adapting to language

8/17/2019 Adapting to Language.

1/22Science Fiction Film and Television 5.2 (2012), 221–241 ISSN 1754-3770 (print) 1754-3789 (online)© Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sfftv.2012.13

Adapting to language

Anthony Burgess’s and Stanley Kubrick’s

A Clockwork Orange

Sean McQueen

Sf frequently suggests a self-conscious and sophisticated interrogation of language systems.

This has provided cinematic adapters of sf novels with unique challenges. In this article I will first

position the role of linguistics in sf in relation to the genre’s broader practices and theory, and

how these relate to adaptation concerns. I will then examine the role of language in Anthony

Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and how Stanley Kubrick uses filmic techniques to reflect

upon this in his 1971 adaptation.

Keywords: Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick, adaptation, linguistics, A Clockwork Orange

It all comes back to words. Tis is why literature is superior tothe other arts and, indeed, why there can be a hierarchy o arts,with ballet at the bottom and sculpture a ew rungs above it. – Anthony Burgess (‘On the Hopelessness’ )

I it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed. – Stanley Kubrick (qtd in Agel )

Le mot juste

James Phelan observes that although ‘created out o language, the worlds weexperience in novels are more than worlds o words; they are, more accurately,worlds from words, worlds that contain the elements o character and action,which are essentially non-linguistic and which are more central to our experi-

ence o those worlds than the words which create them’ (–). Tis passageclearly places the emphasis on the non-linguistic, ofen transcendental aes-thetic nature o reading narrative fiction, rather than the act itsel; and this isair enough. Putting Derrida aside, one can appreciate a good wordsmith likeGustave Flaubert, who apparently agonised or hours, i not days, over the rightword to convey a certain something . Phelan’s comment is not indeensible: astory may be poorly told and characters may be roughly sketched, but both canbe made to go a long way, just as the imagination o a toddler that pens a simplestory is bound to be more pleasing than the words used to tell it. Yet s, whose


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narrative topoi are ofen compared, even more regressively, to inantile powerantasies, requently suggests a sel-conscious and sophisticated interrogationo language systems. Indeed, it is this process o encountering and ‘coming into’language that has provided s with some o its richest source material. Con-

comitantly, it has also provided cinematic adapters o s novels with uniquechallenges. In this essay, I will first position the role o linguistics in s in rela-tion to the genre’s broader practices and theory, and how these relate to adap-tation concerns. I will then examine the role o language in Anthony Burgess’s

A Clockwork Orange () and how Stanley Kubrick uses filmic techniques toreflect upon this in his adaptation, A Clockwork Orange (UK/US ).

Locating suspicion

According to Carl Freedman, s may be characterised not only by its sharedgeneric narrative tropes, but also on the level o the ‘molecular operations olanguage itsel ’ (). Consequently, s literature may be considered to ‘announce’itsel as a literary practice and category o genre fiction through its idiosyncraticuse o language. Freedman’s selection o the opening passage o Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , seems a good place to start:

A merry little surge o electricity piped by automatic alarm rom the mood organ beside

his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised – it always surprised him to find himsel awakewithout prior notice – he rose rom the bed, stood up in his multi-coloured pajamas, andstretched. (Dick )

Te ‘stylistic register’ o this passage ‘marks it as unmistakably science fic-tion’ (Freedman ). Te syntagm is certainly a peculiar one, not least because‘mood’ and ‘organ’ should likely be uncomortable syntagmatic partners, butalso because the ‘mood organ’, ostensibly a device o some sort, seems to havea strange quantifiable effect. Tese terms are not created ex nihilo – moods and

organs are common enough – but here they have acquired, or inspired us toinvest in them, certain qualities, although we are unsure which or now. Tisis evident enough, but as Freedman observes o the passage, which he notesmay be considered largely emblematic o s ’s dialectical approach to language,the mood organ, which later reveals itsel to be some sort o console-operateddevice that emits emotion-specific waves that affect the brain, is ‘unknown inour own empirical environment’, yet in the world o Dick’s novel, ‘is an ordin-ary accoutrement o everyday lie’ (). Tat is, ‘casualness and estrangement’here work together: the ‘unamiliar and the amiliar are held in suspension and


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[are] related to one another through the operations o a radically heterogeneousand polyvalent prose’ (). Dick’s relatively small lexical manoeuvre results ina wide dispersal o meaning, throwing into doubt history, humanity, emotionsand technology, thus making certain cognitive and imaginative demands on its

reader. Its stylistic manoeuvres incite us to read it, and s more broadly, ‘differ-ently than we would read the language o mundane [non-s] fiction’ (). Freedman’s point is that this style orces several unamiliar reading relations,where otherwise normal and simple grammar and words become ambigu-ous. I would suggest that suspicious might be a more appropriate word or tworeasons: it reflects the mindset o the s reader as he or she interacts with thegenre’s interrogative approach, and it describes the particular cognitive effectat work in s linguistics, whereby semiotic chains enact a double-coded move-ment. On the one hand, they highlight the stability o our own ‘conventional’language, to evoke de Saussure, concretising it, i only by juxtaposing it withthe oreign. Tus our conventional language is a natural port o call. On theother, the second, more ‘suspicious’ and thematically poststructuralist move-ment is its simultaneous ability to raise doubt about the conventional languagethat couches these peculiar words. Tus s’s approach to linguistics operatesrather alarmingly, and at the most discrete level, an operation which invari-ably emanates outwards. What may be drawn rom this is that deciphering slinguistics is a particularly ‘writerly’ activity, which emphasises the reader’s ree

