"O Ourang's time" & "A Clockwork Orange"

I’m new to Finnegans Wake. I know that there is a temptation to overinterpret, see things one wants to see, or draw connections that aren’t there. Even if I’m wrong, I’m surprised I can’t find evidence anyone has commented on this. I’ve googled, searched several article databases, read McHugh’s annotations, etc.

With that caveat out of the way:

I was reading aloud at Joyce’s grave (as one does) Wednesday night, when I came to p. 96:

“O Ourang’s time” (minus a few O’s) is strikingly similar to “A Clockwork Orange.” I remember googling in college the meaning of that title. The main theory was that “Orange” was a play on “Orang,” the word for “man” or “person” in Malay. “A Clockwork Orange,” then, is a man who acts with regularity.

“Ourang” is an archaic spelling of “orang,” short for the original English/Latin word “Ourang-Outang.”^(1) “Time” as “clockwork” is self-explanatory.

I searched and found no sources drawing this connection. (Tell me if there is one!) I checked if Stanley Kubrick was a fan of Joyce. He was, and several commenters have drawn connections between his work and Finnegans Wake. But nothing that nailed the connection…

Thing is, I forgot that A Clockwork Orange was originally a book! As I’ve been reading FW and researching allusions, theories, and meaning, I kept seeing “Anthony Burgess.” His quote is a blurb on the back of my copy of Ulysses: “Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.” He wrote FW’s abridgement A Shorter Finnegans Wake, as well as Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader.

But I nearly fell over when I realized he is the author of A Clockwork Orange.

Burgess has affirmed the mechanical-organic meaning of the title in a 1986 introduction to the novel, which he called “Introduction: A Clockwork Orange Resucked”^(2):

(He mentions that the phrase is Cockney slang as well, but it’s unclear if Burgess was pulling legs there. Burgess makes the “Malay orang = man” connection explicit in only one place, that I could find, and it’s Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce.)

Burgess’s quote above highlights one of the primary themes of Finnegans Wake: The importance of the Fall. If there were no fall from grace, there would be no free will. If we were good all the time, we would be denied the gift of God’s mercy. “For God consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” Romans 11:32. O felix culpa! O foenix culprit!

This thematic connection between the novels is drawn many places. I see nowhere, though, connecting the quote “O Ourang’s time” itself to “A Clockwork Orange.”

“O Ourang’s time” is also a reference to “Auld Lang Syne,” as noted by Roland McHugh, et al. I could draw a tenuous connection between it and my interpretation, but there’s no need. I’m not discussing Joyce’s intent; I’m discussing Burgess’s interpretation and use of the material. I’ll put my thoughts together on how the broader passage relates at another clockwork…

Footnotes:

1. As seen in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” by Edgard Allan Poe, among elsewhere. ↩︎
2. “Resucked” is notable phrasing. One can’t help but surmise that this nonword (perhaps Nadsat) is an allusion to “Be it suck” one line below “O Ourang’s time.” ↩︎