The ‘Baroque Weaving Machine’: Contrasting Counterpoint in James Joyce and Anthony Burgess

Abstract

The English polymath Anthony Burgess is today most commonly remembered for his dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange, later filmed by Stanley Kubrick. However, he was an avowedly experimental author of over 30 novels who nevertheless garnered significant popular sales for his fiction and worked extensively in the collaborative fields of popular television and cinema. He espoused conservative politics, the aesthetics of modernism, and aspects of Roman Catholicism during an era when all three were largely unfashionable, and yet found his opinion was sought by many prominent European newspapers on current affairs. From outside academia, he produced volumes of literary criticism and pursued a career as a novelist who composed music, describing himself as a composer who wrote novels. He was an exile who wrote about England, and an Englishman who wrote about the collapse of the British Empire, leavened by a proto-postcolonial perspective. He was unashamedly highbrow, yet habitually appeared on chat shows. He was simultaneously a reviewer, performer, editor, poet, dramatist, composer, journalist, educator, and fiction writer.