play o interpretations: ‘the writerly text is ourselves writing ’ (Barthes ). IstvanCsicsery-Ronay, Jr makes a similar observation: ‘SF readers expect to constructa world by supplying motivation and rationales or unamiliar signs. . . . [Tey]actively supply imaginary new reerents that will give rational meaning to theimplied science-fictional neosemes’ (). Such an analysis is suited to discus-sions o prose s, but I would here like to tease it out a little, extending it towardsthe cinematic adaptation. Te writerly text hinges on a number o points critical both to the analysiso adaptation and to the process o adaptation itsel. At the simplest level one

can identiy at least one conspicuous intertext: the presence, however strongor flimsy, o the novel within the adaptation, i only because o a shared title,character(s) or narrative. Beyond this superficial parity, one gets a heightenedsense that more sophisticated writerly activities are aoot. First, one can assumethat somewhere along the way someone involved in the filmmaking processhas read the novel – hopeully the director, but almost certainly a screenwriter.Discussions like this may be hampered in other cases, but later I will deal withKubrick, who read Burgess’s novel and, afer rejecting Burgess’s effort, pennedhis own screenplay. Second, the production o an adaptation can be considered


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a ormalised process o writing: ‘Te goal o the literary work . . . is to make thereader no longer a consumer, but a producer o the text’ (Barthes ; my empha-sis). Te adapter may thus be considered to have produced a film and a reading,or ‘writing’, o the novel. He or she has not so much ‘reproduced’ as produced

a version o the novel. However, such a Barthesian writerly approach also callsinto question the language o the text and how one navigates ones way throughit. I one is adapting a novel, this is bound to be a consideration and thus a keypoint or this discussion. Here I would like to elaborate upon the point that s presents a unique bodyo fiction that may be considered to require a writerly approach o its read-ers via its use o linguistics. Tis is a two-way relationship: Freedman, DarkoSuvin, and Marc Angenot pay attention to the reader’s linguistic interpretivemethodology, while s novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany also considers thewriting process inherent to the genre. Arguably, the linguistic elements o s arein concert with, and an augmentation o, Suvin’s conception o s as a ‘literatureo cognitive estrangement’ (), in which estrangement is both the ‘underly-ing attitude and dominant ormal device’ (). While the estranging qualities oDick’s passage have been briefly summarised, there is another point to be maderegarding what Suvin considers s’s ‘differentia specifica’ (), the presence o anovum, a ‘totalising phenomenon or relationship deviating rom the author’sand implied reader’s norm o reality’ (). As Suvin notes,

Quantitatively, the postulated innovation can be o quite different degrees o magnitude,running rom the minimum o one discrete new ‘invention’ (gadget, technique, phenom-enon, relationship), agent (main character or characters), and/or relations basically newand unknown in the author’s environment. ()

Tus the mood organ may be considered a novum o the ‘gadget’ sort, in thatwe are intended to presuppose its existence in the novel while it can also becognified well enough in relation to our own empirical environment via thedescription o its workings (cognition being the process ‘which enables thescience-fictional text to account rationally or its imagined world and or the

connections as well as the disconnections o the latter to our own empiricalworld’ (Freedman –)). Extending beyond this minimal unction is its role

. As this excerpt rom Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep demonstrates: ‘Rick said, “Tis” – heheld up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires – “measures capillary dilation in the acial area.We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-called ‘shame’ or ‘blushing’ reaction to amorally shocking stimulus. It can’t be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, andcardiac rate.” He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. “Tis records fluctuationso tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can beound a small but detectable movement o –”’ ().


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in shaping interpersonal and machine/human relationships. Broader still, theterm ‘mood organ’, the yoking o one sign to another, is, in its linguistic prop-erties, a novum, and exemplifies the aorementioned double movement bothsuspicious in and o itsel, which also arouses our suspicion o the adequacy o

our own language both to convey and to understand it. Dick’s unadorned prosestyle nevertheless taxes our comprehension in ways unamiliar to non-s texts.It is a new thing , and a new expression, ‘effecting a shif in the perception o theworld to which [it is] attached’ (Stockwell ). What I hope to adduce here isthe parity suspicious linguistics has with a more time-honoured appraisal os’s estranging narrative properties. Angenot’s observation o the idiosyncrat-ic nature o s narratives, in which he gestures towards Suvin’s concept o thenovum and the genre’s implied reading practices, is useul here:

Te reader o a realistic novel proceeds rom the general (the commonplace, the ideologic-al topos) to the particular (the specific plot governed by this ideological structure). Te sreader ollows the reverse path: he induces rom the particular some imagined, generalrules that prolong the author’s antasies and coner on them plausibility. Te reader engagesin a conjectural reconstruction which ‘materialises’ the fictional universe. ()

Delany observes a similar practice, suggesting that fiction is characterisedby ‘subjunctivity’: ‘the tension on the thread o meaning that runs between (toborrow Saussure’s term or “word”:) sound-image and sound-image’ (). Hesuggests that literary orms can be distinguished along levels o subjunctive

communication: reportage has ‘happened ’, naturalistic fiction ‘could have happened ’ and antasy ‘could not have happened ’, while s communicates narrativeevents that ‘have not happened ’, including those that ‘might happen’, ‘will nothappen’ and ‘have not happened yet ’ (–). S’s level o subjunctivity involvesexperiencing aesthetically pleasurable accretions in knowledge: the conflictinginormation and tension between signs is ‘resolved into a meaningul correc-tion’ () along the syntagmatic chain, or over the course o the narrative: ‘Testory is what happens in the reader’s mind as his eyes move rom the first wordto the second, the second to the third, and so on to the end o the tale’ ().

