Adapting to language

Anthony Burgesss and Stanley Kubricks

AClockwork 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 Iwill first
position the role of linguistics in sf in relation to the genres broader practices and theory, and
how these relate to adaptation concerns. Iwill then examine the role of language in Anthony
Burgesss AClockwork Orange (1962) and how Stanley Kubrick uses filmic techniques to reflect
upon this in his 1971 adaptation.
Keywords: Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick, adaptation, linguistics, AClockwork Orange

It all comes back to words. This is why literature is superior to

the other arts and, indeed, why there can be a hierarchy of arts,
with ballet at the bottom and sculpture a few rungs above it.
Anthony Burgess (On the Hopelessness 15)
If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.
Stanley Kubrick (qtd in Agel 11)

Le mot juste

James Phelan observes that although created out of language, the worlds we
experience in novels are more than worlds of words; they are, more accurately,
worlds from words, worlds that contain the elements of character and action,
which are essentially non-linguistic and which are more central to our experience of those worlds than the words which create them (1156). This passage
clearly places the emphasis on the non-linguistic, often transcendental aesthetic nature of reading narrative fiction, rather than the act itself; and this is
fair enough. Putting Derrida aside, one can appreciate a good wordsmith like
Gustave Flaubert, who apparently agonised for hours, if not days, over the right
word to convey a certain something. Phelans comment is not indefensible: a
story may be poorly told and characters may be roughly sketched, but both can
be made to go a long way, just as the imagination of a toddler that pens a simple
story is bound to be more pleasing than the words used to tell it. Yet sf, whose
ScienceFictionFilmandTelevision 5.2(2012),221241
Liverpool University Press

ISSN1754-3770(print) 1754-3789(online)
doi:10.3828/sfftv.2012.13

222 Sean McQueen

narrative topoi are often compared, even more regressively, to infantile power
fantasies, frequently suggests a self-conscious and sophisticated interrogation
of language systems. Indeed, it is this process of encountering and coming into
language that has provided sf with some of its richest source material. Concomitantly, it has also provided cinematic adapters of sf novels with unique
challenges. In this essay, Iwill first position the role of linguistics in sf in relation to the genres broader practices and theory, and how these relate to adaptation concerns. Iwill then examine the role of language in Anthony Burgesss
AClockwork Orange (1962) and how Stanley Kubrick uses filmic techniques to
reflect upon this in his adaptation, AClockwork Orange (UK/US 1971).
Locating suspicion

According to Carl Freedman, sf may be characterised not only by its shared

generic narrative tropes, but also on the level of the molecular operations of
language itself (36). Consequently, sf literature may be considered to announce
itself as a literary practice and category of genre fiction through its idiosyncratic
use of language. Freedmans selection of the opening passage of Philip K. Dicks
1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, seems a good place to start:
Amerry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside
his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised it always surprised him to find himself awake
without prior notice he rose from the bed, stood up in his multi-coloured pajamas, and
stretched. (Dick 7)

The stylistic register of this passage marks it as unmistakably science fiction (Freedman 31). The syntagm is certainly a peculiar one, not least because
mood and organ should likely be uncomfortable syntagmatic partners, but
also because the mood organ, ostensibly a device of some sort, seems to have
a strange quantifiable effect. These terms are not created ex nihilo moods and
organs are common enough but here they have acquired, or inspired us to
invest in them, certain qualities, although we are unsure which for now. This
is evident enough, but as Freedman observes of the passage, which he notes
may be considered largely emblematic of sf s dialectical approach to language,
the mood organ, which later reveals itself to be some sort of console-operated
device that emits emotion-specific waves that affect the brain, is unknown in
our own empirical environment, yet in the world of Dicks novel, is an ordinary accoutrement of everyday life (31). That is, casualness and estrangement
here work together: the unfamiliar and the familiar are held in suspension and

Adapting to language 223

[are] related to one another through the operations of a radically heterogeneous

and polyvalent prose (37). Dicks relatively small lexical manoeuvre results in
a wide dispersal of meaning, throwing into doubt history, humanity, emotions
and technology, thus making certain cognitive and imaginative demands on its
reader. Its stylistic manoeuvres incite us to read it, and sf more broadly, differently than we would read the language of mundane [non-sf] fiction (31).
Freedmans point is that this style forces several unfamiliar reading relations,
where otherwise normal and simple grammar and words become ambiguous. Iwould suggest that suspicious might be a more appropriate word for two
reasons: it reflects the mindset of the sf reader as he or she interacts with the
genres interrogative approach, and it describes the particular cognitive effect
at work in sf linguistics, whereby semiotic chains enact a double-coded movement. On the one hand, they highlight the stability of our own conventional
language, to evoke de Saussure, concretising it, if only by juxtaposing it with
the foreign. Thus our conventional language is a natural port of call. On the
other, the second, more suspicious and thematically poststructuralist movement is its simultaneous ability to raise doubt about the conventional language
that couches these peculiar words. Thus sf s approach to linguistics operates
rather alarmingly, and at the most discrete level, an operation which invariably emanates outwards. What may be drawn from this is that deciphering sf
linguistics is a particularly writerly activity, which emphasises the readers free
play of interpretations: the writerly text is ourselves writing (Barthes 5). Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr makes a similar observation: SF readers expect to construct
a world by supplying motivation and rationales for unfamiliar signs. ... [They]
actively supply imaginary new referents that will give rational meaning to the
implied science-fictional neosemes (22). Such an analysis is suited to discussions of prose sf, but Iwould here like to tease it out a little, extending it towards
the cinematic adaptation.
The writerly text hinges on a number of points critical both to the analysis
of adaptation and to the process of adaptation itself. At the simplest level one
can identify at least one conspicuous intertext: the presence, however strong
or flimsy, of the novel within the adaptation, if only because of a shared title,
character(s) or narrative. Beyond this superficial parity, one gets a heightened
sense that more sophisticated writerly activities are afoot. First, one can assume
that somewhere along the way someone involved in the filmmaking process
has read the novel hopefully the director, but almost certainly a screenwriter.
Discussions like this may be hampered in other cases, but later Iwill deal with
Kubrick, who read Burgesss novel and, after rejecting Burgesss effort, penned
his own screenplay. Second, the production of an adaptation can be considered

