Intro
Heard of the Stanley Kubrick movie? It's based on Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange, set in a near future where fifteen-year-old Alex and his gang spend alternately chill at the local milk bar (read: milk + drugs) and commit acts of extreme violence. This is typical fun times for Alex until he's busted by the cops, but he's offered the chance to get out of jail by signing up for a new kind of rehab called the Ludovico technique.
Heard of Pavlov's dog? That was a real-life experiment where Pavlov rang a bell and then offered food, so his dogs eventually would start to slobber at the sound of ringing. Sounds appealing, right? The same idea is behind Alex's anti-crime therapy: he is drugged and forced to watch videos of extreme violence, and the drugs make him feel queasy about the images. So he's cured of his violent ways, but is that the ideal? Burgess argues that morality should stem from free will, not brainwashing.
Though the world that Burgess presents is futuristic in some ways, it reflects the cultural zeitgeist of Britain in the early 1960s. This was a time of rivalry between "Mods" and "Rockers" (echoed in the gang warfare in the novel); of cultural expansion in coffee bars (resembling Burgess's milk bars); and of the rise of television—prevalent in the book in a way that predicts the role that the tube was to take on in real life.
Most of all, the Ludovico technique evokes current debates about criminal reform. The novel is therefore relevant to cultural theorists as it engages a whole array of issues of this time and explores the ethical questions that they pose.
Another culturally significant aspect of the novel is the role of classical music, which is key in the Ludovico method in particular: Alex formerly loved his Beethovens and Mozarts, but those tunes are poisoned for him because they're synced up with violent images. As it turns out, some folks are quick to abuse this, with Alex being exploited by a political group that sees him as a way to criticize the government (by kicking up a fuss over the harm done to this troubled boy). Their agenda is phony though, as they're happy to drive Alex to suicide if it helps their cause, locking him in a room and blasting Beethoven through the walls. Jumping from the window, Alex is only hurt; still, it's enough to make the government undo the procedure. The story ends with Alex imagining himself as father to a teenage son who—here's the catch—will be the same as he was at that age. The novel therefore doesn't offer any magic solution, depicting violence as a cycle.
Quote
When I'd gone erk erk a couple of razzes on my full innocent stomach, I started to get out day platties from my wardrobe, turning the radio on. There was music playing, a very nice malenky string quartet, my brothers, by Claudius Birdman, one that I knew well. I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I'd viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha power. And when I'd cheested up my litso and rookers a bit and done dressing (my day platties were like student-wear: the old blue pantalonies with sweater with A for Alex) I thought here at last was time to itty off to the disc-bootick (and cutter too, my pockets being full of pretty polly) to see about this long-promised and long-ordered stereo Beethoven Number Nine (the Choral Symphony, that is), recorded on Masterstroke by the Esh Sham Sinfonia under L. Muhaiwir. So out I went, brothers.
Analysis
First thing's first: the lingo. What is this, Shakespeare? Chaucer? Dr. Seuss? None are too far off—Alex is using a mix of Russian and rhyming slang, along with dashes of actual Shakespeare. If you get into the flow of Alex's train of thought you can get the hang of what he's saying, but this malenky slovtionary can give an extra boost.
The passage above gives us an idea of the role classical music plays in Alex's life, plus his own views on art and society. This brings us back to that old question of high/low culture: Alex isn't exactly your average teen, since he shakes up his violence-and-drug sprees with his superfan-dom of classical music—in fact, he's a bit of a culture snob in that he looks down on the music that other people his age listen to. Despite being a teen terror, then, Alex has an Adorno-esque attitude toward mass culture and talks about the bliss he finds in classical music.
This seems to point to high culture as representing human thought at its most refined, but there's a little catch: it's usually stuff like rock music, slasher movies, and videogames that get accused of warping people's minds, but Alex daydreams of violence to the sound of Beethoven.
This doesn't mean the music's to blame, but it hardly demonstrates the humanizing influence of high art (as Alex himself recognizes). This is key in cultural studies-land because Burgess was writing at a time when there was a lot of buzz about the fact that Auschwitz had been run by men who played classical music and read Shakespeare. So, the novel questions not only the ethics of the Ludovico technique but the humanizing influence of high art, especially for the troubled youth. It's like The OC, but with funkier language and a built-in cultural studies critique of the violence of contemporary society.