Tis approach is loosely inormed by a Saussurean, structuralist schema (thosenotions cognate with poststructuralism are discussed later). ‘Corrections’ maysubvert and alter the reader’s knowledge and expectations, or may be ‘merely aconfirmation o something previously suspected’ (). Tis leans towards a nar-rative cognition based upon linguistic play: the ‘corrective’ schema means that,or the reader, s is an exercise in deciphering and decoding both syntagmaticchains and the overall narrative. Marie Maclean reflects a similar optimismthat s ’s linguistic codes can be resolved: ‘the “arbitrary” signifier, open to anymeaning, is seen to be an intellectual and aesthetic delusion, since the reader’s


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pleasure resides in the coherent creation o an imaginary semiotic system’ (). Perhaps the greatest anxiety or writerly adapters o s novels is, then, theliterature’s abrication o a linguistic novum, which can quickly amount to a‘semantic game without clear reerent’ (Suvin ). While the estrangement o the

sign rom its reerent is a structuralist postulate, there is clearly something yetmore puzzling at the internal level o the sign here. Tis is a Saussurean struc-turalist approach – that the relationship between sign and reerent is arbitrary

– but de Saussure also notes that the internal components o the sign come tosuggest one another (). I would suggest that in s we have a heightened senseo the poststructuralist anxiety that not only is there no strong relation betweenthe sign’s internal components, the signified and the signifier, but also that theormer is questionable in itsel. For what is the description o an alien arteact orother novum but an ofen exhaustive exercise in skipping rom one insufficientsignifier to another, adding up to an unsubstantial or unintelligible signified?Indeed, Seo-Young Chu locates cognitive estrangement in the ‘object or phe-nomenon that the s text seeks accurately to represent’ (). Similarly s hasprovided us with some o the most recognisable onomatopoeia (‘ZAP ’!) andstrange utterances ofen have a holophonic effect. A character or scenario is invariably a grouping o signifiers that conjure asignified which will hopeully allow us to grant it credence due to its parity witha worldly reerent. In one sense, s is no different rom any type o literature

here, as Angenot has pointed out: ‘Te act that an SF story is by definition voido reerent . . . does not in any way help us to characterise SF’ (). He goes on tonote that Madame Bovary is also a sign without a reerent. Tis is true enoughand, while loathe to use the term ‘common sense’ given the theory at hand,I think we can afford to be a little more heuristic in our approach to the ‘adapt-able’ material a text such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary () affords its adap-tors: no matter how ar we stray, we surely do not take Madame to be a Vulcan,nor an android. She is certainly a human emale, not a biological androgynenor a metamorphosing character rom an Ursula Le Guin novel, and we can

. As Mark Bould suggests, ‘Arguably, SF has an exaggerated affinity with one o the basic preceptso twentieth-century critical theory: by naming and describing things which do not exist, are as yetunknown, and cannot (yet?) be known, it repeatedly emphasises a Saussurean conception o languageas arbitrary and unmotivated, as a ramework placed over the valueless, meaningless flux o existence’(‘Preserving’ ).. Chu’s ormula largely rests upon the literalisation o figures o speech and metaphors, or ‘science-fictionemes’, reversing Suvin’s ramework: ‘Science-fictional environments, creatures and arteactsare not the imaginary reerents that most people understand them to be. Tey are the mediums orepresentation constituted by literalised poetic figures o speech’ (). Chu’s is a wide-ranging studyo mimesis and representation in s, whereas my ocus is largely on language-as-novum, resting on aslight departure rom, rather than a reversal o, Suvin.


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iner her pleasant French provincial surroundings are on Earth. A more likelyproblem would be selecting the character’s costume. Suspicion o this sort, as either present in the language used or a provokedreader response, is unique in s. Indeed, it is ubiquitous in the genre and, natu-

rally, open or parody. As such, David ennant as the Doctor in Dr Who (UK–, –) can saely sum up the a-spatiotemporal universe as ‘Wibblywobbly, timey wimey stuff’, relying on reader/viewer amiliarity with s ’s genericlinguistic manoeuvres. While authors such as James Joyce have certainly playedwith linguistic orm, syntax and grammar, s tends towards a different ‘aestheticgoal’, whereby language may not be offered or decipherment but serve to cre-ate ‘a remote, estranged, and yet intelligible “world”’ (Angenot ). As such, s ’ssyntagmatic structures come to dissipate while giving rise to the entertainmento a pleasurable ‘delusion’ () – presumably o being immersed in the fictionaltext, language and all. While this is persuasive, and I will continue to draw onAngenot’s analysis, Walter E. Meyers sees something more critical operatingwithin the genre. He notes that a more developed s text is likely to offer a newword without a precise definition, bringing ‘to the context in which it appearsonly the associations suggested by its form’ (; my emphasis); he adds that i‘through the use o language the author adds an extra imaginative dimensionand at the same time provides the reader with a new perspective from which toview his own society , something special indeed has been accomplished’ (–;

my emphasis). I have emphasised these words or I believe that this is whatis accomplished in both Burgess’s novel and Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation.While a persuasive sociopolitical commentary can certainly be adduced romboth, an equally persuasive argument might be that these texts provide a newperspective rom which to view one another and, more broadly, the role o lan-guage itsel in adaptation.

Linguistics in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange highlights s’s use and arousal o suspicion inrelation to language. Like Dick’s mood organ, many o s ’s unitary neologismsand fictive words are substantives, rather than adjectival relationships or verbssuggestive o new dialects. However, in Burgess’s novel, the introduction onew units and syntagmatic chains may be comprehended as nova that iner alarger linguistic paradigm, a totalising novum. Tere are two elements at playhere. Te first is the tension between the substantial and relational value oeach individual unit, which extends towards new syntagmatic structures and


