In this section, given the fact that most poems in Through the Looking-Glass are long and dreary, we plan to discuss Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” the greatest of nonsense poems in English, to show how the power of intuition can diachronically anticipates serious social institutions to come. In order to evade any cognitive capture, Carroll shifts his nonsense in this verse into high gear by two literary devices of verbal doublet: mirror image and
portmanteau word.38 Making sense of Carroll’s nonsense takes at least two steps to “force out meaning.” At first, the bizarre language in “Jabberwocky” keeps Alice at bay until it suddenly strikes her that holding a Looking-glass book up to a glass might make all the words go the right way again. Nonetheless, the words that all go the right way are as perplexing as ever: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves. / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were
the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe” (TLG 116; emphasis original). According to
Nancy Goldfarb, “the experience of hearing unfamiliar words in a context that establishes expectations for transparent English signification creates anxiety in the uninitiated reader”(87). It leaves Alice dumbfounded because the words seem “to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it [is] certainly English” (AW 56). Though bewildered, Alice is allured by this unrecognizable and nebulous power lurking behind language.
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Sometimes it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed
something: that’s clear, at any rate—.” (AW 118)
Despite the narrator’s patronizing taunt in parentheses, we agree with Karen Alkalay-Gut that
“What does it mean?” is never a problem:
The decision . . . to plumb the depths of “Jabberwocky” is based not on a desire to elicit meaning from the poem. . . . The nonsense serves a serious purpose here, to dislodge the reader from the fixed, limited world, and provide the possibility of limitless association. . . . The function of the nonsense is disorientation and reorientation—removing the reader from the world of limited reality and specificity and placing him in a mythical context. (27-30)
38 For more of Carroll’s doublet, please see Appendix E.
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In a word, the sense of giddiness Alice feels all around is caused by the mythical power of nonsense in language. It should be noted that Carroll’s verbal doublet in “Jabberwocky,”
whether it be mirror image or portmanteau word, defies the logic of representation.
When Alice moves through the misty glass into the Looking-Glass House, she begins to consider whether or not everything there is simply a reverse analogy. To her surprise, “the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her” (TLG 112-13). This little old man is the mischievous Carroll himself, who also grins at those who assume that language is but a mirror reflecting the reality. Another failure of mirror image takes place, as noted above, when Alice reverses words in a proper way, only to find that she is still as “blindfolded” as ever. In his dreamy world of fantasy, Carroll holds another mirror up to this Looking-Glass mirror to produce infinite regress of meaning which disseminates and permeates in all directions. Meaning, so to speak, slips it moorings and drifts out to sea.
One might protest that the second step to bring meaning into full relief is already done when Humpty Dumpty explains, with his mastery of words, to Alice the meaning of the nonsense words in the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” as he keeps a fine balance on the top of a high but narrow wall.
“Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon. . . . “slithy” means “lithe [active]
and slimy.” . . . “toves” are something like badgers. . . . To “gyre” is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To “gimble” is to make holes like a gimblet. . . . And
“the wabe” is the grass-plot round a sun-dial. . . . “mimsy” is “flimsy and miserable.” . . . A “borogove” is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round . . . like a live mop. . . . “rath” is a sort of green pig: but
“mome” . . . I think it’s short for “from home.” . . . “outgribing” is something
between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle.
(TLG 164-6)39 As illustrated above, Carroll fabricates his nonsense vocabulary by two techniques:
(1) neologism: brillig (n), toves (n), gyre (v), gimble (v), wabe (n), borogoves (n), rath (n), outgrabe (v); (2) portmanteau word: slithy (adj), mimsy (adj), mome (n). With the first arbitrary power, Mr. Egg can render equal A (a signifier) and B (a signified) at will. “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less’” (TLG 163). As a result, “glory” can mean “a nice knock-down argument” when all the words, whether old or new, are at Humpty Dumpty’s supreme command. Another arbitrary power comes from an algebraic equation: A + B = C. “You see it’s like a pormanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word” (TLG 164; sic). As Donald Gray adds, “A portmanteau is a traveling bag that opens, like a book, into two equal compartments” (164). Therefore, this portmanteau word still retains two equal meanings from both sides. In the preface to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll further spells out the fine balance in a portmanteau word.
