As Queer as A Clockwork Orange
A Stylistic Analysis of Nadsat in ANTHONY Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
Created to present a nightmarishly dystopian possibility of a British, perhaps even global future, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a novel that follows the life of its 15-year-old narrator, Alex; a protagonist who revels in sadistically committing crimes like rape, murder, and theft to defy the ‘disconnected society’ he does not yet understand. Through an entirely unique language, Nadsat (a popular cultural idiom for teenagers), Burgess manages to present numerous explicit subject matters that go against both his, and our contemporaneous moral social laws. Following Alex through a diegetic narrative, Burgess utilises his ‘anti-language’ of invented, abbreviated slang and colloquialisms, integrating a combination of Russian, Cockney English and mild inclusions of French and German, to describe and create that peculiar, yet familiar, world of A Clockwork Orange.
Through an analysis focusing largely on Text World Theory, this essay aims to highlight how the language of the text is highly important in the creation of an investable text world. Using the theory’s key elements; world builders (time, locale, characters and objects of the text) and function advancers (acting as verb phrases, such as auxiliaries in both English and Nadsat), we will begin to develop an understanding of how Nadsat is established as a precursor to creating a text world. Nadsat’s desired effect is to create a feeling of isolation and alienation for the reader; they must, as the text goes on, learn to actively decipher the strange nature of Alex and his ‘droogs’ speech. The effect of this alienation is intrinsically important to the building of the novel’s text world as it does not completely push the reader out into a sphere of incomprehension but instead places them into a feeling of defamiliarisation. Nadsat’s meaning is gauged when an event or action within the text contains just enough information to make sense of a particular scenario. For this to work, Burgess uses Nadsat to create the necessary initial discourse world so that eventually the reader may comprehend the meaning of its independent vocabulary. The reader is then capable of constructing a text world through their schematic knowledge of Nadsat, using Burgess’s discourse world to both comprehend and form the context surrounding the events of the novel.
Through an initial reading of the text, A Clockwork Orange presents itself as a novel of ‘behavioural modification, and how it is taken to dangerous extremes in the quest for preserving the order of a disconnected society and Alex’s violence against this. It evokes a paradigm of a pre-dystopian world - a world of both real and dystopian qualities – that represents conditioning and entrapment through its use of language. Heller and Kiraly (1974) put forward that because of the explicitly graphic nature of Alex’s crimes, communicating in Nadsat acts as a cathartic expression that allows Alex to feel emotion in an increasingly robotic world; yet it also manages to keep the reader separate from Alex’s crimes. In terms of Text World Theory, to understand a world in which the book and the readers may exist, we must also explore the text through different stylistic lenses; encroaching upon devices from Schema Theory; - which concerns how readers can store existing knowledge and access it as they read; Deictic Shift Theory - how the reader assumedly creates a mental modal of the ‘text world’ which they relocate themselves into; and Modality - how language reflects the interpersonal functions that interplays between people. Alex presents a strong epistemic modality, his assertive and authoritarian nature throughout the extract highlights that he feels in control of his actions. As the narrator, albeit an unreliable one, it is through his view that we see, and therefore create, our text world(s). The epistemic and boulomaic modal verbs or verb phrases Alex so strongly uses, for example, ‘untrussed’, ‘ready to plunge’ and ‘plunged’ in a line like ‘… while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge. So, me plunged. Plunging, I could slooshy cries of agony…’ help to establish the kind of the world he and the reader may now exist within. These verbs and structures act as function advancers to contextualise and construct more complex discourse world references (stylistically called world-builders) that enable us to see and understand the world in which Alex inhabits. Thus, emphasising that as the narrative progresses, the language is used so pervasively that once discernible, allows the reader, through a deictic shift, to regard Alex with a ‘form of empathy’ that enables us to become a part of his world —the text’s world.
