Anthony Burgess

The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)

Emmett

This speculative novel begins with a febrile, starved world, a world groaning under the weight of overpopulation - not the most original idea. It considers what follows from this, which is entirely its own: at the core, the world government's pursuit of a policy, law and culture of sterility in many forms, the literal in the enforcement of homosexual relationships and (he suggests, in turn) the discrimination of heterosexual sex and procreation, to the symbolic - sociopolitical and domestic relations, man reduced to social function and utility, social world reduced to following the ebb and flow of authoritarian mandate, national announcements, the threat of imprisonment. (It is a peculiar interesting premise that is, in the form that it is, it is unlikely to find its way into the mind in contemporary times, much less the written draft or the inked printout.) In its utilitarian greyness, the world is a paler version of Clockwork Orange's.

The 'wanting seed' is economical wordplay, 'wanting' suggesting both yearning and lack. The seed is baldly offspring, the seed of an idea implanted in the novel, seminal beginnings, in the truest sense of the phrase. If this world is limp, colourless and dull as brutalistic post-Soviet architecture and just as morbidly, horrifically, ridiculous in its mass murder cloaked in the mantle of staged battles, its prose and characters are the exact opposite. Beatrice Joanna's (some figure of Dantean Beatrice surely) sensual and wholesome womanly form, a mirror to the unrelenting, glorious fullness of Burgess' prose style, rich oin echoes to novelistic influences and playful with meaning. Burgess suggests and celebrates syntactically the wildness of human nature and the natural vigour of sexual congruence, positing in copulation and manly and womanly desire for each other a rich, primal source of power. Biological reproduction is linked to creation, and artistic plurality in sexual charge lies the core of all art - as one character theorises. Apart from art, the novel is also concerned with theorising cycles of government and civilisation. Coined the Pelphase, Interphase, and Gusphase - the waxing and waning of belief in the goodness of human nature and the ability for self-improvement correlates inversely with the brutality of statecraft. Despite how interesting this all is, there is a moment (perhaps near the cannibalistic plot) where one wonders whether the satirized descent into depravity has all become a bit atrocious and incredible, however since one mustn't underestimate the way civilisations drive themselves into tragic absurdity, perhaps it is not a stretch to imagine this not as satire, too.

For this reader, all this talk about intercourse and art brings to mind Camille Paglia's thesis in Sexual Personae, and here one might pause to wonder about the possibility of what ideas might emerge and be tossed about from a stimulating dinner party conversation between Paglia and Burgess (have they ever met? perhaps? they were both on Buckley's Firing Line). Edit: Not wrong about this. Burgess reviewed this book in "Creatures of decadent light and violent darkness: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" (April 27, 1990) The Independent. London, England: Independent Print Ltd. p. 19.

The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)

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