‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’: State Paternalism and Medical Correction in 1960s Literature

Introduction

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”[1]

So begins Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. This question foregrounds choice— “What?”— and yet its teasing tag— “eh?”— is telling; for Burgess’ narrator Alex, choice is revealed to be a cruel joke.

State Paternalism—

The notion that choice is a joke is echoed throughout the discourse of this period. Theorists such as Althusser (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970) and Foucault (Madness and Civilization, 1960) contemplated how the state might be eradicating the free will of its subjects. Accordingly, the literature of the period frequently deals with paternalism, defined as:

An attitude or policy that overrides a person’s own wishes (autonomy) in pursuit of his or her best interests[2]

In this sense, the state’s erosion of subjects’ choice (‘autonomy’) is state paternalism.

However, in my analysis I intend to foreground the paternal in paternalism. The 1960s saw not only the development of Marxist theories of ideology and Foucault’s theories of power/knowledge, but also a renewed interest in psychoanalysis, epitomised by the publication of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits in 1966. From a psychoanalytical perspective, we might define paternalism as acting like the father, primarily through the exploitation Freud’s ‘castration complex’ (anxiety).[3]

My notion of state paternalism can be summarised thus: The state acting to limit the free will of its subjects, often in a manner reminiscent of the psychoanalytical father.

Medical Correction—

Medical correction was significant to 1960s discourse surrounding state paternalism. By medical correction, I mean the use of medical science to alter a subject’s behaviour to within correct parameters. It dominated Western popular discourse due largely to the Red Scare in the wake of the Korean War (1950-1953). Timothy Melley explains that ‘in September 1950… the Miami News published an article by… a CIA-supported journalist… titled “Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.’[4] The fear of brain-washing ‘gain[ed] a foothold in mainstream [media]…eventually becoming part of a vernacular… of social conditioning.’[5] In 1957 William Sargant applied the notion of brain-washing more popularly, asserting that “Politicians, priests and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s beliefs.”[6] Melley suggests that this ‘insight would later become the basis of the countercultural critique of psychiatry as a repressive, normalizing practice,’[7] evident in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Furthermore, Melley suggests that McCarthyism had labelled discussion of Marxism politically subversive, but the ‘crude’ notion of brain-washing allowed contemplation of ideological conditioning among those averse to communist thought.[8] Thus, 1960s fiction is rife with depictions of brain-washing; removing one’s free will through scientific means or, in my terms: state paternalism through medical correction.

Outline—

My dissertation will examine depictions of state paternalism through medical correction. I will begin with Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), before progressing to Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and concluding with Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962). My analysis will discuss how writers in the early 1960s imagined a state enforcing conformity through its medical apparatuses.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “A bitch and a buzzard and a ball-cutter”

Kesey’s novel tells the story of Randall Patrick McMurphy’s time in a psychiatric ward ran by Big Nurse Ratched, which he compares to a ‘Red Chinese prison camp,’[9] suggestive of contemporary anxieties around psychiatry and brain-washing.

Madness—

Foucault saw the ‘binary division and branding’ of ‘mad/sane’ as an operation of disciplinary power,[10] and following this, Vitkus argues that Kesey’s novel represents ‘madness as a construct that serves the hegemonic ideology of [America].’[11] In Marxist terms, the ruling class is ‘compelled… to… express [its ideas]… as the only rational, universally valid ones.[12] This is manifest in the labelling of those who contradict the ideology of the ruling class (‘the Combine’[13]) as mentally ill, or irrational— ‘bad subject[s]’ in Althusser’s terms.[14] McMurphy’s “insubordination” leads to his “dishonourable discharge” from the military, while his “outbreaks of passion suggest the… diagnosis of psychopath,” because they contradict the submission desired by the state.[15]

In labelling subjects ‘bad’, the state attains the right to medically correct them. The primary form that this takes in the text is “Dr Spivey’s theory of Therapeutic Community”[16], in which the patients are emotionally berated by the Big Nurse and each other, a process which McMurphy compares to a “bunch of chickens at a peckin’ party,”[17] to convey its animalistic cruelty. Harding, the victim of the first “peckin’ party”, explains to McMurphy that “what the fellows were doing today was for my own benefit,” asking: “what other reason would we have for submitting ourselves to it…?”[18] Already we see how the ward’s ideology is paternalistic, as the men are made obedient in their ‘best interest’.

The other forms of correction in the novel are electroshock therapy (EST) and lobotomy. These form the ‘repressive’ aspect of Althusser’s theory of ‘state apparatuses,’[19] functioning ‘predominantly by repression,’ ‘secondarily by ideology’ (namely that of madness). The techniques are used to correct those on whom communal therapy— the ideological apparatus— does not have the desired effect. Harding explains:

“if you continue to demonstrate… hostile tendencies… you get lined up to go to the Shock Shop… [where] you are jointly administered therapy and punishment for your hostile go-to-hell behaviour…”[20]

Evidently then, the ideologically constructed label of madness explains why the men submit themselves to correction.

However, the ideology of madness does not follow Marx’s original definition (‘They do not know it, but they do it’[21]) but rather Zizek’s alteration: ‘They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.’[22] In Zizek’s terms, the ‘totalitarian ideology’ of the ward is not ‘meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously… its rule is secured not by its truth—value but by simple extraideological violence and promise of gain’.[23] The men submit to communal therapy to avoid violent EST and to be labelled “adjust[ed].”[24] In Althusser’s terms, they have been ‘stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting [their] submission.’[25] Harding embodies a Zizekian ‘cynical reason’[26]— an awareness of the ideological farce— in the ironic ‘gestures, grins, grimaces, sneers,’ he employs whilst discussing Spivey’s ideology.[27] This awareness is soon made explicit as he tells McMurphy: “You are right… About all of it.”[28] However, as Zizek explains, this ‘ironic detachment leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy… on which ideology structures the social reality itself.’[29] The men know that communal therapy is a fantasy, but it structures their lives on the ward, continuing to follow Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’[30]

Mechanisation—

Althusser’s definition is literalised by Chief Bromden, the schizophrenic narrator. According to Semino and Swindlehurst, the Chief’s ‘mind style,’ his ‘systematic use of a particular metaphor… reflects… a personal way of making sense of… the world,’[31] and in particular, ideological conditioning. The metaphor in question is the Chief’s belief that ‘everything… is a machine.’[32] The Chief believes that society is ruled by the ‘Combine… a huge organisation that aims to adjust’ (indoctrinate) the world.[33] Its name connotes a machine built for harvesting and refining raw materials; here, bad subjects. The Combine’s primary representative on the ward is Nurse Ratched, whose surname likewise suggests mechanisation, being ‘a near homophone of ‘ratchet.”[34] The Nurse mechanically controls the ‘black boys,’ aides who ‘operate on beams,’ that force them to perform ‘her bidding.’[35] Together, they run the ward, which Bromden describes as ‘a factory for the Combine… for fixing up mistakes made in the neighbourhoods and in the schools and in the churches,’[36] a description which directly recalls Althusser’s notions of the educational and religious ISA.[37] The factory/ward takes mechanisms that are ‘all twisted different’; people who the chief considers ‘big’ (subversive) and it ‘install[s] things… filthy machinery,’ until these big, bad subjects are ‘fixed,’ turned into ‘functioning, adjusted component[s],’ of the Combine machine. [38] Evidently, being ‘different’ is a problem that can only be ‘fixed’ through the installation of ideology. Even Bromden himself has been reduced to “a six-foot sweeping machine.”[39]

Feminisation—

Vitkus argues that ‘this process of transforming the patients into obedient automatons involves the loss of their… masculinity.’[40] According to Meloy, the McCarthy era saw warnings that ‘Americans… were becoming “pink”’ [41] the colour suggestive both of subtle communist indoctrination and femininity, and this fear of feminisation is central to the Combine’s psychoanalytical paternalism.

In the psychoanalytical narrative, the Big Nurse is symbolic father of the ward. Lacan writes that ‘in order to be the phallus… a woman rejects’ all the aspects of femininity ‘in the masquerade.’[42] The Nurse’s masquerade is evident in Harding’s assertion that in spite of “all her attempts to conceal them in that sex-less get up, you can still make out the evidence of some rather extraordinary breasts.”[43] The Nurse compensates by carrying a bag full of phallic ‘needles’— ‘no lipstick or woman stuff’— in order to reassert her paternalism. [44] Moreover, Safer suggest that the Nurse recalls the notoriously phallic woman of classic mythology: she is ‘Medusan figure,’[45] whom the Chief says has the capacity to ‘freeze [men] and shatter [them] all to hell just by looking.’[46] The Nurse seeks to emasculate the men to make them submissive to the Combine, and in this way the two forms of paternalism overlap. A patient named Taber refuses to submit and ‘take his medication orally’ (note the sexual overtones) and so the Nurse penetrates his ‘peach-coloured rear,’ with a ‘long needle’, before the black boys rape him, reinscribing his new femininity[47]. Next, Taber is taken for EST[48] and a lobotomy,[49] before returning from the hospital a ‘new man,’[50] or perhaps rather, a new woman.

