How to Read Literature Like a Professor

(Axel Boer) #1

disjunction between what books ought to be and the function assigned to them here by Forster.


It goes on and on. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, her damaged Great War veteran, Septimus
Warren Smith, commits suicide because his enemies are coming to get him. His enemies? Two doctors.
We customarily associate physicians with healing, but in this novel they are interfering and threatening
figures. Characters in Iris Murdoch’s Unicorn spend a great deal of time trying to identify one of their
number as the title creature, which is associated in folk mythology with Christ. Yet their first choice, who
also seems to be the princess heldp. 242captive in the tower, turns out to be selfish, manipulative, and
murderous, while the second candidate winds up drowning another character (named Peter, no less).
Hardly the image of Christ one would expect in either case. In each of these novels, the dislocation
between our expectations and the reality constitutes a dual awareness, a kind of double-hearing that is
the hallmark of irony.


That dual awareness can be tricky to achieve at times. I can bring a discussion of A Clockwork Orange
to silence by suggesting that we consider Alex, its protagonist, as a Christ figure.


Alex? The rapist and murderer Alex?


No doubt Anthony Burgess’s protagonist has some high negatives. He is supremely violent, arrogant,
elitist, and worst of all unrepentant. Moreover, his message is not one of love and universal brotherhood.
If he’s a Christ figure at all, it’s not in any conventional sense.


But let’s consider a few facts. He leads a small band of followers, one of whom betrays him. He is
succeeded by a man named Pete (although this fact is troubling, since this Pete, unlike Peter, is also the
betrayer). He is offered a bargain by the devil (he relinquishes his soul, in the form of spiritual autonomy,
in exchange for the freedom awarded for undergoing aversion therapy). He wanders in the wilderness
after his release from prison, then launches himself from a great height (one of the temptations Christ
resists). He seems to be dead but then revivifies. Finally the story of his life carries a profound religious
message.


None of these attributes looks right. They look instead like parodies of Christ’s attributes. Or, rather,
none of the attributes but that last one. This is very tricky business. No, Alex is not like Jesus. Nor is
Burgess using Alex to denigrate or mock Jesus. It can look that way, however, if we approach the matter
from the wrong angle or consider it carelessly.


It’s a help, of course, to know that Burgess himself held deepp. 243Christian convictions, that issues of
goodness and spiritual healing occupy a major place in his thought and work. More important, though, is
the item I place at the end of my list, that the purpose of telling Alex’s story is to convey a message of
religious and spiritual profundity. The book is really Burgess’s entry in the very old debate over the
problem of evil, namely, why would a benevolent deity permit evil to exist in his creation? His argument
runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose—or reject—the
good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is no
possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a believer cannot be saved unless the choice
to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no
belief at all.


The Gospels offer us a positive model for their argument: Jesus is the embodiment of the behaviors
Christian believers should embrace as well as the spiritual goal toward which they strive. A Clockwork
Orange,
on the other hand, provides a negative model. In other words, Burgess reminds us that for
goodness to mean anything, not only must evil exist, but so must the option of choosing evil. Alex freely,
and joyously, chooses evil (although in the final chapter he has begun to outgrow that choice). When his

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