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implies a new language. Second, these units and syntagms appear to the readerto be simultaneously enmeshed in what can be understood as a ‘missing para-digm’ (Angenot ), or, as is the case here, a ‘missing’ novum: Burgess language,Nadsat. On a unitary level, words like ‘oobivat’ (rom the Russian ubivat : to

kill), ‘smot’ (rom the Russian smotret : to look) and ‘shlaga’ (rom the GermanSchlager : a club or bat) are empirical symptoms o an implied internalised fic-tive language system. I should like to consider the tension between the relational and substantialmeaning o units symptomatic o the Nadsat (Russian suffix or ‘teen’) argotused by Burgess’s first-person narrator, Alex. Most o the words are modifiedrom Russian, although there are numerous German, Latin, Dutch, regionalSlavic, Gypsy, French and Arabic words, Cockney rhyming slang and someinvented words and expressions. (o the Anglophone reader who knows this,these words would likely appear as ‘borrowed’ neologisms, subsequently ‘angli-cised with ree binding with other morphemes’ (Stockwell ).) Importantly,the words are ‘couched’ within the Anglophone linguistic paradigm. Tus, onemay ‘viddy’ films (rom the Russian vidyet : to see) or ‘slooshy’ music (romthe Russian slushat : to hear). However, these words are not just dropped inoccasionally, rather their use is sustained throughout the novel, spoken byother characters and, perhaps o the greatest importance, related to us throughAlex’s subjective narration. Tus Nadsat is not simply present at the level o

the stray utterance, but is the medium through which we vicariously interactwith the fictitious world as Alex’s language-as-consciousness moves throughit: or example, ‘In the hallway was the good old municipal painting on thewalls – vecks and ptitsas very well developed, stern in the dignity o labour, atworkbench and machine with not one stitch o platties on the well-developedplotts’ (Burgess Clockwork ). In short, we have no recourse to a world that isnot mediated through Alex’s idiosyncratic thoughts and words. Nadsat is, I suggest, the ‘absent paradigm’, a symptomatic component in theconstruction o, or an index to, the overarching absent paradigm o the world o

the near uture. However, the novel’s fist-person narration complicates this. Tereliability o Alex’s narration is unquestionably problematic: he is said to haveacquired Nadsat via ‘subliminal penetration’ (), and his use o it may verywell be a sel-conscious one. As such, Samuel McCracken notes, ‘It seems clearthat [Alex] thinks in Nadsat, and consequently he organises reality by meanso what is his second language. . . . Whether or not we end up considering [his]use o Nadsat as euphemistic, we must recognise that between reality and his

. For the translations o Nadsat I have used Hyman, the most widely cited resource.


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perception o it he draws the veil o jargon’ (). Alex’s narration is language-as-consciousness, and we have no recourse to a world that is not communicatedthrough his subjectivity. Even or an s text, this level o mediation and linguis-tic play is unusual: ‘Although today’s s writers place language mutation in the

oreground o their styles more ofen than beore, it is still rare or s texts tonarrate their estranged worlds primarily through radically estranged discourse’(Csicsery-Ronay ). Similarly, Peter Stockwell notes that the common use o‘a ew aberrant spellings’ are indexical to alienness and/or uturity, rather than‘ully worked out piece[s] o parallel-universe orthography’ (–). Nadsat is,o course, not ‘alien’ in the extraterrestrial sense o the word, although to anAnglophone it is certainly a dizzying experience. Moreover, the implications othe individual Nadsat signs are wide-reaching: through Alex’s narrative voice,every sign, including those which the reader may identiy as English, has thepotential to become Nadsat given their mutual dependence in the comprehen-sion o syntagmatic chains. Nadsat comes to be what Csicsery-Ronay calls ‘aull-fledged mutant discourse in which the rules o syntax and word construc-tion reflect radical social change at the level o language’ (). Nadsat and theworld o the near uture are commensurate, and thus Nadsat may be consideredthe absent paradigm. Although it is an unachievable horizon, in one sense we can get close to itby simply reading through the novel. However, there is a discernible point o

tension, best posed as a question: does the couching o Nadsat units and smallsyntagms, however persistent, within the English language, emphasise thearbitrariness o both the Nadsat and English sign, or does the ormer becomeimmediately reduced to the ‘conventional’ level o the already internalised, Eng-lish language (Saussure )? Te answer is probably both. For an (exclusively)Anglophone reader, unaccompanied by a Nadsat dictionary, the (approximate-ly) Nadsat words seem, contra Derrida, to ‘simply all rom the sky readymade’ (Derrida, Speech ). Te task, o course, is to internalise this language,since checking the glossary would be a tedious (and ar less rewarding) exercise

– ‘it is not, afer all, out o a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!’ (Bakhtin, qtd in Bould, ‘Language’ ). A brie study concluded that by ‘reading ormeaning’, English-speaking readers were able more or less to learn the language,with an accuracy o per cent when checked against the Nadsat dictionary(Pitts, White and Krashen ). Te simultaneous presence o both English andNadsat offers ‘a partial recognition o our reality, but with sufficient alternativityto render the effect o deamiliarisation’ (Stockwell ). Tis relationship is anisomorphic one, where two ‘domains o knowledge’, one amiliar (English), theother unamiliar (Nadsat), interact with one another (). Tus the content


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o the Nadsat sign ‘is really fixed only by the concurrence o everything thatexists outside it’ (Saussure ) – namely English. Moreover, Stockwell suggeststhat ‘all words are undamentally implicated in other similar-looking words’,thus ‘reader[s] ofen try to interpret them in terms o words they already know’

(–). For example, ‘viddy’ suggests ‘video’ and, by extension ‘see’ or ‘watch’. However, the hopelessness o translating and deciphering signifiers in rela-tion to other signifiers is, o course, the existential anxiety o poststructural-ist theory, exemplified by Derrida’s notion o différance, where meaning is inconstant flux, where searching or meaning is an infinitely regressive process(‘Différance’ ). For example, ‘horrorshow’ comes rom the Russian kharashó or ‘good’ or ‘well’, yet is used adjectivally in relation to rather gruesome acts,aligning it with contemporary parlance or ‘wicked’ or ‘sick’ (Morrison x). Simi-larly, Nadsat is both the language o the novel and the word or teen. Tus Der-rida: the ‘meaning o meaning’, in its ‘indefinite reerral o signifier to signifier’,means that ‘it will always signiy again’ (Writing ). In this sense, recourse toa Nadsat dictionary serves only to thwart translation, providing a host o newterms, both the oreign root and a ew English equivalents. Te ultimate ironyound in the Nadsat dictionary is that ‘slovo’ is the Russian word or ‘word’,which just tells us what it is rather than what it means – i such a contradictioncan be briefly entertained. Suspicion, it may thus be said, is rewarded, but neversatiated.

