On A Clockwork Orange, Conlangs, and You, Dear Reader
Or, rather: a quixotic attempt at connecting wind-up oranges, hallucinated languages, and narrative intimacy.
Can you read the word ‘red’? How long would it take you?
It feels like a fairly ridiculous question. After all, everyone’s been familiar with the word since kindergarten. But a wonderfully peculiar caveat exists: the Stroop Effect. When the text says ‘red’ but is coloured ‘blue’, your brain is likely to lag for a surprisingly long time, or even wind up giving you the wrong answer.
The reason for this phenomenon is a cognitive mismatch as the brain attempts to hold two conflicting stimuli at once: the semantic word, which is stimulus A, and the colour of the text, which is stimulus B. The word information arrives at the decision-making stage before the colour information — the colour information being what is actually asked for, and hence, processing confusion arises. The brain, therefore, takes more time to determine the right answer according to task demands and produces a slower response.
The Stroop Effect gives us an interesting analogy. Its defining feature is not really the particular combination of colour and words, but the conflict that occurs when two competing pieces of information are activated at once. So what if we borrowed that principle and applied it to language itself? What if a reader could experience a similar kind of processing friction when a familiar word form carries an unfamiliar meaning?
Conlangs are artificial languages created by authors for a specific piece and can give rise to this bizarre hypothetical. By using loanwords that are vaguely familiar to a reader, an interesting conflict arises; one that is between what the word is meant to denote and what the reader expects it to mean. As a simple example, take the word rook, which, in the world of these characters, means hand. Even if the reader is somewhat familiar with the word as they get into the story, a processing conflict may arise as they associate rook with its actual English meaning: the castle-tower-shaped chess piece. While it may not take long for the reader to parse the intended meaning, it creates a time lag that is akin to the Stroop Effect.
Knowing that conlangs cause readers to pause as they parse words then shifts the question from whether such an effect exists to how it can be used and what effect it can have on the reader. Although conlangs have been marvellously used by thousands of authors, notably Tolkien, who created more than a dozen languages for The Lord of the Rings, none quite do it for an intended psychological effect like Anthony Burgess, in his most acclaimed and iconic novel, A Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange follows Alex, a teenage delinquent who regularly commits crimes for fun. But these crimes aren’t your petty shop thefts or joyrides. Nope. They’re downright horrifying, ranging from random beatings to rape of much younger girls. Although the novel eventually follows the government’s rather concerning attempts to ‘cure’ Alex of his ultra-violent tendencies, the psychological effect of Burgess’ conlang is strongest in the first act, which covers Alex’s daily life before his eventual incarceration. This part of the novel serves as a dichotomous introduction: the reader is strictly confined to Alex’s narration and his attempts to befriend the reader, yet is simultaneously exposed to the horrors Alex commits.
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This conflict, and the semantic Stroop Effect (if one could dub it as that), is because Alex narrates in Nadsat. Burgess derives Nadsat from an odd blend of sources: Russian words, Cockney rhyming slang, and Romany phrases. Critically, however, Nadsat is meant to sound like English. As Burgess himself noted, Nadsat was “a Russified version of English” that “turns the book into a linguistic adventure.” He even describes the notable impact Nadsat had on the broader themes of the book, claiming that “people preferred the film because they are scared… of language.”
But before we get into why Nadsat scares readers, we need to cover why it actually makes them feel comfortable at first. Alex constantly attempts to win over the readers and present himself in a good light, highlighted by his constant addressing of the reader as “O my brothers” and his self-address as “your humble narrator.” Nadsat reinforces this by directly forcing the readers to filter information through Alex’s speaking style. This means the reader is eventually familiarised with Alex’s colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies and begins to process the story in the same manner as Alex. Essentially, the reader subconsciously understands the events of the novel through Alex’s eyes, as they are constrained by how he chooses to convey them.
