All Slang Is Poetry

Nadsat in “A Clockwork Orange”

Since its inception, language has often played an outsized role in the dystopian novel. The obvious example of this relationship lies in George Orwell’s seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian state uses a language — Newspeak — to enforce Party principles and limit freethought. Beside Nineteen Eighty-Four, state-controlled languages appear — to varying degrees — in works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. These novels meditate on the principle of linguistic determinism, the idea that language and its structure shape human thought. Accordingly, the totalitarian state in each novel seeks to control language as a means to control thought. But in some dystopian literature, the role of fictional language extends beyond the tale and into the telling. In rare instances, the fictional language is used not only in dialogue but in narration, integrating into the piece itself, and such is the case with Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a brief and violent mid-century novel. The adolescent anti-hero, Alex DeLarge, narrates in his own Russo-English argot called Nadsat, and to this the novel owes not only its near-canonical status but its existence. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess uses Nadsat to sanitize horrific violence, yield rare moments of poetic beauty, and establish artistic longevity.

Anthony Burgess — one might argue — was a linguist first and an author second, and this seems likely when considering the complex argot that Burgess designed for the novel. Nadsat stands as a form of Russian-influenced English, an English grammar containing a number of non-English substantives. In addition to Russian (droog from друг for friend), the language contains neologisms from Cockney rhyming slang (cutter from bread and butter for money), the King James Bible (sammy from Good Samaritan for generous), and German (klop from Klopfen for knock), and some words which Burgess invented through juvenile mutation (eggiweg for egg).

Alex and other members of the book’s violent teenage subculture speak Nadsat, and the name itself comes from the Russian suffix equivalent of “-teen.” At one point after Alex’s arrest, two psychologists discuss Nadsat:

“Quaint,” said Dr. Brodsky, like smiling, “the dialect of the tribe. Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?”

“Odd bits of old rhyming slang,” said Dr. Branom, who did not look quite so much like a friend any more. “A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.” (Burgess 75)

From this exchange, one phrase outstands: the dialect of the tribe. This line refers to the poem Little Gidding, in which T.S. Eliot wrote of the need to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” an allusion to the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé who promoted linguistic and cultural paternalism. Nadsat — as with any other language — sets its speakers apart from others and “forms a crucial…constitutive part of the droogs’ manly masquerade, merging them into a uniform elitist group and thereby perfecting the artifice of their fearless and seemingly invulnerable warrior masculinity” (Schoene 259). Within the novel, this language barrier further divides adolescents from society at large, greatly impeding communication between the two groups. At the end of the novel, when Alex dreams of starting a family, “Alex’s narrative voice and language also change significantly, as he adopts terms and values approved by society” and this shift highlights the effect Nadsat has in separating Alex from the law-abiding and -enforcing citizenry (Goh 296). This degree of linguistic separation between Alex’s cohorts and the authorities (e.g. parents, passersby, police officers, and prison guards) leads to a breakdown of empathy in both directions. The disintegration, in turn, causes much of the cultural warfare that pervades the work.

A Clockwork Orange features scenes of violence with ordinary frequency and extraordinary intensity. Each night, Alex leads a group of teens to commit opportunistic, random acts of “ultra-violence” for the sake of sociopathic gratification. The novel includes horrific actions — assault, torture, rape, murder. Perhaps the worst single act occurs when Alex lures two ten-year-old girls back to his apartment and rapes them:

I felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two young ptitsas. This time they thought nothing fun and stopped creeching with high mirth, and had to submit to the strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large which, what with the Ninth and the hypo jab, were choodessny and zammechat and very demanding, O my brothers. But they were both very very drunken and could hardly feel very much.

When the last movement had gone round for the second time with all the banging and creeching about Joy Joy Joy Joy, then these two young ptitsas were not acting the big lady sophisto no more. They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. (Burgess 33)

If written in plain English, most readers would find the acts in question unreadable, but as seen in this passage, “[Nadsat] is the jargon of rape, plunder, and murder veiled in unfamiliarity, and as such it works highly successfully” (Petix 224–225). Nadsat provides euphemisms for acts of violence: “the old in-out” means rape while “a twenty-to-one” means gang beating, and “it is far simpler, for example, to read about a ‘krovvy-covered plot’ or ‘tolchocking an old veck’ than it is to settle into two-hundred pages of ‘blood-covered bodies’ or ‘beatings of old men’” (Petix 225). Just as George Orwell wrote that “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, so do “the soft Slav roots fall upon the images like soft snow, blurring the outlines” in this novel (McCracken 280). The argot sanitizes the violence to the point of readability. A Clockwork Orange — one might argue — simply could not exist without Nadsat.