In either case, both answers to the question bring us to the same conclusion,returning us to the dual suspicion o s linguistics. On the one hand, readingNadsat orces a new reading relationship that illuminates the internalisationo our native language (English in my case) as a ready-made system, whichtruncates our relationship to an abstracted paradigm. It also emblematises theshif rom structuralist schematising to poststructuralist liquescence, rom theoptimism o decoding the s text to the ree play o words. For all his emphasison arbitrariness, Saussure thought signs, although unstable in and o them-selves, acquired a relational ‘stability’ by virtue o their difference rom other

signs, hence his aphorism ‘in language there are only differences’ (); or, toput it another way, language ‘is a system o interdependent terms in which the

value o each term results solely rom the simultaneous presence o others’ ().Angenot observes that ‘Every “fictive word,” no matter what its ‘etymology,” willbe read in a particular context. Surrounding elements irradiate virtual mean-ings on the opaque signs’ (). On the other hand, to throw things into a post-structuralist direction, we must also allow this to work the other way: this veryreliance on difference between signs (a broad canvas or Burgess’s Nadsat) andthe positioning o an already internalised language set in relation to a missing


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paradigm, has a contaminating effect on the very language we rely upon, mak-ing the reader doubt, or suspicious o, their comprehension. Nadsat signs cometo signiy again and again, spilling their uncertain meaning into the Englishsigns’ present. Similarly, Stockwell notes that despite their apparent ‘newness’ or

‘alienness’, neology is inevitably and hopelessly relative:

we must view neologism as a thoroughly readerly notion. Unortunately this means thatevery uttered word is a neologism since its meaning varies with every occasion o its use,and since the word will never have previously been used in exactly that situation in exactlythe same way, it is a new usage. ()

All this brings us squarely back to uncertainty, the doubly coded process oestrangement o the linguistic novum. It also returns us to how we write whenwe read, and write when adapting.

Film and book were not meant to illuminate each other6

In a very general, but nevertheless noticeable sense, the process o adaptationunctions by way o an industrialised reusal o scholarly debate, particularlyo poststructuralist currents regarding the mutability and constant deerral othe meaning o language. By and large, the ashioning o a serviceable filmic

icon, be it character, object or mise en scène, ormalises the writerly process,ossiying an interpretation at the level o a cinematic diegesis. (Narrative fidel-ity aside, this is observable in adaptations o s novels involving alien speciesor strange new planets; see, or example, Dune (Lynch US ), adapted romFrank Herbert’s novel o the same name.) However, this assumes, alla-ciously, that the filmic text does not require a writerly approach rom its viewer,as though this process has been assumed solely by the filmmaker, and that, asthe level o perception increases the level o signification decreases, or, to putit in structuralist terms, that ‘assertion always ultimately depends on some level

o shared assumption between utterer and receiver’ (Harland : ). I aminterested here in the way suspicion, once again as both a generic trope andreader response, plays itsel out both at the level o the film, as a work o art in

. Similarly, Bould notes parenthetically that ‘the vast associative web o connotations in which eachindividual word is located, and which varies rom reader to reader, assures that each reader under-stands that “specific” meaning in approximately similar but divergent ways’ (‘Language’ ).. Burgess ‘On the Hopelessness’ .. Dudley Andrew observes that literature works rom signification to perception, while cinema gen-erally works in the opposite direction ().


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its own right, but also at an interartistic and intertextual level, and in relationto a linguistic novum. Neil D. Isaacs notes that ‘Burgess’s dazzling use o language in A ClockworkOrange is the most obvious essential quality to be lost in a filmed treatment

o the story’ (). By this he does not mean that Nadsat is absent rom thefilm, as Alex’s (Malcolm McDowell) voice-over narration is transposed moreor less word-or-word rom the novel in a number o scenes. However, the filmis not construed entirely through his consciousness, as it is in the novel. Isaacscontinues:

More essential . . . is the use o that language by his persona. Alex’s voice – not his vocab-ulary – dominates the book. Te voice is mannered, achieving a kind o hyped musicalquality through its many artifices. As such, it is the perect vehicle or the appropriate andconsistent tone with which it speaks. And in turn that tone o voice ideally conveys the iron-

ic themes. ()

With the obvious exception o the word ‘book’, this strikes me as something onewould write about an actor’s perormance in a film. Vivian Sobchack finds theaesthetic experience o hearing the Nadsat argot one o ‘extraordinary imagina-tive resonance’, a ‘delicate balance between sense and nonsense, between logicalcommunication and magical litany’ (). Indeed, Saussure said o the signifier(in its phonic rather than graphic state) that it ‘is not the material sound, apurely physical thing, but the psychological imprint o the sound, the impres-

sion that it makes on our senses. Te sound-image is sensory ’ (). Burgess’s own comments are worth interrogating: ‘Te light and shade anddownright darkness o my language cannot, however brilliant the director, finda cinematic analogue’ (‘On the Hopelessness’ ). Sobchack notes the irony inhis sel-assessment, which renders his work in ‘visual terms’ () that alsoinsist upon their implied acoustic plasticity. Indeed, to say these words aloudwhile reading, to give them one’s own inflection and then to eed them backinto the novel deictically, is one o the writerly activities demanded o the read-er. Extending this, without insisting on translation or suggesting that Nadsat

signs work as simple substitutions, it is interesting to note that a great many oBurgess’s words are evocative o the plastic sensory qualities cinema routinelyconveys. o ‘viddy’ is to see, to ‘slooshy’ is to hear, to ‘creech’ is to scream, a‘goloss’ is a voice, i something is ‘gromky’ it is loud, and a ‘zvook’ is a sound.Nadsat signs that evoke sensations, rather than things, estrange their syntag-matic context, but also deamiliarise the sensory qualities we conventionallyassociate with them. Te reader can only speculate: how might viddying differrom seeing? what does a ‘creech’, as opposed to a scream, sound like? Interest-ingly, there is no Nadsat word in the novel or ‘read’. Tere are two things about


