A Hypertext Orange Wiki

**Welcome to the A Hypertext Orange Wiki!**
A wiki exploring "A Clockwork Orange" through the hypertext format. If you haven't already, I would recommend installing an adblocker extension to your browser.

## Textual History

*A Clockwork Orange* was first published in 1962, authored by Anthony Burgess. However, when viewing the text with the critical lens of media theory (where authorship can be much more vague and texts are understood to have lives of their own), the genesis of the work becomes much more nuanced.

It might be more accurate to say that the story began in 1942, when Anthony Burgess’s wife was beaten and raped. After all, that specific trauma is brought to life in the second chapter of the work, where the diegetic author of *A Clockwork Orange* goes through the same at the hands of the cynical Alex.

Or, maybe, it might be more accurate to say that the idea first came to Burgess in 1939, when he excitedly read *Finnegans Wake* upon its release.

Or, maybe, a bit later, in 1940, when Anthony Burgess wrote his thesis on *Doctor Faustus*, a piece that, like A Clockwork Orange, is obsessed. After all, many of Burgess’s other works were retellings of *Faustus*, so why not consider this a loose adaptation of that, too?

But, more on that later. For now, let’s stick with the facts.

Burgess wrote the book in 1961, five years after the publication of his first book and nearly two years after he decided to take writing seriously (to give his wife an inheritance after receiving a fatal diagnosis). Burgess wrote four books in 1960 and then in 1961 he wrote *A Clockwork Orange* in a state of constant drunkenness and with lots of notes and deliberation in the manuscript margins. It was released the following year in 1962.

It seems as if Burgess wanted the novel out of his hands fast, for he almost immediately sold the film rights for a crisp $500. Its first adaptation was a partial teleplay to promote its release.

The text wasn’t a smash hit, but it was popular enough to gather a cult following, especially for those in the art or rock scene like the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and Burgess’s next wife.

When a publisher in New York acquired the rights, they removed Burgess’s last chapter. They thought that the final chapter, in which Alex matures, decides to give up ultra-violence and settles down on his own accord, was an indication that Burgess was a cultural sellout. Perhaps they were right – though many have called Burgess an anarchist, he was a self-professed monarchist, and that’s not very punk, is it? Regardless, that shortened cut is the version that was published in America, and it stuck, even if it dramatically changed the interpretation of Burgess’s work.

It was this version that was adapted into Kubrick’s famous film *A Clockwork Orange* (1971) and would immortalize the text. Kubrick expanded, changed, and elaborated on stylistic elements while keeping most of the plot elements intact to the American release, and really transformed the work to fit the film medium (including many intertextual film references).

Like many authors, Burgess initially wept at what had been done to his film and despised the Kubrick adaptation for being a poor reading of what he wanted to say about morality. He also believed Kubrick had stolen his thunder and fame. He intended to write a sequel, though threw it away because he was no philosopher.  For me, while not changing the diegetic *A Clockwork Orange* into a film from a book, the text lost a lot of its metafictional qualities that led me to love the original.

It was not the first film adaptation of Burgess’s work – that would be the pirate film Vinyl, by Andy Warhol, which was not a direct adaptation but lifted story elements just as Burgess lifted writing techniques from Joyce and themes from Faustus.

The Rolling Stones also wanted to adapt the film as a vehicle for their rock-and-roll music, though this never came to fruition.

There were many play adaptations, with Burgess – who always professed wanting to be a musician more than a writer, even at the apex of his success – even adapting it into theater himself with *A Clockwork Orange 2004* with music by U2.

With all of the text’s violent elements, though (including, but not limited to rape, dueling, gang warfare, police brutality, torture, and pedophilia), it is no surprise that the film had to have many scenes pruned (both before and after release) and that the text is often subject to book-bannings. Both Kubrick and Burgess lamented the public perception to their respective works, citing the public’s obsession with violence as a misunderstanding of the message. Kubrick would eventually even work with distributors to have the film censored entirely until one year shy of 2001. This is likely the only way to censor the text – Burgess wrote a story so enamored with violence that it would be impossible to Bowdlerize the text and keep the plot intact.

The plot elements themselves are famously coded in another language – Nadsat. Many have attributed Burgess with constructing a fictional language, though it is more accurate to say that he simply translated English into Russian as a vehicle to critique social planning.

