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... you see that Alex is not content to have control over his own life but he must have authority over others. He beats his "drugs" into submission and makes himself once more dictator over his small dominion. A key to his behavior is found in his name.
Alex is named after Alexander the Great, the famous general who conquered the world but took his greatest solace in intellectual pursuits such as philosophy, which he was trained in by Aristotle. The name Alex, means, depending on which source one trusts, either leader or defender of men (Mathews, p. 36). He acts out because he has been denied his birth right. Despite his viciousness the reader is forced to empathize with Alex. Burgess uses several tools to keep the reader from judging Alex to harshly.
From a semiotic stand point, the dialect that Burgess calls nedstat is the most powerful element of the book. First of all the language helps to distance the reader from the atrocity of his crimes (Mathews, p. 38). It also forces the reader to look at things from Alex's perspective and by doing so recognize ourselves as being like Alex. The repetition of the phrase "Oh my brothers" and the first person narrative also serve to include the audience in the plight of Alex. Also his episodes of ultra violence are phrased in such youthful exuberance that one can not help but savor his twisted individualism.
As disconcerting as it may be, violence is Alex's expression of individuality, and that is what causes the disappointment when he willingly becomes a part of the mass culture. His maturity comes at the price of his individuality, just as Holden Caulfields does. This explains why the American version, which has the last chapter edited, has always been more popular. While Alex might slit our throats, at least he provides hope of autonomy. The theme of A Clockwork Orange can be summed up as Manichean (Mathews, p. 39).
That being that there is no such thing as pure evil or goodness, and that each must come from the other. The book is also centered on the Catholic doctrine of free will (Kennard, p. 183). In order to remain human, Alex must have control over his own actions. Because of his youth he does not fully understand the power of the state, and therefore is powerless against it. Burgess states that as impossible as it is to escape mass culture, it is just as impossible for mass culture to prevent rebellion against it. We get a picture of the person Alex will become in the owner of HOME, F.
Alexander. Which stands for both future Alex and father of Alex. We know that Alex will become F. Alexander because when he returns to the house after his treatment, he recognizes the author of A Clockwork Orange as another Alex. Also they are both the authors of A Clockwork Orange.
F. Alexander can be considered a father figure for two reasons. First of all Alex recognizes that his compassion is of the parental type. HOME, is far more home like than his parents apartment. Also by having sex with the wife he plays out the Oedipal drama that Freud believes is a part of human development (Aggeler, p. 82). The son he envisions in the 21 st chapter, likewise will become Alex.
He even says; "My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the vessels I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry formula surrounded with mewing kot's and kostas, and I wouldnt be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on, round and round" And so Alex grows up and sells out, but this time he chooses to join the mass culture instead of having it forced upon him against his will. The Ramones embodied the same vibrant, amoral youthfulness as Alex, of A Clockwork Orange.
They were saviors to rock & roll, which was already beginning to age and sell out. The Ramones put rebellion back into rock. That essential ingredient, and a sense of fun, is what saved the world from a life time of elevator music. "The Ramones, four leather-jacketed reprobates from the glue-sniffing, acid- dropping teen milieu of Forest Hills, Queens, landed on this flatbed scene like a boulder on a box of sugar cream doughnuts" (Loder, p. 367). Even though they were enormously influential the Ramones never became a huge commercial success like the Beatles. Punk stayed mostly underground for a long time. This was due to the fact that radio stations didnt feel comfortable sticking songs like "Beat on the Brat" or " 53 rd and 3 rd", which is about a homicidal hustler, between K.
C. and the Sunshine Band and Olivia Newton John. The Ramones were rebels all right, and definitely without a cause. Where as the youth of the sixties had lofty ideals, the Ramones and their whole generation saw those ideals crash and burn. "The Ramones, like all 60 s children, had grown up on the Beatles, but by the early 70 s they had grown up, period" (Bessman, p. 15). "Chain Saw" is a true break in the pop song mold. It is both a tribute to a favorite slasher flick and parody of the bubble gum sentiments of most pop songs. The last two lines "Ooh, now Im so much in love/ Cause shes the only girl that Im ever thinking of" sound like they could have been taken of any number of pop songs from the sixties.