Kesey’s editor John Clark Pratt recalls the author asserting that one of the calves on his farm had ‘too much spirit to be a steer’[51] (a castrated bull), and Meloy sees this as an implication ‘that to castrate a male is to take away the very essence of his being, or his spirit.’[52] Similarly, Reis argues that, for Kesey, ‘what castration really implies is a feminization of the male.’[53] Thus, in Schopf’s terms, the Nurse’s acts of feminising correction are forms of ‘psychological castration.’[54] This is explicit from the first therapy session as McMurphy calls the Nurse ‘a bitch and a buzzard and a ball-cutter,’ insisting that “the best way ... to get you to knuckle under is to weaken you by gettin’ you where it hurts the worst ... go for your vitals.”[55] Here, sexuality— what he calls his “fuckin’ tendencies”— is vital his capacity for political dissent— his “fightin’ tendencies.”[56] McMurphy’s implication paraphrases Lacan’s belief that the superego, ‘bound up… with the imago of the father,’ connects ‘libidinal normativeness’ to ‘cultural normativeness.’[57] In other words, the paternal state (manifest within the subject as the superego) induces political submission through sexual repression. The success of this repression is clear in Harding’s assertion that the patients are “rabbits, sans whambam,” submissive animals devoid of their typical virility.[58] Most obviously, lobotomy is tied to this repression, as Harding calls it a “frontal-lobe castration,” adding that if the Nurse “can’t get you below the belt, she’ll do it above the eyes.”[59] The eye/ testicle comparison recalls Freud’s assertion that: ‘anxiety about one’s eyes… is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated.’[60]

However, a more subtle manifestation of the Nurse’s programme of castration is what I will call Lacanian or linguistic castration. In Lacan’s adaptation of Freud, he placed great significance on the phallus as the ‘privileged signifier of [the] mark [by] which the… Logos [(language)] is wedded to the advent of desire.’[61] The phallus represents the first difference recognised by the child (‘he learns that his mother does not have one’[62]) in the endless chain of differences that structure language in post-structuralist thought.  The structure of language ensures that meaning resides solely in the difference between one signified and another. Meaning is always already elsewhere and so the symbolic order of language is necessarily unsatisfying for the child. This dissatisfaction parallels the child’s desire for the mother, repressed by the intrusion of the father’s incest prohibition/law (‘the name of the father… [is]… identified… with the figure of the law’[63]), and projected by the unconscious onto endlessly unsatisfying displacements of her.

So, for Lacan the phallus represents not only desire and law, as in Freud, but language also. Accordingly, we might read difficulties with language as indications of castration of the linguistic phallus. The text’s primary example is Billy Bibbit, whose aptronym designates him the most submissive of the patients: Bibbit/ Rabbit. Billy stutters, a trait similarly connoted by his name, since Reis argues that its pronunciation ‘plays with the lips by repeating the b’s in the same way a stutterer would struggle.’[64] This impediment, I suggest, indicates an inability to navigate and shape the symbolic order in the manner that a phallic, paternal man ought to. Likewise, at the peak of his mechanisation, the Chief pretends to be ‘deaf and dumb’[65] in an act of self-castration. Furthermore, in Lacan, the phallus is near-interchangeable with the ‘name-of-the-father’[66] (both being the representations of language and the law) and thus it is significant that the Chief is called Bromden, the name of his white mother, rather than that of his native American father. The Combine has removed the name of his father, and this is shown to be no anomaly, as the Nurse frequently and deliberately refers to McMurphy as “McMurry”[67], attempting to rob him too. Tellingly, Waxler highlights that this robbery is enacted within a context of obedience[68] as she tells him “Mr McMurry… everyone… must follow the rules.”[69]

Resistance—

Kesey’s narrative centres on the patients’ attempted resistance to state paternalism. Their efforts centre on McMurphy, who becomes the ward’s surrogate natural father, opposed to the Nurse as unnatural, mechanised father. In addition to McMurphy’s aforementioned masculine “tendencies”— Bromden directly associates McMurphy with paternity, saying “he talks a little the way Papa used to, voice loud and full of hell.”[70] Crucially, his voice is tied to his paternal nature. Waxler identifies this Lacanian dimension of McMurphy’s characterisation, drawing attention to his ‘spirited verbal fencing with the Big Nurse.’[71] After McMurphy emerges from the shower, the Nurse insists “You can’t run around here— in a towel,” to which he responds that “there’s nothing to do [except]”[72] drop the towel, threatening an assertion of his masculinity performed within the logic of her own words. When he finally removes it, he reveals that he was wearing ‘white whale’ shorts, effectively showing the Nurse his (Moby) Dick without breaching her rules. McMurphy manipulates the linguistic order more effectively than the Nurse, and consequently asserts his phallicism over her.

Following McMurphy’s example, Waxler argues that Kesey sets the Chief ‘on a symbolic search for the Father: that is, the spark on manhood within himself,’[73] centred on his rediscovery of the name-of-the-father. As we have seen, for the Chief, the more masculine and assertive a character is, the bigger they are. McMurphy is a “lot bigger and tougher than” him who, though once “big”, is now “way too little” to “lay into” the Combine.[74] McMurphy calls this “crazy” talk, but unlike the Combine, does not castigate the Chief, rather admitting that it still “makes sense,” encouraging him to reclaim his use of language.[75] Furthermore, McMurphy asserts that the Chief is “big as a damn mountain,” conveying a naturalistic power at odds with the Combine’s mechanisation.[76] The effect of this encouragement is immediately clear, as the Chief responds:

My Papa was a full Chief and his name was Tee Ah Millatoona. That means The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-On-The-Mountain.[77]

In this reclamation of his father’s name, the Chief begins his return to manhood, and Waxler writes that ‘McMurphy also reminds the Chief that a man, like a pine on the tallest mountain… must grow big and stand erect.’[78] McMurphy promises to teach the Chief his “training programme”, then vows that ‘all the beautiful young girls [will be] panting after’ him.[79] The chapter ends with McMurphy lifting the sheet from the Chief’s bed, leaving him naked and announcing his return to masculine virility: “Look here Chief… You growed half a foot already.”[80]

As Harding states: “man has but one chief weapon against the juggernaut of” the Nurse’s paternalistic “matriarchy,” one being rendered “useless” by the Combine’s process of castration.[81] We see this when Billy, at the conclusion of the novel, finally loses his “cherry”.[82] The morning after he says, without stuttering: “Good morning, Miss Ratched.”[83] In using his real phallus, Billy reclaims his linguistic phallus, navigating the symbolic order as a man should. Even the Nurses’ reaction is telling, as she addresses him as “William Bibbit,”[84] the loss of the childish nickname implying a discovery of the name-of-the-father within himself.

The final assertion of masculinity follows directly after this, as McMurphy chokes the Nurse to near-death. Meloy argues that ‘McMurphy’s violence toward Ratched becomes analogous to a rape act,’[85] as his ‘heavy red fingers’ penetrate the ‘white flesh of her throat.’[86] Moreover, McMurphy rips ‘open her uniform,’ exposing ‘two nippled circles… warm and pink in the light.’[87] He destroys her masculine semiotics, shattering her paternal masquerade and, as Meloy argues, transforms her ‘from a cold machine to something more vulnerable, something “warm and pink.”’[88] Waxler sees this as the culmination of Kesey’s ‘Oedipal story’; McMurphy allows the patients to ‘achieve manhood’ by simultaneously marrying the newly revealed mother— raping the Nurse— and killing the father— destroying her paternal façade.[89]

Futility—

Nonetheless, this Oedipal resolution cannot combat state paternalism; after all, Billy and McMurphy die as a direct result of their actions. To understand why this is, we must account for the Nurse’s womanhood, exploring how a matriarch may be the most effective tool for the paternalistic eradication of male choice.

