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Condemning the Neutrals in Oppressively Dull Worlds: Look Back in Anger, a Clockwork Orange, and Equus

Feelings of personal malaise, national diminishment, and general torpor were by no means entirely lifted even when rationing of food and consumer products finally came to a total end in Britain in the early 1950s. Most creative writers, in various ways, gave expression to the national mood, but some of these same writers were not content simply to represent themes of sterility and supineness. Vitality was to be regained, they insisted, by recognition of the forces of deadness, of which indifference and pallid acquiescence were prominent. What we might call the "condemnation of neutrality" theme is rooted most importantly in St. John and Dante, and branches out in modern times through Conrad and Eliot. "Better to be cold or hot, the lukewarm I spit out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16), St. John's dire warning to the lax church at Laodicea, is the germinal text. Several British writers pick the theme up in the post-World War II period. As examples, consider three well-known literary works that carry, very centrally, a condemnation of lukewarmness, fence-sitting, mindless conformity, habitual indifference: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and Peter Shaffer's Equus. Jimmy Porter, antihero of Look Back in Anger (1956), feels that everything about him is dull, suffocating, sterile. The play's atmosphere reflects his mood: it's a rainy Sunday afternoon and evening in the Midlands with Sabbath regulations, "Victorian Sunday," still in force. Jimmy mightily assails the dullness with clever vituperations aimed at the Establishment, his wife (Alison) and his friend Cliff. Jimmy feels his anger is earned, and he also feels that it can be a revivifying force in lifeless environments commonly found in England of the time. He has a passionate hatred of the upper middle class, but has genuine admiration and affection for one member of that class, Alison's friend Webster, because he has "bite, edge, and drive" (NY: Penguin, 1982:18). While Jimmy is neurotic and something of an armchair rebel, he can be seen as justified in his attempts to spark both thought and feeling in Alison and Cliff. Mostly he fails in this until events cause Alison to leave, and then, melodramatically, to return. Alison has come to learn through suffering (the loss of a child either at birth or late-stage pregnancy). Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, had been a chief antagonist of Jimmy, but he has somehow come to understand his son-in-law's point of view. He tells Alison that both she and he (Redfern) "like to sit on the fence" (66). We are made to understand that Alison too has come to accept what Jimmy stands for and that her acceptance is honest and felt in the gut. She says, "I don't want to be neutral. I don't want to be a saint. I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile" (95). Jimmy, with a kind of adolescent outrageousness, attacks his wife and friend with insults. Alex, the fifteen year old protagonist of A Clockwork Orange (1962), indulges in atrocious physical assaults nightly: drug-fueled rape, mayhem, murder. He behaves the way he does, he thinks, because he chooses to do so, but the oppressive drabness of his surroundings surely plays a role. He lives in a municipal flatblock (housing project) with parents who go out to work ("rabbit") each day at tyrannously dull and meaningless jobs only to return late each day to their apartment where they will, they hope, be safe behind locked doors. People everywhere may well have become oppressed by a mind and spirit-numbing homogeneity, even world government, perhaps, as we learn that there will be a "worldcast" (NY: Norton, 1986:17) on TV this night. …