“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’ in Time for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange

Abstract

Anthony Burgess’s 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 preconceptions. In this chapter, I consider how the film gives Alex a Lancashire accent and emphasises the story’s class-based British setting. It 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.