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Burgess’s language that I think Kubrick, taking a writerly approach to difficult‘adaptable’ material, has played with intentionally or inadvertently: the level osel-reflexivity neology invariably displays (Csicsery-Ronay ) and the highlyperormative nature o the text. While he can be said to have ‘preserved’ them,

he has also reasserted and reinscribed them in filmic language. In doing so, hehas perormed, and requires the viewer in turn to perorm, writerly activities:‘o appreciate a text is not to give it a . . . meaning, but on the contrary to appre-ciate what plural constitutes it’ (Barthes ).

Enunciation in literature and film

At this point, it is useul to distinguish between the literary and cinematicmodes o narration that highlight these points. In literature, the concept oenunciation ocuses on the way narrative is communicated, largely via tensesand modes o address, be they first or third person. ransposed to film theory,‘enunciation has also come to signiy the constitution o subjectivity [the pres-ence o an author or narrator] in language, and secondarily, the production andcontrol o subject relations through the imaginary link established between thenarrator and the spectator by way o their mutual investment in the discourseo the film’ (Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis ). In literature, the nar-

rator is invariably a construct o language (Bluestone ), but in film the nar-rator’s mental activity is expressed along the lines o verbalisation (cognition)and non-verbal discourse (perception) (Chatman Story ). Te presence o afirst-person voice-over on the film’s audio track is an obvious example o cine-matic enunciation, although the cinematic narrator may be identified iconic-ally through editing, shot composition, point o view and lighting, rather than

verbally (Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis ). Despite their differences, Chatman notes that both literary and cinematicenunciation depend upon levels o mediation between the narrative and the

narrator, whose ‘presence derives rom the audience’s sense o some demon-strable [narrative] communication’ (Story ). In Burgess’s novel, direct accessto Alex’s language-as-consciousness comprises the whole o the narrative.Kubrick, however, makes use o dramatic shifs between objectively capturingthe mise en scène, and combining literary verbalisation and visual perceptioninto subjective narrative states that bear the enunciation o Alex’s narrative pres-ence. Chatman observes that ‘by its nature, cinema resists traditional language-

. See Benveniste.


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234 Sean McQueen

centred notions o the narrator’, making enunciation in cinematic adaptationchallenging, as ‘verbal activity urnishes no easy analogy with visual activity’(Coming ). Yet in Kubrick’s adaptation, language, which is ofen confinedto voice-over in relation to cinematic enunciation, has a discernible and unique

relationship with the image and these work together to actualise subjectivity.Csicsery-Ronay suggests that the intelligibility o s’s use o language, particu-larly with regard to neologogenesis, depends upon the ‘ability to evoke imagin-ary differences o culture and consciousness’ (). With an emphasis on thelatter, the ollowing analysis will attempt to demonstrate Kubrick’s cinematicengagement with language and how the filmgoer negotiates Nadsat.

Viddy and slooshy

Kubrick’s film is intermittently narrated in first-person Nadsat by Alex. How-ever, his language-as-consciousness becomes a noticeably intrusive presence inthe film (as opposed to a constant one in the novel) in its orcing o sel-reflexive,intersubjective relationships. Figures and explain this relationship. In bothsequences there are orced relations o ‘seeing’ presented by shot/reverse-shotediting, and ‘hearing’, articulated in Nadsat. In Figure , Alex has just finisheda gruesome rendition o the screen classic, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, as a restrained

Mr Alexander (Patrick Magee) is orced to bear witness to the rape o his wie(Adrienne Corri). In Figure , voice-over narration accompanies an editedsequence in which the camera alternates between a restrained Alex and thescreen, or, we may iner, the screen as seen by Alex. Te film he watches showsa man being beaten by youths, later a woman being gang raped. Tis is ollowedby Second World War stock ootage and Nazi processions and iconography. Tediegetic sound rom the film Alex is watching – laughter, moans o dismay andreverie, and the sounds o blows alling – plays simultaneously with non-dieget-ic music – ominous acoustic rumblings that transorm as the scene progresses.

Te two scenes, which are thematically and technically (in terms o raming andcomposition) similar, serve as mirror images o one another: a and a visuallyand sonically recall one another, while a is simultaneously the mirror imageo b, as b is the mirror image o a. Te reversal o orced privileged pointso view draws the spectator into a precarious relationship as they experienceboth states. Both sequences eature phonological utterances both inclusive and

. Here ‘analogy’ is not to be misconstrued as ‘fidelity’. George Bluestone similarly notes that attemptsat a ‘aithul’ matching o linguistic sign and visual image is ‘disastrous’ to both texts: ‘Te difference istoo great to overcome’ ().


