Free will in Brighton Rock and A Clockwork Orange

As Catholics Greene and Burgess both accepted the doctrine of Original Sin; the concept that since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, mankind has lived in sin and that we are all the products of that sin.

However, Burgess himself argues that the act of original sin – what is known as The Fall of Adam is in itself an act of free will. In other words, Adam and Eve had a choice to act as they did.

St. Augustine describes the Fall of Adam as ‘a happy fault, that it produced so great a redeemer’ in other words,  from ‘the fall’, the outcome is Christ.  The Augustinian view is that without sin there can be no Christ; therefore the concept of good and evil seem to be inseparable and one cannot exist without the other.

This positive view of sin – and consequently free will is can then be seen in a more universal light.  It can be argued that without Adam Eve’s sinful act of free will there would be not only no Christ, but also no human creativity and constructed beauty.

This idea is easily identified in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Alex’s worship of Beethoven demonstrates the link between sinful behaviour and the beauty of human achievement.  Burgess contended that Alex is a violent man – which is essentially normal and representative of the human condition – but Alex loves music, appreciates beauty and delights in the complexity and variety of language.

Alex’s powers of expression and the way he modulates his tone and vocabulary in the book reveal an individual who revels in his articulacy. Alex is different from the droogs not just by leadership, but by his superiority in the way he can relate to his surroundings.  Burgess allows Alex the ‘free will’ to experience his world in a way that allows violence to assume an artistic value of its own and when this creativity / freedom is taken form him we see a character who is instantly less interesting to the reader.  Despite the fact sex and violence are no longer palatable to Alex, his loss of free will simply demonstrate that to not have free will is inhuman and though we may abhor Alex’s action previous to his arrest, we are not able to take any sense of righteous retribution from the violence that befalls him after he has completed the Ludovico treatment.

Pinky is an example of the product of original sin and free will in its least attractive form. Pinky has no redeeming features, and despite what has clearly been a difficult upbringing that has deprived him both financially and emotionally but also starved him of affection his warped  world-view shaped by  little, if any moral guidance that his schooling and early role-models has created a person that we cannot feel any true empathy for.  While Pinky’s past is not explored in detail, we are left with an image of a rigid and dogmatic spiritual upbringing in which idea that ‘you are sinful’ would have been painfully enforced.

Both Greene and Burgess would surely state that there is free will, because it is this freedom of choice that creates characters that they have created.  Alex is the illustration of the creativity and capability for aesthetic appreciation that makes human distinct from the animals – yet is still essentially bad. Pinky is just bad.  Pinky is an example of the product of sin breeding yet more. Pinky is aware that he has the power to make choices, yet his powerful belief that because he has sinned, that he is sin, that being him embodies the very idea of sinfulness. He is left with the destructive conclusion that there can be no redemption and therefore no point  in trying to change.

Alex allows the reader a perspective on choice that Pinky does not.  Alex considers change, he wants to be different and makes a choice to try and bring this about.

Pinky is sickened by life and all its attendant human acts, but he finds himself complicit in them – by killing Hale he sets-off a chain of events which weaken any strength he might have felt from the fact that while he was human, he was at least ‘different’.

Through the necessity to avoid execution for Hale’s murder he is forced to feign love for Rose and is forced into losing his virginity in an ‘act’ that leaves him feeling sullied and vulnerable.  The series of potential traps that his actions and mistakes Pinky set for himself after the murder leave him dependant on Rose for his survival and the fact that he knows he is no longer in control  of his own destiny force him to become the same as every other person he knows.  Ultimately his suicide that combines both the imagery of a descent into hell through the fall from the cliff mixed with the burning Vitriol serves to illustrate the fate of a man who could have exercised his free will, yet ironically seems to accept his damnation and does little, if anything, to avoid it.