Reis employs Melanie Klein’s object relations theory of the split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ breast in the image of the mother[90] to analyse the significance of Harding’s assertion that “we are victims of a matriarchy here”.[91] She argues that the ‘myth of matriarchy’— of a ‘split mother goddess’— is the product of ‘patriarchal imagination,’ and informs Kesey’s novel.[92] The myth causes a ‘split in the male into hypermale and hypomale, “bad boy” and “good boy,”’ epitomised by McMurphy and Billy, who she sees as ‘bipolar aspects of each other,’ one psychopathic, the other submissive.[93] Reis suggests that the good boy will necessarily fabricate an evil mother, while the bad boy will seek the good mother,[94] the former evidenced in Billy’s crippling fear of the Nurse: “You s-s-saw what she c-can do to us!”[95] The Nurse is a bad mother who withholds her breasts in the ‘sexless get-up’ that Harding describes.[96] Thus, McMurphy’s goal becomes to make her— or rather her get-up— “come apart at those neat little seams”;[97] to expose the good breast that the patriarchal imagination suggests exists ‘within each mother.’[98] McMurphy’s breast-exposing attack on the Nurse is a necessary condition of matriarchal control within a patriarchal society.

How can inducing an attack on authority facilitate paternalistic control? To answer this, we must return to madness as the justification for medical correction. Madden cites an interview in which Kesey asserts that ‘what they want you to do is what you’re doing… as long as you take up the gauntlet, [(i.e. challenge the state)] you’ll have somebody to slap you.’[99] Marx’s definition of ideology is echoed in Kesey’s words (‘what they want you to do is what you’re doing’), implying that, for Kesey, the kind of violent revolt that McMurphy embodies is dictated by ideology, allowing the state to ‘slap you’ into submission. This sentiment is mirrored in the words of the Chief’s father, who says:

If you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.[100]

While the rabbit-like patients fall into the former category, McMurphy epitomises the ‘mule-stubbornness’ of the latter, telling the Nurse, in response to her reminder that “everyone… must follow the rules”: “that is the ex-act thing somebody always tells me about the rules… just when they figure I’m about to do the dead opposite” (my emphasis).[101]

That McMurphy’s actions are dictated by the will of the Combine is clear in the Chief’s mechanisation metaphor. Semino and Swindlehurst highlight that ‘up until the last pages of the novel, Bromden does not describe [McMurphy] in mechanical terms,’ but these final pages are telling.  At the start of the novel, the Chief suggests the black boys ‘operate on beams’ from the Nurse,[102] and yet, by the conclusion, it is McMurphy whose ‘slow, mechanical gestures’ towards the Nurse obey ‘orders beamed at him by four-masters.’[103] His masters are the other patients, who perpetuate the patriarchal fantasy that pushes McMurphy to expose the good breast. The Chief notes that ‘everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance,’[104] and it is clear that McMurphy’s rebellion was a predetermined outcome of the Combine’s appointment of the Nurse on the ward. McMurphy never had a choice; in attacking the Nurse, he performs a ‘duty that’ the men feel ‘finally just had to be done.’[105]

The Bind—

Up until this point, I have not addressed the novel’s ending. Kesey concludes his narrative with two further symbolic castrations; two acts of medical correction; two cuts. First, Billy cuts his throat, literalizing the psychological self-castration he had enacted daily in therapy.[106] Second, McMurphy undergoes the long-threatened “frontal-lobe castration”;[107] he completes the Oedipal narrative. Just as the legendary King gouged out his eyes as punishment for incest, McMurphy returns from his correction with ‘bruises around the eyes.’[108]

A patient named Scanlon suffers from epileptic seizures that make him clench his teeth. To alleviate these seizures, he is prescribed Dilantin, an anti-convulsant with the unfortunate side-effect of causing gum-rot. Whatever he does his mouth is in agony. As he puts it:

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Puts a man in one confounded bind, I’d say.[109]

This bind is the crux of paternalism in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Faced with a mechanising, feminising state, subjects are presented with a ‘fundamental choice,’ what Meloy terms ‘the crisis of masculinity in the postwar era: castration or lobotomy.’[110] If you do ‘what they think you should do,’ then correction triumphs and you castrate yourself ‘below the belt.’ If you do ‘the opposite out of spite,’— violently resist— they castrate you ‘above the eyes.’[111] The choice between castration and castration is no real choice.

The Caretaker: “He just doesn’t like work, that’s his trouble.”

Harold Pinter’s 1960 play The Caretaker depicts three men in the room of a house. Aston lives in this room and offers to let Davies, a homeless man, share it with him. Mick— Aston’s younger brother and the homeowner— discovers Davies living in his house and treats him with hostility.

Language, Power and Labour—

Pinter once suggested that:

If I write something in which two people are facing each other over a table . . . This relationship will be an image of other relationships, of social living, of living together…[112]

Therefore, though not overtly political, the relationships between the men deal with what Coppa terms ‘the small-‘p’ ‘politics’ of [the] power structures’ that exist as a condition of social living.[113] As a play, Pinter’s narrative unfolds almost entirely through speech and Aragay argues that it thus emphasises ‘language-as-discourse, as the site where power relations are both produced [and]… negotiate[d].’[114] Accordingly, language becomes both a key site of the state’s paternalistic correction of its subjects and of resistance to this correction.

This paternalism centres on what Tomlinson calls the ‘1960s belief that Britain had a ‘productivity problem.’[115] In the post-war years, there was an intense concern with maximizing output from a highly constrained volume of resources’ and labourers.[116] However, the state was careful to avoid blaming workers for low productivity, and thus employed what Tomlinson calls a ‘carrot’ rather than ‘stick’ approach to improving it, incentivising workers with the newly established welfare safety net.[117] This carrot approach was essentially ideological, as it rested on work ethic ideology, which advocated for a ‘fair day’s work for a fair days wages’[118]. According to Engels, this phrase had been a ‘motto of the English working-class movement’ since the mid-19th century, and in 1881, he explained its meaning:

A fair day’s work is that length of working day and that intensity of actual work… [possible] without encroaching upon [a worker’s] capacity for the same amount of work for the next and following days… A fair day’s wages… is the sum required to… keep himself in working order.’[119]

After the war, this ideology was adapted so that the worker was compensated with social welfare policies as well as wages, but the sole motivation remained to keep workers in working order. In The Caretaker, Pinter explores the ISA’s carrot approach—rewarding those who worked hard—but he also elucidates the RSA’s alternative ‘stick’ approach. Indeed, Woodroffe highlights that the name of the play betrays this fact. To ‘take care of’ can be understood both altruistically and as ‘a euphemism for aggression,’ reflecting dichotomous means of inducing obedient productivity.[120] Thus, Pinter shows the various ways that the state takes care of— or corrects— those who refuse to submit to its desire for productivity.

Aston and the Asylum—

At the end of act two, Aston delivers a monologue recalling his time in an asylum. Alfred Hickling, in his review of a 2009 production, describes it as ‘the climax’ of the play[121]— its centrality cannot be overstated, altering our perception of the play’s events by focusing our explicitly on medical paternalism.

In my analysis of Kesey’s novel, I showed that state labels subjects bad, then ideologically, and— if this fails— physically corrects or ‘castrates’ them. Unsurprisingly, Aston implies that he had been a bad subject in the past. He remembers that in the café just along the road “I talked too much. That was my mistake.”[122] Quigley argues that for Pinter, ‘speaking is a means of’ both ‘consolidating the status quo’ and ‘altering the status quo,’[123] and so talking too much can be an act of subversion. Talking “too much” also ties to subversion in the psychoanalytical framework, as it can be deemed an expression of Aston’s possession of the linguistic phallus. Moreover, Aston ties talking to the productivity problem, saying that, ‘in the factory’ he used to work at, ‘standing there, or in the breaks, I used to… talk about things.” [124] Here, “standing” and “breaks”— implying the lack of labour— are wedded to talking, conjuring that famous phrase: “A little less conversation, a little more action,” obviously alive enough in the 1960s consciousness for Elvis Presley to employ it in his 1968 song.