224 Sean McQueen

a formalised process of writing: The goal of the literary work ... is to make the
reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text (Barthes 4; my emphasis). The adapter may thus be considered to have produced a film and a reading,
or writing, of the novel. He or she has not so much reproduced as produced
a version of the novel. However, such a Barthesian writerly approach also calls
into question the language of the text and how one navigates ones way through
it. If one is adapting a novel, this is bound to be a consideration and thus a key
point for this discussion.
Here Iwould like to elaborate upon the point that sf presents a unique body
of fiction that may be considered to require a writerly approach of its readers via its use of linguistics. This is a two-way relationship: Freedman, Darko
Suvin, and Marc Angenot pay attention to the readers linguistic interpretive
methodology, while sf novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany also considers the
writing process inherent to the genre. Arguably, the linguistic elements of sf are
in concert with, and an augmentation of, Suvins conception of sf as a literature
of cognitive estrangement (4), in which estrangement is both the underlying attitude and dominant formal device (7). While the estranging qualities of
Dicks passage have been briefly summarised, there is another point to be made
regarding what Suvin considers sf s differentia specifica (63), the presence of a
novum, a totalising phenomenon or relationship deviating from the authors
and implied readers norm of reality (64). As Suvin notes,
Quantitatively, the postulated innovation can be of quite different degrees of magnitude,
running from the minimum of one discrete new invention (gadget, technique, phenomenon, relationship), agent (main character or characters), and/or relations basically new
and unknown in the authors environment. (64)

Thus the mood organ may be considered a novum of the gadget sort, in that
we are intended to presuppose its existence in the novel while it can also be
cognified well enough in relation to our own empirical environment via the
description of its workings (cognition being the process which enables the
science-fictional text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the
connections as well as the disconnections of the latter to our own empirical
world (Freedman 167)).1 Extending beyond this minimal function is its role
1. As this excerpt from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep demonstrates: Rick said, This he
held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires measures capillary dilation in the facial area.
We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-called shame or blushing reaction to a
morally shocking stimulus. It cant be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and
cardiac rate. He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. This records fluctuations
of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be
found a small but detectable movement of (40).

Adapting to language 225

in shaping interpersonal and machine/human relationships. Broader still, the

term mood organ, the yoking of one sign to another, is, in its linguistic properties, a novum, and exemplifies the aforementioned double movement both
suspicious in and of itself, which also arouses our suspicion of the adequacy of
our own language both to convey and to understand it. Dicks unadorned prose
style nevertheless taxes our comprehension in ways unfamiliar to non-sf texts.
It is a new thing, and a new expression, effecting a shift in the perception of the
world to which [it is] attached (Stockwell 139). What Ihope to adduce here is
the parity suspicious linguistics has with a more time-honoured appraisal of
sf s estranging narrative properties. Angenots observation of the idiosyncratic nature of sf narratives, in which he gestures towards Suvins concept of the
novum and the genres implied reading practices, is useful here:
The reader of a realistic novel proceeds from the general (the commonplace, the ideological topos) to the particular (the specific plot governed by this ideological structure). The sf
reader follows the reverse path: he induces from the particular some imagined, general
rules that prolong the authors fantasies and confer on them plausibility. The reader engages
in a conjectural reconstruction which materialises the fictional universe. (15)

Delany observes a similar practice, suggesting that fiction is characterised

by subjunctivity: the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to
borrow Saussures term for word:) sound-image and sound-image (43). He
suggests that literary forms can be distinguished along levels of subjunctive
communication: reportage has happened, naturalistic fiction could have happened and fantasy could not have happened , while sf communicates narrative
events that have not happened , including those that might happen, will not
happen and have not happened yet (434). Sf s level of subjunctivity involves
experiencing aesthetically pleasurable accretions in knowledge: the conflicting
information and tension between signs is resolved into a meaningful correction (38) along the syntagmatic chain, or over the course of the narrative: The
story is what happens in the readers mind as his eyes move from the first word
to the second, the second to the third, and so on to the end of the tale (36).
This approach is loosely informed by a Saussurean, structuralist schema (those
notions cognate with poststructuralism are discussed later). Corrections may
subvert and alter the readers knowledge and expectations, or may be merely a
confirmation of something previously suspected (39). This leans towards a narrative cognition based upon linguistic play: the corrective schema means that,
for the reader, sf is an exercise in deciphering and decoding both syntagmatic
chains and the overall narrative. Marie Maclean reflects a similar optimism
that sf s linguistic codes can be resolved: the arbitrary signifier, open to any
meaning, is seen to be an intellectual and aesthetic delusion, since the readers

226 Sean McQueen

pleasure resides in the coherent creation of an imaginary semiotic system (171).

