LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/3. ANTHONY BURGESS (7 September 1932-1993)


By 1993, when Burgess died, the Desperado community had become quite obvious, with clear features, and they fit his work, although he could also be said to follow Joyce in many ways.

● Displacement can be invoked in connection with Burgess, as he worked between 1954-1960 in the Colonial Service in Malaya and Borneo, and even the title of his A Clockwork Orange comes from that area, as the author confesses. He also writes about persons away from home, or even about home being invaded by an alien universe. In A Clockwork Orange the heroes talk a strange language, half-English, half-Russian. In Honey for the Bears, the characters go to Russia, one even chooses to stay there for good, while another smuggles a criminal and turns him loose in the West, thinking he is doing a good deed for both East and West. The real displacement Burgess’s work deals with is the displacement of good and bad, in moral terms. They tend to change places, till the end finds a way of going back to common sense. But the return fills the reader with doubts. Alex is maimed by the attempts of justice at reforming him, the hero of Honey for the Bears is no better for choosing to go back to the capitalist heaven. Wherever they go, Burgess’s heroes are displaced, they never fit in.

● The Desperado writer tries his hand at several genres or types of art, in a subconscious attempt at handling as many devices as possible, at mixing them, too. Burgess wrote, besides novels, a history of English literature, a musical version of Joyce’s Ulysses (Blooms of Dublin), a biography and critical study of Lawrence, a TV script (Jesus of Nazareth) based on one of his own novels. Burgess is in constant search of dissimilarity, whether in style, psychological analysis, environment. A Desperado par excellence, he is a lover of words built in puzzles.

● A Clockwork Orange (title deriving from the Malayan orang, meaning man) is a dystopia of sorts, a future country in which teenagers speak an inaccessible mixture of Russian and English, which discourages anyone from reading on. This country is dominated by teenage violence, which is a common Desperado theme (see Lessing, Golding). Honey for the Bears takes place in the model of all dystopias, Russia. The mixture of comedy and tragedy ends in grotesque, which is often the result of Desperado mixtures. A Desperado hates to be either purely tragic or simply comic, he has to complicate his case and be both, even more things at a time, so he is grotesque, and the fool’s cap suits his very meaningful resourcefulness.

● A Clockwork Orange is a narrative in the first person, a self-description of a ruthless mind, the mind of a teenager who lives a nightmare of murder and violence for which we can find no reason. Other books are third-person narratives, but they focus on one hero alone, whose thoughts and adventures overwhelm all the other characters, all minor and used as mere tools. The novel tends to be a biography of one person alone, not very orderly or accessible, placing deliberate or accidental obstacles in the way of understanding. Burgess likes an encoded text, but chooses the one-hero narrative to relieve the burden he places on the shoulders of the reader.

● Desperado heroes all complain of confusion. We find it in Lessing, Ackroyd, Ishiguro, Swift, Amis, Gray. The baffled hero crosses the narrative without making head or tail of it, and the reader is expected to find the key, to make his own rules for a chaotic world, which the author pours down out of his mind on to the page. What would be logical is not valid. The heroes do without logic, causality is upside down: we have the most unexpected effects following simple, apparently harmless acts. Ishiguro’s hero in The Unconsoled fights this imponderability of all logic. Lessing’s Anna Wulf feels she is going crazy. With Burgess’s Alex, the reader feels that revolt, disgust, horror, disapproval drive him out of his mind. The baffled hero reaches out to the reader, and his difficulty in understanding exactly what is going on, in drawing a final conclusion is not caused by ambiguity, as it happened with Joyce, Woolf, Eliot. An inconclusive work can hardly expect more than an incomplete reading, fighting its own fear of exhausted probing of the text, giving in to the laziness of ‘I cannot follow.’

● Irony is not absent from Burgess, as a major Desperado attitude. It filters everything. The crimes and bloodshed in A Clockwork Orange would hardly be bearable in its absence. It accompanies the very gloomy realization that mere children long for a taste of death. Death, violence are inborn. Irony makes their presence palatable, against the reader’s will. With Burgess, as with many Desperadoes, irony is a refusal to explain. Lessing, Golding, Amis, Gray, Ishiguro never explain, either. They step at a distance from the hero and watch coldly, almost mocking at their suffering, but describing it all the same. With stubbornness, reality is recomposed in detail. What these authors avoid is the merest suggestion of how we are to make sense of it.

● Desperado works are elusive. They do not end in the traditional way. They seem to open the way for a chain of mirrors, of works within the work, endings within the end we are confronted with. The end of a Desperado work is in its reading, but reading itself becomes rereading, and so on, till we give up. The Desperado author encourages the reader to read again, but disarms him first, making sure he will not be able to change anything in the text. The helpless reader accepts the new convention of the teasing text.

● The characters are viewed in an emotionless, dry way. They are victims of incident, the story keeps happening to them, and they hardly have any time to play in it, let alone to think it over or express feelings. The hero is overwhelmed by plot, and a plot from which sentimentality is banned breeds a defensive reader, a reader who becomes as enigmatical and incurious as the author. Burgess, like Gray, Ishiguro, Lodge, Bradbury, refuses direct psychological analysis. He conceals instead of revealing. The Desperado work is a secret, not between the author and the reader (since the author refuses flatly to explain himself, even confess in interviews), but between the reader and himself.

● Dealing ironically with the iron curtain is something Burgess does as well as Lessing, Barnes, Brownjohn or Bradbury. Where Orwell was dead earnest, Burgess treads without fear. The world of 1984 is entered by Burgess’s hero with a smile and every confidence in Honey for the Bears. The same happens to the other Desperadoes. Grimness does not suit them well. They debunk the fear of communism. The same writers, though, are very much concerned with the future of their own country, with the menace of the faintest possibility of communism spreading.

● Concern with technique, both in fiction and poetry, often brings a shallowness of treatment, a use of devices for their own sake, without a supporting meaning. Many poets chase after shockingly unusual rhymes, and forget to fill them with a coherent statement. Many novelists look for unique angles and, in the process, forget about character and plot. The Desperado, in spite of his constant denial of devices (conventions), is a slave of how to approach reality. Even the Desperado critic is undecided, as there seems to be no particular critical approach/ convention that favours the Desperado work.