For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.” (220)
39 Humpty Dumpty’s explanations of words here are slightly different from those given by young Carroll when his “Jabberwocky” first appeared in Mischmasch. Martin Gardener, based on Carroll’s earlier interpretation, gives the literal English of the first stanza: “It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out” (149). In “The Balance of Brillig,” Elizabeth Sewell indicates that Eric Patridge “in his classification of the vocabulary of Jabberwocky gives four new verbs, gimble, outgrabe, galumphing and chortled, to ten new adjectives and eight new nouns” (381). I follow Mr. Patridge’s classification—though without the exact knowledge of ten adjectives and eight nouns—to organize Carroll’s nonsense vocabulary in “Jabberwocky.” For more information of Carroll’s neologism, please refer to Appendix F.3. New Nonsense Vocabulary in “Jabberwocky.”
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On this point, how do we see Humpty Dumpty as a master of words? Is he a despotic emperor of Saussurian linguistics or a schizophrenic nomad on a Deleuzian surface? Can we assume that portmanteau words fail to help us make sense of nonsense at the second stage if the entire panoply of explanations is already marching in tandem?
“Jabberwocky” plays such a pivotal role in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) because it, in our opinion, prophetically takes issue with Ferdinand Saussure’s scientific linguistics. It is widely known that Course in General Linguistics, representative of Saussure’s lifelong search for a systematic knowledge of language, is not published by him, but by the editors who put together his students’ notes taken from his lectures between 1906 and 1911 (CGL iii).
According to Lecercle, “if there ever was one [epistemological break] in linguistics, the name of Saussure should be associated with it” (PLG 2). In seeking out “the principles that govern the life of languages,” Saussure elevates langue above parole by saying that “from the very
outset we must put both feet on the ground of language and use language as the norm of all other manifestations of speech” (CGL 4, 9; emphasis original). In Saussure’s dualism, parole
is speech or individual utterance while langue is a priori language system which all speakers draw upon. “Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous. . . . Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification” (CGL 9). It can be said that Saussure not only pits Apollonian language against Dionysian speech, but also hopes to subsume heterogeneous speech acts under general categories of langue. When it comes to principles that govern the life of language, the nature of the linguistic sign is always the first that comes to mind. On Saussure’s evolutionary critical trajectory, instead of a naming-process that links a name and a thing, he thinks sign is essentially an associative bond that unites a sound image and a concept, only to be overthrown by another two-sided entity:signifier and signified (CGL 65-67). It can be concluded that for Saussure it is the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign that combine signifier and signified. “One could here,” Lecercle
suggests, “use the famous metaphor of the two sides of a sheet of paper, used by Saussure to demonstrate the solidity and closeness of the relation between signifier and signified in the sign” (PLG 70-71).40 Nevertheless, a distinction between two signs in a language system is not made by their respective positive values but by difference-making: “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. . . . in language there are only differences without positive terms”
(CGL 114, 120; emphasis original).
Saussure’s scientific linguistics that precedes parole with langue is not “impenetrable”
but contestable. We must bear in mind that Carroll is a great master of double entendre. When Humpty Dumpty forces his chosen meanings upon words to signify what he wants them to mean, he looks exactly like a tyrannical despot: “‘The question is . . . which is to be master—that’s all.’ . . . ‘They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say’” (TLG 163)! Although Humpty Dumpty’s pontification gives him the appearance of a language master, for us it is nothing but Carroll’s prophetic joke on Saussurian pedants. Our supposition can be more persuasive if we put “impenetrability” into further investigation. At first glance, Humpty Dumpty’s language theory (or practice) appears to be impenetrable; however, the signified meaning of
“impenetrability” veritably backfires: “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life” (TLG 163-64). With Carroll’s playful juggle, the impenetrability of Humpty Dumpty’s sovereign power over his subjects (that is, words) transforms into his having quite enough of a subject that bores him.
Our discussion thus far can help us answer our two previous questions. From our
40 Originally, Saussure writes: “Language can . . . be compared with a sheet of paper” (CGL 113).
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reading of the word “impenetrability,” we maintain that a real master of words, inferred from Carroll’s text, is not a despotic emperor of representation but a schizophrenic nomad of production. Next, Carroll’s use of mirror image has already told us that an old man is jeering at those who simply take his interpretation of nonsense vocabulary in “Jabberwocky” as a vivid representation or verisimilitude of neologisms and portmanteau words. “Too often, Carroll’s use of nonsense has been considered a secret kind of anagram, a trick, a
‘portmanteau.’ Using as great an authority as Humpty Dumpty, the words of ‘Jabberwocky’
are dismissed with a ‘reasonable’ explanation. . . . But Carroll himself seemed to find the whole search for ‘portmanteau’ meaning a joke on the adult reader. . .” (Alkalay-Gut 28-29).