Inevitably, the state identifies him as a bad subject: “one day they took me to a hospital... then… this… doctor… told me I had something.”[125] Like McMurphy, whose tendency to resist instruction has him labelled a psychopath, Aston is told he has “some complaint” because of his talking, and this label justifies his correction. [126]  Aston recalls that the doctor told him:

That’s your complaint. And we’ve decided… that in your interests there’s only one course we can take… we’re going to do something to your brain… if we don’t, you’ll be in here for the rest of your life… but if we do… you can go out… and live like the others.[127]

Pinter utilises the semantic field of paternalism here: the state ‘decides’, rather than the individual; there is ‘only one course,’ one choice and it is in Aston’s best ‘interest’ that the state must correct his brain. The aforementioned carrot and stick approaches are exemplified in the non-choice presented by the doctor: ‘live like the others’— submit to the ideology in the promise of gain— or ‘be in here for the rest of your life’— submit to the extraideological violence of the prison. Ironically, even this non-choice is shown to be a farse. Aston refuses to give the doctor permission to correct his brain, but his mother gives it instead and he is compelled to submit.[128]

At this point, Aston’s monologue takes on distinctly Oedipal undertones. Aston “wrote to [his mother] and told her what they were trying to do”[129]— he has defied the law, he has sought refuge from the paternal in the maternal, and he is punished with castration. He recalls that during EST, they “used to hold the man down,” implying a Combine-like suppression of masculinity.[130] Like McMurphy, Aston violently resists, demonstrating his masculine “fightin’ tendencies”[131] by knocking an aide out and choking another, but the “chief” doctor corrects him with EST nonetheless (“big pincers, with wires on”[132]). As in Kesey, Aston’ symbolic castration is implied through a loss of linguistic ability. Aston gets out, but has a new “trouble”: “My thoughts… had become very slow… I couldn’t think at all… uuuhh… I could… never quite get it… together.”[133] The disjointed structure of his speech, punctuated frequently with ellipses and interrupted by repeated clauses, demonstrates the truth of these words. Nietzsche famously wrote: ‘We cease from thinking if we do not wish to think under the control of language,’[134] and thus, his inability to ‘think at all’ is really an inability to navigate language. We see this inability in Aston’s interactions with Davies. On two separate occasions Aston tells Davies a bizarre anecdote, first about ordering Guinness in a thick mug, second about a lady in the café offering to look at his body.[135] Knowles highlights that ‘these speeches occur after pauses and have no relation to what precedes them… as conversational gambits they are disastrously bizarre,’[136] indicating Aston’s utter linguistic ineptitude, his lack of a Lacanian phallus. Towards the conclusion of his monologue, Aston admits that while he used to talk too much, he doesn’t “talk to people now”, signalling the end of his linguistic resistance to ideology. Appropriately, Aston owns a statue of a “Buddah”, which he finds to be “very well made”, connoting his Buddhist-like vow of silence in the aftermath of his castration.[137]

I have shown that in 1960s literary imagination, castration means submission, and in 1960s Britain, submission means enslavement to productivity. I have also shown that to castrate the Lacanian subject is to plunge them into endlessly unsatisfying symbolic order with no means of navigating it as the father does. In The Caretaker, these two versions of castration are united. The final sentence of Aston’s monologue reads thus: “I want to build that shed out in the garden.”[138] Knowles highlights that Aston’s ‘preoccupation’ with building the shed is a ‘psychological treadmill’:

To work on the house he needs to clear the garden for a shed. To build the shed he needs wood. Saws are needed for the wood, a sawbench is needed for sawing, a shed is needed for a sawbench, a cleared garden is needed for the shed.[139]

Aston’s castration has removed his ability to navigate the symbolic order and he is now lost on a repeating, cyclical chain of signifiers. His desire to build the shed is the result of this castration, but like the chain of signifiers, it is endlessly unsatisfying.

Davies and Aston—

Aston’s incarceration took place offstage, but the events of the play directly mirror the incarceration, with Davies taking Aston’s place as the subject in need of correction. As a homeless man, Davies is a bad subject due to his unproductive nature, though this is only the first reason. Davies, like Aston, talks too much and indeed too well. In the play’s opening, Aston and Davies converse thus:

Aston: You want to roll yourself one of these?

Davies: What? No, no, I never smoke a cigarette… I’ll tell you what though. I’ll have a bit of that tobacco there for my pipe, if you like.

Aston: Yes. Go on…

Davies: That’s kind of you, mister. Just enough to fill my pipe, that’s all… I had a tin, only… only a while ago. But it was knocked off.

For Knowles, this passage constitutes a performance of linguistic acrobatics on Davies’ part.[140] His initial response to Aston’s offer is an incredulous double rejection of ‘what he feels may be charity,’ but his presentation of an ‘alternative possibility’ allows him to ‘accept Aston’s tobacco in terms of his own positive preference for the more socially acceptable pipe,’ while ‘leaving the actual decision to Aston.’[141] Davies then acknowledges his debt, but his ‘self-conscious moderation’ suggests his actions are ‘gentlemanly custom’ as opposed to ‘permanent dependence.’[142] Finally, ‘the closing anecdote ‘alter[s] the action of giving and receiving into a form of indirect restitution’; he is rightfully owed tobacco since he lost his own.[143] Knowles writes that Davies’ ‘self-deception creates… a fiction to live by,’[144] and since the play sees language as a means of negotiating power relations, this passage demonstrates Davies’ capacity to fictionalise an equality between the pair.

For the state, whose ideological apparatus functions by the fabrication of reality through language, Davies’ ability to create in his own fantasy is clearly a threat. It follows that the ISA must indoctrinate him into its own fantasy. In Althusser’s understanding of statecraft, ‘much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses… [are] part of the private domain,’ and thus not explicitly state-owned.[145] Hence, as newly indoctrinated subject, Aston represents the ISA in the microcosmic room. Aston presents Davies with the ideology of the 1960s welfare state. He asks him “Would you like to sleep here?”, and tells him “Here’s a few bob,” mimicking the public housing and unemployment benefit schemes of the post-war years.[146] But these acts of charity are qualified by an expectation of labour: “You could be… caretaker here, if you liked.”[147] Davies’ hesitance to accept the deal is exemplified by his short, open ended responses to the proposition:

I never done caretaking before… I’d have to know … what sort of… I’d have to… what sort of jobs… it’d be a matter of a broom...[148]

Ultimately, Davies seems to reject the offer, saying: “I don’t know about that.”[149]

Consequently, Aston resorts to medical correction. Knowles notes the following ‘correspondences between Aston’s hospital treatment and,’ his behaviour with Davies in the room.[150] Davies complains about a “damn pile of papers,” paralleling the “pile of papers” [151] Aston ‘was shown as medical evidence’[152]. In tinkering with a ‘plug’ and ‘toaster’ among other electrical items, it is as though Aston is attempting to replicate his correction with “electric” equipment.[153] Davies also complains: “I wake up in the morning… He puts on his coat… he looks down at my bed, there’s a smile on his face.”[154] Aston’s behaviour here evokes a psychiatrist in his white coat observing a bed-ridden patient and signals his intention to replicate his own treatment with Davies, indoctrinating him through non-violent correction similar to Dr Spivey’s therapeutic community. When Aston offers Davies the role of caretaker, he hands him a ‘white overall,’ telling him “you could wear this.”[155] In Kesey, the psychiatric aides wore ‘white suits’[156], and so Aston’s offer is really a dual offer: submit to capitalist ideology— become the caretaker— and help me indoctrinate others—become my aide.

Mick and Davies—

Althusser writes that ‘the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology,’[157] but Davies’ tells Aston:

You want me to do all the dirty work… just so I can sleep in this lousy filthy hole every night? Not me...[158]

Althusser continues: ‘bad subjects’… on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus.’[159] Unlike the ISA, ‘the— unified— (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain.’[160] The role of RSA falls to Mick— only the homeowner can use physical power. Like McMurphy, it seems Davies has rejected the carrot, and incurred the wrath of the stick.

As we have seen, the state must justify its repression through mad/sane branding. In the text, we see this when Mick delivers a speech about his uncle’s brother who resembles Davies. Knowles suggests that Mick’s speech is really a veiled analysis of the old man.[161] Mick’s remark that he ‘had a penchant for nuts… wouldn’t touch a piece of fruit cake,’[162] is therefore akin to branding him, in demotic terms, as nutty as a fruitcake (mad). Davies is mad because he is idle, as Mick tells him: “I’m a bit worried about my brother… he just doesn’t like work, that’s his trouble… it’s a terrible thing to have to say.”[163] Knowles argues that this is yet another indirect expression of his opinion of Davies, and so the old man’s assertion: “I know that sort,” is deeply ironic.[164] Nonetheless, that he ostensibly says this about Aston betrays a similitude between Mick and the repressive doctor. Mick also asserts himself as the symbolic father of the house, repeatedly calling Davies “son” and “sonny”.[165] He tells Davies that the bed he has been sleeping in is his “mother’s,” saying: “Keep your hands off my old mum,” [166] effectively introducing the incest prohibition. The fact that the story is a complete fabrication (it is not his mother’s bed), like his veiled labelling, indicates Mick’s ability to use of language to dominate Davies, solidifying his phallic position.

The effectiveness of Mick’s project of repressive paternalism is evident in Davies’ apparent castration anxiety. Freud argues that when a boy ‘regards his little sister’s genitals,’ they seem to be ‘a mutilated organ’ and ‘arouse horror.’[167] In the play, Aston acts as the sister, Davies the boy, and so Aston’s inability to effectively communicate, along with his story of castrating medical correction, are horrifying to the intact Davies. This is evident in Davies cruel verbal attack on Aston, in which he brands him “off [his] nut”, a “creamer”, telling him “They’d put them pincers on your head, they’d have you fixed!”[168] This speech indicates Davies’ knowledge that castrating EST is the punishment for bad subjects; as in the Chief’s mechanisation metaphor, those who rebel are “fixed”. Moreover, Davies insists: “I’m a sane man!... I never been in a nuthouse!” [169] and in the repetition of this point he juxtaposes himself with Aston, anxiously clinging to the knowledge that, unlike his symbolic sister, the paternal state has not taken his phallus yet.

