“Effective Ambiguity in A Clockwork Orange“
Genre: Academic Essay, Portland State University
Product: Graduate-level Literary Analysis
An Essay on the 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange
“Until an individual shelters himself with strict dogmatic structures for understanding the world around him, the innumerable variables that a person considers when assessing a moral or ethical decision creates a natural ambiguity.” –John C Flavin
(Photo located at goodreads.com)
The following academic essay was written for a graduate-level English course at Portland State University. The objective of the assignment was to identify any British author in Great Britain’s history, then analyze the use of language and how that language affected the reader’s experience.
A Clockwork Orange, written by Anthony Burgess and published in 1962, is a deceptively complex work with regard to Burgess’s treatment of language. He combines straight English, Cockney English, and a Russian-influenced argot called “Nasdat”.
My experience analyzing the use of language in this novel was like that of an energetic child discovering a magnificent playground; it was fun writing this paper, parsing through the various languages, and deconstructing and reconstructing the characters, plot lines, and layered ideologies. (Photo located at socialbookshelves.com.)
John C. Flavin
Professor Lo
Portland State University – ENG 596
July 15, 2008
Effective Ambiguity in A Clockwork Orange
In the novel, A Clockwork Orange, written by Anthony Burgess in 1962, contemporaneous society is shown to be inglorious, contemptible, and fearful. English-speaking people know that their literature has a thousand-year thematic tradition of glory and grandeur, and it has long implied or even demanded expectations of how a member of society might conduct himself. This tradition is ignored by Burgess, who, through the narrator and main character, Alex, uses onomatopoeia and paradox that creates ambiguity in order to make graver implications: that society and its people are not valorous—they are weak and live disparate lives. Instead of polishing what he saw as a dysfunctional society during the 1950s and 1960s in order to inspire celebrated moral and ethical choices, Burgess redefines English language conventions and smashes tradition by stretching literary techniques in unprecedented and innovative ways.
The most glaring technique used by Burgess is his use of a language called “nadsat”. It is a constructed language that uses a combination of Russian words, invented words, and English cockney. The use of Russian words in a book that holds no hope for society broadens our understanding of Burgess’s distrustful perspective on ideologies of social order. He was critical of Soviet communism, one of two competing Cold War, superpower ideologies when he wrote the book. “He makes the argot Russian, as if to warn his readers of what society may become if it communizes itself along Soviet lines. The medium becomes the message…with a vengeance, and the message is similar to that in other distopias that deal in visions of society in the future after it has become static, completely controlled, amoral, and heartless” (Evans 409).
In addition to choosing Russian words and phrases as a metaphor for his social criticism, nadsat makes it difficult on the reader. Even when a nadsat glossary is available, it means having to stop reading every sentence, often several times per sentence, in order to understand it. Alternatively, the reader may wish to understand the meanings of the individual words by referring to the context. For example: “Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley…” (Burgess 9). We can guess that “deng” is money because Alex says in that sentence there was no need for any more “pretty polly” (also money) to “tolchock [meaning to beat] some old veck…” Alex then suggests it would be done in an alley, which connotes a dangerous place where muggings more often happen, and then later adds that the victim would swim in his blood and he and his three friends would count the “takings and divid[e] by four…” (Burgess 9). A third possible way to read the book would be to intentionally read through without comprehending every word. It is the most efficient way, and in order to enjoy it, it might possibly be the only way (unless you have a fetish for new words and language and enjoy the process of referencing a glossary in order to understand an otherwise useless language). Roland Barthes, French literary critic, proposes that reading is an erotic experience, one that is pleasurable and results from a person sharing special and solitary time with the literature. He says, “In reading, all the body’s emotions are present, mingled, and coiled up…” (39). By inserting an obscure, and yet symbolic, language into the main character, Alex, who is expected to tell the story, Burgess forces the reader to either struggle to better understand him or to read on without fully understanding him. The text forces either engagement or abandon. Elaborating on Barthes’ (who would undoubtedly appreciate this element of A Clockwork Orange for its “writerly text”) assertion further, the reader is persistently taken out of the present in order to figure out how to comprehend the book; the reader is not readily mingling with the novel, rather he is battling to engage; and finally, the reader is not wrapped up in the content, rather he is continually challenged to ask questions about meaning (Barthes). Burgess’s choice to use this constructed language forces the reader to ask questions and investigate more deeply into the text and the ideas that it portends. The invented language engages rather than shuns the reader (especially one with deep literary interests), and, as we will explore shortly, Burgess uses the vehicle of nadsat to delve into more intricate and subtle layers of meaning that further emphasize his distopic view of society.