This presents a task more achievable than censorship: how do you translate language (or other similar wordplay, like onomatopoeia or puns) that’s already from one language into another, especially if you were translate the text back to the borrowed text’s home language and retain the same effect? Burgess thought it would be as simple as inverting the language (Nadsat now being English), though this method was rejected by Russian translators, who opted to work with Burgess’s broken Russian and develop it from there. Sometimes scenes simply have to be rewritten entirely, new additions to the work which complicate the boundaries between a translation or a new adaptation.

## Why Hypertext?

When I first read the text, I specifically read the Mark Rawlinson Norton Critical Edition published in 2011. This version had references to Burgess’s original manuscripts and conversations with the editor as footnotes (which were, surprisingly, useless to me in this hypertext adaptation). I found that what would have more useful as footnotes were translations of what the narrator was intending to say despite his foreign, unfamiliar language, just like a modern Shakespearean reader. Obviously, this raises questions of authorship (are you then reading the original text with a tool, or a new adaptation/interpretation of the book?).

The easiest way to do it is to simply have a glossary. However, attempting to put a glossary at the back of the novel is something I find ridiculously unwieldy. It might work for something like a map, but when you need to reference what a word means every few lines (or sometimes even just every few words), it becomes ridiculously tiring to turn to the back and scan through the alphabet until you find the right word and then turn back with that word held in your working memory.

It’s not practical to buy a second copy just to have it opened to the glossary. There is a Wiktionary edition of the glossary online, but at that point your attention is divided into two places and thus poses the same problem of not being interconnected with the text.

Footnotes are impractical to use in hypertext: it’s just a recreation of the glossary issue, with you now having to scroll to the bottom of the page and back every time you’re presented with an issue.

What’s better, then, is hovertext tooltips and hyperlinks. You can simply hover over a word to find out what it means and then resume your reading.

I found that this works especially well with intertextual elements, too. Is the author alluding to, or borrowing from, another work? I can link to that – you won’t miss the reference now. Furthermore, you won’t even have to read all of it to distract you from your reading of the main text. With a wiki, I can host summaries of that information alongside the text, too.

With this method, you won’t have to be well-versed in philosophy or theology or literary theory or Burgess’s personal life to understand what’s going on with Burgess’s text or my argument. You won’t be tasked with becoming that, either. Admittedly, it’s not the best form of research, but it is a time-effective form of relaying information to the reader that captures their nebulous digital attention spans.

## Critical Argument

Some theorists have proposed the idea of the Internet as an all-encompassing text. This reminds me of the concept of the all-encompassing genre: allofiction, an expansion of autofiction, which itself is a blending of fiction and personal non-fiction, which is what one would understand *A Clockwork Orange* to be once they read Burgess’s biography.

The concept of the Internet as an alloftext or an omnitext presents a larger question of authorship. It’s as if we have come full circle and reconstructed Plato’s world of forms. We harness information from the heavens, deliver it into our world, and then, with the Internet, return it to the cloud of information. If textual ideas – intellectual property – suddenly becomes so nebulous, then how are we to claim ownership? How are we to attribute creation of a concept to one figure?

My critical argument here is that this is an issue we’ve been wrong about for a while.

We tend to think that this question of “how do we cite community creations” to be a new issue inherent to the Internet. On the contrary, we tend to think of the authorship and creation behind books as simple: they are written by one author. However, an understanding of the communications circuit proves this entirely wrong. The writer always gets his ideas from some experience prior and then those ideas are influenced by editors and then even interpreted into something else radically different by readers and analysts.

Plato might have been wrong with his divine hierarchy and many other things, but perhaps he wasn’t so wrong about humans simply being midwifes to ideas (just misinformed about where that hierarchy resides – actually the information commons, the public domain).

This wiki’s goal is to rip apart each element of the intensely creative, conlanged science-fiction piece *A Clockwork Orange* until readers question its originality and thus our concept of the individual author as the authoritative figure over a piece is entirely destroyed, and, of course, in the process, help readers understand the first two chapters of *A Clockwork Orange* coherently.

## See Also

* A Hypertext Orange Wiki:Why A Wiki?
* Main Text
* Works Cited

## References

1. ↑ Mitgang, 1993, p. 23
2. ↑ Flood, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/25/the-clockwork-condition-lost-sequel-to-a-clockwork-orange-discovered
3. ↑ Flood, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/25/the-clockwork-condition-lost-sequel-to-a-clockwork-orange-discovered

*To see the full list of references for this entire project (and not this specific page), see Works Cited.*