Eventually though, this anxiety works to his detriment, as Davies brands Aston “nutty” in front of Davies.[170] This act of branding constitutes a threat to Mick’s power. Only the state can tell subjects that they have a “complaint”[171] due to the repression it enables, and thus Davies words are an aspiration to statehood. In retaliation, Mick enacts the threatened correction, shouting about his intention to pay Davies off for his work and kick him out (“THAT’S WHAT I WANT!”), and ‘hurl[ing] the Buddah against the gas stove.’[172] That this chastisement is equivalence to EST is clear moments later, as Davies tells Aston:

You need a bit of air… you being in that place that time, with all them doctors… I know them places… I had a peep in one once, nearly suffocated me.[173]

The sudden change from having “never been in a nuthouse,” to having “had a peep in one” implies that Mick’s reproachment constituted this castrating “peep”. The other detail, that Mick smashes the Buddah, reinforces that castration is a means of enforcing work. For Mick, the Buddah, who sat in meditation for 49 days, represents a lifestyle incompatible with the productivity and so its destruction signifies the impossibility of Mick’s subjects living such a life again. The castration of his free will is reflected in the slow disintegration of his once potent voice:

But… but… listen… listen here… I mean… if I was to… get my papers… would you let… would you… if I got down… and got my…

Long silence.

Curtain.[174]

Knowles highlights that Davies is faced with another ‘psychological treadmill’: to get to the job he needs his papers in Sidcup, to get to Sidcup he needs “a pair of good shoes,” for shoes he needs money, for money he needs a job.[175] Like Aston, in submitting to the capitalist demand to work, Davies has placed himself on an endlessly unsatisfying linguistic chain of desire. The fact that when Aston tells Davies “If I give you… a few bob you can get down to Sidcup,” he responds: “You build your shed first!” betrays clearly enough the equivalence of these two goals, neither of which will ever be completed.[176]

Dissatisfaction—

In the end, Davies’ linguistic castration means that the play concludes in a protracted silence. In 1977 review of the play, Bernard Levin wrote: “the truth remains that Mr Pinter has nothing whatever to say. . . [from The Caretaker] nothing emerges.”[177] For Rayner, the play has denied viewers, ‘what Barthes calls the Oedipal pleasure of the text’[178]: ‘to learn the origin and the end’.[179] The ending, a typically ‘silent tableaux,’ does ‘not resolve… but reach[es] a stasis that implies not the ending of desire but… a beginning... in which all potentials for meaning gather, however doomed they may be.’[180] The vague, abstract nature of Pinter’s play resists concrete explanation, making the ending as unsatisfying for us as it is for Davies. We are all doomed to an unsatisfying search for meaning.

A Clockwork Orange: “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange— written in an invented Anglo-Russian argot called Nadstat (Russian for teen)— follows its narrator Alex, a teenage criminal in a near-future dystopian Britain. Alex is arrested by the state who offer him a choice: serve a life sentence or be free in a matter of weeks. The latter requires him to submit to the Ludovico Method, an aversion therapy that removes his capacity to do wrong.

Youth in Revolt—

Darlington underscores the topicality of Burgess’ subject matter to the early 60s imagination, explaining that contemporary reviewers ‘emphasised the figure of… ‘delinquent youth.”[181]  Geoffrey Bullock and Kenneth Young wrote in the Birmingham and Yorkshire Post respectively that ‘the story is about Teddy Boys [(see reference)][182] in a not-so-far distant state,’[183] and that Burgess comes ‘to grips with the rising tide of violence which we know in 1962.’[184] Productivity was not the only problem facing the post-war British state, and the novel depicts a method of solving this other issue.

The opening passage signposts Alex’s rebellious nature, as Burgess writes: ‘there was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs… and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodooks [(minds)] what to do with the evening...’[185] Like Kesey, Burgess employs aptronym, as Morrison highlights that Alex might be read as ‘a-lex: without or outside the law.’[186] Furthermore, the 1960s imagination associates revolt with violence and a disregard for authority (McMurphy) as well as idleness (Aston), and finally youth (the Teddy Boys) all of which Alex demonstrates. In response to the opening question, he asserts:

Our pockets were full of deng [(money)], so there was ‘no real need to… tolchock [(hit)] some old veck [(man)] in an alley and viddy [(watch)] him swim in his blood while we counted the takings… nor to do the ultra-violent [(rape)] on some shivering starry [(old)] grey-haired ptitsa [(lady)] in a shop and go smecking [(laughing)] off with the till’s guts. But as they say, money isn’t everything.[187]

In this dense passage, Alex rejects 1960s work ethic ideology, planning to attain fair wages through the unfair means of destructive rather than productive labour. This is intensified by his remark that ‘money isn’t everything,’ which shows that his destructive labour is motivated not by potential profit but a sadistic love of destruction. Even the act of theft is rendered in terms of bodily violence, as he disembowels the till. Significantly, Burgess capitalises on contemporary anxieties around youth violence by making Alex’s hypothetical victims elderly and thus vulnerable to juvenile vigour. Elsewhere, his disregard for authority is clear as he refers to God in scatological terms as ‘Bog’.[188]

More importantly however, Alex— who brands himself ‘Alexander the Large’[189]— demonstrates the paternal qualities which revolt has centred on thus far, as many of his crimes bear Oedipal overtones. Alex mugs a ‘starry schoolmaster type veck,’[190] whose age and association with child-discipline mark him as pseudo-father, before robbing a tobacconist ran by a man named Slouse.[191] The patriarch is defeated again, but this time Alex also attacks ‘Mother Slouse, the wife,’ and rips her clothes off, admitting:

Viddying her lying there with her groodies [(breasts)] on show, I wondered should I or not, but that was for later on in the evening.[192]

Here, Alex ponders committing ‘ultra-violence’ on a mother, violently subverting the incest-prohibition. Alex does not rape her; this violation comes later. The droogs break into a cottage called ‘HOME’, where they beat a young writer to near-death and then violently gang-rape his wife, whose maternal nature is evident in Alex’s description of her ‘real horrorshow [(good)] groodies.’[193] Later, Alex returns to the house and discovers that the writer is called ‘F. Alexander,’ thinking ‘Good Bog… he is another Alex.’[194]  Rabinovitz highlights that Burgess’ protagonist is often referred to as ‘Alex boy’ and ‘little Alex,’ while Alex brands the writer ‘the great F. Alexander’, associating the former with childhood, the latter with adulthood.[195] Accordingly, Ray suggests that the F in F. Alexander ‘almost certain[ly] stands for ‘Father’, and thus, Alex’s attack on HOME ‘follows… the Freudian model of family relations.’[196]

Additionally, as in Kesey and Pinter, Burgess makes speech essential to Alex’s masculine rebellion. Alex evades RSA punishment for robbing Slouse’s shop by subtly bribing a group of “baboochkas” (old ladies) in a pub with alcohol in advance of the crime.[197] Returning to the pub afterwards, Alex asks the ladies: “We haven’t been out of here, have we?” Alex understands that ‘they caught on,’ and when two ‘rozzes’ (police) suspect their involvement, his ‘innocent’ act (“Us?... Why, what happened?) is supported by the ladies’ promise that “They’ve been in here all night.”[198] Likewise, when speaking to F. Alexander’s wife from outside HOME, he adopts a ‘very refined manner of speech, a real gentlemen’s goloss’ (voice) to ‘[soften her] up… so that she hadn’t shut the door like she should have done.’[199] Significantly, Alex uses this linguistic phallicism to facilitate his Oedpial phallicism.

Alex is capable not only of overthrowing fathers but also occupying their role within the teen subculture. Burgess employs the blade as signifier of the penetrating phallus and/or that which castrates it. Alex remarks that two of his droogs ‘Pete and Georgie had good sharp nozhes [(knives)], but I… had a fine… cut-throat britva [(razor)].’[200] The other droogs are phallic, engaging in the same crimes as Alex, but the narrator implies his own exceptionality in the discrepancy between their juxtaposed blades (‘good’ vs. ‘fine’; ‘sharp’ vs. ‘cut-throat’). Alex explicitly threatens his enemies with castration, shouting: “I’ll have your yarbles [(testicles)] off lovely,”[201] and this treatment extends to his droogs. After an argument is which Alex declares that “there has to be a leader… Discipline there has to be,”[202] he effectively castrates the dissenting Georgie and Dim. Alex slices Georgie’s ‘nozh-holding’ hand and the Dim’s wrist, forcing them to drop their weapons.[203] Here, Alex’s behaviour and rhetoric is uncannily similar to the paternal state, as he advocates for totalitarian discipline and castrates those who refuse to submit. However, as we have seen in the case of Davies, attempts by subjects to ascend to paternal statehood are met with medical correction.