Alex makes the choice to have his capacity for free will removed. This a perplexing irony – he decides to have no capacity for choice and therefore becomes a different person.  When Alex loses his free will, he is no longer ‘Alex’.  It may therefore be reasonable to suppose that Burgess is offering Alex as a metaphor for mankind, that without the capacity of choice, humans are no longer the species that we know them as; that to be human is to choose to be so. Without the capacity to make those choices, we lose our humanity.  The state of ‘being human’ may not always be a good or positive thing – but through Alex, we can learn that even the worst can of human can appreciate the best of humanity.

In answer to the suggestion that ‘there is no such thing as free will’, both authors have suggested that free will is inevitable.  Alex and Pinky both show that the former’s submission to Ludovico and the latter’s adhesion to his Catholicism demonstrate that we choose to be restricted and that in fact it is our choice to be controlled.

Burgess allows the reader to see that by removing choice from a human, they become ‘non-humans’ and therefore proves that free-will is an intrinsic part of human existence.  Greene provides, through Pinky and his hideously ugly life, a vision of humanity trapped in a pit of despair that he has dug himself.  Pinky illustrates that while man has the choice and capacity for good and compassion, he often lacks the will to do so.

This then leavers a final paradox.  Yes, there is free will, but as a human we have no choice in the matter.  It is impossible to reject free will, because that in itself would be a choice – and to make it is an act of free will.

Burgess rejected the idea that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was a pessimistic view of the future.  Burgess viewed all men as violent by nature and that free will was in fact ‘a glorious thing to possess’ and that, in while the society of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ may have had futuristic overtones, it was not really a dystopian view of what was to come – but more of a fable of what humanity is, always has been and always will be.

It would be possible to view the concept of free will as humanities ‘sickness’ and in the case of Alex, he seeks a cure – only to discover that without it he could not survive  – or, indeed even live, without it and that despite the imperfections that an existence containing free will has, it is infinitely better to be true to oneself than to seek artificial goodness – a situation that is ultimately false, unproductive and worthless.

Where does this leave the reader?  Alex is intrigued by the book title ‘A Clockwork Orange’ after he attacks its writer.  He later reflects that he understands this puzzling image better – the idea that something capable of growth and sweetness cannot be controlled, ordered, regulated and mechanised.  Therefore, do we leave the book with a sense that a simple message has been told in an overly complicated and obscure way? What was Burgess striving to achieve through his experimental and possibly perplexing language?

Take away the ‘nadsat’ and do we have a different book? Certainly.  The language permeates the readers subconscious and surely demonstrates a degree of the mind-alteration that Burgess alludes to through Alex’s treatment. Burgess demonstrates that people can be made to think differently – and the relation to free will is that the reader has chosen to read the book.  Accepting the existence and meaning of the unfamiliar language is a subliminal demonstration of an act of free will that we did not realise we were making and while we may find it distracting and even annoying, the fact that we persevere with the desire to understand Alex suggests that humans are quite happy to have their brains ‘washed’ as long as there is a tempting and intriguing enough stimulus.

What is memorable or peculiar about Alex’s actions is not what he does – violence is, after all commonplace, it is how he tells us about it.  We choose to take a greater notice of his most poetic and expressive moments – and this is when he is at his most violent and heartless.  This troubling juxtaposition would then suggest to explain the associations that Alex makes to the beauty of Beethoven and the equal beauty of the damage and pain that he meets out upon others.

As a straightforward allegory or fable, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is a simple enough story – the decline, fall and eventual rise of a vicious hoodlum who, when his intrinsic value as an individual is realised, finishes the story as the champion of society, rather than the scourge. Burgess creates Alex to show that humanity is flawed, but also infinitely complex and its behaviours indefinable; you cannot have a ‘clockwork orange’ it just won’t work…

Perhaps then, in a narrative that would seem to defy traditional conventions of character or genre, the ‘hero’ of this story is therefore ‘free will’ itself. Alex is simply its personification and because of  the inescapable nature of or freedom to choice, there is a little ‘Alex’ in all of us.

© James Willis 2015