We thought the story never ended, but the story of Alex and his droogies to the surface again. Of the unpublished writings of Anthony Burgess, author of the novel a clockwork Orange , come to be found in the archives of the Foundation Burgess, located in Manchester. According to Andrew Biswell, the director, the manuscript consists of 200 pages of notes, ideas thrown and philosophical reflections. Entitled The Clockwork Condition ( The mechanical Pathology ), it would have been written by Burgess, between 1972 and 1973. That is, shortly after the release of the film by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from the original novel in 1971.

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“what a discovery very exciting,” said Andrew Biswell the Guardian , describing the The Clockwork Condition as the “half-philosophical, semi-autobiographical”. “This manuscript provides a context for the work, the most famous of Burgess, he says. He extends his reflections on the crime, the punishment and the possible effects corrosive influence of visual culture. It also offers a new look on the complicated relationship of Burgess in his novel.”

The british writer, who died in 1993, considered in the manuscript that the 70’s are a “hell mechanics” (“a clockwork inferno”) in which humans are reduced to the status of cogs in a machine, relentless, deprived of their natural condition . The Guardian relates that The Clockwork Condition is part of a structure based on the Hell of Dante. Burgess had intended the chapters entitled The Man from hell , trapped in the world of machines, or The Man of purgatory , which tries precisely to escape it.

Ultraviolence and scandal

Anthony Burgess is also on the scandal that followed the release of Kubrick’s movie. The latter depicts the ultraviolence without a goal of a troop of young offenders in a society dystopian, and the way that society responds to violence with violence. If the work is today considered a masterpiece and a classic in the filmography of the filmmaker, the reactions of the audience of 1971 have been particularly difficult. Kubrick and Burgess had received death threats by mail. The developer has decided to pull clockwork Orange of the halls of cinema, and the film has remained unreleased in the Uk until the death of Kubrick in 1999.

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Andrew Biswell explained that Burgess has come to understand that a book of philosophical reflections exceeded its capacity of author of fiction. The idea then came to write a journal, entitled The Year of The Clockwork Orange ( The Year of a clockwork orange ), a project also fell to the water.

The writer has preferred to write the novel A Clockwork Testament , translated into French by The Testament of orange . Burgess tells the story of the history of the poet Enderby – already central in two of his other previous novels – facing the poor reception of a film he chose to adapt from a long poem. With a nod to thinly veiled to the reality. It is by the fiction that Burgess does best to express his own perplexity in the face of the controversy around the film of Kubrick.

Towards a possible publication

The Clockwork Condition remains an unfinished work, little presentable to the public in the state. It consists mainly of drafts, and is even punctuated by explanatory models. Andrew Biswell, also the author of a biography of Anthony Burgess, do not close, however, by the door to publication in the future. There are, according to him, enough material to give “a reconstruction clear from this that the book lost Burgess could have become”.

Already in the past year, of the unpublished writings of Anthony Burgess had been found in the archives of the Foundation. The writer had in fact started drafting a dictionary of slang, writing that he had stopped a time the letters A, B, and Z completed. Burgess was fascinated by the language of the streets. He also imagined a slang special for a clockwork Orange , the nadsat, inspired in particular by the Russian and speaking in london. The very title of the novel is inspired by a phrase he hears in 1945. It is marked by an old “cockney” (resident from the working class of east London). It described a person as “as crazy as a clockwork orange” (“as queer as a clockwork orange”).