The Ludovico Method—

Having rampaged throughout the first part of the book, Alex is imprisoned in Part Two, which sees him offered a proposition: he will “be able to leave state custody in a little over a fortnight,” if he submits to “Reclamation treatment.”[204] This treatment involves being administered with nauseating drugs, then being ‘forced to viddy’ ‘horrible’ films with his eyes clipped open.[205] After the treatment Alex is attacked by a ‘starry’ man, a provocation that would ordinarily cause him to ‘get [his] cut-throat britva out’, but a ‘horrible killing sickness’ arises in him and instead he offers to “get down and lick… his boots”.[206] Alex’s earlier Oedipal crimes are inverted here, as he submits to an older, paternal figure. Having seen the results of the treatment, it is the chaplain, whose earlier words seemed to offer a choice, that points out:

‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain drove him to that act of self-abasement.’[207]

The chaplain almost paraphrases Zizek on ‘extraideological violence and promise of gain,’[208] the treatment literalizing the paternalistic workings of totalitarian ideology. Accordingly, Burgess adopts a mechanisation metaphor when describing its effects, as Alex asks, “Am I just be like a clock-work orange?”[209] The implication is plain— paternalistic removal of choice transforms nature into machine.

However, the Ludovico Method takes ideology a step further by ensuring that all subjects ‘work by themselves’. It literalizes Foucault’s notion of panopticism, in which ‘he who is subjected to [surveillance]… and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.’ In these circumstances, ‘it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour.’ [210] Alex’s treatment ensures that his body both surveils and punishes him, rendering extraideological force unnecessary. The Ludovico Method therefore combines Zizekian ideology and Foucauldian panopticism in an act of paternalistic medical correction par excellence.

Evans describes the treatment as a ‘psychic frontal lobotomy,’[211] tying this method to the snipping elucidated by Kesey, while Darlington directly calls it a ‘castration’,[212] suggesting a precedent for reading the treatment so. This is foreshadowed when Alex tells us: ‘I was 6655321 and not… Alex not no longer.’[213] Like Bromden, the state brings Alex within the law (he is no longer a-lex) by removing the name-of-the-father. Furthermore, the treatment itself is ripe with Freudian imagery. Before he is shown the films, Alex reports that a nurse ‘slam[med] [a] needle into my left arm,’ recalling Taber’s treatment. Likewise, when he watches the films, his ‘glazz-lids [(eye-lids)] [are] pulled up’ so that he cannot ‘shut [his] glazzies,’ (eyes) and they seem almost primed for an Oedipal gouging. [214] This castration culminates in Alex’s total submission and transformation from hypermale to hypomale. After being beaten by the old man, Alex’s submission is exemplified further as he is approached by a ‘lovely young devotchka’ (woman) with ‘real horrorshow groodies.’[215] We notice that this description is identical to that of F. Alexander’s wife, marking this woman as another displacement of the mother. Alex remarks that he ‘would like to have her…with the old in-out real savage.’[216] However, ‘sickness’ arises ‘like a like detective that had been watching round a corner and now followed to make his… arrest.’ [217] This description connotes the RSA, showing how the technique superimposes a surveiling ‘detective’ onto Alex’s mind, enforcing the incest prohibition. As Reis explains, a ‘good boy… will ipso facto create an evil mother,’ characterised by the withholding of her breasts,[218] and thus Alex’s programmed aversion to ‘groodies’ designates him a hypomale.

Free will?—

Certainly, Burgess presents the method as a psychological castration and describing it as an ‘artificial extirpation of free will through scientific conditioning.’[219] However, my interpretation of the role of free will elsewhere in the text differs from its creator. Burgess suggests that part one depicts ‘youthful free will’; ‘having the choice of good and evil although generally choosing evil.’ [220] Conversely, I would posit that the youthful Alex never had any free will in the first place.

Morrison summarises the text’s moral in terms of its motif: ‘Alex must be able to choose good; he must be an orange, capable of growth and sweetness, not a wound-up clockwork toy.’[221] The implication here is that the Ludovico Method is what transforms Alex from orange to clockwork toy, but the protagonist says himself in the novel’s final chapter:

Youth is… not just like being an animal so much as being one of those malenky [(small)] toys… little chellovecks [(men)] made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside...[222]

Rabinovitz argues Alex is suggesting that ‘in his youth he had not been free but determined,’ because ‘the young are like clockwork men; their proclivity towards violence is built into them.’[223] The invocation of the mechanisation metaphor undoubtedly supports this interpretation. But if not their own will, nor the Ludovico technique, what is it that winds the clockwork Alex up?

Costello asserts that ‘the droogs are not shown as choosing creatures, but seem conditioned by their… drug-laden [society]… into behaviour of violence,’ ‘the alternative, the Ludovico Technique,’ is simply a kind of ‘reconditioning.’[224] We see how drug use conditions the youth in Alex’s consumption of the laced ‘milk with knives it,’ which ‘would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one.’[225] Alex’s phallic nature is tied to blades and so the lexical choice is significant; the drugs do not simply ‘sharpen’ him up cognitively, but also stimulate his hypermasculine violence. The meaning of ‘dirty twenty-to-one’ is ambiguous, though it may be rhyming-slang for fun, while ‘dirty’ adds a sexual dimension, suggesting that the numbers might be an allusion to gang rape. This interpretation is consistent with Alex’s later assertion that ‘the knives… were stabbing away nice and horrorshow now,’[226] just before he considers raping Mother Slouse. In this way, the drugs served in the Korova Milkbar condition Alex to violence as much as the nauseating ‘vitamins’[227] injected during the Ludovico Method do the opposite. Nadstat culture’s rampant drug abuse can be interpreted alternatively as a form of medical incorrection.

The Self and the Not-Self—

The question remains: Why would the state incorrect its subjects? The answer to this is obvious enough. We have seen time and again that the state brands subjects mad/nutty/bad to justify their correction. Ironically, in Burgess’ novel, the state forces Alex to be a bad subject so that they can ensure he cannot choose to be a bad subject. We might recall that through its exploitation of the myth of matriarchy, the combine did the very same to McMurphy. Alex says early in the text:

Badness is of the self… but the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government… cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.[228]

The enemy of the state is not badness, it is badness of the self, of personal choice.

Conclusion: Phallogocentrism and State Maternalism

I have demonstrated that literature of the 1960s often presents the politically paternalistic removal of choice as a psychoanalytically paternalistic removal of the phallus. To conclude, I ask, how is losing one’s free will akin to castration? Why is paternalism also paternalism?

Derrida coined the term ‘phallogocentrism’, a portmanteau of ‘phallocentrism and logocentrism,’ to describe the ‘complicity of structure between’ these two systems of thought.[229] For Derrida ‘our discourse irreducibly belongs to [a] system of metaphysical oppositions.’[230] The phallus ‘at once belongs to and makes possible,’ the ‘chain of signifiers’ that he argues forms this oppositional discourse.[231] Derrida thus gives a name to the Lacanian idea that language is structured by differences, the first of which being between phallus and non-phallus. From this one difference, all subsequent differences follow: presence/absence, good/evil (c.f. Genesis).

In the Ludovico Method— the most literal form of medical paternalism— the two basic binaries upon which phallogocentric language rests are severed from Alex. The distinction between man and woman disintegrates due to the treatment’s castrating effect, while the binary between good and evil collapses in his compulsion to ‘choose’ the former. Consequently, we might say that in the phallogocentric imagination, removing the difference between phallus and non-phallus is equivalent to removing that between good and evil; any removal of choice is a castration.