Perhaps the greatest anxiety for writerly adapters of sf novels is, then, the
literatures fabrication of a linguistic novum, which can quickly amount to a
semantic game without clear referent (Suvin 15). While the estrangement of the
sign from its referent is a structuralist postulate, there is clearly something yet
more puzzling at the internal level of the sign here. This is a Saussurean structuralist approach that the relationship between sign and referent is arbitrary2
but de Saussure also notes that the internal components of the sign come to
suggest one another (67). Iwould suggest that in sf we have a heightened sense
of the poststructuralist anxiety that not only is there no strong relation between
the signs internal components, the signified and the signifier, but also that the
former is questionable in itself. For what is the description of an alien artefact or
other novum but an often exhaustive exercise in skipping from one insufficient
signifier to another, adding up to an unsubstantial or unintelligible signified?
Indeed, Seo-Young Chu locates cognitive estrangement in the object or phenomenon that the sf text seeks accurately to represent (5).3 Similarly sf has
provided us with some of the most recognisable onomatopoeia (ZAP!) and
strange utterances often have a holophonic effect.
Acharacter or scenario is invariably a grouping of signifiers that conjure a
signified which will hopefully allow us to grant it credence due to its parity with
a worldly referent. In one sense, sf is no different from any type of literature
here, as Angenot has pointed out: The fact that an SF story is by definition void
of referent ... does not in any way help us to characterise SF (10). He goes on to
note that Madame Bovary is also a sign without a referent. This is true enough
and, while loathe to use the term common sense given the theory at hand,
Ithink we can afford to be a little more heuristic in our approach to the adaptable material a text such as Flauberts Madame Bovary (1856) affords its adaptors: no matter how far we stray, we surely do not take Madame to be a Vulcan,
nor an android. She is certainly a human female, not a biological androgyne
nor a metamorphosing character from an Ursula Le Guin novel, and we can
2. As Mark Bould suggests, Arguably, SF has an exaggerated affinity with one of the basic precepts
of twentieth-century critical theory: by naming and describing things which do not exist, are as yet
unknown, and cannot (yet?) be known, it repeatedly emphasises a Saussurean conception of language
as arbitrary and unmotivated, as a framework placed over the valueless, meaningless flux of existence
(Preserving 164).
3. Chus formula largely rests upon the literalisation of figures of speech and metaphors, or sciencefictionemes, reversing Suvins framework: Science-fictional environments, creatures and artefacts
are not the imaginary referents that most people understand them to be. They are the mediums of
representation constituted by literalised poetic figures of speech (68). Chus is a wide-ranging study
of mimesis and representation in sf, whereas my focus is largely on language-as-novum, resting on a
slight departure from, rather than a reversal of, Suvin.

Adapting to language 227

infer her pleasant French provincial surroundings are on Earth. Amore likely
problem would be selecting the characters costume.
Suspicion of this sort, as either present in the language used or a provoked
reader response, is unique in sf. Indeed, it is ubiquitous in the genre and, naturally, open for parody. As such, David Tennant as the Doctor in Dr Who (UK
196389, 2005) can safely sum up the a-spatiotemporal universe as Wibbly
wobbly, timey wimey stuff , relying on reader/viewer familiarity with sf s generic
linguistic manoeuvres. While authors such as James Joyce have certainly played
with linguistic form, syntax and grammar, sf tends towards a different aesthetic
goal, whereby language may not be offered for decipherment but serve to create a remote, estranged, and yet intelligible world (Angenot 10). As such, sf s
syntagmatic structures come to dissipate while giving rise to the entertainment
of a pleasurable delusion (12) presumably of being immersed in the fictional
text, language and all. While this is persuasive, and Iwill continue to draw on
Angenots analysis, Walter E. Meyers sees something more critical operating
within the genre. He notes that a more developed sf text is likely to offer a new
word without a precise definition, bringing to the context in which it appears
only the associations suggested by its form (8; my emphasis); he adds that if
through the use of language the author adds an extra imaginative dimension
and at the same time provides the reader with a new perspective from which to
view his own society, something special indeed has been accomplished (89;
my emphasis). I have emphasised these words for I believe that this is what
is accomplished in both Burgesss novel and Kubricks cinematic adaptation.
While a persuasive sociopolitical commentary can certainly be adduced from
both, an equally persuasive argument might be that these texts provide a new
perspective from which to view one another and, more broadly, the role of language itself in adaptation.
Linguistics in Burgesss AClockwork Orange

Burgesss AClockwork Orange highlights sf s use and arousal of suspicion in

relation to language. Like Dicks mood organ, many of sf s unitary neologisms
and fictive words are substantives, rather than adjectival relationships or verbs
suggestive of new dialects. However, in Burgesss novel, the introduction of
new units and syntagmatic chains may be comprehended as nova that infer a
larger linguistic paradigm, a totalising novum. There are two elements at play
here. The first is the tension between the substantial and relational value of
each individual unit, which extends towards new syntagmatic structures and

