“Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” Albert Camus clearly felt no need for an element of surprise in The Myth of Sisyphus, his long essay that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This statement appears in the first paragraph of the Preface, before the book even officially begins. I’m a curious individual, and lately I’ve been unusually interested in this subject, so my response was something like, “Okay. Convince me.”

I can tell you right away that this will be a two-part analysis of Sisyphus, because I feel that I must provide an overview of the topic of suicide in literature and philosophy — at least how I’ve perceived it. Then there are two aspects to Sisyphus itself: an eloquent statement of the dilemma, and the closest thing to a solution that Camus — or anyone else, for that matter — has ever devised.

Camus discloses that the book was written in 1940, which I find extremely interesting, if only in terms of what came before and after it. Just scanning my favorites, Henry Miller published his first works in the ’30s — but Kerouac’s first book wasn’t published until 1950. Even earlier, Hesse’s Steppenwolf saw publication in Germany in 1927. I point these out initially because it seems that Sisyphus is a landmark in 20th Century philosophical development — yet in some ways it represents a transition that was never completed (I’ll expand on this later). By transition I mean that Camus essentially broke with the Existentialists of the ’40s and ’50s, most prominently Jean-Paul Sartre.

Camus and Sartre both recognized the absurd nature of life, but while Sartre and others sought to transcend it, Camus thought that required a leap beyond human certitude. As Camus put it, “I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone” (p. 40). Seen in this light, Sisyphus becomes a sort of poetic mathematical exercise in which Camus affirms the absurd life instead of evading it. And according to the Wikipedia page on Absurdism, this book is practically the manual.

Camus argues his case succinctly, acknowledging how deeply he could go into this subject, but at all times subjecting himself to a rigid set of guidelines. The main point of the book appears early: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (p. 3).

He attempts many definitions of the absurd condition:

“Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” (pp. 5-6).

“What is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?” (p. 20)

“That struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). […] A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it” (p. 31).

This blog is riddled with discussions of Existentialism and Absurdism. Two posts that come to mind focus on Sartre’s Nausea and Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But while Sartre’s Roquentin never really considers suicide, Hesse’s Harry is obsessed with the concept. He finds a “Treatise of the Steppenwolf” that explains:

“Suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life as the releaser” (p. 48).

“All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. …It is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand” (p. 49)

But that’s it???!!! That’s all he could offer us? A sense of despair that drags one through life? Isn’t that just making oneself a prisoner of inertia, unable to improve upon any aspect of existence and thus resigning onself to it? Of course I should give Hesse more credit than this. Steppenwolf is a novel, not an autobiography or a philosophical essay. If you know the ending (I won’t spoil it!), it’s believable that Hesse was mocking Harry’s mode of living, even after the awakening inspired by the treatise and his wise lady friend Hermine. But even when more concrete suggestions arise, they’re often vague and difficult to adapt to the context of the 21st Century.

Plus, this book was published over a decade before Sisyphus. But that’s not to say that the literary community made a convincing progression beyond Harry’s position in the subsequent decades. The most prominent example is Jack Kerouac. He wasn’t a philosopher, but he remains one of the most beloved literary figures in American history. In his books he claimed that he could never commit suicide because he was a Catholic and that would mean he’d go to hell. His alternative? He basically drank himself to death. Big Sur outlines part of this irreversible decline.

Obviously the world of literature is very familiar with alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide, but Kerouac was always his own protagonist and thereby immortalized his story. And when examining this twisted path, it’s impossible to maintain a separation between philosophy and psychology. But this existential despair is an important characteristic of modern humanity, and one that cannot be ignored. In Steppenwolf, Hermine tries to calm Harry by saying, “The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (p. 153).

Camus recognized this tendency in existential thought, and he made a point of ruling that out of his possible conclusions in Sisyphus. “I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. […] They always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap” (p. 42). The “leap” mentioned here is applied to any bridge beyond what a human can comprehend. That more commonly means religion, so it was strange for me to see such a term applied to Existentialism, which I had previously seen as an answer of sorts.

In reality Existentialism is a statement of the problem; it’s where Camus begins and quickly dashes off. He’s not convinced by the idea of eternity, whether in organized religion or just broader spirituality. He’s not content to stubbornly hope that the basic condition of life will eventually improve.

Camus began to wonder if the desire to escape is an even bigger problem than the nausea inspired by existence. In other words, what if there was a way not only to endure the situation, but even capitalize off of it? It’s a very slight twist of the mirror that could produce an extraordinarily different outcome. “The danger…lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest – that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge” (p. 50).

Next I’ll explore what one is to do on that dizzying crest, and why and how Camus felt it could be accomplished.

For some time I’ve heard about the significance of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Last year I tried to delve into Crime and Punishment but stopped around the halfway point. Now I wish I would have began with Notes from Underground. Notes is a first-person (but not autobiographical) account of a Russian man in mid-19th Century St. Petersburg who claims to have been living “underground” practically his whole life. The 130-page book is truly a rarity in how much thought-provoking material it contains. It leaves the reader wanting much more information, which might have been partly responsible for C&P’s 600-page length and complicated (but arguably boring) nature.

The two-part Notes (first published in 1864) is a literary genius’ attempt at Show & Tell — or, more accurately, tell and then show. Part 1 is written from the point of view of an unnamed 40-year-old, a broken man ranting about his non-progressive situation and generally bleak outlook on life. It has no plot nor any dialogue. Part 2, on the other hand, is a remembrance of a particularly traumatizing event that happened to the narrator at age 24. This section reads more like a story.

