A Body that Listens: Musical Sinesthesia in a Clockwork Orange

Abstract

A Body that Listens: Musical Sinesthesia in a Clockwork Orange.
Gianfranco Marrone

The most recent semiotic research (that studies subjects such as the passions, aesthesia and the body) have placed in the limelight an important theoretical question that Claude Lévi Strauss dealt with at the end of the 40's: symbolic efficacy. Upon working with the tangible assumptions of enunciation (and, therefore, with the somatic results of communication) the problem of the way in which discourse transforms the body becomes, among others, absolutely pertinent.

In order to study the problem of symbolic efficacy, I propose in this article a first analysis of the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962). The incidents center around the delinquent named Alex who is a very violent and unbiased young man being submitted to a forced "cure" that tries to save him by constraining him from doing anyone anymore harm. But after an initial moment in which the cure seems to dominate his mind, the protagonist threatens to return to his initial state of "ultraviolence," unless he spontaneously decides to grow, mature and raise a family. This double transformation occurs through two fundamental actors: on one side Alex's body and on the other, music.

The analysis of the three basic scenes of the novel in which the protagonist listens to music (the main part of his "cure," an initial scene in his own home and at the end of his suicide) makes us realize that reception does not occur only through the sensory organs predisposed to hearing (like the ears), but also elicits action from the entire body. Music penetrates the body of the protagonist directly who finds himself compelled to eliminate it through the strangest ways: with sperm, vomit, in short, with his own body thrown from a window. In this fashion, the Merleaupontian idea of the paradox of the body receives its farthest reaching consequence.