But few of those songs had their love interests sawed to bits by a maniacal serial killer. The satire comes out in full force against the excesses of the government in "Havana Affair. " By the time this was written the Cuban missile crisis was pretty much forgotten and Vietnam was declared an official disaster. Yet still the US insisted on sticking its nose into anything that smelled the least bit of Communism. For example in 1973 the CIA sponsored a coup to put Augusto Pinochet in power in Chile instead of Salvador Allende (Downey, p. 43). This song with its ridiculous spy for the CIA sent to infiltrate a Cuban talent show, shows the apathy of the average American for the whole mess. The Ramones did the only thing they could, find the humor in a government that was becoming more corrupt and absurd every day. " 53 rd & 3 rd" deals with a more serious subject matter than many Ramones songs.
The central image is that of a desperate vet from Nam who has been used by his country and then abandoned with a lifetime of pain and trauma that he must deal with on his own. The sad irony is that if he would have committed the same crime in Vietnam against Charlie he would be a hero with medals. But instead he is a fugitive from the same law that made him so willing to kill in the first place. This problem extends beyond the plight of a single vet. An entire nation was victim of a authoritarian government that refused to take responsibility for its mistakes. For all the hippies who tried to promote drug use as a mind expanding experience, "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" set forth the blunt truth.
Drugs merely provide an easy way out of reality. Not that the Ramones had anything against escaping a dull suburban existence. But they called it for what was. The song also pokes fun at the idealistic notion of peace and love. Here happiness is merely a side effect of being brain dead. "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" is a testimony to notion that ignorance is bliss. For Hunter S.
Thompson not even massive amounts of narcotics could hide the fact that the American Dream was dead. This statement, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is most evident in the lines "almost two hours later Dr. Duke and his attorney finally located what was left of the "Old Psychiatrists Club" (the American Dream) - a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds. The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had "burned down about three years ago. " Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas walks a strange line between fact and fiction. Thompson molds reality to his own ends both in his writing and in his experience. Thompson was greatly influenced by the Beat writers like Jack Kerouac.
Fear and Loathing follows the same spontaneous structure and prose of books like On the Road. The book centers on the disillusionment of a generation left in the wake of the sixties youth movement. "We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failures is ours, too.
What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid-Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody- or at least some force- is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. " Thompson also addresses the hypocrisy of authority. In Vegas, as in all of society, ones level of guilt is determined by wealth. Thompson and his attorney are able to get away with anything their tripped out, paranoid schizophrenic minds can envision because they have two very large expense accounts to back them up. Yet Thompson relates a story of his gentle hippie friend who was arrested and victimized by the police on trumped up vagrancy charges. The section where Thompson describes the speaker setup for the drug conference serves as a metaphor for the nature of authority.
The drug expert is depersonalized and distorted by the blaring, "low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in the corner. " This creates a kind of wizard of Oz effect. Because the source of the voice is ambiguous, the stupidity of the experts remarks gain an inflated importance. The fact that he doesnt know an once more about the "drug culture" than the back woods cops he is lecturing to, is hidden by a barrage of degrees, which have nothing to do with street culture. Besides that, the cops dont have enough sense to distinguish fact from fiction anyway. While most artists were grieving the death of the idealistic Sixties and coming to grudging acceptance of the falseness and commercialism of the Seventies, Andy Warhol relished the capitalistic bent of society and played a large part in creating the image driven celebrity culture of the Seventies. Many think of Warhol as a whore, and of Pop Art as prostitution (Doyle, p. 153).
Warhol would probably agree with that statement, but he would defend himself by saying that he enjoyed his profession. But with out moralizing his work, one can see that it was indeed a new form of American Realism, because its subjects were inspired by mass and folk culture. And what could be more realistic than a silk screened photograph. Pop Art, even though it may seem like another form of abstraction, is actually a reaction against the Abstract impressionist movement, which was lead by artists like Jackson Pollack (Banes, p. 164).
And if anything thats what Warhols work was about. He presented a little slice of Americana directly to the public without passing his own aesthetic judgments. But Warhols reality, even in his macabre pieces like "Electric Chair" and "Orange Car Crash", was not a gritty one because we dont usually perceive reality as gritty. As a coping mechanism we cloak the cold hard facts, behind veneers of public image, drugs, and idealism.
Marilyn Monroe embodied the two things that interested Warhol the most, celebrity and death. It is no wonder that he did so many paintings bearing her image. Marilyn was the emblem of, if not the American Dream, at least the Hollywood Dream. She was a testament to the belief that image is everything. How else could one explain how a plain and insecure girl could become an enduring sex symbol.