Colin Wilson expounded the greatness of Notes in his 1956 book The Outsider (discussed here previously), calling it “the first major treatment of the Outsider theme in modern literature. [...] It stands as a uniquely great monument of Existentialist thought.” However, he focuses on aspects of the book that (to me, at least) don’t seem vital to gain a deep understanding. (Mostly he just wasn’t very skilled at choosing the right quotes.)

Still, Wilson isn’t alone in crediting Notes as the first true Existentialist work. And I think that it’s still so valid today because of that, given that Existentialist themes have remained popular among those who can’t seem to rise up from the philosophical underground. Donald Fanger writes in the introduction that “the underground man…is to be seen as representative, his ‘underground’ itself a state shared by others and not simply the product of individual pathology or biographical accident” (p. xix).

To quote the underground man directly is probably the best method of description, but I’ll try to explain anyways. He’s a lonely, unsuccessful creature who hides in his small apartment and curses the outside world. Despite his strong views and reported intelligence, he’s extremely neurotic, often accidentally contradicting himself or blatantly reversing his claims in an attempt at being honest with himself and his imaginary audience.

“I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something” (p. 3).

Faced with constant hardship, the narrator claims that he has learned to enjoy psychological distress and emotional pain.

“It’s in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your situation” (p. 7).

“But how preferable it is to…be aware of everything, of all the impossibilities and stone walls, and yet refuse to reconcile yourself to a single one [...] It is entirely obvious that you are not to blame at all; and, in consequence of all that, to sink into voluptuous inertia” (p. 12).

“For the direct, inevitable, and logical product of consciousness is inertia—a conscious sitting down with folded arms” (p. 16).

I’ve gotten the impression from other literary figures that inertia is a thing to be avoided at all costs, which makes one think that the underground man might be trying to justify his own terrible situation. The unsatisfying nature of his own life also seems to afford him the right to criticize all of mankind.

“…All these theories about teaching mankind to understand its true, normal interests…are for the time being—in my view—nothing but idle exercises in logic! [...] But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all costs” (p. 22).

“…Man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere preferred to act according to his own wishes rather than according to the dictates of reason and advantage. And his wishes may well be contrary to his advantage; indeed, sometimes they positively should be…

“One’s own free, untrammeled desires, one’s own whim, no matter how extravagant, one’s own fancy, be it wrought up at times to the point of madness—all of this is…constantly knocking all systems and theories to hell. [...]

“What man needs is only his own independent wishing, whatever independence may cost and wherever it may lead” (p. 25)

The underground man makes it clear that independence is important in theory, but isn’t so fond of what independence breeds. Or at least he’s not convinced that independence solves more problems than it creates.

“…All of man’s purpose, it seems to me, really consists of nothing but proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not an organ stop! Proving it even at the cost of his own skin; even at the cost of turning back into a troglodyte” (p. 31).

“Man is primarily a creative animal, condemned to strive consciously toward a goal…in other words, to be eternally and continually building roads for himself, leading somewhere, no matter where. But he may sometimes be tempted to slip off to the side precisely because he is condemned to build these roads…

“Man loves to create…But why, then, does he also passionately love destruction and chaos? [...] Because he is himself instinctively afraid of achieving his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing?” (p. 32).

“He sacrifices his life in this quest, but, I swear, he’s somehow afraid of really finding, discovering it. For he feels that, as soon as he finds it, there will be nothing to search for” (p. 33).

“I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering—that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness” (p. 34).

Sure that he has ruled out man’s claim to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the narrator again exclaims that he’s better off staying underground. But only for a moment…

“The best thing is conscious inertia! An so, hurrah for the underground! [...] Ah, but I am lying again! Lying, because I know…that it’s not at all the underground which is best, but something different…something I long for and can never find!” (p. 37).

This is what I meant by wanting more information, because, while Part 2 thoroughly explains how the narrator ended up in this situation, there are hardly any suggestions offered for what he (or mankind) might do to progress. In The Outsider, Wilson kept returning to the idea of a religious solution (even if it’s unrelated to God or traditional, organized religion). And Fanger states in the introduction that Dostoevsky included Christian elements in the original manuscript’s ending, which were supposedly removed by the censors.

I’m inclined to think that Notes is better off the way it is — at least regarding religion — for reasons that are too complicated to fit into this already-too-long article. Maybe step one is admitting that we’re really nothing more than bugs stuck under the floorboards. Then step two can be some kind of progression from there.

In fact, Fanger’s introduction contains a few brilliant statements and suggestions:

“…The underground man here is touching on a quest in which pleasure is of no use — the quest for self-definition and self-affirmation. [...] It reopens the question of what it means to be human…” (p. xx).

“But he has concluded that reason accounts for only one-twentieth of a human being. If we are to understand the text before us, we must accordingly attend to the other nineteen-twentieths of this character…” (p. xxi).

And that, in my mind, leads us to a psychological study of the human unconscious using the knowledge left to us by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. But that topic will have to wait until later.

(After seeking out these quotes, I realized that Notes deserves a two-part analysis to match its two-part structure. After all, this post was derived from the first 40 pages of the book! So perhaps I’ll return to Part 2 sometime soon.)

