LITERATURE: A Clockwork Orange – Language First

Aside from the easy violence of this future world, there is the language of the first person narrator (Alex) to accept.

Then brothers, it came.  Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven.  I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds.  (p. 38)

From context, we can figure out that he’s laying on his bed with his hands under his head on the pillow with his eyes closed, mouth open, listening to the flow of the music.

Every now and then we get a lesson:

(…) so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is), Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. (p. 4)

I’m not sure whether it’s because we haven’t come to these words earlier or whether Burgess took this opportunity to clarify by giving us the definitions, but it bothered me a bit to have it explained in parentheses.  It could be cleverness on Burgess’ part, but then again, hand and face will come up often, and they’d be words that are fairly easy to figure out.  But there are a lot of questions that this created language brings up.

In most futuristic novels, there is going to be words made up to fit the time period, particularly in fantasy worlds which are so popular these days.  But in a first person pov, it’s rare to speak so differently except to name certain objects or places that wouldn’t exist in our contemporary world.  So the slang of the narrator, directly spoken to the reader, is rather unusual.  Or, is this what indeed should be considered by fantasy and sci fi writers; that their characters would be speaking so very differently than we do now? 

In getting accustomed to the language, do we read in full understanding of the sentence or do we mentally switch rooker to hand without thinking about it?  Remember the experiment of writing a sentence without using all the letters of the words and having people read it easily, as if nothing were missing at all?

In reading a novel that uses phrases or words from another language, such as Nabokov’s Lolita in which Humbert Humbert often reverts to French, we may or may not choose to bother looking up the translation.  In A Clockwork Orange, we don’t have a choice.  We simply can’t.

I’m wondering too whether the story is changed in any way by the difference in language.  Would the bloodied mouths and ripped guts have the same impact?  Is the violence hidden or softened at all within the language? 

And yet, the narrator while keeping his distance in this space foreign to us, keeps calling to us, "O my brothers," that makes us a part of it all.