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“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’ in Time for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange
Julian Preece 
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, Pages: 117 - 129
Swansea University Author:
Julian Preece
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DOI (Published version): 10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_6
Abstract
Anthony Burgess’s Alex is as linguistically astute as any first-person narrator in the international history of the picaresque genre, to which A Clockwork Orange emphatically belongs. Alex alters his voice or ‘goloss’ according to the effect he wishes to have on his interlocutor, insists on language...
| Published in: | Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture |
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| ISBN: | 9783031055980 9783031055997 |
| ISSN: | 2634-629X 2634-6303 |
| Published: |
Cham
Springer International Publishing
2023
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa62484 |
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| Abstract: |
Anthony Burgess’s Alex is as linguistically astute as any first-person narrator in the international history of the picaresque genre, to which A Clockwork Orange emphatically belongs. Alex alters his voice or ‘goloss’ according to the effect he wishes to have on his interlocutor, insists on language supremacy over his ‘droogs’, and judges everyone he meets by how they speak. Alex’s acts of deception depend on his ability to imitate others’ language usage but he gets arrested when his preferred ‘Nadsat’ is recognised by one of his victims. It is not only Alex’s individual speech acts, however, which confront and mock a world controlled by adults, authority, religion, and science, his whole narrative is a non-confession, like classic picaresque novels from Lazarillo de Tormes to Simplicissimus, mixing high and low registers and challenging a range of readers’ preconceptions, above all those of bien-pensant liberals, who are the target of Burgess’s satire. Stanley Kubrick’s film gives Alex a Lancashire accent and, again through voice, intonation and speech patterns, emphasises the story’s class-based British setting, thus in some instances undermining the novel’s reactionary agenda. This chapter relates the language politics of A Clockwork Orange to Burgess’s other early fiction, most notably The Malayan Trilogy, and to his interest in linguistics more broadly to argue that his knowledge of other languages and understanding of how their interaction with one another is determined by power relations also influenced his representation of English in his fiction. |
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| Keywords: |
Adaptation; Language; Nadsat; Linguistics; Malaya; Malayan Trilogy; Picaresque; ‘Goloss’ |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
This output is attached to the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative, which ran from 2018-19. |
| Start Page: |
117 |
| End Page: |
129 |