Well ladies and gentlemen, apparently I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with these blog posts. I could make the argument that I have approximately three jobs right now, and that I’m only getting paid for two of them…but that’s a lousy excuse. And if I’m gonna slack on my blogging duties, the least I can do is leave you with something deep to ponder on your own time. But with the last two posts focusing on Twitter and Wife Swap, clearly I didn’t accomplish that either.

In case it hasn’t made itself obvious through my blogging (and writing — or lack thereof — on Supraterranean.com), I’m going through something of a transition. I can’t express it fully at this time. At the very least, I write much less frequently than I have throughout the past two years. The reasons are plentiful. I don’t have any regular columns, freelancing, or other sorts of publishing relationships. At the moment, it’s all about Supraterranean…but that’s only one of those three “jobs,” and the other two don’t involve writing.

As David Gessner suggested in his New York Times Magazine essay (which I discussed here last fall), the reading life is the writing life. So I’m first trying to get back on my regular schedule of heavy reading, and hopefully the writing will flow on its own. Maybe part of my transition has to do with changes in why I write. I first started writing on a regular basis in January 2006 when I started a music blog on blogger.com. I wrote to pass the time and because it was fun. I was drunk on Kerouac and stuck in a big city that seemed to hate me as much as I hated it. I got through it by going to as many concerts as possible and using the written word to organize my listening habits.

The foremost point is that I wrote for the sake of writing. Any time I start doing otherwise, I catch myself and try to get back to that original motivation. That applies to inane journalistic assignments that require me to sacrifice my creative impulses for the sake of a maniacal editor, but it goes beyond that. I’m sure every writer hits a wall now and then. I don’t just mean “writer’s block” — there are also projects that refuse to be finished. Usually I don’t let it bother me. I think of it as planting seeds. If I sit down and write 1,000 words on pure impulse generated from vague ideas, sometimes I shelf it and come back to it later.

A notable example of this is my essay “A Healthy Contempt for Journalism,” which I published on Supraterranean.com in September 2008. I probably started writing that in January ‘08, since the events discussed in the essay happened between Sept-Dec 2007. In other words, it took eight months to finish, but much of that time the project was totally inactive. In all truth, there was no way I could have written that whole essay in January ‘08. I needed time to develop a broader perspective. I had to learn more about the journalism industry beyond my narrow experience with one internship and a year of grad school.

Finally a time came when the pieces seemed to start assembling themselves, and the rest of the essay was more fun to write. More importantly, I was happy with the final draft. That’s another reason to write: if both the process and the product are fulfilling to the author. If you hate the act of writing, or none of what you end up writing is pleasing or inspiring to you, then chances are you won’t be a writer for long.

Of course, there are many other reasons that people write. In the 20th Century, many people made careers out of writing. I suppose some people still do it, but with the fall of the newspaper industry (and the subsequent drop in freelancing opportunities) it’s becoming much more difficult. Really any kind of paper publishing is more difficult. And yet that’s how all literary classics were born, especially in the 1900s. No one had the means to self-publish. Some publishing company had to invest in an author for the author to be exposed to the public and gain an audience. There have always been multiple avenues, but that “needle in a haystack” method is what sticks out in my mind. I always think about Kerouac trying to sell On The Road to publishers for something like eight years, and then becoming the “King of the Beats” practically overnight.

And that’s another reason that some people may try to write, to achieve fame. It’s the whole rock ‘n’ roller mentality that swelled to monstrous proportions at the end of the 20th Century. It’s a seductive idea in writing, the hope that one’s efforts will eventually be affirmed on a grand scale, thus justifying all the tireless research, endless typing, awkward sleep schedules, and/or damaged personal relationships. Even if a writer tells himself that’s not why he’s writing, it’s another thing entirely to consistently write just for the sake of writing.

The great Hunter S. Thompson was even guilty in that regard. As he started to build his reputation in journalism, he once wrote to a friend that he was having trouble working on fiction. He said that inspiration was hard to come by without any promise or potential for payback. To me, that’s really sad, especially because The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are two of my favorite “fiction” books, and I wish there had been more of the same from Thompson.

So writing for money is a bad idea. Is writing for fame just as bad? That question will now (and probably forever) return me to a conversation in Steppenwolf (discussed here previously), when Hermine says to Harry:

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

Those who know me well can see me striking through my main literary inspirations, and the only one left is Henry Miller. But I cannot disqualify neither Miller’s intentions nor his finished works. I’ve only read three of them so far — most recently Black Spring — but if he made one thing clear to me in the first three books, it was that he wrote for the sake of writing. I think Nietzsche would have called it (or did call it) feeding off of one’s own flame. (Wait, I’m confused — he said to consume yourself in your own flames.)

Before I lose track of what I’m thinking about, I want to express a few things about Miller. I keep telling my girlfriend that he is the most underappreciated literary figure in American history. What’s most compelling about Miller at the current time is my complete inability to express what’s so special about him. Yes, I’ve talked about his unique way to protest. Yes, I’ve mentioned his “first draft as final draft” and transparent autobiographical novel style. But no matter what I say about him, I’m sure I’m still missing the core of his being. I feel that I still have so much more to learn about this genius. I also have more to uncover regarding his importance to this generation of Americans (or Earthlings). Next I’ll probably try to tackle his reputed masterpiece, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.

