Nadsat and Newspeak

If you’ve had the chance to glance at my favourites page already, you may have nodded approvingly at my love of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. These books are both fantastic dystopian fiction and if you’ve never read them, you absolutely must. If you tried but couldn’t get past the way they were written, you absolutely must try again.

In order to really ground the dystopian feel, Burgess has elected to make Alex speak Nadsat – a language made up of Russian and Anglo-American neologisms – and Orwell’s characters are immersed in Newspeak; a wonderful appendix details the history of this language. Alex speaks Nadsat from the very first page, which is a little disorienting, but situates the reader immediately in a new environment. Newspeak is introduced far more gently, as notions and ideas like ‘doublethink’, to illustrate the strangeness of Winston’s world.

In A Clockwork Orange, the reader becomes completely absorbed in Alex’s life, encouraged to adopt his view of the society in which he lives through Burgess’ poetic language mixed in with the Nadsat. This enables sensitive subjects, such as extreme violence, to be covered, with devices such as alliteration, sibilance and rhyme used to put across Alex’s passionate and intelligent nature. Orwell intermingles ideas conveyed through Newspeak terminology with language more akin to modern English, creating a more sinister, seeping dystopian feel. Both of these approaches make for compelling reading, but what I’m wondering is: does the language of these novels make the images more frightening to read or does it soften them?

For me, it definitely increases the readability and credibility of these texts, and I'd say they definitely entertained me more than they frightened me. However, if I were to re-read them both in five or ten years’ time, maybe I’d react differently in relation to the ways the world around me has changed. Blank-packeted cigarettes anyone?

If there are any other dystopian novels that I should know about which play around with language in similar ways, I'd love to hear about them. I've always said that if I wrote a thesis, it would be along the lines of this topic, that's how much I love it.