; E. Landowski and J.-L. Fiorin José Luiz (edited by), O gosto da gente,o gosto das coisas. Abordagem semiótica, São Paulo, Educ, 1997; E. Landowski, R.Dorra Raul and A.C. de Oliveira (edited by), Semiótica, estésis, estética, SãoPaulo-Puebla, Educ-Uap, 1999; G. Marrone, Il dicibile e l’indicibile, Palermo,L’epos, 1995; G. Marrone (edited by), Sensi e discorso, Bologna, Esculapio, 1995;P. Ouellet, Poétique du regard. Littérature, perception, identité, Montréal,Septentrion & Limoges, Pulim, 2000 ; M.P. Pozzato (edited by), Estetica e vitaquotidiana, Milan, Lupetti, 1995; P. Violi, Significato ed esperienza, Milan,Bompiani, 1997.

On the semiotics of passions see P. Fabbri and I. Pezzini (edited by), Affettivitàe sistemi semiotici. Le passioni del discorso, Versus, 47-48, 1997; A.J. Greimas e J.Fontanille, Sémiotique des passions. Des états des choses aux états d’âmes, Paris,Seuil, 1991; I. Pezzini, Le passioni del lettore, Milan, Bompiani, 1998; I. Pezzini(edited by), Semiotica delle passioni, Bologna, Esculapio, 1991.

On spatiality see S. Cavicchioli, Lo spazio, i sensi, gli umori e altri saggi, Milan,Bompiani, 2002; M. Hammad, Leggere lo spazio, comprendere l’architettura, Roma,Meltemi, 2003; G. Marrone, Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo,Turin, Einaudi, 2001 (cap. 6).

A recent scholarship that reassesses semiotic theory on the ground of a reflec-tion on the body, to which we are indebted for a certain number of ideas andanalytical models implicitly discussed in this book, is J. Fontanille, Figure delcorpo. Per una semiotica dell’impronta, Roma, Meltemi, 2003.

On symbolic efficacy the obligatory reference is to the famous essay by Cl.Lévi-Strauss, “L’efficacité symbolique”, in Revue d’histoire des religions, 135 (1),1949, now in Id., Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon. This subject has been dis-cussed by a great number of disciplines from ethnology to psychology,psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, medicine, history of art,mediology, semiotics etc. As well as the fundamental critical observations by C.Severi (La memoria rituale. Follia e immaginazione del Bianco in una tradizione scia-manica amerindiana, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1993; Id., “Nuove considerazionisull’efficacia simbolica”, Etnosistemi, 2000) to the seminal article by Lévi-Strauss, Tobie Nathan’s reflections in the ethnopsychiatric field are useful toour aims (see especially Le sperme du diable, Paris, Puf, 1988; L’influence quiguérit, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1994; with I. Stengers, Médecins et sorciers, Paris, Lesempàcheurs de penser en ronde, 1995; and R. Debray’s reflections on the mediafield, Introduction à la médiologie, Paris, Puf, 1999. Initial studies on symbolicefficacity in semiotics are found in I. Pezzini, (edited by) Semiotic Efficacity andthe Effectiveness of the Text. From Effects to Affects, Turnhout, Brepols, 2001 (espe-cially P. Fabbri and F. Marsciani’s articles). See: also P.L. Basso et al., Le passioninel serial tv. Beautiful, Twin Peaks, L’ispettore Derrick, Roma, Nuova Eri/Vqpt,1994 (especially i O. Calabrese introduction); G. Marrone, Corpi sociali, cit.(introduction and Chapter 6).

The text of Anthony Burgess’novel A Clockwork Orange we referred to is A.



Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962), with an Introduction by Blake Morrison,London, Penguin, 1996. The Italian translation we have used by Floriana Bossiis A. Burgess, Arancia meccanica, with an interview with Stanley Kubrick and astatement by Anthony Burgess, Turin, Einaudi, 19962. On the debate betweenPelagians and Augustinians see by the same author The Wanting Seed (1962).Burgess’ polemics against Kubrick have been elaborated in A ClockworkTestament: or, Enderby’s End (London, Hart Davis-McGibbon, 1974) and in AClockwork Orange: a Play with Music (1987; London, Methuen 19982). In relationto Burgess and in particular A Clockwork Orange we have referred to the follow-ing texts: R. Bowie, “Freedom and Art in A Clockwork Orange: Anthony Burgessand the Christian Premises of Dostoevsky”, in Thought, 56 (223), 1981; J.Carson, “Pronominalization in A Clockwork Orange”, in Papers on Language andLiterature, 12, 1976; A. Escuret-Bertrand, “A Clockwork Orange: AnthonyBurgess”, in Autour de l’idée de Nature: Histoire des idées et civilisation: Pédagogieet divers, Paris, Didier, 1977; R.O. Evans, “Nadsat: The Argot and ItsImplications in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange”, in Journal of ModernLiterature 1, 1971; M. Gorra, “The World of A Clockwork Orange”, in GettysburgReview, 3(4), 1990; F. Gregory (edited by), Singin’ in the Brain. Il mondo distopicodi A Clockwork Orange, Turin, Lindau, 2004 (with essays on Kubrick’s movieand a bibliography on both works); W. Hutchings, “‘What’s It Going To BeThen, Eh?’: The Stage Odyssey of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange”, inModern Drama 34 (1), 1991; S. Manferlotti, Anti-utopia. Huxley Orwell Burgess,Palermo, Sellerio, 1984; S. McCracken, “Novel into Film; Novelist into Critic: AClockwork Orange again”, in The Antioch Review, 32 (2), 1973; Th.L. Mentzer,“The Ethics of Behavior Modification: A Clockwork Orange Revisited”, in Essaysin Arts & Sciences, 9, 1990; E. Petix, “Linguistics, Mechanics, and Metaphysics:Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962)”, in Old Lines, New Forces: Essayson the Contemporary British Novel, 1960-1970, edited by R.K. Morris, London:Associated UP, 1976; R. Rabinovitz, “Mechanism vs. Organism: AnthonyBurgess’ A Clockwork Orange”, in Modern Fiction Studies, 24, 1978; D.Watermann, Le miroir de la société: la violence institutionnelle chez AnthonyBurgess, Doris Lessing et Pat Barker, Ravenna, Longo, 2003.

Stanley Kubrick’s original screenplay of A Clockwork Orange has been pub-lished in the volume S. Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, based on thenovel by Anthony Burgess, New York, Ballantine books, 1972; now Southwold,Suffolk, Screenpress books, 2000; both editions with no page indication. Withinthe wide literature on Kubrick and in particular on this movie see: Vv. Aa.,Stanley Kubrick, Dossier Positif, Paris, Rivages, 1987; V. Amiel, “Orangemécanique. Les fruits de la civilisation”, in Positif 439, 1997; Ch. Auduraud,Ch., “Orange mécanique, ou l’éternel retour du docteur Folamour”, in Positif439, 1997; S. Bassetti, La musica secondo Kubrick, Milan, Lindau, 2002; J. Baxter,Stanley Kubrick. A Biography, London, Collins, 1997; R. Benayoun, “StanleyKubrick le libertaire”, in Positif 139, 1972; now in Dossier Positif cit.; S. Bernardi,Kubrick e il cinema come arte del visibile, Milan, Il Castoro, 2000; J.-L. Bourget,“Les avatars du cercle”, in Positif 136, 1972; now in Dossier Positif cit.; Th.Bourguignon, “Orange mécanique. La träs horrorifique et träs potoyable his-toire d’Alex l’ultra-violent”, in Positif 379, 1992; M.W. Bruno, Stanley Kubrick,Roma, Gremese, 1999; J. Chapman, “‘A bit of the old ultraviolence’. A ClockworkOrange”, in British Science Fiction Cinema, edited by I. Q. Hunter, London &