In reality I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do with this blog post, and that was simply to list some quotes from Black Spring with minimal discussion. I had also planned on making some points about how Henry Miller would have loved to see the massive jump in creativity that is resulting from digital technologies and the Internet. That just goes to show that I haven’t written enough lately, or maybe it’s evidence that I’m slowly taking on particular traits of my writer heroes. One of Miller’s prominent characteristics was extreme attention deficit. If I remember correctly, Tropic of Capricorn starts and ends within a very small time frame, and everything in between is either a remembrance from the past or an exploration from his imagination.

However, I don’t take the blog format for granted. In this spontaneous, convenient writing environment, I often feel more productive than times that I write in Microsoft Word. But after 1,300 words of this, I think I will leave you with a passage which, since it was written in the stretch of 1934-1935 — before both World War II and some famous works from that era by George Orwell and Jean Paul Sartre — was a highly prophetic statement:

“I cannot forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away at the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time–a history of all time.

“If I was unhappy in America, if I craved more room, more adventure, more freedom of expression, it was because I needed these things. I am grateful to America for having made me realize my needs. I served my sentence there. At present I have no needs. I am a man without a past and without a future. I am–that is all. I am not concerned with your likes and dislikes; it doesn’t matter to me whether you are convinced that what I say is so or is not. It is all the same to me if you drop me here and now. I am not an atomizer from which you can squeeze a thin spray of hope. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots” (pp. 23-24).

If in the last post I gave off the impression that I’m anything but an ardent fan of George Orwell, please allow me to correct myself. 1984 is one of my favorite novels. But recently I’ve become more aware of the less-than-coincidental similarities between that book and the way the modern world is governed. Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) published 1984 in 1949; it directly followed the 1945 publication of Animal Farm. As C.M. Woodhouse says in the introduction to Animal Farm, the novel was presented to the public in the same month as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

A quote from Orwell in the introduction makes the purpose of both of these books very clear.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism” (p. vii).

However, I may have previously insinuated that, although 1984 was almost certainly intended as a protest against government, it might have had the adverse effect of teaching governments how to achieve an even greater level of control. In fact there’s an extensive section of that book in which the protagonist is allowed to read the guidebook of the government’s inner circle. It’s no cursory outline; it’s practically a working model for the American Empire from the end of WWII right on through the Bush era. What I mean is just that Orwell may have given more ammunition to the governments than to the oppressed citizens. According to Woodhouse, this was the exact opposite of Orwell’s intention.

“This personal enemy was no single individual or government—it was the system of the world capable of producing and using atomic bombs” (p. vi).

Furthermore, Woodhouse argues that Orwell saw the utmost importance in words and language — not an uncommon trait among professional writers. Woodhouse therefore poses this question: was Animal Farm the first instance of the pen being not only mightier than the sword, but even mightier than the bomb?

“The pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have” (p. vii).

I want to return to Henry Miller, but first I’ll discuss this story some more. For those not familiar with it, Animal Farm is a tale of revolution in which farm creatures overthrow the human farmer and set out to govern themselves. The pigs take charge since, unlike the other animals, they can read and write, and at first Napoleon and Snowball lead a sort of democracy together. They scrawl the Seven Commandments on the barn wall:

“1) Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2) Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3) No animal shall wear clothes. 4) No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5) No animal shall drink alcohol. 6) No animal shall kill any other animal. 7) All animals are equal” (p. 33).

And then everything falls apart. The deterioration is well-calculated and many steps are predictable; the supposedly unalterable commandments are, one by one, edited and/or erased, for the benefit of those in power, to the great disadvantage of the other animals. There are traces of every violent, corrupt government that existed in the 20th Century, especially the Soviets. And as Woodhouse points out, “all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling…” (p. xi).

On that subject, Woodhouse spends a large portion of the introduction examining the book’s subtitle, “A Fairy Story.” As he explains,

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit” (p. x).

“Its message (which is by no means a moral) is that of all the great fairy-stories: ‘Life is like that—take it or leave it’” (p. xii).

Now perhaps you can see why I got sensitive about the criticism of Henry Miller. If Orwell’s longest piece of literary criticism claimed that Miller’s greatest fault was being passive and complacent, then how can the point of Animal Farm be, as Benjamin the donkey puts it, “life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly”? What’s the point of writing only against totalitarianism and becoming nearly synonymous with the word “dystopia,” if Orwell couldn’t devise anything better? What’s so wrong about the idea that some kind of utopia is possible, even if it’s just inside the imagination of an individual mind?

That’s one way of describing what Miller was after: a utopia of the mind. Or at least he was seeking perfect expression. It’s very evident throughout Animal Farm that the animals cannot revolt against the powerful pigs because they lack the means to even form rebellious thoughts. Also, because they cannot write, there is no written record of the farm’s history. Napoleon and his propagandist Squealer use this fact to manipulate the farm animals, altering history however it suits their agenda. I don’t think this should be taken lightly. Miller understood that the freedom and pursuit of expression were some of the most important things in life. This leads me to wonder if expression, or “the pen,” is really what will put us back on the track of progress. And there’s also the fact that all history will now be recorded and disseminated over the Internet (that’s a topic I’m currently sculpting into a longer essay).

I’m willing to staunchly defend Miller because—as he himself said of Goethe—he was a beginning, not an end. Miller made himself into a platform to build upon, a bridge spanning the void of modern humanity. Orwell was a terrific writer and his most popular works show us how not to operate the world. But if “how not to operate the world” is the same as “how the world is actually operated,” then what do we have? We have nausea, I suppose—but that’s another story (one I’ve also discussed here).

