A Clockwork Orange, Part 2

The most notable part of A Clockwork Orange is that it makes heavy use of a slang of Burgess's own devise.  This language is called "Nadsat" by critics and fans after its own word for "teenager," the group that makes up the bulk of its users.  The first thing that needs to be said about it is that it the way it is constructed is sheer brilliance.  It's mostly Anglicized Russian, with some infantile corruptions of English words thrown in.  And it's charming.  It's one of two things that make Alex a remotely likeable character despite his sociopathy (the other being his love of classical music.)  It really is a pleasure to read.  Burgess had a noted love of words, and it comes through beautifully even in something thrown together like Clockwork.

The problem with the vocabulary in the book is that the reader is drowned in it, from the very beginning.  In the version I picked up, Burgess sends the reader to the glossary at the back nineteen times.  Beyond the obvious, the problem with this is that Burgess did not himself provide a glossary at all - the version I have was provided by a literary critic who worked most of it out for himself.  Because of this, several of the words are uncertain even when you look them up in the back.


Burgess was not the first author to make up his own language.  George Orwell did it in 1948 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) and J. R. R. Tolkien did it in 1954 (The Lord of the Rings.)  While at this point I know rather more Nadsat than I do Newspeak or Elvish, I was never completely submerged in the latter two, and I was never left guessing what I had just read, at least not when it mattered.  But in Clockwork, the unfamiliar language interferes with the presentation of the narrative.  Orwell used Newspeak in a very judicious way.  Our first encounter with it is followed immediately with an explanation of what Winston is being told.  By the time we reach the end of the book, we have only been subjected to as much Newspeak as was necessary.  By the end of The Lord of the Rings, we only know a single Elvish word.  While the made-up language is a nice addition to the work, it never impedes our understanding of the author's words.  Nadsat occurs on every single page of Clockwork.  And some of the words are so similar that it's difficult to distinguish them one from the other.  "Grazhny," "grazzy," and "gromky," are all words the reader has to distinguish.  Oh, and let's throw "jeezny" in there for good measure.  It's all rather confused. 

Book 1: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962

The title card from the beginning of Quentin Tarantino's 1994 masterpiece, Pulp Fiction.

I'll be blunt:  I didn't like this book.   I felt this way for several reasons, primary among them that it attempts to hide its true nature by pretending to be something it's not.  It masquerades as great literature, but in reality it's nothing more than cheap pulp fiction.
 
 

The genre of pulp fiction is defined by a few things: the roughness of the paper on which it was printed, the cheap price for which it was sold, the poor quality of the writing, the brief timescales over which the material was composed, and the lurid subject matter (see the above image, which I'll come to shortly.)  While some of the books made pretense towards warning about the dangers of sex, drugs, and violence, their purpose at root was to play towards our prurient interest, to titillate.  These were cheap books that could be bought down at the train station to read during a trip, or at the drug store to read over a lunch break.  They could be entertaining, certainly exciting, but they did not edify or enlighten.  Nobody thought they were great literature.

A Clockwork Orange is positively swimming in sex, drugs, and violence.  The main character, Alex, is the leader of a brutal criminal gang that terrorizes the community in which he lives.  They commit savage acts of "ultra-violence" against random pedestrians, engage in bloody battles with other street gangs, and finance themselves by looting shops around town.  It is not out of character for them to steal a car, drive to a nearby village, break into a cottage, and violently gang-rape a woman living there.  And these escapades were precipitated by a trip to the milk bar, where milk laced with drugs could be got.  (This idea, that consuming mind-altering drugs could effect wanton sex and violence, is a staple of pulp fiction.  Think of 1936's Reefer Madness: it pretends to be a warning to polite society about the dangers of consuming marihuana, but at core it's just bald titillation.)  Burgess, here, has hit the trifecta.  These actions are made all the more tawdry by the fact that the perpetrators are teenagers (Alex himself is a mere fifteen.)

Now, all this is not to say that these things cannot be used in a great work.  Pulp Fiction is a cult classic and my personal favorite film.  It portrays these three things in spades.  While the film does not teach us anything particularly profound about the human condition, I like the acting, directing, dialog, camera work, nonlinear storytelling, and use of music.  I think Tarantino is being ironic in giving his film that name, and starting it with that title card.  He's telling us to regard the film as nothing more than a cheap thrill.  But when Jules and Vincent walk out of that diner and "Surf Rider" starts playing, you know you've really witnessed something truly spectacular.


A Clockwork Orange has something similar to this.  Burgess gives Alex these lines on the Bible:

"...and I would read of these starry yahoodies tolchocking each other, and then peeting their Hebrew vino and getting on to the bed with their wives' like handmaidens, real horrorshow."

Basically, what all that means is that Alex likes reading the Bible because he gains vicarious pleasure from the violence, intoxication, and sex in the old book.  (I'll get to the problem of the vocabulary in another post.)  He even fantasizes about being a Roman soldier scourging Jesus.  Obviously, Alex is hugely missing the point of the book.  This is an admonition to the reader not to mistake the book for some cheap pulp fiction.  Unfortunately, that's crap.

