Chapter 46 concept

"Please, let me do something. Shall I wipe your boots? Look, I'm going to get down and lick them clean." Believe it or not, man, I got down on my knees, stretched Long tongue to lick his dirty and smelly boots.But this guy didn't appreciate it at all, and kicked my sores, although the kicks weren't too hard.At that time, I seemed to think that simply grabbing his ankle with my hands and throwing this abominable guy down would not cause vomiting and pain.So that's what I did.He was taken aback and fell to the ground with a crash, and the audience burst into laughter.But when I saw him fall on the floor, I was scared again, and I quickly reached out to pull him up.He got up and was about to give me a serious punch in the face when Dr. Brodsky said:

"Okay, that's enough." Then, the scary guy bowed slightly, and ran away as lightly as an actor.At this time, all the lights were shining on me, so that I couldn't open my eyes, and the rotten wound was painful, and I couldn't help crying out.Dr. Brodsky told the audience: "As you have seen, our subjects were forced to do evil to do good, which is a paradox. The idea of ​​using violence is always accompanied by very strong physical pain. To overcome this, our subjects had to undergo a complete change of attitude. Any questions?" "Choose," a deep, mellow voice murmured.I guess the voice came from the prison chaplain. "He had no choice, did he? He demeaned himself in order to protect his own interests, out of fear of suffering. Obviously, he didn't do it voluntarily. He stopped doing bad things, but he also lost the ability to judge right from wrong."

Antoine Borges, "A Clockwork Orange" (1962) The term "concept fiction" usually implies that a book is not very narrative.The characters are flexible and eloquent.They go back and forth on philosophical issues, leaving little time to eat, drink, or flirt.This ancient tradition, dating back to Plato's Dialogues, is now long out of date.For example, hundreds of novels of this kind were published in the nineteenth century, dealing with abstractions against and in defense of high and low Church Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, skepticism, and so on, occasionally A bit of melodrama was thrown in for the needs of library circulation; most of it, as a result, was completely forgotten, and rightfully so; lethargy.

This kind of novel is sometimes called "theme novel", that is, a novel with an argument.It is worth noting that we borrowed this word from French.Whether conceptual fiction with a clear thesis or, more broadly, purely theoretical and dialectical, there always seems to be more ground for development in Continental literature than in English literature.Perhaps this has something to do with the apparent absence of a self-defining intellectual layer in British society.This fact is sometimes attributable to the fact that England had not experienced a revolution since the seventeenth century and was relatively unaffected by the historical upheavals of modern Europe.Whatever the reason, there is no novelist in modern British literature to rival Doentyevsky, Thomas Mann, Robert Musser, or Jean-Paul Sartre.Perhaps D. H. Lawrence came closest to them, especially in them, but the views discussed and expounded in his writings were personal, not to mention very eccentric, and often at odds with the mainstream of modern European thought. There is a certain distance.

Of course, any novel worth reading contains concepts, inspires them, and can use them for discussion.But what we call "conceptual novel" mainly refers to such a novel, the source of energy of the work is the concept, rather than, for example, feelings, moral choices, interpersonal relationships, or the ups and downs of people; it is the concept that produces, forms and maintains The energy of narrative.In this sense, British novelists are more accustomed to direct discussion of concepts in comic and satirical novels (including campus novels) or in different forms of fiction and utopian or dystopian fantasy.Earlier I gave examples of two kinds of novels—like Malcolm Bradbury's The Historic Man and Samuel Butler's Erevan."A Clockwork Orange" by Antoine Borges belongs to the second category.

Antoine Borges recorded in his autobiography that around 1960 there were two gangs of hooligans in Britain, one was called the "Modern School" and the other was called the "Rock School".He said that his "A Clockwork Orange" was inspired by them.Their behavior raises an eternal question, how can a civilized society be free from illegal violence without abandoning its own moral standards?Burgess, an unconventional Catholic, said: "I feel that the novel must have a philosophical or theological basis-the artificial destruction of human free will through scientific conditioning; the problem is that this should not be worse than the free choice of evil."

The story is narrated by Alex in candid colloquial style.He was a depraved petty hooligan sentenced for appalling hooliganism and violence.In order to be released, he agreed to undergo Pavlovian aversion therapy.The therapy consisted of showing him a film similar to the crime he committed and giving him a drug that made him sick.This therapy is very effective.This is evidenced by the plot in an excerpt from this article.In front of a group of criminologists, Alex is taunted and abused by an actor (hired for the purpose).But as long as he tried to fight back, he would feel disgusted, and finally had to grovel and let it go.The prison chaplain asked if he had lost his humanity during the treatment.

In addition, there are many similar "concept novels", such as Morris's "News from Nowhere", Huxley's "Brave New World", and Orwell's.Like them, "A Clockwork Orange" is also set in the future (albeit not very distant), which allows the novelist to directly present and discuss his ethical concepts without being restricted by the real world.The brilliance of Borges lies in the fact that he closely combined this proven and effective therapy with a very creative "juvenile talk" style (see Section 4).Teenagers, like criminals, tend to use slang as gang jargon to differentiate themselves from adults and respectable society.Borges imagines 1970s Britain where juvenile delinquents talk heavily influenced by Russian. Stanley told his story in a "Russian English" to a group of imaginary "friends" (in Russian drugi means "friend" and nadsat is a suffix for "+"), although he was speaking with officials Standard English is used when speaking.There are some slang words that rhyme with the London dialect in the dialogue, such as Charlie (Charlie) = Charlie Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin) = Charlain (priest), but basically they are all from Russian.As long as you read the first ninety-nine pages of the novel, you can guess the meaning even if you don't know Russian.In the second sentence of this excerpt, "Sharries" means "ass," "yahzick" means "tongue," "grahzny" means "dirty," and "Vonny" means "smelly."Borges hoped that his readers would gradually learn this Russian-like English in the process of reading, guessing the meaning of loanwords from the context and other clues.The reader thus also experiences a kind of Pavlovian conditioning, albeit not by being punished but by being rewarded (i.e. being able to follow the story), thereby reinforcing the impression.An added bonus is that this mimetic language keeps the horrific actions described at a distance that satisfies artistic needs without overly disgusting—or overly agitating.When Stanley Kubrick made the novel into a film, he gave an even more ironic display of the influence of conditioning: Kubrick acted out the violence in it more vividly, which caused a greater illusion and made it easier to read. Acceptance made the film inspire hooliganism, which was contrary to his original intention, and the director finally had to withdraw the film.