A Clockwork Orange and the 'Nadsat' language
1. THE NOVEL
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When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, it was considered sheer Science Fiction. But Anthony Burgess intended this novel, properly novella, to be a study on free will and psychological behaviourism. Burgess's nightmare vision of youth culture, which made him famous as a satirical novelist, offers a gripping insight into the life of a disturbed young man. The imagery is superb, and the details with which the violence is described are never gratuitous. The reader is left breathless, outraged, excited, concerned.
"It is not, in my view, a very good novel," he wrote later, "but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about 1960, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest [that the young criminals] were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment... There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy... Society, as ever, was put first."
A Clockwork Orange is set in a future London. 15-year-old Alex, the main
character, and his three friends are devoted to ultra-violence
and horrorshow. They beat up old men, rape girls, torture and
murder, with no qualms. Despite this diabolical orgy of criminality, they are merry and
spirited like elfs in an Elizabethan comedy. Alex is the only one in his gang who has
fully conscience of what he's doing; on the contrary, his 'droogs' arrange horrorshow in a rather childish way, without knowing why. While
committing ruthless acts of violence, Alex mantains an 'elevated' attitude. He doesn't
listen to pop, but only to classic music. After the government decides to brainwash him by
the 'Ludovico therapy', he'll be no more able to appreciate his favorite composers. (The
name 'Ludovico' concerns with Ludwig van Beethoven.)
Burgess's novel is an interesting, disturbing and controversial work of fiction. Since its
first apparition, it has provoked thought and reaction. John Gardner considered A
Clockwork Orange "Burgess's most brilliant and blackest achievement".
"The reviews it received not only failed to whet an appetite
among prospective book-buyers: they were for the most part facetious and uncomprehending.
What I had tried to write was, as well as a novella, a sort of allegory of Christian free
will. Man is defined by his capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses
good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil instead: evil is a theological
necessity. I was also saying that it is more acceptable for us to perform evil acts than
to bee conditioned artificially into an ability only to perform what is socially
acceptable. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (anonymous in those days) saw the book
only as a 'nasty little shocker', which was rather unfair, while the down-market
newspapers thought the Anglo-Russian slang was a silly little joke that didn't come
off."
(From: A.B., prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A play with music.
Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987)
The English universe described by Burgess in A Clockwork Orange seems to have been subject to both American and Russian intervention, if not invasion, and the derivative language, spoken by the young, indicates the effects of propaganda through subliminal penetration. A motif used in the book is the repetition of the phrase: "So what's it going to be then, eh?" at the beginning of each section. This showing the monotony in the world around Alex, not in Alex' life. Alex and his droogs rebel against the shallow conventions of the society. Alex has chosen evil as a deliberate act of spiritual freedom in a world of radical conformism. Violence may be evil, but in terms of humanity it is better than inertia.
"Burgess's romantic view of violence (...) is that of an
old-fashioned traditionalist who can see no good in our levelled out, contemporary
society, which leads to grey totalitarianism. These romantic views again stem from his
Catholic upbringing of a strict, black Jansenist kind. He calls himself a sort of Catholic
Jacobite, who hates our present-day pragmatic socialism, because, as he explains in Urgent
Copy, '...any political ideology that rejects original sin and believes in moral progress
ought strictly to be viewed with suspicion by Catholics'."
(From: Anthony Burgess, by Carol M. Dix. 'Writers
& their Works'. Published for the British Council by Longman Group Ltd. 1971)
One of the most revolutionary features of A Clockwork Orange is provided by the language used by the four 'drughi' or 'droogs'. Rather than speaking a formal English, they use a vernacular known as Nadsat (the Russian suffix for -teen). Most of their speech is in recognisable English with Russianate words.
"My late wife and I spent part of the summer of 1961 in
Soviet Russia, where it was evident that the authorities had problems with turbulent youth
not much different from our own. The stilyagi, or style-boys, where smashing faces and
windows, and the police, apparently obsessed with ideological and fiscal crimes, seemed
powerless to keep them under."
