This essay reads Jack Womack's near-future novel Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993) in the context of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962). Although published thirty years apart, the latter in Britain and the former in the United States, A Clockwork Orangeand Random Acts of Senseless Violence demonstrate some striking similarities. Both are the stories of very young protagonists, Burgess's 15-year-old Alex and Womack's 12- year-old Lola. Both are set in near futures of incredible violence, state violence as well as street violence. And, most strikingly, both use a language which is quite radically different from our own familiar English, a narrative strategy which results in a powerful kind of defamiliarization. My initial interest in these two novels began as an examination of the ‘future’ discourses which are so outstanding a feature of each text; however, over time I have become more interested in the kinds of fictional subjectivity constructed through these discourses, rather than in the discourses themselves.

1. Theory/Context

The theoretical context for this discussion is what has been called the ‘death’ of the subject, one of the most resonant of the many ‘crises’ which have come to be identified with the postmodern condition. This particular crisis has arisen because of redefinitions of the subject which, in the context of Enlightenment thought, has traditionally been characterized as the individual self of liberal humanism. Recent reformulations of subjectivity, however, have raised intriguing and disturbing challenges to Enlightenment positions. For instance, Fredric Jameson suggests a convincing (re)construction in his claim that the ‘shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject [a familiar concern of modernism] is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject’. Within the context of the postmodern, the subject is no longer that unified self, that self-identified entity, the construction of which has been tracked by Michel Foucault in works like The History of Sexuality and The Order of Things. In one of his more apocalyptic—and frequently quoted—turns of phrase, in fact, Foucault writes of ‘man’ as ‘an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.’