Throughout A Clockwork Orange, the inclusion of Nadsat is interwoven heavily with the text’s use of standard English. In many respects, it acts both as an amplifier and a buffer for the violence of the text. Although it may initially estrange the reader from trying to comprehend the language and violence that it so openly presents, as the novel progresses, the repetition of certain words and lexicological phrases, such as ‘droogs;’ meaning gang members, ‘veck;’ man or person; or ‘viddy’; see, helps to support the reader’s understanding of what is going on and the violence in Alex’s actions. In this sense, it holds an importance for the reader as it creates a distinction between them and the intense violence that Alex commits. These words then, in certain structures or formats, act as function advancers that aid in the world-building of the text. They help to establish the differences between the text world; a construct created by the reader through their individual interpretation of the text, and the discourse world; the real world in which Burgess attempts to communicate with the reader. In the extract, we are placed directly in the middle of one of Alex and his Droog’s violent escapades. Located in Chapters 2 and 3 of Part 1, this passage is possibly one of the most pivotal of the text. Over the past few chapters, Burgess has presented his readers with a new hybrid language that they must learn to comprehend to truly understand the text itself; thus, leading to the creation of what we hope to be a personal yet true text world. Linguistically speaking, the mirroring of violent acts Alex and his other ‘droog-ish’ characters commit highlights the onomatopoeic style or qualities that Nadsat presents. Although Nadsat contains foreign words; these words contain logical morphemes, phonemes and other phonetic devices that sound like the actions they describe (Galen 2002:16). Examples of these are highlighted:
“Georgie with like a cold leg of something in one rooker and half a loaf of cleb with a dollop of malso on it in the other […] They clopped over to the writer veck whose horned rimmed otchkies were cracked but still hanging on […] who was still creech, creech creeching…”
In this excerpt, the reader can become aware of how the context and formation of Nadsat’s words help to identify their specific meaning. Considering this, they could easily make sense of Georgie making a sandwich in the ‘veck’ and ‘devotchka’s’ home. The function advancing phrase ‘…dollop of malso’ can be ‘translated’ to a dollop of mayonnaise using the verb ‘dollop’ and the voiced nasal consonant ‘m’ followed by the ‘ei’ sound of the ‘a’ vowel in ‘malso’ that also parallels and fronts mayonnaise. The same is increasingly plausible with more violent lexes like ‘clopped’, ‘slovos’ and ‘creeches’. The alveolar plosive consonants and relative sibilance of the ‘p’, ‘c’, ‘s’ and ‘d’ sounds help to amplify the animosity and violence of the words. It presents how words can be given more meaning through sound, intensifying their intended violence once understood, and ultimately giving the reader a larger conceptualisation of a situation and its context, facilitating the creation of a more realistic text world.
By incorporating ‘Nadsat’, Burgess utilizes its unfamiliarity and lexical contexts to establish recognizable schemas through its recognisable world builders like locale, objects and preconditional headers of human development and behaviour. By looking at the extract, it’s easy to say that A Clockwork Orange is a satirical work, one that aims to highlight the violent delights and exploits of a futuristic teenage gang, satirizing the psychologist B. F Skinner’s theories of human behaviour and the welfare state of 1970. This is illuminated through the numbering of the novel's chapters, combining them with determining sentences and word-structures, such as ‘I’d done the lot now. And me still only fifteen.’ we become increasingly aware of the novel’s stimuli for schema’s relating to growing older, highlighted by Alex’s ascension into a later stage of adolescence. Burgess himself posited that novelists of my stamp are interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that [a] number has to mean something in human terms’ for it to be registered and understood." Contextually speaking, at the age of twenty-one, those within the U.K, the United States, and the USSR were eligible to vote; this age, both within the novel and its inter-text-to-world nature signifies a maturing human being. Here, as Semino would illustrate, the text uses its schemata to project human behaviour through actions of violence, numerical significances (chapter titles) and lexical choices. By leaving the readers to construct an interpretation for themselves, their prior world knowledge and ‘the interconnections [of] textual triggers’ adds further meaning to Alex’s behaviour and the text’s ambiguously familiar events. Considering Burgess’s finite perspective on life (in 1959 he was diagnosed with a cerebral tumour that estimated he had only a year to live), Esther Petix presents that ‘the reader is as much a flailing victim of the author as he is a victim of time's finite presence’. Here she denotes that, in some way, the novel is a ‘coming-of-age’ for Alex. To present the schema of growing older, Alex’s final decision at the end of the novel ‘to settle and have children’, alongside his more frequent use of standard English helps solidify this belief. This, to some degree, is the same for the reader, as by reading the book, they have entered their own text world and are ‘charged with advancement and growth’.
