Violence As Artform
...seems to reign supreme. The lead character, Alex, and most members of his generation, spend their evenings recreationally beating passersby, having small but brutal gang fights, and generally destroying both property and people. Yet these images and instances of destruction constantly interact with images of art, of things created, usually thought to be the diametric opposite of such violence. Indeed, over the course of the novel, creation and destruction become almost indistinguishable. The motivations for creation and destruction are more important to the novel than the distinctions between the two.
Alex and his three droogs, Pete, Georgie and Dim, commit many acts of violence in the first five chapters, vivid and graphic enough that even Burgess admits in his introduction that "my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers" (Burgess ix).1 The crimes are always committed with a certain theatricality, giving Alex's narration the tone of an artist's pride. The "maskies" that the four wear are not only "real horrorshow disguises," but also provide dramatic effect (153). It is ars gratia artis (art that comes purely out of a desire to create art), as Alex does not cite any motivation for his violence besides the fact that he derives pleasure from it, and these four perpetrators consider their violence art. Alex's repetition of "O my brothers," particularly in the more grueling scenes, gives the novel the feel of one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories,2 a creation myth. Both the manner of telling the tales and the tales themselves are a new, hybrid genre. There are even specific rules for how it should be done, parameters of the genre, as Alex shows when he criticizes Dim for "going too far, like he always did" in berating an old man on the street before the four attack him (Burgess 6). Dim tries to make the "dirty"...
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