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N.Y., Routledge, 1990; M. Ciment, Kubrick, Paris, Calman-LÇvy, 1980; R. Costade Beauregard, “Les jeux de la violence et du pouvoir dans l’Orange mécanique(1971) de Stanley Kubrick”, in Violences et pouvoirs politiques, edited by M.Bertrand, N. Laurent e M. Taillefer, Toulouse, Presses Univ. du Mirail, 1996; G.Cremonini, Stanley Kubrick. L’Arancia Meccanica, Turin, Lindau, 1996; G.Deleuze, Cinéma II. L’image-temps, Paris, Minuit, 1985; P. Duncan, StanleyKubrick. Un poète visuel, London, Taschen, 2003; Th. Elsaesser, “Screen Violence:Emotional Structure and Ideological Function in A Clockwork Orange”, inApproaches to Popular Culture, edited by C.W.E. Bigsby, London, Arnold, 1976;R. Eugeni, Invito al cinema di Stanley Kubrick, Milan, Mursia, 1995; M. Falsetto,Stanley Kubrick. A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Westport (Conn.)-London,Praeger, 1994; P. Giuliani, Stanley Kubrick, Paris, Rivages, 1990; E. Ghezzi,Stanley Kubrick, Milan, Il Castoro, 20024; N. Kagan, The Cinema of StanleyKubrick, New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1972; S.M. McDougal (editedby) Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”, Cambridge U.P, 2003; G.D. Phillips,Stanley Kubrick. A Film Odissey, New York, Popular Library, 1975; B. Rey-Mimoso Ruiz, “Le detail Beethoven dans Orange Méchanique”, in Le cinéma endetails, “La Licorne”, fuori serie, 1998; M. Sineux, “Maestro, musique!”, inPositif 186, 1976; now in Dossier Positif cit.; A. Walker, Stanley Kubrick directs,New York, Harcourt Brave Jovanovich Inc, 1972.

On the semiotic analysis of literary and filmic texts in general see: P. Basso,Confini del cinema, Turin, Lindau, 2003; D. Bertrand, Précis de sémiotique littéraire,cit.; F. Casetti, Dentro lo sguardo, Milan, Bompiani, 1985; J.-Cl. Coquet, LeDiscours et son sujet, Essai de grammaire modale, Paris, Klincksieck, 1984; Id., Laquête du sens, Paris, Puf, 1997; U. Eco, Lector in fabula, Milan, Bompiani, 1979;Id., Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi, Milan, Bompiani, 1994; P. Fabbri, La svol-ta semiotica, cit.; Id., Elogio di Babele, Roma, Meltemi, 20032; P. Fabbri e G.Marrone (edited by), Semiotica in nuce, 2 voll. Roma, Meltemi, 2000-01; J.Fontanille, Sémiotique du discours, Limoges, Pulim, 1998 ; J. Fontanille e Cl.Zilberberg, Tension et signification, Liège, Mardaga, 1998 ; J. Geninasca, La parolelittéraire, Paris, Puf, 1997; A.J. Greimas, Du sens, Paris, Seuil, 1970; Id.,Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte: exercices pratiques, Paris, Seuil, 1976; Id., Dusens II, Paris, Seuil, 1983; A.J. Greimas e J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaireraisonné de la théorie du langage, Paris, Hachette, 1979; Idd. Sémiotique.Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, tome II, Paris, Hachette, 1986; Ju.Lotman, La semiosfera, edited by S. Salvestroni, Venezia, Marsilio, 1985; G.Marrone, Corpi sociali, cit.; F. Marsciani e A. Zinna, Elementi di semiotica genera-tiva, Bologna, Esculapio, 1991; Ch. Metz, L’énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site dufilm, Paris, Klincksieck, 1991; M.P. Pozzato, Semiotica del testo, Roma, Carocci,2001.

On cinematic transpositions of literary texts the bibliography is very extensive.Among the most recent: N. Dusi, Il cinema come traduzione, Turin, Utet 2003; andA. Fumagalli, I vestiti nuovi del narratore, Milan, Il Castoro 2004.

On the literary practice of the myse en abime see L. Dallenbach, Le récit specu-laire, Paris, Seuil, 19862.

On the productive use of aesthetic texts see the synthesis of current debate inS. Cavicchioli, Lo spazio i sensi gli umori, see above.



On an introduction to the main political philosophy issues concerning thenotion of violence see P.P. Portinaro, “Violenza”, in I concetti del male, edited byP.P. Portinaio, Turin, Einaudi, 2002.

The anthropological thesis of the scapegoat is in R. Girard, La violence et le sacré,Paris, Grasset, 1972.

On cinema’s hypnotic nature, see R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cin-ema e ipnosi, Milan, Vita & Pensiero, 2002.

On death, the body and the medical gaze see: Ph. Ariäs, L’homme devant la mort,

Paris, Seuil, 19772.

Bibliiographical Notes 143


The Ludovico Cure. On Body and Music in A Clockwork Orange

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