Deciding one day that his privileged students at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Brunei simply did not want to be taught, Anthony Burgess abruptly abandoned the teaching profession--by lying face down on the classroom floor. It was, he said, "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration."
Two years later, in 1962, Burgess published his diabolic fable A Clockwork Orange--and set off on one of the most productive (and eccentric) careers in modern British literature.
Burgess's interest in language was profound. Readers of A Clockwork Orange (translated to film in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick) will recall the challenging Anglo-Russian slang--called nadsat--that Burgess invented for the punk protagonist Alex and his "droogs." In addition to the eight real languages (including Malay) that Burgess spoke fluently, he created a Stone Age language, Ulam, for the characters in the film Quest for Fire (1981). He also wrote frequently about linguistic matters, most notably in the book Language Made Plain (1964, revised 1975).
In his preface, Burgess characterizes the book (now unfortunately out of print) as "a primer for amateurs by an amateur," addressed in particular to "teachers of language who feel that every pupil . . . should have some basic awareness of the total linguistic process and not just a knowledge of particular languages."
Language Made Plain is not a prescriptive grammar. It offers instead an engaging and informed introduction to the field of linguistics. And Burgess's occasional outbursts are reserved for targets significantly larger and more ominous than abusers of "whom" or fans of "irregardless."
On dark days, when we understand too well the impulse to lie face down on a classroom floor, we might turn for succor to Burgess's final paragraphs:
English has a strange knack of doing well for itself, however much the old guard booms about threats to purity, the dangers of pollution. English did well out of the Danish and Norman invaders; it will continue to profit from the strange loan-forms and coinages of the mixed populations that--in both England and America--represent the new ethnological order. Whatever form of English ultimately prevails--the British or the American variety--it will still be a great and rich and perpetually growing language, the most catholic medium of communication that the world has ever seen.
But, if we cannot really resist change, we can resist inflation, that debasement of language which is the saddest and most dangerous phenomenon of a world dominated by propaganda machines, whether religious, political, or commercial. Propaganda always lies, because it overstates a case, and the lies tend more and more to reside in the words used, not in the total propositions made out of those words. A "colossal" film can only be bettered by a "super-colossal" one; soon the hyperbolic forces ruin all meaning. If moderately tuneful pop songs are described as "fabulous," what terms can be used to evaluate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? The impressionable young--on both sides of the Atlantic--are being corrupted by the salesmen; they are being equipped with a battery of inflated words, being forced to evaluate alley-cat copulation in terms appropriate to the raptures of Tristan and Isolde. For the real defilers of language--the cynical inflators--a deep and dark hell is reserved.
Yet language survives everything--corruption, misuse, ignorance, ineptitude. Linking man to man in the dark, it brought man out of the dark. It is the human glory which antecedes all others. It merits not only our homage but our constant and intelligent study.
(Language Made Plain, revised edition, Fontana/Collins, 1975)
Selected Works by Anthony Burgess:
- The Doctor Is Sick (1960)
- A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- The Wanting Seed (1962)
- Language Made Plain (1964; revised, 1975)
- Earthly Powers (1980)
- A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages, Especially English (1992)
- A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