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suggestive o Nadsat and, more broadly, the missing paradigm indicated by its

presence. Tis occurs either at the level o the filmic diegesis (Figure ) or at anon-diegetic level (Figure ). By reasserting the heightened sel-reflexivity oBurgess’s prose and by perorming it cinematically, the film incites the viewerto perorm via interpretation what is essentially a perormative text. Kubrickwrites, and makes the viewer write in turn, the estranging properties o Nad-sat. Te intrusive imposition o Alex’s didactic, direct address to the spectatorin Figure – ‘viddy well’ – and the voice-over narration and subjective inter-pretation o the intra-cinematic film in Figure , reflect and inspire a writerlyapproach to the text in relation to the linguistic novum, eliciting estrangement

Alex: ‘I’m singin’, just singin’ in the rain.

Viddy well, little brother, viddy well.’

Alex’s voice-over narration: ‘A very good

professional piece of sinny, like it was

done in Hollywood. The sounds were

real horrorshow. You could slooshy the

screams and moans, very realistic. You

could even get the heavy breathing and

panting of the tolchoking malchicks at

the same time. And then what do you

know, soon our dear old friend, the red,

red vino on tap . . . began to flow. It’s

funny how the colours of the real world

only seem really real when you viddy

them on a screen.’

Figure 1b

Figure 1a

Figure 2b

Figure 2a

Time and space in film

T i m e a n d s p a c ei nfi l m


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236 Sean McQueen

on both a visual and phonological plane. It makes us both privy to a suspiciousNadsat linguistic consciousness, and abstracted observers o its missing para-digm as mediated through one o its speakers. On the one hand, we inhabit two different roles, observers o writing and

writers ourselves: we see and we viddy . In the first scene, we are explicitly told to viddy, sharing the perspective o Mr Alexander. Te camera then moves romhis ace to that o his wie as she is molested. In the second scene, we share thegaze with Alex, one who viddies instinctively. In both scenes, the camera is attimes shaky, capturing the violence in an exploratory and declarative ashion,but also uncertain in its raming. Te first scene is brie, suggestive o a sim-ultaneous immersion and repulsion. Tis is a orced relation o one who doesnot viddy instinctively, namely Alexander or the cinematic spectator who, viaediting, assumes an uncomortable ‘perceptual sympathy’ (Chatman Story )with his visual experiences. Te second scene provides a ormal contrast. It is afilm being projected within the film, but is also subjectively mediated throughAlex’s consciousness. As such, there is conusion between the austere cameraand Alex’s unblinking eyes. Chatman notes that the cinematic ‘match-cut’ sug-gests the enunciation o a specific narrator: ‘i in the first shot the characterlooks off-screen . . . and there ollows a cut to another setup within his eyeshot,we assume that he has in act seen that thing, rom that perceptual point o view’(Story ). Conflating Alex’s visual perception and the camera, the gaze ollows

the trajectory o the thrusts and punches on-screen, jerking lef as the victim isstruck on the right hand side o the ace, and vice versa. Tis is accompaniedby Alex’s Nadsat voice-over narration, giving us a privileged and unnervingperspective o a Nadsat-construction o the world. Tis reflects the suspicion aroused by the aorementioned double-codedmovement ound in s linguistics, where the conventional and the oreign arebrought into relie via juxtaposition, only this time it is rendered cinematically

via Alex’s enunciation: like Alex we viddy , rather than ‘see’. Tere is a notice-able difference here between cinematically realised Nadsat and that in the

novel. Stockwell suggests that s neologisms ofen incite the reader to seek a‘linguistic correspondence’, where ‘words rom similar lexical fields [unction]as synonyms and [are] thus interchangeable’ (). In Burgess’s novel, we maybe tempted to substitute ‘viddy’ with ‘see’. However, in Kubrick’s film, they areneither commensurate nor interchangeable. Indeed, the difference, or ‘mean-ing shif’ in this treatment o language resembles neosemic recontextualisation,where ‘new meanings [are] attached to existing words’ (Stockwell ) – thistime meaning is ormed through the difference between the novel and the film-ic adaptation. Alex’s subjectivity is a violent and alien one, and inhabiting both


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its language and how that language determines the world around it makes oran unnerving shared experience. Te contrast between the camera’s movement and raming, sometimes reluc-tant and skittish, sometimes austere and static, evokes a Nadsat subjectivity via

filmic enunciation. Te near-haptic sensations o onomatopoeia in Burgess’sNadsat, such as ‘glolp’ and ‘chumble’, incite the reader to speculate on how theyare to be articulated: ‘they entice the reader’s participation in an alternativesemiotics in which the sign reers, not to conventional and abstract meanings,but via its own palpability to corresponding qualities in the physical consist-ency, properties, and kinetics o things’ (Goh ). Tis is reflected in Kubrick’sadaptation, particularly in Figure , where we see Alex’s consciousness con-struct the filmic image and hear him narrate his sensations. Te camera/Alexenthusiastically synchronises itsel with the orce and direction o violent blows,emphasising the physicality o the language-as-consciousness. Te engage-ment o the spectator by means o eye-level matches invites a conflation o Alexand the spectator, making the spectator process the filmic image through anestranged linguistic novum. A similar process occurs on an auditory level. In the first scene, Alex bringsthe phonological aspects o Nadsat into relation with music. It is, as Sobchackputs it, ‘unoriginal’ music used ‘originally’, here emphasising the contrast o thesonic and the visual: ‘old movie memories are almost insupportably mocked.

Te violence and rape is done to the song and . . . we are victims o the violencedone [to] our memories and associations’ (, ). In the second scene, we hearAlex processing the sounds o the film. His use o Nadsat simultaneously placesus in a subjective slooshying relationship (as opposed to ‘hearing’) to the non-diegetic music, which turns rom ominous to excitable once Alex’s voice-overpoints out the blood. In this negotiation, voice-over, diegetic and non-diegeticmusic comment on each other, and perorm a Nadsat linguistic consciousness,while also suggesting that we are perorming one ourselves. Alex’s narration,‘It’s unny how the colours o the real world only seem really real when you

viddy them on a screen’, emphasises the relationship: an intersubjective Nadsatauditory clue that invites us sel-reflexively both to assume and reflect upon thefilmic image and our own interpretation.

