What is Nadsat

One of the most innovative aspects of A Clockwork Orange is the language Burgess’s protagonists employ. Nadsat, Russian for ‘teen’, is the invented slang in which Alex narrates the novel, his experiences described in raucous and unfamiliar prose. Much of his inspiration came from a holiday to Leningrad in 1961, which he discovered reminded him of the Manchester of his youth. It was a rare occurrence for a British citizen to travel to Russia in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, and this is perhaps one of the reasons Burgess is often confused with spies of the period such as Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Yet, the impetus for Burgess’s trip was cultural curiosity, and he hoped to produce a novel from his experience. In fact he produced two: A Clockwork Orange andHoney for the Bears (1963). Arguably, Tremor of Intent (1966) also contains some inspiration from this period.

In preparation for his trip, Burgess spent time learning the language, just as he had with the Malay language during his time in the colonial service in the 1950s. His love of language, whether the tongues of the European countries in which he lived, or plain English, pervaded everything he wrote. From the Northern simplicity of One Hand Clapping (1961) to the Elizabethan richness of Nothing Like the Sun (1964), to the linguistic innovation in novels such as Napoleon Symphony (1974) and, of course, A Clockwork Orange, Burgess’s writing takes endless pleasure in words. He writes, ‘One feels strongly (at least I do) that practitioners of literature should at least show an interest in the raw materials of their art’.

In addition to the Russian influence, Nadsat derives from a number of other sources: Romany; Cockney rhyming slang; the language of the criminal underworld; the English of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans; armed forces slang; and the Malay language familiar to Burgess.

Within this patchwork of languages, Burgess is careful to allow context to offer definitions. When we hear Alex talking of his intention to ‘tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood’, it is clear what is being said, yet often Nadsat is used as a language of opposition, something that establishes the droogs as an isolated counter-cultural group, even before their brutal behaviour is described.

Much like George Orwell with his ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949), Burgess aimed to create a timeless language to depict his dystopian future, perhaps the reason why the novel has had such longevity. The language also removes the action of the novel from geographical location, and the city it is set in could stand for anywhere from Manchester to Leningrad, London to Los Angeles, or other even more distant locales.

Burgess viewed his use of Nadsat as a ‘brainwashing device’, something he writes about in You’ve Had Your Time (1990): ‘The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually clarified by context: I would resist to the limit any publisher’s demand that a glossary be provided. A glossary would disrupt the programme and nullify the brainwashing’. The book’s editor, James Michie, had some hesitations about the density of Nadsat in the novel and stated a desire for Burgess to ‘make it gently accelerando. You can’t throw too much of it at them too quickly’. This editorial suggestion led to revisions in the first part of the novel, and is shown when Alex helps the reader through some of the tougher language. For example: ‘rooker (a hand, that is)’, ‘litso (face, that is) and ‘my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim’.

Despite Burgess’s insistence that there should be no glossary, there have now been many editions of the novel that include a glossary, including the exhaustive and meticulous one contained in A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the novel in 2012.

What inspired Burgess for writing the novel?

Burgess was inspired to write A Clockwork Orange during a visit to Leningrad in 1961. There, he observed the state-regulated, repressive atmosphere of a nation that threatened to spread its dominion over the world. At the time of his visit, the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, and communism was establishing itself in countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Cuba. Burgess regarded communism as a fundamentally flawed system, because it shifts moral responsibility from the individual to the state while disregarding the welfare of the individual. Burgess’s deeply internalized Catholic notions of free will and original sin prevented him from accepting a system that sacrifices individual freedom for the public good. A Clockwork Orangemay be seen in part as an attack on communism, given the novel’s extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice.

During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi,gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. While Burgess was eating dinner at a restaurant one night, a group of bizarrely dressed teenagers pounded on the door. Burgess thought they were targeting him as a westerner, but the boys stepped aside graciously when he left and then resumed pounding. Burgess insists that he based nadsat—the invented slang of his teenage hooligans in A Clockwork Orange—on Russian for purely aesthetic reasons, but it seems likely that this startling experience influenced his portrayal of Alex and his gang. Along with English Teddy Boys, a youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s associated with American rock music, the Russian gangs provided a template for the hoodlums in A Clockwork Orange.

However, A Clockwork Orange shouldn’t be understood simply as a critique of the Soviet Union or of communism, because the dystopian world of the novel draws just as much on elements of English and American society that Burgess detested. In his own estimation, Burgess had a tendency toward anarchy, and he felt that the socialistic British welfare state was too willing to sacrifice individual liberty in favor of social stability. He despised American popular culture for fostering homogeneity, passivity, and apathy. He regarded American law enforcement as hopelessly corrupt and violent, referring to it as “an alternative criminal body.” Each of these targets gets lampooned in A Clockwork Orange, but Burgess’s most pointed satire is reserved for the psychological movement known as behaviorism.

Popularized by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s, behaviorism concerned itself with the study of human and animal behavior in response to stimuli. Through the application of carefully controlled system of rewards and punishments—a process referred to as conditioning—Skinner demonstrated that scientists could alter the behavior of test subjects more effectively than had previously been thought possible. (In one famous experiment, he successfully trained laboratory pigeons to play ping pong.) To many people, behaviorism seemed to offer an almost limitless potential to control human behavior, and the movement had a profound effect not only in academia, but on education, government, and criminal rehabilitation as well. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess satirizes behaviorism with his portrayal of the fictional Ludovico’s Technique.

BACKGROUND

A Clockwork Orange was written in Hove, then a senescent seaside town. Burgess had arrived back in Britain after his stint abroad to see that much had changed. A youth culture had grown, including coffee bars, pop music and teenage gangs. England was gripped by fears over juvenile delinquency. Burgess claimed that the novel's inspiration was his first wife Lynne's beating by a gang of drunk American servicemen stationed in England during World War II. She subsequently miscarried. In its investigation of free will, the book's target is ostensibly the concept of behaviourism, pioneered by such figures as B. F. Skinner.

Burgess later stated that he wrote the book in three weeks

About this blog

This blog is dedicated to an investigation of the dystopian novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess. The book is interesting not only from the point of view of its deep, philosophical ideas, but from the stylistic point of view as well. Linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of the novel will be further investigated. The problem of translation the book into Slavic languages will also be studied.