This was one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written on this blog, and I think that stands as evidence that these are not easy topics to tackle. If it’s still questionable, let me say clearly that I think Orwell was a genius. Instead of a list of quotes from the book itself, I’d simply like to share my favorite passage:

“As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak… Instead—she did not know why—they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. [...] She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. [...] But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled” (p. 85).

The Great Gatsby wasn’t the first book I read more than once; that was The Call of the Wild by Jack London. And the reason I had read Gatsby twice so soon was, admittedly, because it was assigned reading in both high school (English) and college (Arts & Humanities) classes. However, I’ve developed this strange habit of underlining books while I read, and both times I read Gatsby, I was using a class copy that was lent to me and that I wasn’t supposed to mark up. So I felt that I should return to the great American novel once again to give it the underline treatment and preserve my favorite quotes and passages for easy reference.

The second time I read it must have been the summer of 2002 — almost seven years ago — and yet, reading it a third time, I noticed parts of the book that have undoubtedly influenced my writing. Even “Don’t Ever Let the Ice Cream Melt,” the story I just published on Supraterranean.com last month, contains segments that echo my lasting impression of Gatsby. And yet that was a totally unconscious factor in my writing process. It makes me wonder what else from long ago influences my creative work in the present time. Some writers would call this perjury even if it’s unplanned. I’d like to think that it’s a positive thing when my favorite literature shapes my own writing. Isn’t that the point of looking up to other writers, and trying to learn from their accomplishments and mistakes?

I’ve always been one to clash with figures of authority, not so much in an outward way as within my own head, and my experience with English teachers was no exception (I always got along better with science and Spanish teachers). However, I feel somewhat indebted for having read Gatsby with two different teachers. Each provided a vastly unique interpretation of the book, but neither was necessarily tailored to the level of the class. For example, my 11th grade teacher pointed out that two characters went to have sex when they disappeared in Chapter II, but it was the college instructor who focused on the names listed in Chapter IV, illustrating that East Egg was all old money (mostly White Ango-Saxon Protestants, or at least people of Western European background) and West Egg was all new money (people from Hollywood and Broadway, but also Eastern Europeans).

Having most of the symbolism and mysterious segments already figured out, I was able during this third read to really soak up the language and story — especially the vocabulary. In fact, if I named one book that has made me love the English language more than any other, it would be Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s grasp of adjectives and adverbs was purely astounding. And the book is far more poetic than I remembered, with sentences that seem to curl and float around the page, winding intricate lullabies where other authors would chant monosyllables. I even kept a list of words I would have sworn I’d never seen before: meretricious, somnambulatory, caravansary. Then there were awesome words I had seen but couldn’t define: dilatory, credulous, magnanimous, interminable, etc, etc.

To be completely honest, my comprehension level was significantly lower during the first two reads. I just wasn’t an avid reader until around the age of 22 — that’s the only explanation for it. Reading takes practice, just like any other skill.

These are just a few of my favorite passages. They’re not related in any specific way, and (I’m hoping) one doesn’t have to have read the story to appreciate them.

“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing” (pp. 99-100)

“After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion” (p. 110).

“They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep” (p. 150).

“…Perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees” (p. 162).

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (p. 182)

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (p. 182)

Gatsby’s belief in “the orgiastic future” is particularly interesting. There is obviously more than one definition or conception of the American Dream. In a recent newspaper article, one economist referred to it as the idea that each new generation will have a higher standard of living than the previous generation. According to that economist, using that definition, the American Dream has ended — at least at the present time, following the recession that started in Fall 2008.

But this isn’t the first time that the American Dream has been declared dead. I seem to remember Hunter S. Thompson hinting at such a suggestion in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (By the way, Thompson once typed out Gatsby in its entirety to make the style and vocabulary his own). Maybe every American must endure the death of his or her first dreams, only to build up new ones and hope that they will take flight. The problem is that most men never build up new dreams; most men fade into the ashen wasteland — like Wilson in this story.

I think Gatsby’s American Dream is an all-encompassing one: the simple hope that the future will be better than the past and present. (UPDATE 3/14/09: It just occurred to me that I haven’t fully expressed this thought. Let me try again; I think it’s actually a two-part concept. 1) That the future will be better — or at least not worse than — the present. 2) That the present can live up to the favorable aspects of the past. Obviously this is still a failure of an attempt to encapsulate the Dream. The basic idea is that things should either remain steady or get better, not get worse as time goes on.) But even that modest dream can be unbearably difficult to nurse at times. I’m hoping that the general public will experience a rebirth of that essential dream, now that the Bush Administration cannot damage our national morale or international reputation any longer. Although, for us to depend on any one man for such a transformation would be totally irresponsible.

And then there’s the ghost of youth, issuing sweet whispers that haunt us and fill our minds with memories that seem more wholesome and complete than any adult experience — which brings to mind another Gatsby quote:

“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight” (pp. 136-137).

David Foster Wallace was a new name when an acquaintance lent me the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Inside the 1997 collection of essays and articles, a bookmark had been placed at a selection titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” an 80-odd-page exploration of the relationship between TV and fiction writing at the start of the ’90s. The title is a twist on E Pluribus Unum, or “Out of Many, One” in Latin (but I had to look that up, even though it’s a common phrase in American history). The essay still serves an important purpose 19 years on, in that it helps explain a complex subject from a perspective I cannot personally obtain. After all, Wallace wrote this in 1990, when I was a wee little boy.