Yet, Lacan writes that ‘it is the assumption… of castration that creates the lack on the basis of which desire [and Logos] is instituted,’ an assumption only made after perceiving the difference between mother and father. If the father had no phallus, Logos would not be instituted. Therefore, in its paternalistic abolition of the difference between good and evil (on which language rests), the Ludovico Method symbollically castrates the paternal phallus. It is not Alex who is castrated, but his metaphorical father; his transformation is not post but pre-Oedipal. Through this castration of the father, Alex is returned to a realm without choice and therefore without difference: a realm of plenitude. In Lacanian terms, Alex is ‘excised from the primordial symbolization’ and re-enters ‘the Real.’[232] Lacan writes that both Freud’s life and death drives ‘mythify’ ‘the Real’. That is to say all ‘desire’ is for the plenitude of the real, either in the maternal body (‘the lost object’) or in death’s absence of signification.[233] With respect to the life drive, the paradox can be pressed further: the paternalistic Ludovico Method is somehow also maternalistic. In its removal of choice, the method forces a return to the maternal Real through an expulsion from the symbolic order. There is precedent for this reading in the other texts also. Meloy notes that Kesey ‘described the patients as submissive and childlike, calling them’, in a letter, “infants growing… back to complete dependence, to darkness, the womb.”[234] Here, the patients’ submission is not emasculating but rather infantilizing, constituting a return to the Real of maternal dependence. Furthermore, in the opening of the book, the Nurse instructs the black boys to shave Chief Bromden, the castrating connotations of the razor sharply in mind. In response, the Chief employs the metaphor of a ‘fog-machine’ which produces fog thick enough for him to ‘hide’ from the boys,[235] which Waxler describes as a ‘womb-like… retreat from… attempts at symbolic castration.’[236] This exemplifies how the threat of paternal castration compels men to return to the womb-like Real. Within the fog, the Chief ‘can’t see six inches in front of’[237] him, and this, along with Kesey’s assertion that the patients are ‘growing backwards… to darkness,’ recalls the darkness that engulfs Aston during his monologue regarding his own medical correction (‘by the close of the speech only Aston can be seen clearly’) and the final ‘curtain’ that inundates Davies following his chastisement by Mick.[238] This gives greater precedent to reading the state as maternalistic in 1960s literature, as the paternal state seems to castrate itself and ingest its subjects whole in a sick reversal of birth. Perhaps this is not so surprising, given that in 1965 Conservative MP Iain Macleod coined the term ‘nanny state’ to describe the welfare government of the period;[239] a term which has become near-synonymous with paternalism, defined as ‘a government that tries to… make too many laws about how people should live their lives.’[240]

To conclude, in literature of the early 1960s, as a result of state paternalism/ maternalism, characters are frequently depicted as having one option: ‘freely accepting [their] submission.’[241] Yet, they almost invariably demonstrate the irrevocability of human free will in their selection of an alternative option. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Cheswick drowns himself after being sent to the ‘disturbed’ ward for opposing the rationing of cigarettes, Billy slits his throat upon realising the inevitability of his submission to his mother, and the Chief smothers the lobotomised McMurphy.[242] Similarly, in A Clockwork Orange, Alex hears a woman singing an opera that he recognises, specifically ‘the bit where she’s snuffing it with her throat cut, and the slovos [(words)] are ‘better like this maybe.”[243] This foreshadows his realisation that, when faced with the removal of choice, it might be ‘better’ to ‘finish it all off by jumping out’ of a window.[244] Even in The Caretaker, although neither Davies nor Aston commit suicide, the latter’s assertion that he ‘should have died,’[245] suggests that this option would have been preferable. Zizek describes the Real as ‘traumatic’ because it cannot be integrated into the symbolic order. [246] Evidently then, when victims of medical correction are compelled into an unnatural fulfilment of the life drive— a return to the maternal Real within the symbolic order— the trauma is so great that they are left to make the only real choice we have seen thus far: submit to the death drive and reach a natural Real. That’s what it has to be then.

Endnotes

[1] Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), p. 3.

[2] ‘Paternalism’, Oxford Reference, <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100310127#:~:text=n.,his%20or%20her%20best%20interests> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[3] Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 209-226. (p. 217).

[4] Timothy Melley, ‘Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States’ in New German Critique, 103 (2008), pp. 145-164. (p. 145).

[5] Melley, pp. 148-149.

[6] William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (London: Heinemann, 1957), xiii. Quoted in Melley, p. 152.

[7] Melley, p. 152.

[8] Melley, p. 149.

[9] Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2005), p. 58.

[10] Michel Foucault, ‘From ‘Discipline and Punish”, in A Critical And Cultural Theory Reader, 2nd edn (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), pp. 94-101. (p. 97).

[11] Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Madness and Misogyny in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest’,  Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 14 (1994), pp. 64-90. (p. 64).

[12] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘From The German Ideology’, in A Critical And Cultural Theory Reader, 2nd edn (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), pp. 39-41. (p. 40).

[13] Kesey, p. 6.

[14] Louis Althusser, “From ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in A Critical And Cultural Theory Reader, 2nd edn (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), pp. 42-50. (p. 48).

[15] Kesey, pp. 42, 40.

[16] Kesey, p. 52.

[17] Kesey, p. 51.

[18] Kesey, pp. 52-53.

[19] Althusser, p. 43.

[20] Kesey, p. 62.

[21] Karl Marx, “The Commodity, 1867”, Marxists.Org <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm> [Accessed 07/04/2022].

[22] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object Of Ideology, (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 25-26.

[23] Zizek, p. 27.

[24] Kesey, p. 58.

[25] Althusser, p. 49.

[26] Zizek, p. 27.

[27] Kesey, p. 54.

[28] Kesey, p. 56.

[29] Zizek, p. 27.

[30] Althusser, p. 44.

[31] Elena Semino and Kate Swindlehurst, ‘Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest’, Style, 30 (1996), pp. 143-166. (pp. 143, 146).

[32] Semino and Swindlehurst, p. 150.

[33] Kesey, p. 6.

[34] Semino and Swindlehurst, p. 154.

[35] Kesey, p. 6.

[36] Kesey, p. 36.

[37] Althusser, p. 42.

[38] Kesey, pp. 37, 189.

[39] Kesey, p. 62.

[40] Vitkus, p. 65.

[41] Michael Meloy, ‘Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, The Journal of Men’s Studies, 17 (2009), pp. 3-14. (pp. 4-5).

[42] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 583.

[43] Kesey, p. 64.

[44] Kesey, p. 4.

[45] Elaine B. Safer, “It's the Truth Even If It Didn’t Happen’: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 5 (1977), pp. 132-141. (p. 134).

[46] Kesey, p. 87.

[47] Kesey, pp. 31-32.

[48] Kesey, p. 33.

[49] Kesey, p. 36.

[50] Kesey, p. 36.

[51] Ken Kesey, ‘Letter to Ken Babbs: ‘People on the ward.’’ In J. C. Pratt (Ed.), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and criticism, (Signet: New York, 1973), pp. 339-345. Quoted in Meloy, p. 3.

[52] Meloy, pp. 3-4.

[53] Patricia Reis, ‘Good Breast, Bad Breast, This Is the Cuckoo's Nest: Ken Kesey and the Myth of Matriarchy’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 3 (1987), pp. 77-96. (p. 89).

[54] William Schopf, ‘Blindfolded and Backwards: Promethean and Bemushroomed Heroism in One Flew Over

the Cuckoo’s Nest and Catch-22’, The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 26 (1972), pp. 89-97. (p. 94).

[55] Kesey, p. 54.

[56] Kesey, p. 59.

[57] Lacan, p. 95.

[58] Kesey, p. 60.

[59] Kesey, p. 164.

[60] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 219-252. (p. 231).

[61] Lacan, p. 581.

[62] Lacan, p. 582.

[63] Lacan, p. 230

[64] Reis, p. 84.

[65] Kesey, p. 4.

[66] Lacan, p. 482.

[67] Kesey, p. 23.

[68] Robert P. Waxler, ‘The mixed heritage of the chief: Revisiting the problem of manhood in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, Journal of Popular Culture, 29 (1995), pp. 225-235. (p. 231).

[69] Kesey, p. 24.

[70] Kesey, p. 10.

[71] Waxler, p. 228. [It is as if Kesey is suggesting, like Jacques Lacan, that adulthood is achieved by the son when the child moves into the system of language… that has been defined and represented by the father].

[72] Kesey, p. 86.

[73] Waxler, p. 225.

[74] Kesey, p. 187.

[75] Kesey, p. 190.

[76] Kesey, p. 187.

[77] Kesey, p. 188.

[78] Waxler, p. 231.

[79] Kesey, p. 191.

[80] Kesey, p. 192.

[81] Kesey, p. 64.

[82] Kesey, p. 255.

[83] Kesey, p. 270.

[84] Kesey, p. 270.

[85] Meloy, p. 3.

[86] Kesey, p. 275

[87] Kesey, p. 275.

[88] Meloy, p. 11.

[89] Waxler, p. 226.

[90] Reis, p. 81.

[91] Kesey, p. 56.

[92] Reis, pp. 77-79.

[93] Reis, pp. 77, 84.

[94] Reis, p. 87.

[95] Kesey, p. 60.

[96] Kesey, p. 64.

[97] Kesey, p. 67.

[98] Reis, p. 84.

[99] Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale, (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 205. Quoted in Fred Madden, ‘Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner’, Modern Fiction Studies, 32 (1986), pp. 203-217. (p. 205).

