/lit/ - Literature

>>10589426
>>10589618
yikes

>The trapeze artist's costume ripped along his backside with an audible crack, and a more horrible sound of wrongness accompanied what followed: A torrent of dyed diarrhoea, tracing behind the acrobat in an arc of myriad shimmering colours. The audience watched on, mesmerised by a true Gravity's Rainbow.

fucking postmodernists

A Clockwork Orange rings the most true, for a number of reasons. Orwell's dystopia is just a propaganda metaphor that aimed to render the terror of Stalinism intelligible to people (Englishmen) to whom pure despotism was remote from their historical memory - it wasn't in any meaningful was diagnostic of the anti-human elements of Liberalism; it was and is just a morality play about an alien form of total state that Orwell suggested must be actively confronted. Its a pro-democracy fable that avoids punitive critiques of the author's own culture.

Huxley's book is a scathing attack on modernity in general but doesn't provide any great insight into the peculiar theology of Liberalism in and of itself. While cogent and prescient, its more a cautionary tale about global technology and human freedom - and the fact that no extant political system or value system can adequately manage its disruptive features.

The genius of "Clockwork Orange" is that it describes a world where the liberal-democratic regime has mutated into a therapeutic state - an occurrence that, in Burgess' nightmare world. has been exascerbated in scope and intensity by the monumental domination of world-culture and historical dialectic by Sovietism. The answer to ''New Soviet Man'' in the United Kingdom is a kind of ''therapeutic man'' - whose life is shorn of any moral considerations of his thoughts and behavior, he is simply identified as ''sick'' or ''healthy'', which culminates in human creativity becoming synonymous with violence in the minds of people who are brutalized psychologically by a state that is entirely at odds with nature. The book identifies the cultural pathology of Liberalism, in other words. Its aged far better than other dystopian stories for this reason.

let me off this ride