Wallace actually discusses both fiction and literature from the 1950s on, but focuses on a few main points or theories. He asserts that the one thing tying together TV and fiction circa 1990 was irony (i.e. – “A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor.” – Wiktionary). He develops this argument by discussing why people watch TV in general, how TV got so ironic, and what happened when fiction tried to reclaim the irony throne it had held since long before ironic TV got so pervasive.

Part of the reason I found the essay so interesting is because, as an adolescent, I was an eager consumer of television. My time spent growing up can be mapped as a steady path from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon to Saved by the Bell to…well…to all the sitcoms aimed at people over the age of 12. Then I got to high school and realized that most TV shows are retarded (for lack of a better word). And things only got worse after that: Survivor and American Idol led the way for “reality” TV, while dumbed-down dramas still dictate a large portion of adult viewership.

Now, looking back, I’m sort wondering how it had gotten so bad before I was even born. Enter Wallace, who unforgivably calls TV a “malignant addiction.”

“By 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, ‘spectacles vehement and untutored and rude’ that aimed ‘to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste’” (p. 36).

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality” (p. 37).

As you can see, Wallace didn’t let himself resort to calling TV an evil device intended for brainwashing or mind control. I’d rather not be so forgiving, but he argues the point well. Still, he doesn’t let TV off the hook for being capable of such high levels of manipulation, spread across the areas of psychology, emotion, and behavior.

“The modes of presentation that work best for TV…are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more…well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it” (p. 39).

“The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (p. 63).

“…Also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass…” (p. 64).

After Wallace outlines the core of the problem, he introduces a subgenre called Image-Fiction. He claims that this style was closely tied to television, not only as a reflection of the various content on TV, but also in that it was an attempt to reclaim irony for the world of literature. The peak of this subgenre, according to Wallace, was the then-brand-new novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner. The work “incorporates elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans; and as the book is also filled with TV and pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it may be difficult to read without the wide-ranging knowledge of current affairs” (Wikipedia).

In other words, Leyner created a novel as random, flighty, and all-encompassing as TV itself. Unfortunately, though, Image-Fiction was (arguably) a fruitless effort.

“The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch” (p. 52).

Wallace takes this as a dead-end for contemporary fiction, in that the lone device television (“E Unibus”) had become just as much a consumer and recycler of culture (“Pluram”) as it was an entertainment culture provider. These fiction writers couldn’t escape what Wallace called TV’s aura. But he also claims that rebellion in the face of institutionalized irony is pointless.

“…Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (p. 67).

I especially liked a quote from another author: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (Hyde, p. 67). This reminded me of Pitchfork Media, and the essay I wrote about that organization – which brings up interesting questions about modern times, post-Y2K. Even if the Internet and other media have started to wean us as a culture from the grip of TV, do we still remain a society of ironic rebels with no clue how to construct a better future for ourselves? At the time, Wallace thought that having more control over content – the type, sequence, timing, etc. – would make no difference. Furthermore, he seems scared of the idea of anarchy, as if having any one device or organization determine his content input was a source of comfort. I’d like to think that the Web 2.0 explosion, with stars including YouTube, Last.fm, and Facebook, is a sign that people do appreciate having such control. But I’m looking at the subject 20 years later, so I have that advantage.

Wallace admits that his missing escape plan might be due to his lack of foresight or imagination. I have to agree with that notion, since I founded Supraterranean on the hopeful idea that we can further develop our creative ambitions through new forms of expression and interaction. This reminds me of The Matrix: once you stop trying to bend the spoon with your mind, you realize that only your mind can bend, not a metal object (…and after all, there is no spoon). We’re beginning, as a culture, to learn how to bend our minds, when once we had convinced ourselves (or had been convinced by TV) that it was impossible. What I’m trying to say is that, when we’re ready, TV will become obsolete. And that process is already under way.

But then again, I have been in a better-than-normal mood lately, so that could be swaying my conclusion.

In an eerie coincidence, I’ve set out to write about The Bell Jar on the day after the anniversary of author Sylvia Plath’s death.

For about 10 years, I’ve wondered what Plath’s story was all about. Ever since Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club mentioned Plath, I thought she must be an important author to become acquainted with. The specific quote came when the “narrator” confronts Marla Singer about being a tourist at cancer support group meetings. “In the Tibetan Philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, we’re all dying. But you’re not dying the way Chloe is dying.”

I recently became more interested in Plath when I learned that she had only written one novel — a mostly autobiographical one; then even more so upon seeing that the book documented her experience in New York as an intern at a fashion magazine. I thought I would be able to relate to the tale, since I myself spent an overwhelming period in a big American city, and was hired as editorial intern at a magazine during my last season there.

I was wrong, for the most part. The book didn’t grab me very often. I considered that could be because poetry was Plath’s forte, and she hadn’t taken the time to develop her skills as a novelist. But my favorite book authors are extremely poetic (Kerouac, Miller, Hesse, etc). A poetic handle should make a work of prose better, not worse. I also reminded myself that Plath was a woman (duh…) — not that that would determine anything about her writing ability, but it may have presented some natural obstacles in my quest to understand the author, since sex has a significant effect on psychology, language usage, and many other human traits.