The novel is a metaphor for what Burgess sees as a disconnection between factions of society and it is an expression of his disgust for the lack of meaning (and subsequent abhorrent behavior) that he saw in society. “For Burgess, society’s brutality is more threatening than the individual’s; its power is inhuman, enormous, and unrestrained. Burgess, commenting on A Clockwork Orange, has indicated that he meant to encourage a comparison between Alex’s brutality and society’s: ‘The violence in the book is really more to show what the State can do with it’” (Rabinovitz 48). Burgess utilizes literary techniques to augment this metaphor. He manages to extend the usage of onomatopoeia, beyond auditive words, that hold a higher onomatopoetic value.[1] By constructing the pseudo-language with this literary technique, it reads with an air of lightness, which, paradoxically, is perfectly contrary to what the words are describing: destruction, violence, rape, and other crimes. Principle One in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics says, “the linguistic sign is arbitrary” (Saussure 964). According to Saussure, the word for stupid could just as likely be candle, and if it still means stupid, then its linguistic sign—what we name it—is arbitrary. But onomatopoeia, in particular when used with auditive words, proves this to be untrue, especially with the worldwide and multi-language use of certain auditive words. For example, the words for a crow calling in English is caw caw; in Finnish, it is kraa kraa; in German, it is krah krah; and in Japanese, it is kaa, kaa (lonympics.com). If a word can sound like what it means, then it is no longer an arbitrary sign. The onomatopoetic word chosen to make the sound of a crow calling, by definition, makes the sign decidedly not arbitrary; rather, the signified dictates, across languages, cultures, and hemispheres, essentially the same sign.
The critical importance of this separation from Saussure’s First Principle is to highlight the significance of Burgess’s constructed language to not only symbolize his criticism of Soviet brutality, but also to emphasize the paradox created by using a language that possesses high onomatopoetic value spoken most avidly by Alex, a ruthless and apathetic criminal.
Burgess’s invented nadsat languge has two kinds of nadsat words that hold this type of value, some refer to sound words and others do not. The following are a few invented and auditive words with strong onomatopoetic value: blub, meaning to sob; chumble, meaning to mumble; clop, meaning to knock; and then, creech, meaning, to scream (Burgess 187-191). These four examples were invented and inserted into the language of the narrator throughout the book. We know the purpose of onomatopoetic words—to ellicit greater imagery in the minds of the reader—but here it also adds to the paradoxical nature of the reader struggling and succeeding to understand and relate to Alex. Burgess wastes no time indicating the amoral nature of Alex, who as narrator, tells on the first page that he and his “droogs” will beat an old man in an alley and leave him swimming in his own blood. Further, they won’t do it for his money. The implication there is they do the beatings for fun; they are not desparate. Nadsat, with these onomatopoetic and poetic qualities, is “essentially a pseudo-language constructed upon a series of phrases, puns, and uncertain connotations” (Davis and Womack 25). This paradox affects the quality of the reading. For the scrutinous reader, it can be unsettling to read, much like Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler in The Great Dictator, spinning the giant globe as if it were an idle pastime.
Other paradoxes exist. As previously mentioned, Burgess immediately establishes Alex as a hoodlum in order to be very clear he is detestable in his behavior and attitude. He also immediately establishes Alex as a complex individual, and not merely a one-dimensional thug. Alex isn’t greedy; “Money isn’t everything” (Burgess, 10). Alex dresses well; “The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion…” (Burgess 10). Prior to beating a man nearly to his death, he approaches his victim by noticing the books he is carrying: “It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother” (Burgess 13). Alex suddenly speaks with excellent grammar, ceases to speak in nadsat, and makes a social observation in this sentence; he is not a one-dimensional thug, he is capable of deliberating civilized discourse. This paradox, a meaningless thug with no connection to society who is also bright and attentive when he wants to be, makes the reader work even harder to, as Barthes put it, be “present, mingled, and coiled up” in the literature (39). Instead, the reader, in addition to detesting the narrator, is posed with the possibility that he is redeemable, since he is capable of discerning some social values from others. “Without redeeming qualities, the morally repulsive Alex would be a cardboard villain…” (Rabinovitz 49). But there is yet another layer of paradox that Burgess employs in order to guide the reader.