228 Sean McQueen

implies a new language. Second, these units and syntagms appear to the reader
to be simultaneously enmeshed in what can be understood as a missing paradigm (Angenot 10), or, as is the case here, a missing novum: Burgess language,
Nadsat. On a unitary level, words like oobivat (from the Russian ubivat: to
kill), smot (from the Russian smotret: to look) and shlaga (from the German
Schlager: a club or bat)4 are empirical symptoms of an implied internalised fictive language system.
Ishould like to consider the tension between the relational and substantial
meaning of units symptomatic of the Nadsat (Russian suffix for teen) argot
used by Burgesss first-person narrator, Alex. Most of the words are modified
from Russian, although there are numerous German, Latin, Dutch, regional
Slavic, Gypsy, French and Arabic words, Cockney rhyming slang and some
invented words and expressions. (To the Anglophone reader who knows this,
these words would likely appear as borrowed neologisms, subsequently anglicised with free binding with other morphemes (Stockwell 125).) Importantly,
the words are couched within the Anglophone linguistic paradigm. Thus, one
may viddy films (from the Russian vidyet: to see) or slooshy music (from
the Russian slushat: to hear). However, these words are not just dropped in
occasionally, rather their use is sustained throughout the novel, spoken by
other characters and, perhaps of the greatest importance, related to us through
Alexs subjective narration. Thus Nadsat is not simply present at the level of
the stray utterance, but is the medium through which we vicariously interact
with the fictitious world as Alexs language-as-consciousness moves through
it: for example, In the hallway was the good old municipal painting on the
walls vecks and ptitsas very well developed, stern in the dignity of labour, at
workbench and machine with not one stitch of platties on the well-developed
plotts (Burgess Clockwork 25). In short, we have no recourse to a world that is
not mediated through Alexs idiosyncratic thoughts and words.
Nadsat is, Isuggest, the absent paradigm, a symptomatic component in the
construction of, or an index to, the overarching absent paradigm of the world of
the near future. However, the novels fist-person narration complicates this. The
reliability of Alexs narration is unquestionably problematic: he is said to have
acquired Nadsat via subliminal penetration (86), and his use of it may very
well be a self-conscious one. As such, Samuel McCracken notes, It seems clear
that [Alex] thinks in Nadsat, and consequently he organises reality by means
of what is his second language. ... Whether or not we end up considering [his]
use of Nadsat as euphemistic, we must recognise that between reality and his
4. For the translations of Nadsat Ihave used Hyman, the most widely cited resource.

Adapting to language 229

perception of it he draws the veil of jargon (432). Alexs narration is languageas-consciousness, and we have no recourse to a world that is not communicated
through his subjectivity. Even for an sf text, this level of mediation and linguistic play is unusual: Although todays sf writers place language mutation in the
foreground of their styles more often than before, it is still rare for sf texts to
narrate their estranged worlds primarily through radically estranged discourse
(Csicsery-Ronay 30). Similarly, Peter Stockwell notes that the common use of
a few aberrant spellings are indexical to alienness and/or futurity, rather than
fully worked out piece[s] of parallel-universe orthography (489). Nadsat is,
of course, not alien in the extraterrestrial sense of the word, although to an
Anglophone it is certainly a dizzying experience. Moreover, the implications of
the individual Nadsat signs are wide-reaching: through Alexs narrative voice,
every sign, including those which the reader may identify as English, has the
potential to become Nadsat given their mutual dependence in the comprehension of syntagmatic chains. Nadsat comes to be what Csicsery-Ronay calls a
full-fledged mutant discourse in which the rules of syntax and word construction reflect radical social change at the level of language (31). Nadsat and the
world of the near future are commensurate, and thus Nadsat may be considered
the absent paradigm.
Although it is an unachievable horizon, in one sense we can get close to it
by simply reading through the novel. However, there is a discernible point of
tension, best posed as a question: does the couching of Nadsat units and small
syntagms, however persistent, within the English language, emphasise the
arbitrariness of both the Nadsat and English sign, or does the former become
immediately reduced to the conventional level of the already internalised, English language (Saussure 68)? The answer is probably both. For an (exclusively)
Anglophone reader, unaccompanied by a Nadsat dictionary, the (approximately) 200 Nadsat words seem, contra Derrida, to simply fall from the sky ready
made (Derrida, Speech 33). The task, of course, is to internalise this language,
since checking the glossary would be a tedious (and far less rewarding) exercise
it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words! (Bakhtin
293, qtd in Bould, Language 227). Abrief study concluded that by reading for
meaning, English-speaking readers were able more or less to learn the language,
with an accuracy of 76 per cent when checked against the Nadsat dictionary
(Pitts, White and Krashen 271). The simultaneous presence of both English and
Nadsat offers a partial recognition of our reality, but with sufficient alternativity
to render the effect of defamiliarisation (Stockwell 61). This relationship is an
isomorphic one, where two domains of knowledge, one familiar (English), the
other unfamiliar (Nadsat), interact with one another (200). Thus the content

230 Sean McQueen

of the Nadsat sign is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that
exists outside it (Saussure 115) namely English. Moreover, Stockwell suggests
that all words are fundamentally implicated in other similar-looking words,
thus reader[s] often try to interpret them in terms of words they already know
(1234). For example, viddy suggests video and, by extension see or watch.
However, the hopelessness of translating and deciphering signifiers in relation to other signifiers is, of course, the existential anxiety of poststructuralist theory, exemplified by Derridas notion of diffrance, where meaning is in
constant flux, where searching for meaning is an infinitely regressive process
(Diffrance 11). For example, horrorshow comes from the Russian kharash
for good or well, yet is used adjectivally in relation to rather gruesome acts,
aligning it with contemporary parlance for wicked or sick (Morrison x). Similarly, Nadsat is both the language of the novel and the word for teen. Thus Derrida: the meaning of meaning, in its indefinite referral of signifier to signifier,
means that it will always signify again (Writing 25). In this sense, recourse to
a Nadsat dictionary serves only to thwart translation, providing a host of new
terms, both the foreign root and a few English equivalents. The ultimate irony
found in the Nadsat dictionary is that slovo is the Russian word for word,
which just tells us what it is rather than what it means if such a contradiction
can be briefly entertained. Suspicion, it may thus be said, is rewarded, but never
satiated.
In either case, both answers to the question bring us to the same conclusion,
returning us to the dual suspicion of sf linguistics. On the one hand, reading
Nadsat forces a new reading relationship that illuminates the internalisation
of our native language (English in my case) as a ready-made system, which
truncates our relationship to an abstracted paradigm. It also emblematises the
shift from structuralist schematising to poststructuralist liquescence, from the
optimism of decoding the sf text to the free play of words. For all his emphasis
on arbitrariness, Saussure thought signs, although unstable in and of themselves, acquired a relational stability by virtue of their difference from other
signs, hence his aphorism in language there are only differences (120); or, to
put it another way, language is a system of interdependent terms in which the
value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of others (114).
Angenot observes that Every fictive word, no matter what its etymology, will
be read in a particular context. Surrounding elements irradiate virtual meanings on the opaque signs (12). On the other hand, to throw things into a poststructuralist direction, we must also allow this to work the other way: this very
reliance on difference between signs (a broad canvas for Burgesss Nadsat) and
the positioning of an already internalised language set in relation to a missing