(From: A.B., prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A play
with music. Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987)
The slang of Alex and his gang is derived from Anthony Burgess's own interest in linguistics and the history of language - see his work published in 1965, Language Made Plane. To understand why he invented Nadsat it is necessary to look at the main subject of the novel. A Clockwork Orange is largely concerned with psychological oppression and governments exercising power over young people. Alex' so-called friends set him up and he goes to jail, where he learns of this new program that would get him out of prison in less than two weeks. He is sentenced to be 'cured'. He is given shock treatment and is told, "You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially accetable acts, a little machine capable only of doing good." When he gets out of the therapy he can be seen as a 'model citizen'. His unexpected hate to Beethoven's music is a side effect that symbolically indicates the losing of his deeperseated sense of humanity.
"It is this suspicion of our contemporary liberal humanism,
of our willingness to reform rather than punish, to educate rather than discipline that is
seen in A Clockwork Orange, as a traditionalist's fear of the future. (...)
Obviously Burgess's feeling is that there is potentially more good in a man who
deliberately chooses evil, than in one who is forced to be good. Men are what they are,
and are not forced into being so by any social conditioning or pressures."
(From: Anthony Burgess, by Carol M. Dix. 'Writers
& their Works'. Published for the British Council by Longman Group Ltd. 1971)
Burgess visualizes the future world as a dark and dismal one. He expresses his view
that no matter how 'good' one's actions are, unless one has free moral choice, he is
spiritually damned. His war is against moral persecutions and pavlovian experiments on
humans. When Alex is treated to become sick at the thought of violence, he turns into 'A
Clockwork Orange'. Or as the prison chaplain says, "When a man ceases to choose, he
ceases to be a man." This is the 'Free Will versus Predestination'-concept. Burgess,
a happily lapsed Catholic, frequently raised the oppositions of free will and
predestination in various of his novels (outside A Clockwork Orange, see especially
The Wanting Seed and Earthly Powers), describing his own faith as
"alternating between residues of Pelagianism and Augustinianism".
A Clockwork Orange forces us to ask the question, "Do we lose our humanity if we are
deprived of the choice between good and evil? Do we become - as the title suggests - A
Clockwork Orange?"
"The book was called A Clockwork Orange for various
reasons. I had always loved the Cockney phrase 'queer as a clockwork orange', that being
the queerest thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some
day to use it as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be
appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an
organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served
in Malaya, where the word for a human being is orang."
(From: A.B., 1985. Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, London, 1978)
2. THE NADSAT
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The use of a completely new syntax is utterly magnificent
- a stroke of genius. And it proves once aggain Anthony Burgess's remarkable ability and
facility with languages of all kinds and with words in general. At a first glance the
vocabulary of anti-hero Alex sounds incomprehensible: "You
could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches."
Or: "So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the
cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While
the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in
and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga
that was the heighth of Roman fashion."
Then the reader, even if he knows no Russian, get to grips with it, and it's a very
expressive and colourful read. Some of the meaning becomes clear from the context: "We gave this devotchka a tolchock on the litso and the krovvy came
out of her mouth", which approximately translated means, we gave this girl a
blow on the face and blood came out of her mouth.
Anthony Burgess has not used Russian words 'literatim', but with deliberate abuse. Some expressions (grahzny bratchny = dirty bastard; lubbilubbing = making love) and single words (gullywuts = guts) sound more accomplished than in English language, and have a touch of magic spell. The light-handed transformation of golova (head) into gulliver - with its Swiftian associates - is only one of many brilliant inventions. Alex and his 'droogs' are addicted to drugs named drencom, synthemesc, vellocet... Other words of the Nadsat are roughly anglicized: khorosho (good or well) as horrowshow; iudi (people) as lewdies; militsia (militia or police) as millicents. Pooshka (cannon) indicates a pistol; rozha (grimace) turns into rozz - one of the words for policeman; samyi (the most) becomes sammy (generous); soomka (bag) is an ugly woman.
This Slav argot is seasoned with rhyming slang and gypsy's bolo. Alex' way of speaking includes the repeating phrase "O my brothers" and words like crark (to yowl), cutter (money), golly (unit of money), sharp (female), filly (to play or fool with), etc. The 'gypsy talk' interfuses with a rhyming slang, which contains expressions like pretty polly for money (rhyming with lolly or current slang).
Occasionally there are inevitable associations, such as cancer for cigarette, pan-handle for erection, mounch for snack and charlie for chaplain. Various neologisms are produced by simple schoolboy transformations: appy polly loggy (apology), baddiwad (bad), jammywam (jam), eggiweg (egg), skolliwoll (school), and so forth. Other words are amputations: guff (guffaw), pee and em (pop and mom), sarky (sarcastic), sinny (cinema).