This theory became more viable when I remembered I haven’t read a book by a female author since high school (almost 10 years ago), when required reading lists dictated my total reading activity. I’ve forgotten most of those (I recall not hating The Joy Luck Club though). It’s possible too that female authors don’t have good representation in the school-assigned reading category. It is doubtful that To Kill A Mockingbird or The Bluest Eye have won over many males in recent generations — those creatures that spend most of their time playing video games, shooting each other in the brain with simulated automatic weapons.

My reasons for not loving the book are precise. For a respected female poet and future suicide victim, she was alarmingly out of touch with her own emotions. She didn’t pass over difficult moments, but she tended to breeze through experiences that seemed to deserve more analysis or attention. She also (somewhat annoyingly) didn’t make a convincing effort at self-analysis, to try and figure out what had caused the bell jar experience in the first place. Obviously there were many factors that contributed to the problem (I won’t discuss most of them, so as not to ruin the story), but one stuck out to me more than the others.

Esther Greenwood (aka Plath), a life-long straight-A student, has based much of her identity on her ability to win awards and scholarships. Then she returns home from her month-long magazine internship in New York, only to find out that she’s been rejected by a famous author who personally selects students for a writing class at Harvard. This is a person who has essentially never failed in her life, and then is suddenly refused the opportunity to thrive further by some snobby professor, before even being given the chance to display her abilities. That kind of helpless failure can cause total meltdown in the ambitious mind of a previously confident individual. Never mind the possibility of help from a psychiatrist; instead of working with her to pick apart the issue, Dr. Gordon prescribes electroshock treatment, which is about as useful as snorting gunpowder in terms of psychological therapy.

Needless to say, it’s a rough story — even for the weathered reader. However, there was one moment when I did connect strongly with Plath. It was during an episode in the novel when former romantic interest Buddy Willard takes Esther skiing for her first time. She expects to hate it, but alas:

“I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.

A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery–air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy’” (p. 97).

And this came only a few paragraphs after one of the first hints of suicide:

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”

Skiing is my heroin, an activity that — when undertaken on the right mountain and during the proper snow conditions — sends me instantly into the land of bliss. And I think about that often lately. Is my answer simply to move to a small town on a big mountain, and let everything follow from that? It was my unlikely fantasy for many years after high school, but it still hasn’t happened. Who knows.

(My apologies for the recent inactivity. This week my computer hard drive crashed and I started a new job. I’ve been a bit out of sorts.)

UPDATE 2/13/09: I’m afraid I didn’t give Plath enough credit in the self-analysis department. Maybe she just didn’t want to draw it out. But she did explain:

“All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me” (p. 31).

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks…” (p. 77).

Perhaps the story deserves a deeper analysis on my part. It seems like the problem had something do to with a human world based on Reverse Social Darwinism, where highly evolved individuals like Plath are actually at a disadvantage for survival or coping in modern society. It’s a paradox: succeeding at adolescent tasks in no way guarantees that you’ll succeed in adult endeavors, and in many cases those youthful successes actually render one less fit for adult life.

That’s a problem I think about a lot. Reverse Darwinism was the focus of Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy, which was reportedly a failure of a comedy, but still an amazing concept. The plot: an average man travels to the future and realizes he’s the smartest person alive, because starting in the 21st century, intelligent people stopped having children. They were unhappy with the degenerative state of world affairs, caught up in the implications of parenthood, or simply too busy working hard at their jobs.

From that angle, I appreciate Plath’s effort much more.

On a very un-nauseating inauguration day for the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, I turn to a book about a much less appealing human experience than we Americans are currently going through.

The first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre seems to be one of the best templates for the Existentialist fiction and philosophy that arose in the mid 1900s. The book was initially published in 1938, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. The story concerns a man of about 30 years of age named Antoine Roquetin, who is staying in the coastal town of Bouville, France to finish researching and writing a historical nonfiction book. Suddenly he is struck by a lasting sensation which he calls “the Nausea” – in short, a feeling of terror caused by the very concept of existence, and disgust over all things that surround him, living and inanimate.

The novel itself doesn’t present a clear picture of what Sartre’s Extistentialism is really all about. But, conveniently, the introduction by Hayden Carruth does, and so that is the source I use here. Carruth starts by saying that “Existentialism is a philosophy–if a philosophy at all–that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world” (p. vi).

(Somehow the song “This Is Our Emergency” by Pretty Girls Make Graves comes to mind…). Carruth points out that this outlook has appeared throughout history and literature, as far back Biblical mythology and ancient Greek philosophy. But modern Existentialism was cultivated primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, with a bit of help from Dostoevski. However, Carruth claims that Sartre’s Existentialism was unique to the 20th Century, and was in direct opposition to the philosophy of Hegel:

“Hegelianism was the philosophy of history and the mass. By projecting a Final Reality toward which all history flows in a process of ever-refining synthesis, Hegel submerged the individual consciousness in a grand unity of ideal mind. [...] The Existentialist knows that the self is not submerged…and any system of thought that overrides this [individual] suffering is tyrannical [...] From this comes man’s despair, but also, if he has courage, his existential integrity” (p. viii).

Carruth suggests that philosophy is not a progression towards an end point, in the way that human life is a progression towards death. He argues that, if man were to keep on living indefinitely, his philosophy would keep on changing. “Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy” (p. xiii).