Adapting to language 231

paradigm, has a contaminating effect on the very language we rely upon, making the reader doubt, or suspicious of, their comprehension. Nadsat signs come
to signify again and again, spilling their uncertain meaning into the English
signs 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. Unfortunately this means that
every uttered word is a neologism since its meaning varies with every occasion of its use,
and since the word will never have previously been used in exactly that situation in exactly
the same way, it is a new usage. (137)5

All this brings us squarely back to uncertainty, the doubly coded process of
estrangement of the linguistic novum. It also returns us to how we write when
we 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 of adaptation

functions by way of an industrialised refusal of scholarly debate, particularly
of poststructuralist currents regarding the mutability and constant deferral of
the meaning of language. By and large, the fashioning of a serviceable filmic
icon, be it character, object or mise en scne, formalises the writerly process,
ossifying an interpretation at the level of a cinematic diegesis. (Narrative fidelity aside, this is observable in adaptations of sf novels involving alien species
or strange new planets; see, for example, Dune (Lynch US 1984), adapted from
Frank Herberts 1965 novel of the same name.) However, this assumes, fallaciously, that the filmic text does not require a writerly approach from its viewer,
as though this process has been assumed solely by the filmmaker, and that, as
the level of perception increases the level of signification decreases,7 or, to put
it in structuralist terms, that assertion always ultimately depends on some level
of shared assumption between utterer and receiver (Harland 1987: 18). I am
interested here in the way suspicion, once again as both a generic trope and
reader response, plays itself out both at the level of the film, as a work of art in
5. Similarly, Bould notes parenthetically that the vast associative web of connotations in which each
individual word is located, and which varies from reader to reader, assures that each reader understands that specific meaning in approximately similar but divergent ways (Language 232).
6. Burgess On the Hopelessness 15.
7. Dudley Andrew observes that literature works from signification to perception, while cinema generally works in the opposite direction (32).

232 Sean McQueen

its own right, but also at an interartistic and intertextual level, and in relation
to a linguistic novum.
Neil D. Isaacs notes that Burgesss dazzling use of language in AClockwork
Orange is the most obvious essential quality to be lost in a filmed treatment
of the story (124). By this he does not mean that Nadsat is absent from the
film, as Alexs (Malcolm McDowell) voice-over narration is transposed more
or less word-for-word from the novel in a number of scenes. However, the film
is not construed entirely through his consciousness, as it is in the novel. Isaacs
continues:
More essential ... is the use of that language by his persona. Alexs voice not his vocabulary dominates the book. The voice is mannered, achieving a kind of hyped musical
quality through its many artifices. As such, it is the perfect vehicle for the appropriate and
consistent tone with which it speaks. And in turn that tone of voice ideally conveys the ironic themes. (125)

With the obvious exception of the word book, this strikes me as something one
would write about an actors performance in a film. Vivian Sobchack finds the
aesthetic experience of hearing the Nadsat argot one of extraordinary imaginative resonance, a delicate balance between sense and nonsense, between logical
communication and magical litany (146). Indeed, Saussure said of the signifier
(in its phonic rather than graphic state) that it is not the material sound, a
purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound-image is sensory (66).
Burgesss own comments are worth interrogating: The light and shade and
downright darkness of my language cannot, however brilliant the director, find
a cinematic analogue (On the Hopelessness 15). Sobchack notes the irony in
his self-assessment, which renders his work in visual terms (148) that also
insist upon their implied acoustic plasticity. Indeed, to say these words aloud
while reading, to give them ones own inflection and then to feed them back
into the novel deictically, is one of the writerly activities demanded of the reader. Extending this, without insisting on translation or suggesting that Nadsat
signs work as simple substitutions, it is interesting to note that a great many of
Burgesss words are evocative of the plastic sensory qualities cinema routinely
conveys. To viddy is to see, to slooshy is to hear, to creech is to scream, a
goloss is a voice, if something is gromky it is loud, and a zvook is a sound.
Nadsat signs that evoke sensations, rather than things, estrange their syntagmatic context, but also defamiliarise the sensory qualities we conventionally
associate with them. The reader can only speculate: how might viddying differ
from seeing? what does a creech, as opposed to a scream, sound like? Interestingly, there is no Nadsat word in the novel for read. There are two things about

Adapting to language 233

Burgesss language that Ithink Kubrick, taking a writerly approach to difficult

adaptable material, has played with intentionally or inadvertently: the level of
self-reflexivity neology invariably displays (Csicsery-Ronay 13) and the highly
performative nature of the text. While he can be said to have preserved them,
he has also reasserted and reinscribed them in filmic language. In doing so, he
has performed, and requires the viewer in turn to perform, writerly activities:
To appreciate a text is not to give it a ... meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it (Barthes 5).
Enunciation in literature and film