"But most of the roots are Slav," explains a doctor in the novel. "Propaganda. Subliminal penetration."
"Russian loanwords fit better in English than those from
German, French, or Italian. English, anyway, is already a kind of mélange of French and
German. Russian has polysyllables like zhevotnoye for beast, and ostanovka
avtobusa is not so good as bus stop. But it also has brevities like brat for
brother and grud for breast. The English word, in which four consonants strangle
one short vowel, is inept for that glorious smooth roundness. Groodies would be
right. In the manner of the Eastern languages, Russian makes no distinction between leg
and foot - noga for both - or hand and arm, which are alike ruka. This
limitation would turn my horrible young narrator into a clockwork toy with inarticulated
limbs. As there were much violence in the draft smouldering in my drawer, and would be
even more in the finished work, the strange new lingo would act as a kind of mist
half-hiding the mayhem and protecting the reader from his own baser instincts. And there
was a fine irony in the notion of a teenager race untouched by politics, using
totalitarian brutality as an end in itself, equipped with a dialect which drew on the two
chief political languages of the age."
(From: A.B., You've Had Your Time, pag. 38. Grove Weidenfield, New York,
1991)
As we know, Alex' picturesque vocabulary is largely used in Stanley Kubrick's
cult movie too. If we analyze the book and the movie, we can see that some items
transformed themselves from one to another 'text'.
In the book Alex ends up as a free individual with all his criminal impulses and,
incidentally, his love of music returned. He is considerably matured and ends
optimistically saying:
"Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and turning vonny earth and
the stars and the old luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking
like a mate."
The first edition of A Clockwork Orange in the U.S.A. had the last chapter missing. This was a decision of the American publisher and in no way endorsed by Mr Burgess. The publisher also included a Nadsat glossary, which was also against Mr Burgess's wishes. By using Nadsat, Burgess hoped the readers would see far beyond the mere description of the various violent acts, as this would tend to straight-jacket their feelings for Alex and therefore prevent them from uncovering any deeper meanings behind the work. Star director Kubrick based his film version on the American edition of the book, and this fact modified the balance of Burgess's original story. Also many translations in other languages often miss the real purpose of the Nadsat.
"In Italy, where the book became Arancia all'Orologeria,
it was assumed that the title referred to a grenade, an alternative to the ticking
pineapple."
(From: A. B., prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A play
with music. Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987)
But why had the first American edition the last chapter missing? Perhaps, given American mores and morality, the publisher thought that having Alex (of his own free will this time) become "good" wasn't the right thing and so he snipped that important final chapter. Burgess disliked this editing not only because of the general principle of not tampering with an authors work, but also because he had planned the novel with exactly 21 chapters. We must remember that Burgess was a passionate musician - he wrote a couple of symphonies - and arithmetic has a great weight in the classical music. The number 21 is very important for the structure of A Clockwork Orange. 21 = three sections of seven chapters. And Alex & Co. find their redeeming (and redemption) at the age of 21. The whole novel is based on numbers and symbols, beginning with the title.
"These juveniles were primarily intrigued by the language of
the book, which became a genuine teenage argot, and they liked the title. They did not
realise that it was an old Cockney expression used to describe anything queer, not
necessarily sexually so, and they hit on the secondary meaning of an organic entity, full
of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton. The youth of
Malaysia, where I had lived for nearly six years, saw that orange contained orang,
meaning in Malay a human being."
(From: A. B., prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A play with music. Century
Hutchinson Ltd., 1987)
Although Anthony Burgess said that A Clockwork Orange was intended to be a study about how the State affects the lives of the citizens, its unique language and the formidable character of Alex gained cult status. Director Stanley Kubrick later witdraw his movie following a moral panic about a 'copycat killings' allegedly performed by a youth wearing the costume of Alex and his 'droogs'.
A Clockwork Orange is considered one of the best novels of the Twentieth century, and I agree with this general opinion. But I've read quite all works by Anthony Burgess in the last years and would affirm that Earthly Powers, A Dead Man in Deptford, 1985, The End Of The World News, Tremor of Intent, as well as the 'Enderby'-trilogy, are to compare with A Clockwork Orange for brilliancy, depth, insight and innovation.
Mr Burgess has written more than just one masterpiece...
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