This time he redefines the grammatical uses of the words you and thou. Roger Brown and Albert Gilman explain the fundamental power structure created by this distinction, and how their use can assert a superior or inferior position. “…Power is a relationship between at least two persons, and it is nonreciprocal in the sense that both cannot have power in the same area of behavior. The power semantic [in you and thou] is similarly nonreciprocal…” (Brown and Gilman 255). Alex, the narrator and main character, uses these modes of pronominalization, you and thou, according to whether or not he is in control of the relationship. If he is in control, Burgess wrote the character of Alex to use the formal and polite version of the pronoun, thou. When he is not in control, Alex uses the pronoun, you. Deviating from the conventions, Alex pays no attention to whether he is familiar with the other person in the relationship. “It is with the thou/you pronoun distinction, and not the nadsat vocabulary, that Burgess indicates the significant changes in the central character in the novel” (Carson 200). And it is through this paradox—Alex is polite and conventional when he conducts himself in morally reprehensible ways, yet informal and familiar when he conforms to social conventions or the authorities—that Burgess takes control of the English language to suit the text, the context, and the deeper metaphors of this novel. And A Clockwork Orange is a novel with ambiguous messages. It requires several readings and deeper analysis to draw definite conclusions—and still they are debated as to their meaning.
Burgess employs mainly a veridical paradox: “A paradox can reveal a true, but completely unintuitive or startling, consclusion from the premises” (bennorton.com). Alex is an amoral criminal who nonetheless gets mad at one of his “droogs” (fellow thugs) when he was rude in public by insulting a singer in a bar: “But old Dim [Alex’s droog]…let off one of his vulgarities, which in this case was a lip-trump followed by a dog-howl followed by two fingers pronging twice at the air followed by a clowny guffaw. I felt myself all of a fever and like drowning in redhot blood, slooshying [listening] and viddying [seeing] Dim’s vulgarity…” (Burgess 32). Shortly thereafter, Alex “fisted Dim skorry [good] in the rot [mouth]” (32). It then became a major conflict among the droogs, and this is how Alex is eventually isolated from his gang and mutinied as their leader. A simpler, more stereotypical anti-hero would join in his friends’ vulgarity. But Alex has standards, which makes him an ambiguous character, not to mention an even more ambiguous vehicle for Burgess’s cynicism. As stated earlier, this redeemable quality—essentially defending the pride of the singer on stage in the bar—is what creates the ambiguity about how to feel as a reader whether society might consider his well-being as a worthwhile effort or not. In an e-mail interview, critic, writer, and editor for thesatirist.com, Dan Geddes, agrees: “Alex’s paradoxical nature does make him complex. Is he believable? Yes…” (Geddes). It is possible to believe a person can be a thug and have manners; however, it is not intuitive to have a thug who cares about appearances, manners in public places, and certainly not classical music.
Alex’s interest in classical music is an integral part of his character and the story as a whole. Alex says, “…what I fancied first tonight was this new violin concerto by the American Geoffrey Plautus, played by Odysseus Choerilos with the Macon… Philharmonic…” (Burgess 36). It defies stereotypes to have both attributes, primitive and refined, within one character, and for this reason, Burgess’s use of Alex as a multi-paradoxical character is effective in creating moral ambiguity for which the reader must decipher only through careful reading. “Burgess’s…system works best when it is applied to the subject which concerns him the most, human individuality. Here it becomes a useful metaphor for portraying psychological complexity, for delineating the unpredictability of human beings responding to conflicting urges” (Rabinovitz 49). The multiple layers of literary techniques and the multiple layers within each of those constitutes that psychological complexity, the “unpredictability of human beings,” so that, while there may be much to argue over whether or not real people could exist in Burgess’s distopic vision of the future, the result is the same for the reader’s experience as it is for any onlooker of his contemporaneous society: ambiguous. Until an individual shelters himself with strict dogmatic structures for understanding the world around him, the innumerable variables that a person considers when assessing a moral or ethical decision creates a natural ambiguity. The proper role of the State, the rights of the individual, fair and equal justice, the significance of human nature, environmental factors, parental influence, and dozens of other major considerations create that complex and unpredictable daily conundrum of moral and ethical decision-making. Donald Costello writes in “The Review of Politics,” published by Cambridge University Press, regarding the effect of A Clockwork Orange: “All is juxtapostion, seemingly unguided; and we [the reader] are left to sort out our own emotions and reactions as best we can” (191).