At this point, it is useful to distinguish between the literary and cinematic

modes of narration that highlight these points. In literature, the concept of
enunciation focuses on the way narrative is communicated, largely via tenses
and modes of address, be they first or third person.8 Transposed to film theory,
enunciation has also come to signify the constitution of subjectivity [the presence of an author or narrator] in language, and secondarily, the production and
control of subject relations through the imaginary link established between the
narrator and the spectator by way of their mutual investment in the discourse
of the film (Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis 106). In literature, the narrator is invariably a construct of language (Bluestone 23), but in film the narrators mental activity is expressed along the lines of verbalisation (cognition)
and non-verbal discourse (perception) (Chatman Story 181). The presence of a
first-person voice-over on the films audio track is an obvious example of cinematic enunciation, although the cinematic narrator may be identified iconically through editing, shot composition, point of view and lighting, rather than
verbally (Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis 147).
Despite their differences, Chatman notes that both literary and cinematic
enunciation depend upon levels of mediation between the narrative and the
narrator, whose presence derives from the audiences sense of some demonstrable [narrative] communication (Story 147). In Burgesss novel, direct access
to Alexs language-as-consciousness comprises the whole of the narrative.
Kubrick, however, makes use of dramatic shifts between objectively capturing
the mise en scne, and combining literary verbalisation and visual perception
into subjective narrative states that bear the enunciation of Alexs narrative presence. Chatman observes that by its nature, cinema resists traditional language8. See Benveniste.

234 Sean McQueen

centred notions of the narrator, making enunciation in cinematic adaptation

challenging, as verbal activity furnishes no easy analogy with visual activity
(Coming 124).9 Yet in Kubricks adaptation, language, which is often confined
to 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 of sf s use of language, particularly with regard to neologogenesis, depends upon the ability to evoke imaginary differences of culture and consciousness (20). With an emphasis on the
latter, the following analysis will attempt to demonstrate Kubricks cinematic
engagement with language and how the filmgoer negotiates Nadsat.
Viddy and slooshy

Kubricks film is intermittently narrated in first-person Nadsat by Alex. However, his language-as-consciousness becomes a noticeably intrusive presence in
the film (as opposed to a constant one in the novel) in its forcing of self-reflexive,
intersubjective relationships. Figures 1 and 2 explain this relationship. In both
sequences there are forced relations of seeing presented by shot/reverse-shot
editing, and hearing, articulated in Nadsat. In Figure1, Alex has just finished
a gruesome rendition of the screen classic, Singin in the Rain, as a restrained
Mr Alexander (Patrick Magee) is forced to bear witness to the rape of his wife
(Adrienne Corri). In Figure 2, voice-over narration accompanies an edited
sequence in which the camera alternates between a restrained Alex and the
screen, or, we may infer, the screen as seen by Alex. The film he watches shows
a man being beaten by youths, later a woman being gang raped. This is followed
by Second World War stock footage and Nazi processions and iconography. The
diegetic sound from the film Alex is watching laughter, moans of dismay and
reverie, and the sounds of blows falling plays simultaneously with non-diegetic music ominous acoustic rumblings that transform as the scene progresses.
The two scenes, which are thematically and technically (in terms of framing and
composition) similar, serve as mirror images of one another: 1a and 2a visually
and sonically recall one another, while 1a is simultaneously the mirror image
of 2b, as 1b is the mirror image of 2a. The reversal of forced privileged points
of view draws the spectator into a precarious relationship as they experience
both states. Both sequences feature phonological utterances both inclusive and
9. Here analogy is not to be misconstrued as fidelity. George Bluestone similarly notes that attempts
at a faithful matching of linguistic sign and visual image is disastrous to both texts: The difference is
too great to overcome (23).

Adapting to language 235

Figure 2a

Alex: Im singin, just singin in the rain.

Viddy well, little brother, viddy well.

Alexs 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. Its
funny how the colours of the real world
only seem really real when you viddy
them on a screen.

Figure 1b

Figure 2b

Time and space in film

Figure 1a

Time and space in film

suggestive of Nadsat and, more broadly, the missing paradigm indicated by its
presence. This occurs either at the level of the filmic diegesis (Figure1) or at a
non-diegetic level (Figure2). By reasserting the heightened self-reflexivity of
Burgesss prose and by performing it cinematically, the film incites the viewer
to perform via interpretation what is essentially a performative text. Kubrick
writes, and makes the viewer write in turn, the estranging properties of Nadsat. The intrusive imposition of Alexs didactic, direct address to the spectator
in Figure1 viddy well and the voice-over narration and subjective interpretation of the intra-cinematic film in Figure2, reflect and inspire a writerly
approach to the text in relation to the linguistic novum, eliciting estrangement

