Re-reading A Clockwork Orange

 

I am resuming my re-reading challenge after a long break as I was reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light – slow read of many, many pages that took me over two months. Goodreads points out to me that I am behind schedule.

I included A Clockwork Orange in my list because it seemed an obvious choice, and now I cannot remember whether I read it before I saw the movie or after. I saw the movie in 1975 at the very earliest (a pirate black-and-white copy), and I haven't watched it since so I have just glimpses of episodes and no memory of whether the movie follows the novel. Not unexpectedly, what I remember is the worst scenes of violence and the worst scenes of Alex's therapy. I don't remember how the film ends, actually don't remember the rest of the plot after therapy. Likewise, my memory of the novel was extremely vague.

My current copy has a foreword, from which I learned that the novel was published in the USA without the final chapter and that the film was based on the American version.

Since I was prepared for the violence, it didn't shock me, and it is possibly less shocking because it is narrated by Alex matter-of-factly in his idiosyncratic language. I was much more disturbed by the moral and political messages which I find far two explicit and therefore less effective. Maybe it is the spirit of the early 1960s.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel is the language, much of which is obviously missing in the film. I haven't counted, but I would guess at 5 to 10 slang words per sentence, and I wonder how many make sense unless you know Russian. You can always figure out the meaning, but for me part of the joy of reading was recognising the Russian words cleverly disguised by English spelling and grammar. I am not referring to “gulliver” and “horrowshow”, but to much more subtle and imaginative usage. In some cases it took a few instances before I got it - “oddy knocky” was one, not straightforward to get from the context.

What Burgess and his critics perhaps didn't know is that at the time the novel was written, Russian nadsats, or teens, were actively using a similar kind of jargon where you not only needed the knowledge of English, but also a good deal of creativity. So you could hear phrases such as: “Я митингую с герлой в восемь клоков” (I am meeting a girl at 8 o'clock), ”У меня трузера штатские” (My trousers are from the USA) or ”Чилдренята, напутонивайте шузы” (Children, put on your shoes”), which is exactly the way Alex uses language. I have tested these examples on some Slavic scholars, and they didn't pass the test. I wonder whether Burgess would have passed it.

I got curious about how the novel was translated into Russian, and the translator used this very same kind of slang, spelling – and misspelling – English words in Cyrillic and inflecting them by Russian grammar. So Alex's droogy becomes his frendy, mesto becomes pleis, litso becomes feis, and deng becomes mani. No Russian reader today would have problems with this language, it is common currency.

In terms of language, A Clockwork Orange is compared to Finnegans Wake and Ridley Walker. I never got past the first page of Ridley Walker because I am not a native speaker, but in Finnegans Wake it helps to be multilingual.

When I met Olof Palme

Everybody in Sweden today shares their memories of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister who was assassinated thirty years ago. A bit similar to J F Kennedy: everybody - old enough - remembers what they did. I am old enough. But that's another story.

On the day following the assassination, Staffan and I were going to a city in Sweden where a play he had translated was opening. I was still in bed when Staffan stormed in, screaming: "I am not going to any f*ing opening night!" My reaction was that the author had said something stupid or the theater had misspelled Staffan's name on the poster or something mundane like that. Instead, he threw the morning paper at me, with Palme on the front page.

The opening night was of course postponed, and Staffan and I, together with the rest of Sweden, spent the following days in front of television.

Inescapably, I remembered my only encounter with Palme, which I will share now. A couple of years earlier, there was another opening night (now you will get the impression that we didn't do anything other that attend opening nights, which is very true since Staffan was much involved with theatre in those days). It was a musical which Staffan co-authored and which featured a very famous actress in the main role. It so happened that she had participated in Palme's election campaign, and therefore he was a guest of honour at the performance and the following party.  I happened to sit next to him at the party, and when he realised I was Russian, he looked at me, took a deep breath and started reciting one of the best-known Russian poems by Alexander Pushkin:
         
          Буря мглою небо кроет,
          Вихри снежные крутя...

There he stopped, and I picked up without thinking and finished the whole poem, which ends by a proposal to have a drink, which we did.  

Staffan thought it was hilarious when I told him. Not that the Swedish Prime Minister could recite the first two lines of Russian poem, which he had likely learned as a child from his Russian nanny, but that I could immediately pick up and continue. I didn't find it remarkable at all. Every educated person in Russia can recite poetry for hours.  

Don't trust your memory!

In my deep aversion toward young adult dystopia I am re-reading classics again, and the time has come for Anna Karenina. It is one of the books I re-read often; in fact, I know for sure that I re-read it the winter before we moved to Cambridge, six years ago. I also know for sure that I didn't read it for the plot, like I did when I read it first time, as a teenager. I knew what happened and how. I read it slowly, enjoying every word, every sentence. You would imagine that you'd remember a novel that you read six years ago and many times before that.

The first thing that struck me was that in between her misfortunes, Anna writes a children's book. It is only mentioned it passing, and most people would not even notice it, but surely I should have remembered such an important detail!

Anna is also opium addicted. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it, since all upper-class men and women did it in the late nineneeth century, but this fact is repeated several times, and surely it shouldn't come as a surprise?

The greatest revelation was Karenin, Anna's husband. Of course we align with Anna against him, and of course I have read criticism pointing out that, given the circumstances, he acts nobly. On this reading, however, I noticed something that makes me forgive him whatever sins he may have committed. When Anna is dying in postpartum fever and Vronsky is weeping by her bedside, what does Karenin do? He saves the baby. The text says so explicitly: the newborn baby was totally neglected and would have died if Karenin hadn't taken care of her, got a wet nurse, made sure the baby was warm and fed. Now, this may also be viewed as a noble gesture of a cuckold husband. But noble as he may be, nobody expects a cuckold husband to cuddle the fruit of his wife's illicit affair. In this short episode, while our attention is solely with Anna, Karenin is revealed as his true self. 

Many years ago, at a workshop on Russian literature, we were discussing Anna Karenina, and someone said how inexplicable it was that Anna loves her son by the detested husband, but doesn't care about Vronsky's daughter. I took out my best Freudian tools and said it was absolutely clear. She doesn't love her husband, so all her love is focused on her son. She loves Vronsky, and a daughter will one day become her rival - a story best known as Snow White... I could just as well have thrown a stink bomb. They told me I was cynical, that I apparently had no children and could not imagine how a mother feels, and so on. I admited that I had three children, two sons and a daughter, and I tried to point out that we were discussing fiction, but to no avail.

I remember it now, because of course the same is true about Karenin. His son steals his wife's love. But with the daughter, even though she is another man's daughter, he has something of Anna and something to love.