The book is supposedly about what happens when the government takes away a man's ability to choose right from wrong.  While this is literally true, there is only so much sex, drugs, and violence necessary to get that story told.  Violence needs to be done both by and to Alex, and both of these things certainly happen.  As far as the drugs are concerned, I don't think they need to be present at all.  I think their inclusion constitutes needless, shameless, sensationalist scaremongering.  And the same goes for sex.  One of the first things Alex does in the book is to break into a man's home, beat him to a pulp, and force him to watch a gang rape of his wife, which he leads, and which results in her death.  Including this could be an appropriate part of the story, if (as in the film version) Alex came to regret the action, but he doesn't.  While he meets the husband again two years later, the man narrowly misses recognizing Alex before they part ways, and he meets with no consequence.  This rape should be horrific enough for any literary purpose (though it truly serves none,) but we are treated to a second rape which occurs when Alex seduces two ten-year-old girls in a record store and plies them with alcohol.  While we are spared the graphic details, the event's inclusion is unnecessary and becomes all the more disturbing when we consider that it is only there for our own titillation.  Further, Alex encounters not one but two voluptuous, scandalously clad nurses over the course of his adventures.  The fetishization of nurses is not uncommon, as evidenced by its perennial inclusion among the hyper-sexualized Halloween costumes available to young women, in pinups, dirty magazines, etc.  Liking nurses is all well and good, but there is quite simply no excuse for including this flagrant gratification.
 

Adding to the book's pulp status is the fact that it was written in a mere three weeks.  Doing some quick math, a 21-chapter book written in 21 days works out to one chapter written every day.  Burgess has admitted that he only wrote the book for money anyway.  This is the way many pulp books are written:  en masse, over a brief period, during hiatus or sabbatical from other work.  Each chapter takes only ten of fifteen minutes to read.  In fact, I finished the book without ever even intended to start it.  I was surprised by how quick a read it was - I just picked up idly while a had free minute here and there, and before I knew it the book was over.  I hadn't even intended to start my project with this book, but I've already finished reading it.  Everything about this book, from its content to its presentation, screams pulp fiction.  And at base, that's what it is.


I won't say, though, that I didn't like any part of it.  It was at least partially and enjoyable read.  And when judged for what it is, pulp fiction, it does its job just fine.  But when you try to hold it up against other books like Gatsby or Mockingbird, it just doesn't compare.


Now, I also want to talk about Burgess's use of language and his handling of the central theme, but I'll leave those to other posts.

Statement of Purpose

On this blog I will mostly be writing about books.  I have wanted for some time to read TIME Magazine's list of the 100 best novels.  I read mostly nonfiction, and I feel that reading some fiction would be a nice experience.  I'm looking forward to seeing how my ability to talk about novels and my ideas about what constitutes good writing will change over the course of the project.

There isn't any real reason why I should pick that list as the source of my reading material.  I just like lists, and so does TIME magazine.  They have lists of all sorts of things - the 100 Greatest Albums, and the 100 most important people of the year.  I've seen publication on the shelf put out by TIME such as the 100 most important people in history, and 100 recent important scientific discoveries.  The Modern Library also has a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, which I suppose I could read when I'm done with this project (although I suspect there will be considerable overlap between the two lists.)  Unlike TIME's, the Modern Library's list is ranked, which I don't like.  I think it invites petty squabbling over which books are better than others.  Is Ulysses really better than The Great Gatsby?  Who cares?  The question doesn't say anything about each book's individual merit.  Each book is written for several reasons, but not among them for any book is that it be compared to other books.  As I'm reading Catch-22, am I really supposed to be considering how it stacks up against Slaughterhouse 5 and Nineteen Eight-Four?

The other notable difference between the two lists is that the ML list goes back farther.  TIME restricted itself to novels that saw a review in their magazine upon its first publication.  This forces them to exclude books published in languages other than English as well as those before 1923, the year of TIME's debut.  This leaves out the ML's number one, 1922's Ulysses.  The Modern Library indulges itself two years of the previlous century, including 1899's Heart of Darkness.  The Modern Library gave much more weight to older books:  the most recent one in 1983's Ironweed.  TIME makes up for its lost two decades by going into the 21st century.

I'm looking forward most to reading the books on the list that I've already read and seeing how my opinion of them changes after a second reading.  I also most want to read The Catcher in the Rye, because I've never met a single person who has read it and liked it, and Lolita, because I've read only the first paragraph, and it may be the best writing I've ever read.

Of course, if I read one book a week it will take me just under two years to finish this project, that's not very likely: all of The Lord of the Rings's 1200 pages are included.  That's a pretty tall order for one week.  That's okay - it will be a great accomplishment if I actually do finish.

I've started reading A Clockwork Orange already, and my next few posts will be about how I don't think it's all that great.