Filmic ‘correction’

Similar to Burgess’s sel-assessment, Delany notes the highly visual process andsensations o reading, emphasising (as noted above) the aesthetic pleasures


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238 Sean McQueen

ound in the temporal process o ‘correcting’ the reader’s suspicions, eitheraffirming or subverting them with knowledge accreted along the syntagmaticchain, and as the overall narrative progresses. He contrasts this process withwatching a film:

Let’s look more closely at what happens in this visual journey. How, or example, doesthe work o reading a narrative differ rom watching a film? In a film the illusion o real-ity comes rom a series o pictures each slightly different. Te difference represents a fixedchronological relation which the eye and the mind together render as motion. Words in anarrative generate tones o voice, syntactic expectations, memories o other words and pic-tures. But rather than a fixed chronological relation, they sit in numerous inter- and over-weaving relations. Te process as we move our eyes rom word to word is corrective andrevisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had amoment beore. (–)

Delany suggests that when reading, time is able to flow both backwards andorwards. Te cognitive effect is one o simultaneity: a temporally linear, or-ward progression revises what has come beore it. Tis recalls the above obser-

vations made in relation to the Derridean ‘spillage’ o signification. However,I would like to critique and augment Delany’s position regarding film: filmproduces similar effects to those Delany finds in the linguistic play o proses. Te filmgoer is required to be equally apperceptive, as new inormation isdrawn into relation with previous experience. With reerence to my analysis

o Kubrick’s film, on the one hand this negotiation occurs between the filmicdiegesis and an intertext – specifically Alex’s gruesomely ludic rendition o‘Singin’ in the Rain’. His jaunty perormance is disturbing due to its immediatethematic contrast with the violent molestation, but all the more so because itcalls upon cinematic history – and on the viewer’s ‘dormant memory’, whichis comprised o ‘extra-textual encyclopaedic knowledge’, elements o which are‘brought to bear’ (Stockwell ). Much like the tension between Nadsat andEnglish, the film contaminates our points o reerence, making them and ourrelationship with them suspect. (As much could be said or the film’s deploy-

ment o classical music motis, particularly Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony asreconfigured by Moog synthesiser, which is equally estranging, as it calls uponand disrupts prior knowledge.) On the other hand, addressing Delany’s conception o simultaneous tem-poral movement, it can be argued that film perorms ‘corrections’ via its expres-sive resources in narrative time and space and, via editing, by visual and sonicrepetition, reversal and juxtaposition, and so on. Tese can be expressed intwo ways, one immediate, the other less so: first, in the time taken in a sin-gle shot there is the immediate interaction between audio and visual tracks;


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and, second, a relationship is ormed by moving between shots via editing in asequence, or significantly protracted along narrative time. Te ormer is analo-gous to Stockwell’s ‘active memory’, made up o ‘recently encountered items’;the latter to the ‘ongoing text-world’ o ‘semi-active memory’ o sequences ‘that

the [viewer] has encountered and remembered up to this point in the reading’(–). In Kubrick’s film, both occur and, more importantly, interact with andcomment on one another. Te immediate expression can be identified in thealmost comically bizarre music that clashes with the violent imagery in Fig-ure b. By comparison, the shots that comprise Figure are a sequence (likewisethose comprising Figure ) that can be understood as ‘corrections’ that requirerevisions o subjective positions orced into relation by filmic techniques: theydemonstrate a subjectivity inormed by Nadsat language-as-consciousness, butalso suggest, via the camera, that the spectator is perorming such a subjectivity.Moreover, the complex relationship between Figures and is a significantlyprotracted one: the ormer occurs at the beginning o the film, the latter midway.Te relationship recalls Delany’s description o linguistic play: the individualshots are reconfigured, or ‘corrected’, during their respective sequences that are,in turn, recalled and juxtaposed with one another along the narrative. Tus thefilm evinces a complex system o ‘inter- and over-weaving relations’ occurringat different points in narrative time, provoking revisions o previous narrativeexperiences, metaphorically aligning linguistic tropes with the editing process.

Te sel-reflexive and perormative aspects o these two scenes bring intorelie a privileged access to a Nadsat consciousness, twinned with the horizono a missing linguistic paradigm, this time rendered both visually and sonically.Similarly, both adaptation and interpretation have aroused reader responsessimilar to those evoked by the novel, where our attention is drawn to theestranging nature o inhabiting and encountering novum-as-language, bothsuspicious o text and ourselves as interpreters and participants.

The writerly is the novelistic without the novel10

Burgess said o the book that ‘when the reader has finished the novel, he willhave penetrated the vocabulary o the Russian-based Nadsat, and hence willhave gotten, willy-nilly, a basic Russian lexicon. He will thus understand a littleo what it is like to be brainwashed’ (qtd in McCracken ). Alex is said to haveacquired Nadsat via a process o ‘subliminal penetration’, which may be Bur-

. Barthes .


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240 Sean McQueen

gess alluding to this ambition. Kubrick’s engagement with the qualities o thelanguage via film provides a unique commentary that elicits an ofen uncom-ortable response that, at the supra-paradigmatic and extra-textual level o thereader, has a similar cognitively estranging effect. Yet, in ways specific to the

cinematic register, the film makes us get inside the language, both superficiallyobserving and hearing it, and at a more intimate and conronting, intersubject-ive level. As we become complicit in the construction o these states, this dem-onstrates how we make meaning out o language, and how language unctionsin the adaptation. Te writerly process, as both reflected and perormed in s, isanalogous to a mood organ, where we may dial in the emotional register, but betaken aback by its imposition.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andrew Milner or his comments on the first draf o this essay, andNatalie Satakovski, who helped tease out some o the finer points.

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