She was pure fabrication, from her appearance (Marilyn was notorious for taking three hours or more just to do her makeup), to her personae and name. That artifice comes across in the painting. Her features are veiled by flat panels of makeup and her hair color is cartoonish. Marilyn became for Warhol a symbol of the power to shape ones own destiny. The mystery surrounding her death also greatly intrigued Warhol. Although she was not particularly talented and was not a natural beauty she managed to exit life surrounded by conspiracy theories involving everyone from the President to the Mob.
To Warhol death was the ultimate celebrity, which he explored extensively in paintings like "Orange Car Crash. " Warhols morbid paintings have a stark reality that is much more powerful than any abstract impressionists interpretation could ever be (Lippard, p. 99). This is because America, as a society, is so used to being barraged with false emotions from the media that we have learned to tune out. But when a person is confronted with tragedy, pure and unadulterated, the reaction is all the more personal and powerful because the artist has not attempted to interpret it. Halston was no stranger to the power of image. First as Jacqueline Kennedys personal milliner and then as hugely successful celebrity designer during the seventies he single handedly defined the feminine ideal of his time. The womens movement really took hold in the seventies.
Fashion at the time was all about power and freedom. As opposed to the demure femininity of the Fifties and Sixties, the disco age was embodied by aggressive sexuality. This is look is epitomized by the quintessential Halston dress. Halston produced many variations on his halter-necked, wrapped, backless dress (Milbank, p. 246).
Lots of bare skin made it sexy yet the cut and the fabric was simple and unadorned. In general, seventies fashion was pared down and close fitting. The growing simplicity and androgyny of day wear was important to women who wanted to be taken seriously in the workplace. Establishing equality with men was of up most importance in the beginning of the womens movement. A large part of that equality involved dispelling the double standard that frowned on promiscuity among women but praised it in men. A closer fit emphasized the contour of the body over the construction of the clothing.
Sexy replaced pretty in the seventies view of beauty. Also blatant sexuality was the rule when it came to Seventies night life. At exclusive discos like Studio 54, admission depended on ones ability to attract attention. And Halston ruled the New York fashion scene that presided over places like Studio 54 and Andy Warhols Factory. Ultimately the post war period was about learning to cope with quickly changing environment where mass culture and the government was stripping away peoples sense of individuality and autonomy.
The changing landscape allowed repressed minority groups such as women and blacks to finally gain the power they had been denied for so long. While the average white male felt that his opportunities were becoming increasingly limited. This manifested itself in the formation of many counter culture movements. All of which eventually succumbed to or were engulfed by the mass culture. Because the truth of the matter is that as much as culture controls who we are, we control it by virtue of the fact that we make up society.
Works Cited In order of appearance: Im, Seymour. " Introduction to Desolation Angels. " Modern American Literature; Volume 2. New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co, 1960, p. 253 Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Lawrence.
The Regents Press of Kansas. 1976 Kelly, Sean, Rosemary Rogers. Saints Preserve Us! New York: Random House. 1993 Downey, Matthew T, et all, ects. ed. The Twentieth Century: Postwar Prosperity and the Cold War (Volume 4). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1992 Mathews, Richard.
The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess. New York: The Borgo Press. 1978 Kennard, Jean E. "Anthony Burgess: Double Vision. " Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 1987 Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. Birmingham: The University of Alabama Press. 1979 Loder, Kurt. Bat Chain Puller: Rock and Roll in the Age of Celebrity.
New York: St. Martins Press. 1990 Bessman, Jim. Ramones: An American Band. New York: St. Martins Press. 1993 Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Munoz. Pop Out: Queer Warhol.
Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1996 Banes, Sally. Greenwich Village 1963. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1993 Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. London: Thames and Hudson. 1985 Milbank, Caroline. New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers. 1989 All Other Sources Ali, Tariq, Susan Watkins. 1968: Marching in the Streets. New York: Free Press. 1998 Allen, Donald M.
ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Groves Press. 1960 Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: Ballatine Books. 1963 De Castelbajac, Kate. The Face of a Century: 100 Years of Makeup and Style.
New York: Rizzoli. 1995 Dodd, David. The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics: A Web Site. web >. June 1, 1999 Piccoli, Sean. The Grateful Dead.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. 1997 Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York: Vintage Books, a Division
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