Clockwork Orange

ClockworkOrange, a book by AnthonyBurgess?, popularized in a movie by StanleyKubrick. It's futuristic fiction in the vein of classics like NineteenEightyFour and BraveNewWorld. From another perspective, it's a linguistic masterpiece that both explores our use of language and toys with the evolution of language to the ultimate merger of English-speaking and Russian-speaking cultures. (The book teaches you the language with no effort on your part. If you don't believe me, pick up a copy, turn to the middle and try to read it. But you don't notice this problem if you read start-to-finish.) I think the movie was the setting for the first commercial works of the Moog Synthesizer (a la SwitchedOnBach, which came a little before or a little after Clockwork, I don't remember before), the forebearer of all modern synthesizers.

Given the author's fascination with language, one would expect the book to wear language on its sleeve. And it does, in the title, though the significance is not widely recognized. "Clockwork" signifies the increasing mechanisation of society, perhaps the movement from a civil society to one that is purely monochronic, with all quotidian activities routinized and synchronized. "Orange" is a time-damaged extrapolation of` "organic," evocative of the essential natural chaotic processes that underlie nature and all activity.

The tension between "clockwork" -- automation - and "orange" - our natural selves -- is the predominant subtext of this book. In particular, it explores the ill-fated social direction of mechanising essentially human processes. The early use of the synthesizer ("computerized music," including a computer-generated vocal solo line and chorus for "Freude, Freude") supports this thinly veiled theme.

[I'm not sure the vocal solo and chorus count as "computer-generated". They were produced using a widget called a "spectrum follower" - which I think is the same thing as a vocoder - from real singing. -- GarethMcCaughan]

See PatternsVsDescriptions.

-- JimCoplien

The title has two primary meanings: first, from the Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange", something that on the surface was normal, but inside was artificial and unnatural; second, the overlap with Malay "orang" meaning "man" (witness "orang-utan", "man of the forest"). -- Derived from a 1985 interview with Burgess

It's also the affectionate nickname of the Glasgow underground. Due to the trains being orange. It was built in 1896 and forms a large circle around the city with the trains going round and round and round (hence "clockwork").

And hence, also the name of a pub crawl. Where one gets off at each station and has a drink...

-- KatieLucas

As an additional note on this fine book, try to find the British version with the "missing" last chapter.

-- FrankAdrian

Has anyone read "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban? This is a book similarly written in its own language. And it has an staggeringly complex mythic structure, as well as a vocabulary that simplifies and enriches discussion of the metaphorical using vocabulary derived from (by now quaintly archaic) computer terminology.

So good, I turned right around and read it a second time. -- EricMoon

I remember reading a sci-fi short story once where the author gradually introduced new words as you proceeded. It came as a complete surprise to look back at the last page of the story a few days later and realize that it appeared to be complete gibberish.

In fact, it was written completely in the author's invented language and made perfect sense the first time you read it. Unfortunately it only works once, as on subsequent re-reading you're too aware of what he is doing.

I'd love it if anyone else can point identify the story/author -- KeithDerrick

"Meihem in Ce Klasrum" by Dolton Edwards (from Astounding Science Fiction in 1946). A copy is on the web at http://www.ecphorizer.com/Articles1/meiheminceklasru.html and an updated version can be found at http://www.grrr.net/spelling.html

"Flowers for Algernon" by (I think) Daniel Keyes does something similar. Instead of an invented language, the end is in pidgin English. As the story proceeds, the narrator's verbal skills increase drastically, then decrease to near unintelligibility. If you just read the end, you might well have a hard time deciphering it.

I haven't read the "missing final chapter" but I've always been entranced by the book and the movie. Although the book is said to be about the conflict between organism and mechanism, I felt a chill of a different flavor at the end. Alex is a complete sociopath, yet society finds a way to use him to its advantage at the end, as a sociopath. It strikes me as a horrible vision, no doubt more because of what I brought to it than what is there. -- MichaelFeathers

That's just the thing, though. With the "missing" (actually the original) last chapter, the message is completely different, and even more profound, IMO. -- MikeSmith

The movie has a missing final scene too: the lead character getting crucified in the middle of an orgy of debs. -- PCP

Please note that this page is not, as some would have us believe, OffTopic; it is a discussion and study of societal drift through language manipulation. This is something pointed out as being made easier through the use of technological means. We are one of the forces at work here, so the discussion is very much on topic.

CategoryBook, CategoryMovie, CategoryScienceFiction