In my book Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology, I have a section titled “The Synoptic Analysis of Programmed Texts.” The section opens with a chapter on “The Advent of Literary Dystopia.” In this chapter, I devote several pages to the examination of several novels by Anthony Burgess. After discussions of Burgess’s 1985 and Byrne (click HERE for my World Literature Today review), I set forth a description of A Clockwork Orange.
Preceding my remarks on this novel and the film, I offer arguments for drawing distinctions among dystopian and satirical works. I describe the origins of dystopian writing in Menippean satire, indicating that the third book of Gulliver’s Travels—the most “dystopian” section of the novel—is the generic forerunner of literary dystopia.
The third book portrays a dictatorship presided over by a scientific academy that parodies the utopian scientific government envisioned by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis. Strictly speaking, satire doesn’t portray future states based on brutality, dictatorship, or totalitarianism—these belong to the domain of literary dystopia. Instead, satire concerns itself primarily with the roles intellectual mythology and orthodoxy play in making dictatorships possible. Thus it is possible to identify elements in 1984 and Brave New World which are satiric and distinguish them from elements which are dystopian. Seen in this light, it is easy to recognize works such as Čapek’s War with the Newts or Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as not being dystopias but satires. (148)
In the conclusion to these remarks, this distinction is expressed succinctly: “If a work describes how bad things are, you have a satire on your hands. If a work describes how bad things could be, you are tangling with a dystopia”. This formula is followed by the rather unsettling admonition: “However, notwithstanding the prophetic element, the roots of dystopia are found in Menippean satire and its diagnoses of euphemism and intellectual mythology. Curiously enough—indeed, ominously—the primary foci of Menippean satire in this respect are not despots or corrupt statesmen, but rather schoolmen and academies” (148).
Here are my remarks on A Clockwork Orange:
(158-159)
A few pages later, the chapter concludes:
(160)
Note: The chapter was expanded from an article of the same title appearing in Extrapolation, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1999, edited by Mack Hassler.
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