236 Sean McQueen

on both a visual and phonological plane. It makes us both privy to a suspicious

Nadsat linguistic consciousness, and abstracted observers of its missing paradigm as mediated through one of its speakers.
On the one hand, we inhabit two different roles, observers of writing and
writers ourselves: we see and we viddy. In the first scene, we are explicitly told to
viddy, sharing the perspective of Mr Alexander. The camera then moves from
his face to that of his wife as she is molested. In the second scene, we share the
gaze with Alex, one who viddies instinctively. In both scenes, the camera is at
times shaky, capturing the violence in an exploratory and declarative fashion,
but also uncertain in its framing. The first scene is brief, suggestive of a simultaneous immersion and repulsion. This is a forced relation of one who does
not viddy instinctively, namely Alexander or the cinematic spectator who, via
editing, assumes an uncomfortable perceptual sympathy (Chatman Story 159)
with his visual experiences. The second scene provides a formal contrast. It is a
film being projected within the film, but is also subjectively mediated through
Alexs consciousness. As such, there is confusion between the austere camera
and Alexs unblinking eyes. Chatman notes that the cinematic match-cut suggests the enunciation of a specific narrator: if in the first shot the character
looks off-screen ... and there follows a cut to another setup within his eyeshot,
we assume that he has in fact seen that thing, from that perceptual point of view
(Story 159). Conflating Alexs visual perception and the camera, the gaze follows
the trajectory of the thrusts and punches on-screen, jerking left as the victim is
struck on the right hand side of the face, and vice versa. This is accompanied
by Alexs Nadsat voice-over narration, giving us a privileged and unnerving
perspective of a Nadsat-construction of the world.
This reflects the suspicion aroused by the aforementioned double-coded
movement found in sf linguistics, where the conventional and the foreign are
brought into relief via juxtaposition, only this time it is rendered cinematically
via Alexs enunciation: like Alex we viddy, rather than see. There is a noticeable difference here between cinematically realised Nadsat and that in the
novel. Stockwell suggests that sf neologisms often incite the reader to seek a
linguistic correspondence, where words from similar lexical fields [function]
as synonyms and [are] thus interchangeable (142). In Burgesss novel, we may
be tempted to substitute viddy with see. However, in Kubricks film, they are
neither commensurate nor interchangeable. Indeed, the difference, or meaning shift in this treatment of language resembles neosemic recontextualisation,
where new meanings [are] attached to existing words (Stockwell 119) this
time meaning is formed through the difference between the novel and the filmic adaptation. Alexs subjectivity is a violent and alien one, and inhabiting both

Adapting to language 237

its language and how that language determines the world around it makes for
an unnerving shared experience.
The contrast between the cameras movement and framing, sometimes reluctant and skittish, sometimes austere and static, evokes a Nadsat subjectivity via
filmic enunciation. The near-haptic sensations of onomatopoeia in Burgesss
Nadsat, such as glolp and chumble, incite the reader to speculate on how they
are to be articulated: they entice the readers participation in an alternative
semiotics in which the sign refers, not to conventional and abstract meanings,
but via its own palpability to corresponding qualities in the physical consistency, properties, and kinetics of things (Goh 271). This is reflected in Kubricks
adaptation, particularly in Figure 2, where we see Alexs consciousness construct the filmic image and hear him narrate his sensations. The camera/Alex
enthusiastically synchronises itself with the force and direction of violent blows,
emphasising the physicality of the language-as-consciousness. The engagement of the spectator by means of eye-level matches invites a conflation of Alex
and the spectator, making the spectator process the filmic image through an
estranged linguistic novum.
Asimilar process occurs on an auditory level. In the first scene, Alex brings
the phonological aspects of Nadsat into relation with music. It is, as Sobchack
puts it, unoriginal music used originally, here emphasising the contrast of the
sonic and the visual: old movie memories are almost insupportably mocked.
The violence and rape is done to the song and ... we are victims of the violence
done [to] our memories and associations (212, 215). In the second scene, we hear
Alex processing the sounds of the film. His use of Nadsat simultaneously places
us in a subjective slooshying relationship (as opposed to hearing) to the nondiegetic music, which turns from ominous to excitable once Alexs voice-over
points out the blood. In this negotiation, voice-over, diegetic and non-diegetic
music comment on each other, and perform a Nadsat linguistic consciousness,
while also suggesting that we are performing one ourselves. Alexs narration,
Its funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you
viddy them on a screen, emphasises the relationship: an intersubjective Nadsat
auditory clue that invites us self-reflexively both to assume and reflect upon the
filmic image and our own interpretation.
Filmic correction

Similar to Burgesss self-assessment, Delany notes the highly visual process and
sensations of reading, emphasising (as noted above) the aesthetic pleasures

238 Sean McQueen

found in the temporal process of correcting the readers suspicions, either

affirming or subverting them with knowledge accreted along the syntagmatic
chain, and as the overall narrative progresses. He contrasts this process with
watching a film:
Lets look more closely at what happens in this visual journey. How, for example, does
the work of reading a narrative differ from watching a film? In a film the illusion of reality comes from a series of pictures each slightly different. The difference represents a fixed
chronological relation which the eye and the mind together render as motion. Words in a
narrative generate tones of voice, syntactic expectations, memories of other words and pictures. But rather than a fixed chronological relation, they sit in numerous inter- and overweaving relations. The process as we move our eyes from word to word is corrective and
revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had a
moment before. (367)

Delany suggests that when reading, time is able to flow both backwards and
forwards. The cognitive effect is one of simultaneity: a temporally linear, forward progression revises what has come before it. This recalls the above observations made in relation to the Derridean spillage of signification. However,
I would like to critique and augment Delanys position regarding film: film
produces similar effects to those Delany finds in the linguistic play of prose
sf. The filmgoer is required to be equally apperceptive, as new information is
drawn into relation with previous experience. With reference to my analysis
of Kubricks film, on the one hand this negotiation occurs between the filmic
diegesis and an intertext specifically Alexs gruesomely ludic rendition of
Singin in the Rain. His jaunty performance is disturbing due to its immediate
thematic contrast with the violent molestation, but all the more so because it
calls upon cinematic history and on the viewers dormant memory, which
is comprised of extra-textual encyclopaedic knowledge, elements of which are
brought to bear (Stockwell 147). Much like the tension between Nadsat and
English, the film contaminates our points of reference, making them and our
relationship with them suspect. (As much could be said for the films deployment of classical music motifs, particularly Beethovens Ninth Symphony as
reconfigured by Moog synthesiser, which is equally estranging, as it calls upon
and disrupts prior knowledge.)
On the other hand, addressing Delanys conception of simultaneous temporal movement, it can be argued that film performs corrections via its expressive resources in narrative time and space and, via editing, by visual and sonic
repetition, reversal and juxtaposition, and so on. These can be expressed in
two ways, one immediate, the other less so: first, in the time taken in a single shot there is the immediate interaction between audio and visual tracks;

