Why is ‘A Clockwork Orange’ so called?
In the book, the writer whose wife is raped is the author of a book called A Clockwork Orange, but as to why Anthony Burgess decided to call HIS book after his character’s book, I dunno.
I don’t have my copy here with me, so i am doing this from old memories.
Basically it was titled thusly becauyse trying to influence to a person’s free will and “build a better person” was like building a clockwork orange… sure the outside would be perfect but internally it would be a useless mechanized version of it’s original inspiration.
I seem to remember Anthony Burgess claimed he overheard someone use the phrase “Queer as a clockwork orange” in a pub, and it stuck with him.
Anyway, the idea is the oxymoron of something being both organic and mechanical. Alex is flesh and blood, but after he’s brainwashed, he’s nothing more than a machine with no free will.
I now have 3 completely different answers!
Just to confirm Cabbage’s info, the phrase ‘queer as a clockwork organge’ was a colloquial term applied to homosexuals in England around the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Why ‘clockwork orange’ exactly? It’s hard to give any particular reasons as to why common colloquial expressions like this grow up… they just do. Obviously, a ‘clockwork orange’ would be something very strange and unnatural, hence very ‘queer’ in the original sense of ‘queer’ to mean ‘weird’. There may be some derivation or influence from the English playwright N.F. Simpson whose pleasantly eccentric plays always had names which embraced contradictions, such as ‘A One Way Pendulum’ and ‘A Resounding Tinkle’.
As to why Burgess thought this the ideal title for his novel, I have no idea and have never come across any explanation from Burgess himself.
My friend, who is a huge Kubrick/Burgess fan, explained this to me once.
If you take something juicy and sweet like an orange, and try to make it run like clockwork, predictably, it would no longer be an organge. Similarly, if you take a human and make him pure good or pure evil, he would no longer be human. Just a machine of God or the Devil. Burgess was speaking out against the State controlling people through behavior control, kind of like a modern 1984, where Big Bro is in your head.
You encounter these issues with modern criminal recovery programs. For example, in the cases of pedophiles, a judge might have them injected with deprovera in order to lower hormone levels. The method used in the book was that they’d give him some painful chemical to produce a Garcia effect with the images and thoughts of violence. The protagonist (antagonist?) didn’t know that the shit they were giving him was causing the pain, so he (and his mind) associated the bad feeling with violence.
Grieve–
All the answers above are correct, taken in aggregate.
I can’t find my copy of “ACO”, but it had an introduction by Burgess in which he explained the origin of the title. In addition to what’s already been said in this thread, Burgess pointed out that “orange” sounds like the Malay “orang”, which means “human”. I think he also mentioned something about the term “clockwork orange” evoking the image of a small explosive, since hand grenades were nicknamed “pineapples”.
Perhaps it was defined in the vocabulary annexed to the book itself, of which I do not have a copy.
“There is the title, to begin with, a memorable and richly suggestive one adapted from a piece of slang: ‘as queer as a clockwork orange’ is a Cockney expression meaning very queer indeed (the meaning can be, but isn’t necessarily, sexual), and Burgess could see its potential even before he had a story to go with it.”
…
“Alex must be able to choose to be good; he must be an orange, capable of growth and sweetness, not a wound-up clockwork toy.”
A review I once read of the book said that “A Clockwork Orange” is a metaphor for a biological machine…like Alex became after being brain washed. Alive, but no free will.