Sep

19

Kid Nation? You’ve Gotta Be Kidding.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

September 19, 2007 |

“There exists in our world an unusal, partly savage tribe, ancient and widely distributed, yet until recently little studied by anthropologists and historians. All of us were at one time members of this tribe: we knew its customs, manners, and rituals, its folklore and sacred texts. I refer, of course, to children.” -Alison Lurie

It’s hard to say what the new CBS show Kid Nation promises. Apparently it’s already causing controversy even before it airs although the commercials for it promise a show the entire family can watch.

Whenever I think of “kid nation”, naturally I think of a book I absolutely hated in high school, and still have mixed feelings about. You might have already guessed that I’m talking about Lord of The Flies by Sir William Golding. It was a book I despised because, well, I already knew that children were savage, monstrous little beasts who would form destructive little cliques if left on their own. Even as an adult I read Alison Lurie’s quote and think, “What do you mean, partly savage?” My feelings toward the book have softened a little–I was helped along by a Salon article, Reading Lord of the Flies, which revealed layers of complexity I missed in my original skimming of the book. Writer Rebecca Traister made me take a second, more serious look at the book with well-chosen quotes such as this one:

 

“Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgement for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her.”

Heavy stuff. And yet I also think the ending is a cheap cop-out. Even Golding himself admitted that, when adults behave like the children in the book, there is no happy ending; there is no uber-adult who steps in to stop the carnage. So why did he stick in a happy ending? Golding undermined his own book by turning squeamish at the end. He’d allow the horrendous murder of a sow, but when it came to butchering one of his own characters he blinked.

Another, even more controversial book, one that’s not, as far as I know, on any high school reading lists, is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. It’s easily Burgess’s best-known book, helped a lot by Stanley Kubrick’s film, and Burgess himself absolutely hated the book. As anyone who’s read the complete version (the book was originally published in 1962 but no U.S. edition with the final, twenty-first chapter was published for twenty-six years) the film cuts off prematurely. Big things happen to little Alex after “I was cured, all right.”

The reason I bring up A Clockwork Orange is because it, too, was kind of a kid nation. While Malcolm McDowell and his fellow “droogs” in the film seem fairly old, Burgess emphasizes their youth in the book. They rule the streets in spite of being so young. Alex has committed rape, theft, and finally murder, and is sentenced to jail at the age of fifteen.

And yet Burgess clearly believed in forgiveness. Also, he’s quite emphatic that this was not meant to be a “true”, or even true to life story, but more of an allegory. It’s set in a dystopian future where synthetic drugs are not only easily available but legal and the youth speak in a strange hybrid of English, Russian, and other languages, along with some modified baby talk. Alex is transformed at the end. He becomes a completely different person. The idea throughout the book is that goodness is chosen, not forced, and Alex chooses goodness in the end.

American publishers weren’t squeamish about the rape, robbery, murders, torture, and other grim details throughout A Clockwork Orange, but faced with a happy ending they blinked. Faced with the possibility that a violent young thug could be genuinely reformed, that children could change from savages into decent, civilized individuals, they cut the twenty-first chapter from the book. As Burgess notes, numbers in his books have significance. Twenty-one used to be regarded as the age of adulthood, and the book itself is divided into three sections of seven chapters each. At the hands of American publishers it became a slightly off-balance book of three sections, two with seven chapters and a final one with six.

A friend and I used to debate whether Burgess really planned the book with twenty-one chapters or whether he tacked on the final one because, like Golding, he was squeamish. Perhaps a more relevant question would be, were the American publishers right? Burgess himself would have to agree that not every Alex chooses to be good in the end; some die young (as does one of Alex’s droogs), and others become even more hardened criminals, mafia bosses and warlords and drug kingpins.

In Lord of the Flies it’s a closed system: the children have no exposure to other possibilities. And for them goodness is not ultimately chosen; goodness, in the form of a uniformed father figure, conveniently shows up just when needed. In A Clockwork Orange Alex begins to change himself at the end. He is helped (not forced) by an external catalyst and finally begins to move out of his old, stagnant life. In one book the happy ending is the easy way out; it’s forced goodness. In the other we’re given more than one possibility; the kids might turn out all right, or they may not. We can help, but, in the end, it’s as much up to them as it is to us.


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