Burgess's A Clockwork Orange extends and amplifies the theme of language in a dystopian society, dealt with earlier in Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984.
Unlike those two earlier novels, written in ordinary language in the third person, Burgess has his central character Alex narrate the story in a strange futuristic English in which, significantly given that the novel was written in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, there are many words borrowed from Russian. The Russian-derived words often have an inverted-meaning implication. For instance, the word khorosho which means "good," becomes "horrorshow" in this new English. Droog (friend) sounds like the English word "goon"—an apt description of Alex and his buddies. Apart from the Russian-isms, there is a strange, dreamlike quality to Alex's language. In a way that seems astonishingly prophetic, this scaled-down and rambling English anticipates the informal and abbreviated language of text messages, and of social media in general, of our time.
The weirdness of Alex's English emphasizes the distance between his generation and the older people, the survivors from the Establishment of the previous age who are depicted still doing such things as watching TV and writing books. The man Alex encounters doing the latter is writing a manuscript actually titled "A Clockwork Orange." This phrase in itself presents a linguistic riddle that is at the heart of the novel's theme. Most Americans, and possibly even most British people, have (or had, before Burgess himself explained it) no idea that these words are evidently Cockney slang, used in the phrase "queerer than a clockwork orange." Though Burgess and others have advanced additional meanings, it would be almost as valid to regard "a clockwork orange" as a deliberately nonsensical phrase, symbolizing the meaninglessness of the chaotic future world of the novel.
In Brave New World, though the characters speak normal English, their language is also dominated by catchphrases and sloganeering, altered from past expressions and reflective of their dystopia, such as "Ford's in his flivver, all's right with the world." In 1984, the Party, in creating "Newspeak," is undertaking a massive reduction in the English vocabulary, in order to limit thought and essentially turn people into automatons. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess takes these literary techniques a step further by writing the narrative itself in a futuristic form of English that is emblematic of a dysfunctional world, in which the new normal is the violence and psychosis of his main character, Alex.
Sunday, July 23, 2017
How are themes of language developed within Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange?
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