[100] Kesey, p. 180.

[101] Kesey, p. 24.

[102] Kesey, p. 6.

[103] Kesey, p. 275.

[104] Kesey, p. 28.

[105] Kesey, p. 275.

[106] Kesey, p. 274.

[107] Kesey, p. 164.

[108] Kesey, p. 277.

[109] Kesey, p. 154.

[110] Meloy, p. 7.

[111] Kesey, pp. 164, 180.

[112] Arlene Sykes, Harold Pinter (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 101. Quoted in Austin Quigley, ‘Pinter, politics and postmodernism (1)’ in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 7-27. (p. 14)

[113] Francesca Coppa, ‘The sacred joke: comedy and politics in Pinter’s early plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 44- 56. (p. 51).

[114] Mireia Aragay, ‘Pinter, politics and postmodernism (2)’ in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 246- 259. (p. 247).

[115] Jim Tomlinson, ‘The British ‘Productivity Problem’ in the 1960s’, Past & Present, 175 (2002), pp. 188-210. (p. 189).

[116] Tomlinson, p. 190.

[117] Tomlinson, p. 191.

[118] Friedrich Engels, ‘A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day’s Wages’ (1996), Articles by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881, < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm#n1> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[119] Engels.

[120] Graham Woodroffe, ‘Taking Care of the ‘Coloureds’: The Political Metaphor of Harold Pinter’s ‘The Caretaker’, Theatre Journal, 40 (1988), pp. 498-508. (p. 499).

[121] Alfred Hickling, ‘The Caretaker’ (2009), The Guardian, <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/mar/13/theatre-review-the-caretaker-bolton> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[122] Pinter, p. 89.

[123] Quigley, p. 23.

[124] Pinter, p. 89.

[125] Pinter, p. 89.

[126] Pinter, pp. 89-90.

[127] Pinter, p. 90.

[128] Pinter, p. 90.

[129] Pinter, p. 90.

[130] Pinter, p. 91.

[131] Kesey, p. 59.

[132] Pinter, pp. 90-91.

[133] Pinter, p. 91.

[134] Friedrich Nietzche, ‘The Project Gutenberg Ebook Of The Will To Power’ (2016), Gutenberg.Org, <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52915/52915-h/52915-h.htm#Page_38> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[135] Pinter, pp. 23, 34.

[136] Ronald Knowles, ‘The Caretaker and the ‘point’ of laughter’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 5 (1979), pp. 83-97. (p. 92).

[137] Pinter, p. 20.

[138] Pinter, p. 92.

[139] Knowles, p. 92.

[140] Knowles, p. 86.

[141] Knowles, p. 86.

[142] Knowles, p. 86.

[143] Knowles, p. 86.

[144] Knowles, p. 86.

[145] Althusser, pp. 42-43.

[146] Pinter, pp. 17, 23.

[147] Pinter, p. 65.

[148] Pinter, pp. 66-67.

[149] Pinter, p. 68.

[150] Knowles, p. 91.

[151] Pinter, pp. 40, 90.

[152] Knowles, p. 91.

[153] Pinter, pp. 23, 55, 90.

[154] Pinter, p. 101.

[155] Pinter, p. 67.

[156] Kesey, p. 3.

[157] Althusser, p. 48.

[158] Pinter, p. 107.

[159] Althusser, p. 48.

[160] Althusser, pp. 42-43.

[161] Pinter, p. 45 and Foucault, p. 97.

[162] Pinter, p. 45.

[163] Pinter, pp. 76-77.

[164] Pinter p. 77 and Knowles, p. 88.

[165] Pinter, p. 53.

[166] Pinter, pp. 52.

[167] Freud, ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, pp. 215, 217.

[168] Pinter, pp. 106-107.

[169] Pinter, p. 107.

[170] Pinter, p. 117.

[171] Pinter, p. 90.

[172] Pinter, p. 119.

[173] Pinter, p. 122.

[174] Pinter, p. 125.

[175] Pinter, p. 84 and Knowles, p. 92.

[176] Pinter, p. 109.

[177] Bernard Levin, ‘The Hollow Art of Harold Pinter’, The Sunday Times, 30 October 1977. Quoted in Aragay, p. 25.

[178] Alice Rayner, ‘Harold Pinter: Narrative and Presence’, Theatre Journal, 40 (1988), pp. 482-497. (p. 483).

[179] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 10. Quoted in Rayner, p. 483.

[180] Rayner, p. 491.

[181] Joseph Darlington, ‘A Clockwork Orange: The Art of Moral Panic’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 45 (2016), pp. 119-134. (p. 127).

[182] The Teddy Boys were a British teen subculture known for their idiosyncratic dress sense, love of Rock music and their violent delinquency, which reached a peak in the 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots.

[183] Geoffrey Bullock, ‘Review’, Birmingham Post, 15 May 1962, p. 14. Quoted in Darlington, p. 127.

[184] Kenneth Young, ‘Review’, Yorkshire Post, 15 May 1962, p. 20. Quoted in Darlington p. 127.

[185] Burgess, p. 3.

[186] Blake Morrison, ‘Introduction’ in A Clockwork Orange, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), pp. i- xix. (p. ix).

[187] Burgess, p. 3.

[188] Burgess, p. 3.

[189] Burgess, p. 36.

[190] Burgess, p. 6.

[191] Burgess, p. 10.

[192] Burgess, p. 10.

[193] Burgess, p. 18.

[194] Burgess, p. 117.

[195] Burgess, pp. 29, 120 and Rubin Rabinovitz, ‘Ethical Values in Anthony Burgess’s ‘Clockwork Orange”, Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979), pp. 43-50. (p. 46).

[196] Phillip E. Ray, ‘Alex Before and After: A New Approach to Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange’, Modern Fiction Studies, 27 (1981), pp. 479-487. (pp. 484-485).

[197] Burgess, p. 9.

[198] Burgess, p. 11.

[199] Burgess, pp. 17-18.

[200] Burgess, p. 14.

[201] Burgess, p. 15.

[202] Burgess, p. 24.

[203] Burgess, p. 41.

[204] Burgess, p. 70.

[205] Burgess, pp. 76-79.

[206] Burgess, pp. 92-93.

[207] Burgess, p. 94.

[208] Zizek, p. 27.

[209] Burgess, p. 94.

[210] Michel Foucault, “Panopticism’ from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 2 (2008), pp. 1-12. (p. 7).

[211] Robert O. Evans, Nadstat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange’, Journal of Modern Literature, 1 (1971), pp. 406-410. (p. 410).

[212] Darlington, p. 131.

[213] Burgess, p. 57.

[214] Burgess, p. 76.

[215] Burgess, p. 95.

[216] Burgess, p. 95.

[217] Burgess, p. 95.

[218] Reis, p. 87.

[219] Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had your Time, p. 22. Quoted in Darlington p. 128.

[220] Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had your Time, p. 22. Quoted in Darlington p. 128.

[221] Morrison, p. xxiii.

[222] Burgess, p. 140.

[223] Rubin Rabinovitz, ‘Mechanism vs Organism: Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (1978-79), pp. 538-541. (p. 539).

[224] Costello, p. 191.

[225] Burgess, p. 3.

[226] Burgess, p. 8.

[227] Burgess, p. 74.

[228] Burgess, p. 31.

[229] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, trans. by Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-R. L, , Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), pp. 31-113. (pp. 97-98).

[230] Jacques Derrida, ‘Of Grammatology’, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 20.

[231] Jacques Derrida; Willis Domingo; James Hulbert; Moshe Ron; M.-R. L, p. 94.

[232] Lacan, p. 324.

[233] Lacan, pp. 723-724.

[234] Meloy, p. 9. And Ken Kesey, ‘Letter to Ken Babbs: ‘People on the ward.’’ In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and Criticism, ed. by J. C. Pratt, (New York: Signet, 1973), pp. 339-345. Quoted in Meloy, p. 9.

[235] Kesey, p. 7.

[236] Waxler, p. 227.

[237] Kesey, p. 7.

[238] Pinter, pp. 88, 125.

[239] Steven Poole, ‘Sugar-tax goes sour: why does the word ‘nanny’ terrify Tories?’, The Guardian, 22 July 2021, < https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/22/sugar-tax-goes-sour-why-does-the-word-nanny-terrify-tories#:~:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9Cnanny%20state%E2%80%9D%2C,much%20like%20a%20good%20thing> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[240] ‘Nanny state’, in The Cambridge English Dictionary [online], <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nanny-state> [Accessed 17/04/2022].

[241] Althusser, p. 49.

[242] Kesey, pp. 149, 151,

[243] Burgess, p. 22.

[244] Burgess, p. 124.

[245] Pinter, p. 92.

[246] Zizek, p. 74.

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