Self-described in Burgess’s original introduction as a ‘standard prototype of the dystopian sub-genre, the backdrop of A Clockwork Orange evokes the heavily uneasy and immoral natures of texts such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or George Orwell’s 1984. Much like their individual texts, the reader is presented with a mysterious, yet oddly familiar sense of the text world. Within these works, the protagonists must go through an understanding of moral development that suits the world around them. Nadsat’s often highly metaphoric or ironic style assists in creating uncertainty or uneasiness that, in turn, mirrors the mind of its own protagonist. The identification of the proto-Anglo-Russian phrases draws upon the ‘real world’, or discourse world’s contexts that the reader is familiar with and illuminates the ambiguity of the text world that is needed to make it appear dystopian. This is necessary, for as the novel's anti-hero, Alex is presented as a youth who fights to feel alive in a corrupt society that he does not quite understand, the language of the text helps the reader to more openly identify with Alex and his world. Within the extract, the use of the word "horrorshow", which would normally evoke a sense of the grotesque, or terror is translated to ‘beautiful’. The phrasing may seem metaphorical due to the dark connotations it presents, but for Alex, it simply states his excitement over the violence he and his droogs commit. Realistically, ‘horrorshow’ is seemingly incongruous, it’s ironic due to the paradoxical nature it elicits. However, the linguistic confusion of Nadsat and the ironies it puts forth help make sense of what kind of world A Clockwork Orange is trying to establish. It’s a motif of sorts, one which in some respects can appear self-aware, highlighted by when Alex discovers a book by the ‘viddy’ entitled ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Derived from the old English expression "queer as a clockwork orange," (meaning something very strange), Alex and the reader realise that the world they may exist within is indeed a clockwork orange, something Alex cannot deal with due to his own adolescence.
Yet, the highly pervasive incorporation of Nadsat within Burgess’s text does not force the reader into a situation where they feel disconnected from, nor apart of, A Clockwork Orange’s world. Through its use of ironic and metaphoric language, begetting alienation, defamiliarisation and other devices, it allows the reader to become immersed within its text world or remain totally ignorant to it, as it veils the violence of the story. For the most part, its anti-language and intriguingly unfamiliar style to tantalise the reader, intriguing them to learn more of its language; making it seemingly impossible to ignore the actions and events of the text and inviting the reader to become a part of its dystopian world.
References:
Burgess, A. (2000). A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin Group. pp. 12-20.
Duchan, J. F., Bruder, G. A., Hewitt, L. E. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. University of New York Press: New York. pp. 1.
Fowler, R. (1979). Anti-Language in Fiction. Style, 13(3), 259-278. [online] available from < http://www.jstor.org/stable/42945250 > [3rd January 2017]. pp. 259.
Galens, D. (2002). A Study Guide for Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (Novels for Students). Michigan: The Gale Group. pp. 6-7., 12., 24.
Golding, W., Epstein, E. L. (1954). Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee.
Hitchcock, V. P. (1999). A Clockwork Orange. in Tibbetts, J. C., and Welsh, J. M.
Welsh, Novels into Film. New York: Facts on File. pp. 36–37.
Jeffries, L., McIntyre, D. (2010). Stylistics (Cambridge Textbook in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 77-78., 126-133., 152-153.
Moya, S. (2011). A Clockwork Orange: The Intersection Between a Dystopia and Human Nature. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. pp. 7.
Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. London: Secker and Warburg.
