| 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.
The controversy between determinism and free will, present in all
Burgess’s novels, is brought up in One Hand Clapping too,
as we see Howard determined to be the master of his future through
his choices and actions. This is the reason why he tries, and even
succeeds, to train his photographic mind to imagine the future.
Thus he wins on some horse races and multiplies his money. But more
important than money is his feeling that he is able to seize control
of his own destiny. Now he can time and determine his (and Janet’s)
own death. Having in fact little time at hand, he tries to enjoy
everything money can buy, but at the same time he tries to demonstrate
to Janet the futility and meaninglessness of material life. Like
any other Burgessian anti-hero who at a certain moment is separated
from his home (or identity), Howard takes a trip to America, where
he is exposed to new values. But instead of being illuminated and/or
of succeeding in finding a means of coping with himself and the
new world he lives in, Howard learns nothing from this journey and
sticks to his planned death:
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
Yet his suicide “pact” is a “one-hand-clapping”
pursuit since Janet is too intent on living and thus, in self-defence,
she kills him. It is an undistinguished and un-heroic death she
condemns him to by hitting him with a coal hammer, a symbol of the
material world they live in. She thus points to the uselessness
of his un-heroic negativism. From the moment she kills him, Janet
becomes an anti-hero protagonist as well, since she creates her
own values which are certainly in contradiction with the values
of society: besides being a murderess, she becomes a thief too,
and enters into a strange relationship with another man. In a way
she is the one who succeeds in what Howard fails at: she re-creates
her own values and lives up to them. By retiring to a quiet place
in France – again the hero’s estrangement from her natural
environment – she acquires some kind of Buddhist peace, and
lives by the sound of “one hand clapping.”
In Manichaean terms she seems to be an Augustinian, who easily accepts
reality as it is, with its good and evil side, while Howard, who
is disappointed by the society he lives in and tries to reassess
its values, is a Pelagian. The very values which could ultimately
save society place him in a definite isolation as anti-hero, since
he has the disadvantage of finding himself among a minority unable
to utter their beliefs loudly enough, as they can only clap with
one hand. His alienation, a typical anti-heroic one, is the source
of both his separation from the majority who accept a life of conventions,
and of the meaninglessness of his actions. Burgess does not solve
Howard’s dilemma and the latter’s quest journey only
reveals the predicament of the individual facing a cultural wasteland.
Although funny and entertaining, with a clearly satiric point, the
novel depicts an extremely frightening materialistic world.
Notes:
1 Anthony Burgess, One Hand Clapping (London: Vintage, 1996), 106.
2 Ibid., 107.
3 Ibid., 6-7.
4 Ibid., 1.
5 Ibid., 131.
6 Ibid., 169.
7 Ibid., 28.
8 Ibid., 49.
9 Ibid., 68.
10 Ibid., 150.
11 Charles G. Hoffmann and A.C. Hoffmann, “Inside and Outside
Mr. Enderby.” in Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess, edited
by Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven and Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1987), 30.
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