Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
My Syphilised Yarbles
We'll say one thing for Alex: he knows his composers.
Yeah, we know. That's a bit like saying "Hey, Hannibal Lecter knows his French cooking!" but the fact remains: Alex, a fifteen-year-old rapist and murderer, has the tastes of a sixty-year-old musicologist.
And, according to some, that should make him an automatically good kid:
I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I'd viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieted Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha power. (1.4.24)
"Civilized my syphilised yarbles" is right. (We think?)
Think-pieces claim that youth is being corrupted by crazy new fads—and, if they only listened to the right music, they'd be respectable members of society. Of course, in the case of Alex, they're dead wrong. Alex admits that listening to great composers makes him hunger to commit violent acts.
Maybe it's this knowledge (that classical music spurs Alex to rape and murder) is why the Ludovico technique is designed to make Alex hate classical music. But we don't think so: the doctors in charge of administering the technique admit that the music is just atmospheric. In any case, the end result is that Alex—the former classical music lover—is made physically ill by the sound of Beethoven, etc.
This underlines how horrible and misguided the Ludovico technique is. While the technique strips Alex of the ability to choose to be violent, it also strips him of the very thing that newspapers assume "would like quieted Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized." It removes the good along with the bad.
Or—and we're going to complicate this real quick—there is no "good" to be removed along with the bad. "Great Music" doesn't "quiet [Alex] down." It riles him up and makes him thirsty for blood. Art isn't meant to do good—it's meant to make you feel. And music, in Alex's case, certainly gets the job done.