Petix, E. (1962). Linguistics, Mechanics, and Metaphysics: Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. State University Press of New York: Buffalo. pp.3-4.
Semino, E. (1997). Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman. pp.125.
Vogler, K. (2009). Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange: Alienation or Identification? Druck und Bindung: Norderstedt Germany. pp. 10.
Werth, P. (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. pp. 7.
Extract 1: A Clockwork Orange, Chapter 2.
Burgess, A. (2000). A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin Group. pp. 12-20.
Here we see Alex and his Droogs enter a house through force, leading to the committing of horrendous crimes, such as assault, theft, and rape.
‘It’s a book,’ I said. ‘It’s a book what you are writing.’ I made the old goloss very coarse. ‘I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books.’ Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name-A CLOCKWORK ORANGE-and then I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: ‘-The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creature, against this I raise my swordpen-’Dim made the old lip-music at that and I had to smeck myself. Then I started to tear up the sheets and scatter the bits over the floor, and this writer moodge went sort of bezoomny and made for me with his zoobies clenched and showing yellow and his nails ready for me like claws. So that was old Dim’s cue and he went grinning and going ere r and a a a for this veck’s dithering rot, crack, crack, first left fistie then right, so that our dear old droog the red- red vino on tap and the same in all places, like it’s put out by the same big firm- started to pour and spot the nice clean carpet and the bits of his book that I was still ripping away at, razrez, razrez. All this time this devotchka, his loving and faithful wife, just stood like froze by the fireplace, and then she started letting out little malenky creeches, like in time to the like music of old Dim’s fisty work. Then Georgie and Pete came in from the kitchen, both munching away, though with their maskies on, you could do that with them on and no trouble. Georgie with like a cold leg of something in one rooker and half a loaf of kleb with a big dollop of maslo on it in the other, and Pete with a bottle of beer frothing its gulliver off and a horrorshow rookerful of like plum cake. They went haw haw haw, viddying old Dim dancing round and fisting the writer veck so that the writer veck started to platch like his life’s work was ruined, going boo hoo hoo with a very square bloody rot, but it was haw haw haw in a muffled eater’s way and you could see bits of what they were eating. I didn’t like that, it being dirty and slobbery, so I said:
“Drop that mounch. I gave no permission. Grab hold of this veck here so he can viddy all and not get away.” So they put down their fatty pishcha on the table among all the flying paper and they clopped over to the writer veck whose horn-rimmed otchkies were cracked but still hanging on, with old Dim still dancing round and making ornaments shake on the mantelpiece (I swept them all off then and they couldn’t shake no more, little brothers) while he fillied with the author of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ making his litso all purple and dripping away like some very special sort of a juicy fruit. “All right, Dim,” I said. “Now for the other veshch, Bog help us all.” So he did the strong-man on the devotchka, who was still creech creech creeching away in very horrorshow four-in-a-bar, locking her rookers from the back, while I ripped away at this and that and the other, the others going haw haw haw still, and real good horrorshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge. So me plunged. Plunging, I could slooshy cries of agony and this writer bleeding veck that Georgie and Pete held on to nearly got loose howling bezoomny with the filthiest of slovos that I already knew and others he was making up.
Then after me it was right old Dim should have his turn, which he did in a beasty snorty howly sort of a way with his Peebee Shelley maskie taking no notice, while I held on to her. Then there was a changeover, Dim and me grabbing the slobbering writer veck who was past struggling really, only just coming out with slack sort of slovos like he was in the land in a milk-plus bar, and Pete and Georgie had theirs. Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed–typewriter, lamp, chairs–and Dim, it was typical of old Dim, watered the fire out and was going to dung on the carpet, there being plenty of paper, but I said no. “Out out out out,” I howled. The writer veck and his zheena were not really there, bloody and torn and making noises. But they’d live.
So we got into the waiting auto and I left it to Georgie to take the wheel, me feeling that malenky bit shagged, and we went back to town, running over odd squealing things on the way.”