Burgess creates a private language that is solely shared between Alex and the reader, forcing them to adopt his worldview and sense of humour before they’re given access to his particular brand of horrors. Nadsat creates a fun, secretive club dynamic that feels downright intimate at first. This, combined with some of the childish phrases Nadsat offers, like ‘baddiwad’ for bad, can make Alex seem precocious and eccentric, helping to tone down some of the red flags that readers may notice at the beginning of the novel. So, for the first couple of pages, as Alex and his droogs (gang) spend several pages just sitting, talking, and sipping drug-spiked moloko (milk), you’re almost lulled into a false sense of security.
As the first couple of pages convince you that Alex and his droogs seem to be decent fellows, Burgess abruptly pivots to their ultraviolence, without any visible transition. As soon as Alex and his droogs leave the milk bar, they instantly spot an old man and begin to ruthlessly beat him up. This depraved action is committed because they need to dispose of their pent-up, drug-induced energy. This is thrust upon the reader, leaving them dazed and in a sense of cognitive dissonance as they attempt to fit two opposing pieces into the wider puzzle. When combined with the fact that this occurs at the very beginning of the novel, meaning the reader is still attempting to grasp Nadsat and is experiencing the aforementioned time lag of comprehension, a sort of narrative dissociation is created. They commit more crimes, and among all this bewilderment, the focus on the intensity of the violence itself is diluted. The actual event becomes wallpaper.
Additionally, Nadsat functions as a translucent, protective barrier that blurs the most jagged edges of the violence. This serves as narrative distance that is ultimately shockingly contrasted by the next chapter, where the droogs commit their most horrific crime yet: the rape of a woman, as her husband is forced to watch. By this point, the nature of the crime is so horrific, and the reader is familiar enough with Nadsat, that the insulation that Alex attempted to build is completely shattered. The reader has acclimatised to Alex’s language, and has already gotten a bitter taste of his crimes, and this chapter proves to be the tipping point into the realisation that this fifteen-year-old is not just a person drinking moloko; instead, he is someone with a complete disregard for society’s core values. Of course, the progressive structure of the novel makes it a dawning realisation, but Burgess continues to give you no time to breathe: this is the main act, the climax, where you can no longer deny or stand politely away from the crime.
What remains in the wreckage of this closed gap is much more horrifying. As Nadsat is a language specific to Alex, the reader becomes, as discussed, habituated to how Alex thinks, speaks, and acts. As any positive perception slowly hits rock bottom, what is left is horror regarding it. The intimacy between narrator and reader is potent to the point where the reader feels vaguely complicit in the crime. Because they’re not just in the room; they’re in Alex’s head, which is a step closer to understanding the ringmaster than even his dear droogs are. Nadsat plays a critical role here: it makes parsing the true horror of the violence more difficult, for a specific period of time, so that it hits harder when the reader has already become socialised into the narrator’s worldview. The reader, to some level, understands Alex. What could be more horrifying than that?
Nadsat, then, invites the reader to consider that, in this world, ultraviolence isn’t some irrational, bastardly thing to completely condemn — it is obviously unjustifiable, but it stands against the broader context of actions in a dystopian world; one where choice, no matter how morally repulsive, matters significantly. Where choosing, even if it is reprehensible, is still something of moral value, rather than being sanitised and packaged up as a Perfect Person. Thus, it speaks to the broader themes, functioning as an intimate perspective into an otherwise completely unrelatable character.
Burgess’ conlang functions as a marvellous instance of the impact that language can truly have when deliberately used; it is, ultimately, a toast to the fact that even a fabricated, imaginary language can successfully emotionally manipulate the reader. It is testimony to how words inked on a page, limited to the bound covers, can change how we undergo abstract cognitive processes, including emotional processing and moral evaluation.
It is a stark reminder of the fact that even something terse and external can have a profound impact on our mental lives. And so conlangs really move beyond the tacky Stroop Effect analogy I initially mentioned, because they are more than just a quick effect. Nadsat puts you in a time capsule that eventually unravels and allows you to truly live in the themes of the book. Unlike the Stroop Effect, it doesn’t stop at lingering for a few seconds; it alters the way you think.
Ultimately, conlangs aren’t conflicting pieces of stimuli, but rather a valuable tool in the arsenal of a skilled author. And good writers, as William Styron said, “…leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
