Hey so yay Banned Book Week! How can I not put in my two cents with all the great blog posts out there?
My favorite banned book is A Clockwork Orange.
For those of you picturing the
sleazy 70s film, you’re probably all WELL YEAH IT WAS BANNED but let’s hear some words from author Anthony Burgess:
"We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.”
In a nutshell,
A Clockwork Orange is about a violent teenager doing violent things who is captured by the government who make him an offer: go to jail for your crimes, or enter into our 2 week experimental program to "cure" the violence out of you. Alex (the name of our anti-hero) accepts the latter, and is then strapped to a chair, given severe nausea-inducing drugs, and is forced to watch extremely violent films with his eyes wired open so he won't miss a thing. The experiment works - whenever Alex considers an act of violence, his body falls into an aggressive bout of nausea and pain. As a little we-hate-you, the police also played Alex's favorite music - classical - while they were conducting the experiments, so now that makes him nausea-crazy too. Later when he’s in the top floor of a building some classical music starts playing; the nausea and pain is too much to bear so he flings himself out the window in an attempt to kill himself. He doesn't succeed, and the blow the fall gave to his head has reversed the experiment. He is free to do violence again.*
But does he? Yes, which really blows the whole message of the story IMO. You see, the 21st chapter of the book was omitted from the American release - the publisher thought a redeeming ending was too wishy washy. The backbone of the story is moral choice - how choices don't matter if they're forced upon you; you must choose good or bad for yourself. Back in 1960s America, we were all led to believe in what Burgess called a "
badly flawed" ending, where Alex decides to descend back into his dark nature.
To remedy this, Burgess wrote a
stage adaptation.**
K so you’re probably thinking JULES GET TO THE POINT OR SHUTZ UP so here we go: Seve has been approved to direct a play at BYU-Idaho in between
Arsenic and Old Lace and
Marriage of Figaro, and we're thinking it'd be cool to do
A Clockwork Orange . . . with an all-female cast.
It's not the play he'll actually do, because of time (it has to be a one act), money (budget is tight), and pending approval (this is BYU-I, after all) but we're thinking it'd be a sweet project to pursue in the future. Thoughts?
* this plot was off the top of my head, so some things might not be exact, but the basic plot is accurate.
** the setting is a dystopian England and the novel was written in Nadsat, an English-Russian hybrid slang language invented by Burgess himself. Take that, Tolkien.
