Mr. Burgess likes to portray the universe as a "duoverse," that is, a cluster of contending opposites which agitate against moderation. "The thing we're most aware of in life," he writes, "is the division, the conflict of opposites—good, evil; black, white; rich, poor—and so on." And since living in the center of this conflict is, to use Mr. Burgess's illustration, like trying to picnic in the middle of a football field, we gravitate naturally (and gratefully) toward any ideology which is able to convince us that this conflict is actually an illusion, that in fact there is somewhere an ultimate unity in which all extremes resolve themselves. To this end the Church proffers God; socialism, the classless society; and the artist, his art.

"Art," according to Burgess, "is the organization of base matter into an illusory image of universal order." The artist is an alchemist, drawing on the inherent disorder and dissonance of the human experience and somehow transmuting them into a dazzling display of order and harmony. Contending forces which divide our allegiances in the real world are tamed and reconciled in the artistic creation, or at least seem to be, and the illusion of unity is the final product of this creative process.

Yet though most people, according to Burgess, are possessed by the need to unify, they generally accept solutions rather than work out their own. How many Calvinists are there, after all, for every Calvin; how many Marxists for each Marx? Only the sexual division, the thing that makes a man different and apart from a woman (and vice-versa), is actually resolvable on an individual and thoroughly active level. This ritual, grâce à Dieu, is the exclusive possession of no one class or profession—there is, one assumes, no sexual aristocracy—and it may serve the artist as well or as poorly as it does anyone else. But it is of particular importance in Burgess's novels about artists because, as another means of achieving confluence, sex is closely allied with the creative act. It is, in fact, consistently used to reflect the condition of the less democratic syntheses which his artist-characters pursue.

Sex and art, then, serve as two separate though related expressions of the same drive, and because Burgess's protagonists in Nothing Like the Sun and A Vision of Battlements resort frequently to both, the two provide a good perspective on the conflict and confluence theme which figures so prominently in the ever-burgeoning Burgess canon. (pp. 46-7)

[In A Vision of Battlements] "the rock" looms like a threatening deity over the affairs of Sgt. Richard Ennis, Burgess's half-fictional protagonist who finds himself posted in wartime Gibraltar as instructor in the newly formed "Army Vocational and Cultural Corps." The unit is divided into two branches: the forward-looking "Vocational," which goes about training men to build a new world when the war is over; and the backward-looking "Cultural" (Ennis's), which is supposed to inculcate an appreciation for the arts, but languishes instead in the inattention of what C. P. Snow was to call the New Men. Ennis wants to make it in this new world, for his own sake as well as for his wife's (she eventually runs off with an American—the new world personified), but finds himself irresistibly attracted to the old: to his art, to the ancient culture of the Spanish and the Moors, and to his Spanish mistress, Concepción.

Burgess's description of the dilemma is characteristically direct: "Ennis had become a manichee, at home in a world of perpetual war. It did not matter what the flags or badges were; he looked only for the essential opposition—Wet and Dry, Left Hand and Right Hand, Yin and Yang, X and Y. Here was the inevitable impasse, the eternal stalemate."… And down the line the alliances form. Ennis's English wife, Laurel, is cool, refined, aseptic; Concepción is rich, warm, fragrant. While Laurel is the England of the Norse gods and the briny sea, Concepción is Spain, the ancient mingling of Latin and Moorish cultures, the stronghold of the Catholic Church—not the defensive, displaced Catholicism of Ennis's (and Burgess's) Northern England, but the proud, entrenched faith of Mediterranean Europe. And while Ennis is portrayed as sexually impotent with his wife ("Really, you are impetuous"), he is seen to enjoy a quite satisfactory relationship with Concepción, the product of which, predictably enough, is conception. (pp. 47-8)

The dichotomy, of course, brings to mind Shakespeare, particularly the Shakespeare of the sonnets, who serves, if somewhat posthumously, as the subject of Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun. Fair England and dark Africa once more compete for the allegiance of the artist, and once more, it is the very delicate, refined beauty of the aristocratic North balanced against the rich and passionate allure of a black woman. In Nothing Like the Sun Concepción reappears as the dark lady, an East Indian woman of mysterious background whom Will woos and wins for his mistress; and Laurel's place is taken by young Harry (WH), Earl of Southampton, patron and sometime object of Will's hypergamous affections.

The important distinction between the two pairs, however, is not so much that the fair image turns male, but that the hostile/reverent attitude which characterized this relationship in A Vision takes on the added aspect of sexual attraction. With Laurel, Ennis is unable to achieve any sexual compatibility; rarely, in fact, does he think of her in sexual terms. But with young Harry, Will manages to express both his hostility and his admiration through the ambivalence of their homosexual relationship. Sex serves as a vengeance as well as a pleasure, and as a result, the role of the fair image in this novel becomes much more complex and much more vital.

Burgess carefully adumbrates the relationship which is to develop between Harry and the poet by inserting early in the narrative a number of passages which establish Will's homosexual leanings. (p. 48)

In the light of Burgess's concern with artistic synthesis, particularly synthesis as it carries over into sexual activity, homosexuality certainly seems a distortion of the drive to unite the male/female division. In A Vision, this is partially explained by the notion of channeling the energy which derives from the tension of conflict out of the natural heterosexual solution into the more demanding but ultimately more satisfying possibilities of art. The greater the sense of division, the more potent (and productive) the drive to unite it. When Ennis talks about transmuting lust into creative energy, it is to this that he is referring. The "calm epicene atmosphere" of Julian and his circle serves to dam the energy which might otherwise dissipate in lesser (i.e., sexual) activities.

But the relationship between the creative and the sexual impulse is much more complex than this simple equation of psychodynamics suggests, primarily because other factors enter into the process. For Ennis, as well as for Will, sexual excitement becomes almost a necessary condition for the creation of art. Time and again these artist/protagonists find themselves composing, often against their own will, at the height of their sexual passion. (p. 50)

In a sense, sexual heat becomes the muse, the inspiration to create. This is certainly the case in Nothing Like the Sun, where the entire narrative is built up around the conviction that the sonnets Shakespeare wrote stemmed from his bisexual entanglements. (p. 51)

But neither the homosexual nor the heterosexual relationship endures through the maturing of Shakespeare's own artistic abilities, and by the time he is ready to begin the period of the great tragedies both have virtually expired. Love ceases to be his goddess—fair or dark—and, simultaneously, love ceases to be his muse. The venereal disease which he contracts (Burgess speculating here) represents the product of his love, just as the miscarriage and death of Concepción in A Vision represent the end result of Ennis's love. Heterosexual love proves not only unproductive, as is the homosexual, but destructive, a force which is capable of inspiring the soul to create, but which in the process exacts a terrible price. The goddess is no longer one of love and sweet verse, as the early comedies certainly suggest, but an embodiment of the evil which shackles the lives of good men in the tragedies. Scabrous and near death, WS perceives that the disease which has come of his love is a metaphor for the evil that dominates all mankind, that "… the great white body of the world was set upon by an illness from beyond, gratuitous and incurable. And that even the name Love was, far from being the best invocation against it, often the very conjuration that summoned the mining and ulcerating hordes"…. In both novels then the movement is away from this form of inspiration, and toward deeper and more personal wells of creative energy. Sexual love reveals itself to be far more destructive than it is procreative, and the division between man and woman, so alluring in its promise of synthesis, yields only to the confluence of the protagonist's art. (pp. 51-2)