What’s It Going To Be Then, Eh?

Reading for Intertextuality in A Clockwork Orange

By Kassidy Tirelli

At the start of the novel A Clockwork Orange,the main character, fifteen-year-old Alex, is a very unsympathetic narrator. Through Alex’s actions, we are able to recognize the proairetic code, which determines the causal narrative sequence and syntagmatic progression. For example, he proceeds throughout the first part of the book with little care for the wellbeing of the people around him, beating, raping, and robbing those who are unfortunate enough to encounter him. The resulting effect of this is that he is eventually arrested, which leads him to be sentenced to fourteen years in prison. The effect of placing a person like Alex in that type of environment is that he eventually ends up beating one of his cell mates to death. His actions cause him to become the prison’s first Ludovico Treatment test subject, and as a result of the treatments, he loses all of his ability to be bad or violent.

At this point, I’d like to address the underlying semic code that exists within the Ludovico Treatment. In the book, the treatment that Alex undergoes involves him being injected with medicine that makes him violently ill, and then being forced to watch extremely graphic and violent films. Eventually, Alex is no longer given the shots, but still feels extremely sick when watching the films. Sounds familiar, right? That’s because it is. While the author never explicitly mentioned Pavlov’s dog or classic conditioning, his description of similar methods being utilized for the Ludovico Treatment allowed him to bring the similarities between the two to his readers’ attention.

Anyway, to return to the proairetic code, the loss of his predisposition toward violence causes him to be released back into society, but the resulting effect is seen in his suicide attempt after realizing he had become a clockwork orange. His suicide attempt causes him to be cured of the damage done by his treatments, and the effect is that the government essentially apologizes to him and promises to leave him alone. This causes him to return to his old life as a gang leader, although the effect of this is him recognizing that he no longer wants to be a part of that life. At the end of the novella, we see that Alex has grown out of his old lifestyle, and now yearns to settle down, marry, and become a father. He has left the violence of his youth behind and now wishes to move forward.

This recognition of the proairetic code leads us toward the symbolic code, which generates unresolvable oppositions, or antitheses, that structure a given conflict, and ultimately reinforce dominant cultural codes, within the text. Much like Demian, the symbolic code of A Clockwork Orange lies in the distinction between good and evil. Throughout the story, the forces of “good” and “evil” are at work on Alex. He begins the book as evil as he attacks, robs, and murders people. Then, he becomes good once he is forced to undergo the Ludovico Treatment, although he once again turns evil once he jumps out a window, cures himself, and reenters his old world of gangs. However, at the end of the book he realizes that he wishes to become good by his own accord, dreaming of becoming a father and meeting a nice woman to be the mother of his child. This back and forth between good and evil structures the story, allowing for a forward progression as Alex fights first to regain who he once was, and then to move forward as he realizes he has grown out of who he used to be.

However, it is imperative that we note the importance that Alex decided to be good on his own, rather than at the hands of the government’s treatments. For example, on page 106, after Alex says that it might be nice to be good, the Prison Chaplain says to him:

“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights over this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?” (pg. 106).

In saying this, the Prison Chaplain wants Alex to realize that goodness out of necessity is not the same as goodness by choice. If Alex only has the option to be good, if he does not have the ability to commit acts of violence if he has to, or even to protect himself, that is not goodness, but rather lack of options. The idea that the Prison Chaplain is trying to get at is that without evil there is no good, and without good there is no evil. In order to have one you must have the other.

However, on page 212 the difference between forced and voluntary goodness is evident. After Alex leaves his new droogs for the night and runs into his old droog, Pete, as well as his wife, he begins to contemplate his future, saying:

“But first of all brothers, there was this veshch of finding some devotchka or other who would be a mother to this son. I would have to start on that tomorrow, I kept thinking. This was something like new to do. This was something I would have to get started on, a new like chapter beginning. That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog, Alex…But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes” (pg. 212).

In this quote, one can see that good to Alex has become a choice, something new for him to try out, rather than something that is forced onto him by the government. He has decided on his own that it is time for him to lay his life with his droogs to rest and to explore a new portion of his life.

This brings us to the cultural code, which ‘controls all other codes through its reliance on the controlling values. The cultural code in this novel is that good will always prevail over evil, which is an existing’ cultural order, and one that has already been read, seen, done, and experienced. This is evident in that Alex fought so hard to regain control of his own life and mind in hopes of returning to his former role as a gang leader. However, once he was able to return to his old life, he found that it no longer interested him. Instead, he realized that violence is a childish thing and that he had moved past that part of his life. The things he now wants are seen as good and culturally appropriate; to meet a nice woman, to become a father, to move on to the next stage in his life. In reaching for these things, Alex shows that despite the awful things he has done in the past, good will always prevail in the end.