Not only does Nadsat sanitize violence, it aestheticizes violence. In the beginning of the novel, Alex and his friends fight a rival gang. Alex describes cutting into his much-slower enemy:

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz — left two three, right two three — and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. Down this blood poured in like red curtains. (Burgess 14)

John Steinbeck often praised beauty in literature, even making allowances for “dreadful beauty.” And — in its own way — this description of violence holds a certain beauty. The sentences waltz across the page, catching a rhythm of their own. Even as the reader contemplates the destruction of the human body, the language becomes poetic. The two curtains of blood phrasing seems graphic, yet stylized. His fat filthy oily snout seems rhythmic in its meter: FAT FILTH·y OIL·y SNOUT. In the winter starlight seems romantic, at once in and out of place. Nadsat — in the near-boundless power of language — has made violence sanitary and aesthetic, readable and enjoyable. But the beauty of Nadsat is not always dreadful.

In rare instances, the argot captures moments in ways that English cannot. This happens when Alex takes a short break in between crimes to lie on his bed and listen to Beethoven. He describes the music:

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. (Burgess 24)

In this moment, Burgess breaks from dystopia and falls into a sort of Joycean fit. Burgess describes music with colors and textures, weaving a patch of synesthetic prose. In a terrifying novel, this stands as a moment of pure, unfettered beauty. Throughout A Clockwork Orange, Burgess presents appalling scenes through appealing sentences, and this juxtaposition leads the reader to a question of origins. Does the horror penetrate the beauty, or the reverse? Shel Silverstein once wrote, much to the same effect: “I asked the zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits?”

Beyond style, the use of Nadsat reinforces the universality of A Clockwork Orange. Burgess manufactured Nadsat from a variety of languages, so the argot remains unbound to any one location. Accordingly, readers do not immediately associate the story with any one setting. The dystopia of A Clockwork Orange stays applicable to all societies — Alex’s story could happen in London or New York or Paris. The book itself has never gone out of print, and appears in translation all over the world. (Publishers famously encountered problems with English-Russian editions, given Nadsat’s heavy Russian influences. The publishers eventually settled on translating an English novel with Russian slang into a Russian novel with English slang.) Burgess’ use of Nadsat keeps the novel — and its message — alive and frightening for readers in any nation.

Not only does Nadsat promote universality across place, it preserves longevity over time. Dystopian novels often transpire in the near future, and for good reason — dystopia (the literature argues) might lie just a few years away if current trends persist. But this presents a problem: how can the novel endure once the near future has become the distant past? In short, anachronism poses the greatest threat to vitality. Yet dystopian literature has continued to endure after decades. Consider Orwell’s masterpiece, which he wrote in 1948 and which he set in 1984. In 2017, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains immensely popular, topping the bestsellers list in January with the inauguration of Donald Trump. Critics often credit the novel’s timelessness to Newspeak, its fictional language, and just as Newspeak has helped preserve Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nadsat has helped preserve A Clockwork Orange. When outdatedness can kill a book, salvation lies in never dating it.

After contemplating the intricacies of Nadsat and its implications, one begins to notice its technical role in the novel. The argot sanitizes scenes of extreme violence which might have prevented the novel’s publication. Beyond sanitization, Nadsat is fundamental in the aestheticization of violence and the creation of beauty. Nadsat takes A Clockwork Orange out of place and makes it placeless, takes the novel out of time and makes it timeless. In these ways, Nadsat yields a novel with a more-universal applicability and more-endless endurance. For decades, dystopian authors have manipulated language, but Anthony Burgess advanced the genre by manufacturing his own.

The English critic G. K. Chesteron wrote, “All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry,” while the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” These sentiments seem to collide in Anthony Burgess horrific novel, a masterpiece of tale and telling that is at once dark and searing. Ultimately, A Clockwork Orange is good literature because it is great language.