The title itself, A Clockwork Orange, is also simultaneously an indictment on governments who try to rule too much and another agent of ambiguity. “Clearly, Anthony Burgess intends to imply the accepted meaning, as derived from the Cockney expression, “Queer as a clockwork orange,” referring to the aberrant and unnatural…[man’s] clockwork will malfunction if tampered with…” (Coleman 62). The State “tampers with” Alex by using the Ludovico Technique, an attempt to reform his capacity for violent and criminal behavior through a series of drug injections and Pavlovian conditioning so that he can’t choose good or evil. The central question that is not ambiguously posed by this approach to social justice is, does a person cease to do evil if the question of choice is removed? What is ambiguous is how the reader answers the question, and true to the rest of the book, Burgess does not answer it explicitly. “The elimination of his capacity for evil necessarily entails the elimination of his capacity for good. In its ignorance of the psychic symbiosis of good and evil, the State has murdered Alex” (Coleman 63). This appears to be a clear interpretation that Burgess condemns this behavior, that the State has overstepped its right to manipulate people. With particular significance to modern-day American political ideologies, i.e., conservative and liberal, the idea that the State has “murdered Alex” is decidedly a conservative value, appropriate “tampering”—think capital punishment. Yet, over and over, Burgess has been described by critics as having written a conservative-minded satire on left-winged ideologies: “If anything, Burgess gets some jabs in against the Left…” (Geddes).
If capital punishment is an acceptable intervention of the State on the individual for reprehensible and amoral behavior, why not neutralizing an individual’s ability to make moral and ethical decisions? The ambiguity lies in this simple refrain: that is a matter of interpretation. Hence, the mirrored reflection of the reader’s experience with A Clockwork Orange and an individual’s experience determining the moral relativity of everyday decisions.
Many critics have projected what they know about Anthony Burgess’s life into their interpretations. “Burgess has indicated that he feels these conflicts within himself just as he observes them in others. One might make a comparison between Burgess the young composer and Alex the music-lover…” (Rabinovitz 49). But after four and a half decades since the release of A Clockwork Orange, even its most obvious messages remain ambiguous because of the layers and layers of literary techniques and the use of a constructed language that still has not been nearly replicated. The brilliance of Burgess’s novel lies in the ambiguity and subsequent divergence of interpretation.
Annotated Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “On Reading.” From Science to Literature. University of California Press, 1989, 33-43.
In “On Reading,” Roland Barthes uses this opportunity to discuss the process of reading as compared to the process of writing. He acknowledges in this essay that there is no doctrine for reading, as if there were some right or wrong way to do so, and further, that he therefore disavows himself from any authority on the subject. Because of this, the essay is more of an exploration, to “situate” reading in the literary world.
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1960. “The pronouns of power and solidarity.” Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 253-276.
Brown and Gilman introduced the expressions T-form and V-form to refer to the Latin words for you, tu and vos. The did so because they believed that in ancient Rome, and subsequently in other Germanic languages, the differences between various pronouns express a power structure between the speaker and the person being spoken to.
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.
Carson, Julie. “Pronominalization in A Clockwork Orange.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 12 (1976): 200-05.
This piece delves extensively into the use of the words you and thou by the main character, Alex, in A Clockwork Orange. Carson asserts that Burgess intentionally assigns Alex with the use of you when he is not in control, and thou when he is in control. It is a thorough analysis of the novel, as she breaks down every important instance of this pronominal usage, including times when Alex has reason to feel both in and out of control.
Coleman, Julian. “Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.” Explicator. 1983, Fall: 42 (1): 62-63.
This Princeton University piece is a fairly simple and direct review of A Clockwork Orange, and Coleman discusses the main thematic thrust of the novel. Primarily, Coleman is interested in illustrating the meaning of the title and why it is so wrapped up in the question of human nature and Burgess’s interest in it. He cites an interview with Burgess that keeps the credibility of his assertion strong.
Costello, Donald P. “America in Change: Reflections on the 60’s and 70’s.” The Review of Politics. (1972) Vol. 34, No. 4, 187-193.
This piece by Costello is a review of three films, not novels. Woodstock, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange (which had just been released) are compared her as evidence of the degradation of a positive cultural influence. Costello does not confuse his position that among the three films, their influence is not merely counter, or other than, the mainstream culture, but anti-, opposed to culture. Costello acknowledges the films’ artistic qualities, but clearly expresses a disapproving thesis about their influence, especially on youth.
Craik, Roger. September 1, 2003. “Bog or God in A Clockwork Orange.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews. Vol. 16, Issue 4.
