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Concerning the title
from Anthony Burgess' preface in the modern american prints:
"...I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed
with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If
he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork
orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with
colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound by
God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the
Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be
totally evil.
...I don't think I have to remind readers what the title means. Clockwork
oranges don't exist, except in the speech of old Londoners. The image
was a bizarre one always used for a bizarre thing. "He is as queer
as a clockwork orange" meant he was queer to the limit of queerness.
It did not primarily denote homosexuality, though a queer, before
restricitve legislature came in, was the term used for a member of
the inverted fraternity. Europeans who translated the title as Arancia
a Orologeria or Orange Mécanique could not understand
it Cockney resonance and they assumed that it meant a hand grenade,
a cheaper kind of explosive pineapple. I mean it to stand for the
application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing
with juice and sweetness." |
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