Adapting to language 239

and, second, a relationship is formed by moving between shots via editing in a

sequence, or significantly protracted along narrative time. The former is analogous to Stockwells active memory, made up of recently encountered items;
the latter to the ongoing text-world of semi-active memory of sequences that
the [viewer] has encountered and remembered up to this point in the reading
(1467). In Kubricks film, both occur and, more importantly, interact with and
comment on one another. The immediate expression can be identified in the
almost comically bizarre music that clashes with the violent imagery in Figure2b. By comparison, the shots that comprise Figure1 are a sequence (likewise
those comprising Figure2) that can be understood as corrections that require
revisions of subjective positions forced into relation by filmic techniques: they
demonstrate a subjectivity informed by Nadsat language-as-consciousness, but
also suggest, via the camera, that the spectator is performing such a subjectivity.
Moreover, the complex relationship between Figures 1 and 2 is a significantly
protracted one: the former occurs at the beginning of the film, the latter midway.
The relationship recalls Delanys description of linguistic play: the individual
shots are reconfigured, or corrected, during their respective sequences that are,
in turn, recalled and juxtaposed with one another along the narrative. Thus the
film evinces a complex system of inter- and over-weaving relations occurring
at different points in narrative time, provoking revisions of previous narrative
experiences, metaphorically aligning linguistic tropes with the editing process.
The self-reflexive and performative aspects of these two scenes bring into
relief a privileged access to a Nadsat consciousness, twinned with the horizon
of a missing linguistic paradigm, this time rendered both visually and sonically.
Similarly, both adaptation and interpretation have aroused reader responses
similar to those evoked by the novel, where our attention is drawn to the
estranging nature of inhabiting and encountering novum-as-language, both
suspicious of text and ourselves as interpreters and participants.
The writerly is the novelistic without the novel10

Burgess said of the book that when the reader has finished the novel, he will
have penetrated the vocabulary of the Russian-based Nadsat, and hence will
have gotten, willy-nilly, a basic Russian lexicon. He will thus understand a little
of what it is like to be brainwashed (qtd in McCracken 432). Alex is said to have
acquired Nadsat via a process of subliminal penetration, which may be Bur10. Barthes 5.

240 Sean McQueen

gess alluding to this ambition. Kubricks engagement with the qualities of the
language via film provides a unique commentary that elicits an often uncomfortable response that, at the supra-paradigmatic and extra-textual level of the
reader, has a similar cognitively estranging effect. Yet, in ways specific to the
cinematic register, the film makes us get inside the language, both superficially
observing and hearing it, and at a more intimate and confronting, intersubjective level. As we become complicit in the construction of these states, this demonstrates how we make meaning out of language, and how language functions
in the adaptation. The writerly process, as both reflected and performed in sf, is
analogous to a mood organ, where we may dial in the emotional register, but be
taken aback by its imposition.

Acknowledgements
Iwould like to thank Andrew Milner for his comments on the first draft of this essay, and
Natalie Satakovski, who helped tease out some of the finer points.

Works cited
Agel, Jerome. The Making of Kubricks 2001. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Andrew, Dudley. Adaptation. Film and Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2000. 2837.
Angenot, Marc. The Absent Paradigm: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Science Fiction.
Science Fiction Studies 17 (1979): 919.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday, 1974.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral
Gables: U of Miami P, 1971.
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.
Bould, Mark. Preserving Machines: Recentering the Decentered Subject in Blade Runner
and Johnny Mnemonic. Writing and Cinema. Ed. Jonathan Bignell. Harlow: Longman,
1999. 16478.
. Language and Linguistics. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould,
Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint. London: Routledge, 2009. 22535.
Burgess, Anthony. On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books into Films. New York
Times (20 Apr 1975): 1415.
. AClockwork Orange. London: Penguin, 2000.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1978.

Adapting to language 241

. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep: AScience-fictional Theory of Representation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP,
2008.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown: Dragon Press, 1977.
Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs.
Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978.
. Diffrance. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 127.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Voyager, 1996.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2000.
Goh, Robbie B. H. Clockwork Language Reconsidered: Iconicity and Narrative in Anthony Burgesss AClockwork Orange. Journal of Narrative Theory 30.2 (2000): 26380.
Harland, Richard. Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-structuralism. London: Routledge, 1987.
Hyman, Stanley E. Glossary of Nadsat Language. Anthony Burgess, AClockwork Orange.
New York: Ballantine, 1963. 18591.
Isaacs, Neil D. Unstuck in Time: Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse Five. Literature/
Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 12231.
Maclean, Marie. Metamorphoses of the Signifier in Unnatural Languages. Science Fiction
Studies 33 (1984): 16673.
McCracken, Samuel. Novel into Film: Novelist into Critic: AClockwork Orange ... Again.
The Antioch Review 32.3 (1972): 42736.
Meyers, Walter E. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1980.
Morrison, Blake. Introduction. Anthony Burgess, AClockwork Orange. London: Penguin,
2000. viixxiv.
Phelan, James. Worlds from Words: ATheory of Language in Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1981.
Pitts, Michael, Howard White and Stephen Krashen. Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary through Reading: AReplication of the Clockwork Orange Study Using Second
Language Acquirers. Reading in a Foreign Language 5.2 (1989): 2715.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. London: Peter Owen, 1960.
Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd edn. London:
Rutgers UP, 2004.
Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 1999.
Stockwell, Peter. The Poetics of Science Fiction. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary
Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Copyright of Science Fiction Film & Television is published by Liverpool University Press, and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without Liverpool University Press's express
written copyright permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.