Dalrymple notes that in addition to being philosophically profound and socially prophetic, A Clockwork Orange (1962) is linguistically highly inventive, Anthony Burgess marking the separateness of his novel’s young protagonists from their elders
by their adoption of a new argot. Vital for groups antagonistic towards the dominant society around them, such argots allow them to identify and communicate with insiders and exclude outsiders.
Although Dalrymple worked in a prison for 14 years, he never came to understand the language that prisoners used as they shouted to one another across landings and between buildings. It was, he says,
their means of resisting domination.
Anthony Burgess
In the banlieues, les jeunes
use an argot derived from words spelt and pronounced backwards, and incomprehensible to educated speakers of French.
People of Jamaican descent in Britain
use a patois when they want not to be understood by anyone else.
The connection between argot and criminal purposes
has long been close, of course; and the importance that Burgess ascribes to the new argot in A Clockwork Orange suggests that he saw youthful revolt as an expression more of self-indulgence and criminality than of idealism — the latter, shallower view becoming orthodoxy among intellectuals not long after A Clockwork Orange appeared.
Dalrymple calls Burgess’s creation of a completely convincing new argot more or less ex nihilo
As a linguistic invention, Nadsat
is the equal of Orwell’s Newspeak. A vocabulary that is entirely new and incomprehensible at the beginning of the book becomes so thoroughly familiar to the reader at the end that he forgets that he has ever had to learn its meaning: it seems completely natural after only a hundred pages.
