Against Forewords: A Rant About A Clockwork Orange
I recently read A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, for the first time. It’s a story best known as the 1971 Stanley Kubrik film (which I have seen many times), but it started life as a short novel from 1962, and let’s just say Burgess did not like what Kubrik did to the book. Not at all. In the edition I read, there was a quite scathing authorial foreword on this very subject, a foreword that has inspired my rant today.
Burgess has two major complaints: the first is that he actually doesn’t think much of the book, and is grumpy that Kubrik’s film has given this “lesser work” such immortality. The second – and more interesting – point is that Kubrik’s film uses the American edition of the story, rather than the British one. The American version cuts the twenty-first chapter, where Alex decides that he is too old for this sex-and-violence lifestyle, whereas the British version has it. The American version is accordingly darker, and it feeds through into Kubrik’s adaptation. Burgess is upset that this upends the themes of his text, going so far as to complain that a static protagonist invalidates the point of the novel (or indeed any novel).
Basically, Burgess has no business writing this as a foreword.
Firstly, there’s the comment on quality. No reader wants to be told they’re wasting their time by a book’s own preamble. Gregory Benford’s foreword to Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men makes the truly inane suggestion that the early chapters ought to be skipped, and then takes an irrelevant potshot at Stapledon’s politics. Jeff VanderMeer apparently has an introduction to a Clark Ashton Smith collection where he attacks Smith’s prose style. In either case, it is a mystery why the publisher included a hatchet job within the covers of the actual book – and in the present case, it is doubly a mystery because this is the author doing the bashing. Burgess may have thought he was expressing honest frustration, but for me as a reader it backfired. The author telling me A Clockwork Orange isn’t worth reading makes me less inclined to try his other works. It also makes me think they’re a tad pretentious.
More importantly – and this is where Burgess’ foreword truly irritates me – it is not the author’s job to tell me how to interpret the text. Interpretation is the job of the reader, not the author. I actually prefer the American version (and Kubrik’s film) because as a reader, I do not buy Alex’s change of heart in the twenty-first chapter – it feels like a cop-out, rather than an organic development of the character. Yes, Burgess is making the thematic point about the supremacy of choice – Alex chooses to do terrible things, then has his ability to choose taken from him, then he suffers for it, then he finally emerges, and decides to “become an adult.” It is just that, based off what Alex is, I do not feel he would have made that final choice.
By contrast, cutting the story off at the twentieth chapter leaves Alex as an evil little shit – but an evil little shit that has undergone character development from “rebel” to “government salary-earner.” Moreover, if Burgess is emphasising the role of individual choice, Kubrik emphasises the role of social institutions in limiting that choice. The film also sets Alex’s fondness for sex and violence against the darker underpinnings of his own society (brutal prisons and police, and copious implied perversions. Et cetera). While I normally regard themes as the most important element of adaptation, in this case, I genuinely appreciate the contrasting views presented in film and book – a dialogue worth having.
In short, my own reading of the text differs from what the author wants me to think. Serves him right, really.
Nor is Burgess alone in producing a foreword to his own text that really has no business being there. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a book I actually think is the author’s best (primarily because I hate Kvothe) – but Rothfuss does not help himself by producing both a foreword and afterword that add absolutely nothing except page-count. It screams cynical padding when an author keeps patting themselves on the back for how uncharacteristically literary they are being. Oh, and there is J.R.R. Tolkien, who at least uses the foreword of The Lord of the Rings to remind his readers that the book is not allegory. Tolkien’s foreword, in contrast to Burgess,’ is basically telling the reader that interpretation is up to them – an admirable sentiment, but it has done little to discourage the inevitable Second World War analogies it tries to pre-empt. Also, while I understand Tolkien’s reasoning for his foreword far better than Rothfuss’, a foreword that tells readers to think for themselves arguably serves the same basic purpose as no foreword at all.
More generally, I think forewords can be justified in situations where the text is of great historical significance – where the reader may appreciate some historical background on the book, without being told what it means – or where the casual reader really does need a bit of hand-holding before starting the book (i.e. it’s James Joyce or something). Otherwise I think forewords do more harm than good. If the author or commentator can’t help themselves, and really need to comment on content, I much prefer an afterword – which the reader will encounter having already reached their own conclusions. An afterword allows reader and commentator to be on the same page, so to speak, whereas a foreword does not.
A Phuulish Fellow 