Living this deep in philosophical literature, I can’t help but wonder why so many people take an “all or none” approach to philosophy. It seems that if one system doesn’t explain everything, people eventually pass it off as useless. Why not pick and choose from various schools of thought, in order to synthesize a working philosophy to live by? It seems that Carruth would have agreed with that notion, when he said, “Philosophical truth assumes many forms precisely because times change and men’s needs change with them” (p. vi). Although, for the record, Existentialism is the most valid philosophical realm that I have found thus far in my individual studies.

Another passage reminds me of Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown (which I’ve written about here before). “Man the thinker is a by-product, a nonessential component of reality, and he and all his works cling to existence with a hold that is tenuous and feeble” (p. ix).

“The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning–this is its self-defining cause–and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea” (p. xi).

Nausea can be considered incomplete if only because it doesn’t provide an escape for Roquetin. But if taken in conjunction with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” we could perhaps assume that there is no escape from existence, and that Roquetin’s priority is to find some way to cope. As Carruth puts it, “Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out” (p. xiv). Roquetin hints at both music and writing (or art in general) as promising elements to include in his future life. And I guess that makes me feel better for being a music junkie and blogger/journalist/aspiring novelist.

This week while searching for freelance work, I happened to find the web site for Poets & Writers Magazine, the self-proclaimed “primary source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers.” Their home page currently features an article called “Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents.” It’s essentially a five-page interview arranged by Grove/Atlantic editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler, except with some twists thrown in. Ferrari-Adler asked herself an important question before starting: “Wouldn’t it be more valuable to writers if I could get a few drinks in them first?” The answer is, indubitably, YES!

Reading a novel that was the source material for one of your favorite films is always an interesting and potentially disappointing endeavor. So far my biggest let down in that department was Fight Club, the 1996 book written by Chuck Palahniuk. It wasn’t so much Palahniuk’s fault, as it was film director David Fincher’s incredible success. Fincher took a bizarre, disjointed novel and turned it into a brilliantly cohesive work. Palahniuk can still be credited with the themes, ideas, and characters, of course — and the author far surpassed that work about a decade later with Choke.

Still, I wanted to take the same chance with A Clockwork Orange, written by British author Anthony Burgess. I had a feeling that it would be an important book. But when I bought a copy of Orange, I was unaware of the minor controversy behind Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version. Apparently, when the book was first printed in the U.S. in 1962, the publisher had requested that the 21st chapter be omitted from the novel. It’s not the type of story that can be ruined with spoiler discussions, but I’ll try to be brief. The story regards a teenage boy named Alex, who commits violent crimes for fun, is imprisoned, volunteers for a new “curative” technique, then is released two years after the initial crime.

The problem is that the new technique hasn’t really cured him; it only creates an adverse physiological response to violence and sex. In other words, those stimuli now render Alex immobile and make him feel like he’s going to vomit. The government’s primary goal is to clear the streets of crime and criminals, while also relieving overcrowded prisons, but certain individuals express humanitarian concerns. An author character who finds the new Alex says:

“You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. [...] A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man” (pp. 174-175).

One key difference between the book and the film is that the title A Clockwork Orange is actually the name of a work by the author character, and the concept is addressed and explained fairly early. The term is meant to express “the attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, …laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation…” (p. 25).

As the author describes in the introduction to the 1986 edition:

“When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel” (p. xxi).

“The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities” (p. xiii).

One of the novel’s great strengths is the clarity of delivery. The cast is limited and the plot is tight and circular, almost to the point where it could survive as a stage play. It’s so clear that it sheds light on some confusing philosophical topics and questions. Yet it’s philosophical without being one bit preachy. And the reader isn’t given an ideology to accept because, although every character has ideas or suggestions, not one character in the book is really likable. However, Burgess does allow a certain amount of sympathy for Alex, which is strange, since he is essentially a 15-year-old armed robber, rapist, and murderer.

But my favorite thing about the book is the Nadsat dialect, the repertoire of slang that Alex and other teenage “droogs” use to communicate. It’s a twisted combination of Russian and English, and I’m sure that viewing the film version about a dozen times made it easier to understand the terminology while reading. Still, the novel lacks visual cues, vocal intonation, and other helpful hints. As a result, I often felt like I was learning a new language, and boy was it addictive. I could hear the words echoing in my head for days. My favorite line of the whole book might be: “Naughty little malchicks handy with cut-throat britvas—these must be kept under” (p. 167), malchicks meaning punks or just teenagers, and britvas meaning knives. That sentence is delivered by a police officer who used to be Alex’s droog enemy, and it’s a great example of how these fabricated words add vivacity to the story.

After reading the book, I have to agree with the original American publisher that the 21st chapter should have been omitted. In that chapter (when Alex has reached the age of 18), Alex begins to sense that he is growing up, and that maybe he should do something more productive with his life: stop the empty criminal behavior, find a wife, start a family, etc. However, to illustrate that sort of change and not seem contrived, it would have taken about 300 pages—in other words, an entirely different book. Maybe Burgess should have written a sequel to Orange to outline the kind of moral transformation he wanted to see in Alex.

Orange makes many interesting claims, but not one is more powerful than the last scene of Kubrick’s film (the end of the book’s 20th chapter), when Alex imagines having sex in front of a crowd of cheering people, as he exclaims, “I was cured all right.” It’s a profound statement about the immutability of the human animal, an insanely complex being, perhaps bestowed with the power of both good and evil, but with much quicker access to and more prevalent expression of the evil side. That’s one of those confusing philosophical concepts I mentioned before. Are we on an eventual path towards good? Or will our evil side continue to rule until we self-exterminate?