This piece is full of brief explanations about Burgess’s invented language, nadsat. He breaks down each and every type of word—Russian, Russian slang, Cockney, Cockney slang, French, etc. The overall intent is to suggest, not prove, that Burgess’s invented language may have been influenced by Stevie Smith’s poem, “Our Bog is Dood.” She points to the similarity in brevity and playfullness, the innovation and rhyming, between the work of Stevie Smith and the language invented by Burgess.
Davis, Todd R., Kenneth Womack. “O My Brothers’: Reading the Anti-Ethics of the Pseudo-Family in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.” College Literature. 2002 Spring; 29 (2): 19-36.
This piece uses family systems as its central focus, and analyzes A Clockwork Orange in terms of its treatment of families, both as actual entities and conceptually. Davis and Womack point to the positive (or at least, less offensive) portrayals of family that Burgess creates. They assert that even the family of Alex’s thugs have a loyalty for a little while, that Alex’s mother and father show they understand moral behavior, and they suggest that when juxtapositioned in one novel, Burgess manages to leave the reader with an idea about what a positive family is and is not.
Evans, Robert O. “Nadsat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 1, No. 3 (Mar., 1971), 406-410.
In 1971, when Evans published this piece through Indiana University Press, the Cold War was on most Americans’ minds. It was nine years after Burgess published the novel, the VietnamWar (a guise for the Cold War struggle), and so Evans asserts in this essay what was very likely already well-known: that the choice for Burgess to use mostly Russian to invent this argot was to make a criticism about Soviet government abuses, of which there were many that were well-publicized. But the focus on the Russian argot appears to be more of a vehicle to understand the novel than a focus. For Evans, the essay appears to be an opportunity to focus on the artistic and moral failures of A Clockwork Orange.
Geddes, Dan. E-mail interview. July 5, 2008.
Dan Geddes is the creator of his own Web site called The Satirist. He has written and published numerous satires, book reviews, and essays on literature. His work as appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Modern World. This interview was made available by e-mailing him and asking questions about his review of A Clockwork Orange, which overall was not favorable. I also asked him if he thought there was a paradoxical element to Alex’s character and whether the made him more or less believable.
Krehbiel, Judi. March 10, 2001. “Image N Sound.” Retrieved July 4, 2008 from http://www.eighthfloor.org/academy/jkrehbiel/image-sound/onomot.htm.
This Web site is a simple reference that is made available for the students of the Eighth Floor Academy. The basic definitions and information were compiled by Judi Krehbiel.
lonympics.co.uk. 2008. Retrieved July 14, 2008 from http://www.lonympics.co.uk/ AAAaC.htm.
lonympics.co.uk is a simple reference Web site that provides a variety of facts about a multitude of subjects. Pertinent to this paper, the site provides several lists and comparisons of words from multiple languages.
Northrop, Ben. October 26, 2008. Bennorthrop.com. Retrieved July 4, 2008 from http://www.bennorthrop.com/Home/Blog/2006_06_01_quine.php.
Ben Northrop has written a number of articles and essay regarding an array of topics, mostly having to do with social, technological, and literay issues. He expounds at length on the definition of paradox, among many other literary devices.
Rabinovitz, Rubin. 1979. “Ethical Values in Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange.” Studies in the Novel. Denton, TX. Vol. 11: 43-50.
Rubin Rabinovitz explores the opposing views of libertarians and authoritarians “on how to best provide social controls” by juxtapositioning the A Clockwork Orange and another Burgess novel, The Wanting Seed. He opposes the Pelagian views against Augustinian, which is the essential question in A Clockwork Orange. That is, the Pelagian view asserts that human nature is unaffected by the Original Sin, and the Augustinian view asserts that the Original Sin predetermines that we are all sinners. These opposing views, the crux of the novel, Rabinobitz says, were described as Pelagian and Augustinian by Burgess himself.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. 1983.
Ferdinand de Saussure was an early pioneer in linguistics. Having lived in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, his ideas laid the groundwork for future linguists and literary artists. The First Principle discussed in this paper was and still is considered an important theoretical concept that opens and creates discussion to help to understand the relationship between what he termed the sign (or word) and the signified (the meaning of that word. While this paper asserts that onomatopoeia counters Saussure’s First Principle, there is no attempt being made here to dismiss it entirely.
[1] Whether auditive or not, onomatopoetic value, a term being coined here, allows the reader to intuitively understand the meaning based on how it sounds. It also adds to the rhythm and flow of the words and sounds in the sentence, increasing the poetic value of the writing.