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A
‘ONE HAND CLAPPING’ APPROACH TO LIFE |
| A
product of Burgess’s ‘terminal year,’ One Hand
Clapping did not receive much critical appreciation mostly because
it appeared under the pseudonym Joseph Kell. It is a first person
narration of life in the 1950’s in the suburban Midlands,
satirizing the world of consumerism as represented by television,
supermarkets, council houses, washing machines, vacuum cleaners,
and so on. The strange title may suggest that the Western wasteland
could be helped by an Eastern philosophy, namely by Zen Buddhism.
As Howard Shirley explains to his wife Janet, one hand clapping
“[is] from Zen Buddhism.... It’s something you have
to try and imagine.... It’s a way of getting in touch with
Reality, you see, proceeding by the way of the absurd.”1 Besides
this non-materialistic hint in total opposition with the materialistic
society depicted by the novel, One Hand Clapping is the very title
of the play within the novel they go to, a play Janet concludes
as being about “everybody being very unhappy because they’d
got their education paid for by the government, or something, and
there was no war on for anybody to fight in, or something like that.”2 It is actually through Janet’s monologue that we find out that, like most other people in the 1950’s, Howard is tortured by the pettiness, vulgarity and stupidity of everything surrounding him, by the threat of another war and of the Hydrogen Bomb, and that he finds life useless to live because “...when all’s said and done, there’s not all that much to live for...there may be no future to bother about.... And it’s a wicked world.”3 In fact both Howard and Janet are but mere products of the society the former rejects, a middle class environment devoid of any aspirations. The inventory of their life and possessions reveals the lack of spiritual perspective that they share: “We had a TV, a radio with a strap like a handbag for carrying round the house, a washing-machine, a vac, but no car of our own or children.”4 I would like to highlight at this point how Burgess short-circuits a very serious problem, like having or not having children, by enumerating it alongside with having earthly possessions as a radio, washing-machine or a vacuum cleaner. This way of mocking important things is a device he likes and employs often enough and is meant to emphasise the pettiness of the characters. Yet if the fairly clever but vulgar and ill-educated Janet totally accepts the values surrounding her, her husband is a severe critic of the world generating these norms, and his ‘gift,’ namely his photographic memory, becomes some kind of paradoxical quality leading him to desire to commit suicide. The story narrated by Janet is at the same time funny and scaring: having won a big TV quiz prize due to Howard’s photographic memory, they can buy and do whatever they may desire. But soon enough happiness is turned into frustration when they discover that “there was nothing else that [they] were missing except the things that money can’t buy.”5 Thus, what in the beginning seemed to be a blessing becomes a burden that affects both of them, although in different ways. As a product of the modern secondary school system where teachers, instead of teaching their students English and History, pay more attention to the entertainment aspect of their education, Janet lacks any understanding of what lies behind the values she accepts. Consequently, she turns from a loving wife into a femme fatale and later on into a murderess, all the while claiming that the only thing she wants is “to live a nice decent life.”6 Howard, who is more intelligent, better educated and more sensitive than his wife, is affected by the threat of mortality as embodied by nuclear weapons and wishes to live like a millionaire for a while and then die. This cynical attitude is the starting point of his quest journey. A typical Burgessian anti-hero, he is remarkable in no way, except for his photographic memory. He works as a used-car salesman and lives a rather dull life that imitates the commercials on TV to such an extent that sometimes reality seems but a pale imitation of television and an episode of a soap opera is far more real than a real emergency.7 Even after having won the TV quiz show and having become a public person he cannot become a local hero because, as Janet puts it, [although] people would point him out in the street...it didn’t seem...that they pointed him out in a nice way, as if he was a pop-singer, but in a sort of mixed way, part admiring and part sneering...as though it was all wrong for a grown man to waste his time on book-learning...8 The fact that he is not recognized as a hero by his community, combined with the illusion that since he is able to reproduce things about the great writers of the past he is automatically endowed with their dignity and idealism, makes his victory as a winner of the quiz a hollow one. In the interview with a reporter from the Daily Window he admits that the great humanistic writers were humiliated at school when [they] had to do them, The Mill on the Floss and A Shorter Boswell and Henry IV Part I were [their] set of books, and [they] drew dirty drawings all over them. And the teachers were no better than [they] were. And now humiliated by just being used to win a thousand pounds.9 He
thus asserts that the great writers of the past are in fact being
negated by mass culture. And these great masters and mass culture
represent the ‘duoverse’ created by Burgess in this
novel. Howard is torn apart between the respective set of values,
he himself being but a pale imitation of the former through his
photographic memory. If Janet lives only in and for the present,
Howard seems to have a slight understanding of the past (i.e., the
superiority of the great masters) and he certainly wants to be able
to plan his future. We’ve got to show the Daily Window and the whole world that we are getting out of the world as a sort of protest. Our deaths will sort of show how two decent ordinary people who’d been given every chance that money can give but no other chance, no other chance at all, how two such people felt about the horrible stinking world. “Death, girl, death...that’s what I’m talking about, death, lovely death. We’re going to die, girl.”10 By
this intention to physically annihilate Janet and himself, Howard
tries to prove both his final detachment from the material world
and his capacity to control his destiny. As critics noted, because
Howard “attempts to understand and develop beyond the limitations
of his environment [he can] only solve his dilemma by the desperate
remedy of death.”11
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