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"O my brothers": Reading the anti-ethics of the pseudo-family in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
College Literature, Spring 2002 by Davis, Todd F, Womack, Kenneth
A neo-humanist criticism in its own right, family systems psychotherapy provides readers with a powerful mechanism for reflecting upon the role of the family in literary texts. Its theoretical rapport with ethical criticism finds its origins, moreover, in each paradigm's valuation of the significant interrelationships that inevitably exist between our senses of selfhood and the larger worlds in which we live. In The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy, Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales observe that "the members of one's family are one's significant others par excellence" (1979, 9). As an inherently open system, the family must at once provide support for integration into a solid family unit as well as differentiation into relatively autonomous selves.2 According to the terminology of family systems psychotherapy, finctional families possess the capacity for achieving morphogenesis, which John V. Knapp defines as the process that allows a given family system "to deviate from its usual relationship among component parts and even to amplify that deviation" (1996, 67).William C. Nichols and Craig E. Everett further explain morphogenesis as the process through which families effect radical, meaningful change. Morphogenesis "involves altering the nature of the system itself so that new levels of functioning are achieved" (1986, 130). Reaching such "new levels of functioning" allows family members to achieve selfhood beyond the boundaries of their family systems. While most families succeed in accomplishing morphogenesis and creating other functional and differentiated family units outside of their original family systems, some families succumb, rather understandably, to the pleasing equilibrium of homeostasis, which Barnard and Corrales define as a family's tendency-no matter how detrimental it may be-to preserve constancy. "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability" (1979, 13). Despite its considerable danger to a given family member's ability to achieve selfhood beyond the family system, homeostasis provides the family with a means for preserving its various-and often unhealthy-value systems.
In addition to its obvious therapeutic applications, family systems psychotherapy's clinical vocabulary affords literary scholars with a critical mode for investigating, in fictional narratives, the role of the family both as an agent of change and as a mechanism for maintaining stasis. In contrast with Freudian and psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, family systems psychotherapy maintains that the family presupposes the individual as the matrix of identity. Interpretive paradigms that rely on Freudian and other forms of psychoanalysis-perhaps because of their intense focus upon issues of "downstream causality"3 and early childhood experiences-simply neglect to consider the interpersonal family dynamics that impact a given literary character's evolution toward selfhood. Reading the terminology of family systems psychotherapy through the lens of ethical criticism underscores the value and meaning inherent in the concept of efferent reading. In one sense, efferent reading ultimately provides Burgess's protagonist with the means for establishing his own form of ethical renewal.Yet in a larger sense, the act of efferent reading affords the audience of A Clockwork Orange with a mechanism for questioning the dubious ethics that undergird the value systems depicted in the novel, as well as the ethical dilemmas that we encounter in our lives beyond the text. Merging the terminology of family systems psychotherapy with the moral philosophy inherent in contemporary ethical criticism allows us to recognize the vital intersections in the novel between Burgess's satirical anti-ethics and the problematic familial structures that Alex encounters throughout the narrative.
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