more prolegomena to V. : 1962 and more 1963

[Mark Kohut]

MK changes Ian to:
But if V. was largely finished in '61...?

    * That he {Burgess] had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub in 1945 and assumed it was a Cockney expression.¹ In Clockwork Marmalade, an essay published in the Listener in 1972, he said that he had heard the phrase several times since that occasion. However, no other record of the expression being used before 1962 has ever appeared.[4] Kingsley Amis notes in his Memoirs (1991) that no trace of it appears in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historial Slang. 
    * His second explanation was that it was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning "man". However, the novel contains no other Malay words or links.[4] 
    * In a prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, he wrote that the title was a metaphor for "...an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton."[4] In his essay, "Clockwork Oranges" ², Burgess asserts that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's positively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will. 

Again, I think I remember TRP finding and expressing lacks in Partridge's Dictionary.....

Burgess's mistress, Lhianna Marcella, I think, later his wife, was a TRP reader and later translated GR, I believe. She "met" Anthony via his writing (when
she recognized the similarity in two pseudonymous early works he sent when she was with a publisheror agent) but they did not seem to meet in person until 1963. However, who knows whether she and Candida, TRP's agent, exchanged any manuscripts manuscripts? 

That pavlovian or mechanical laws metaphor SURE came alive in GR...with or without the word "clockwork"...for exactly those free will or wha? reasons....so to speak. 
 
And the phrase 'clockwork universe' came from Descartes, that Enlightment rationalist whom TRP gleefully savages in AtD...
Descartes' universe was a mechanical ('wind-up') clockwork robot universe, with energy only as the property of matter being in motion and nothing other than ...
www.new-science-theory.com/rene-descartes.html- Cached- Similar

A notable exclusion from this theory [Clockwork Universe theory] though is free will, since all things have already been set in motion and are just parts of a predictable machine. Newton feared that this notion of "everything is predetermined" would lead to atheism[citation needed].

undermined by one of our favorite Pynchon concepts: 

This theory was undermined by the second law of thermodynamics ( the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value) and quantum physics with its unpredictable random behavior.
 



On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 6:28 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Clockwork Orange (the novel) was published in 1962.  Not necessarily any thematic connection, but the phrase may have got Pynchon's wheels turning.  Lots of clockwork imagery in V.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>>Sent: Jun 9, 2010 7:14 PM
>>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>Subject: Re: more prolegomena to V. : 1962 and more 1963
>>
>>
>>Continuing the post on 1963 first, here is some more from that year:
>>
>>         --March on Washington
>>         --MLKjr. I Have a Dream speech
>>
>>         --Assassination of America's Fisher-King, JFK, of course, in November
>>
>>         --for the first time, freshman females in the US answer a longstanding goals poll by not putting
>>marriage w white picket fence house and kids first. (still want that, but adventure, travel, chance
>>to be single awhile comes first)
>>
>>1962
>>
>>           Rwanda and Burundi gain independence.
>>    * Supporters of Algerian independence win 99% majority in a referendum. De Gaulle grants independence to Algeria.
>>    * A heavy smog develops over London. [Digression but it is easy enough to see this, sea-changed by a genius, as the giant adenoid in GR, yes? ]
>>
>>      Tanganyika and Uganda become independent within the Commonwealth.
>>
>>      ['nother digression: Rolling Stones play first gig. Times they are a changing, of course]
>>
>>      Anti-Mosley- [the fascist]  crowd disrupts a right-wing Union Club public gathering.
>>
>>     Ranger 4 rocket crashes on the moon. JFK affirms that the US will land a man on the moon before the decade ends.
>>
>>     Cuban missile crisis, October.
>>
>>
>>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."