Hence, in spite of given explanations, Carroll’s making sense of nonsense has nothing to do with “What does it mean?” but “How does it work?” Neologisms and portmanteau words in
“Jabberwocky” are vehicles for expressing his philosophy of double entendre. In our reading, Humpty Dumpty who masquerades as a master of words is, at best, nothing more than a dummy maneuvered by Carroll the ventriloquist.
There is a Mr. Hyde lurking behind Dr. Jekyll drama in Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, just as there is one in Lecercle’s Saussure. In Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Lecercle proposes a hypothesis of two Saussures to cast suspicion on a langue-centric Saussure: “there are two Saussures, or rather that, behind (or beneath) the founder of a new science and the author of the celebrated Cours, there is another, Hyde-like, character, the demented seeker of anagrams” (PLG 2). According to Lecercle, when Saussure, during the years 1906-10, was engaged in private research on a variety of texts, he found the composition of a poetic text was a cryptogram concealing a pre-text (anagram) which provided the text with its main theme, but did not necessarily appear on the surface; nevertheless, no sooner had his inner Mr.
Hyde crossed the border between sanity and madness than his insistence on the reality of language, his respect for the system of langue, on account of no scientific proof, remerged to
pull his parole from dissolving into delirium (PLG 3-6). It is a shame that what he takes as a mental patient’s delusion could have been the fantastic key to the deepest workings of language. The March Hare is skirting along the frontier where Saussure’s two sides of a sheet of paper “solidly” and “closely” adhere to each other. As Lecercle suggests, the starting point of Saussurian linguistics will be a distinction, which separates the relevant (langue) from the irrelevant (parole) by this logic of separation (PLG 171). What is internal is the systematic side of language whereas what is external would be the subversive side of it, but these two sides of language, Lecercle notes, are inseparable as Saussure’s metaphor of sign (PLG 70-71).
On the bright side, meaning is constructed by differentiation and composition, and the totality, and the closed character of the system, guarantee its correct construction. On the dark side, meaning proliferates, in short threads that can hardly manage to weave a coherent text: there is no totality, no guarantee, and the field is never closed. (PLG 71)
“The other Saussure is in fact an anti-Saussure” (PLG 199), but, it is sad to say, that demented part of him never prevails over his sanity. In comparison with Saussure’s quarantine against the subversive, monstrous language prowling on the external outside, Carroll is overjoyed at having tea with the March Hare in his world of fantasy. The Saussurian principles that govern language are snares to catch the mythic power of heterogeneous parole. To the contrary, the unruly idiosyncrasy of language makes its lively monstrosity, but when caught in a set of systematic coordinates, language becomes a much less mobile (or even a sedentary) force. It is Carroll’s “backward” literary fantasies that breathe new life into the now sick and passive language snared within the confines of science.
In “Blessed Rage: Lewis Carroll and the Modern Quest for Order,” Donald Rackin justifies Carroll’s mad and nonsensical disorder: “The lovable imp Bruno in Carroll’s Sylvie
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and Bruno Concluded (1893), seeing the letters ‘E-V-I-L’ arranged by Sylvie on a board as
one of his ‘lessons’ and asked by Sylvie what they spell, exclaims, ‘Why it’s LIVE, backwards’” (400). Chaotic, nebulous and tumultuous outside is virtually a mad game without rules. Rackin gives an expressive comment: “The fault here lies, of course, in life itself. When Alice complains to the Cheshire Cat that the croquet game seems to have no rules, she couples this with ‘and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive.’A cat literally has no idea of this confusion, but we humans certainly do” (“Blessed Rage”
400; emphasis added). If errors are ever significant to life, it is their being “out of joint” that makes them one of a kind, without recourse to—let’s borrow Deleuze’s terms here—the quadripartite character of the reflexive41 difference of organic representation: “the identity of the concept, the opposition of predicates, the analogy of judgment and the resemblance of perception” (DR 34). Readers are infatuated with Carroll’s world of fantasy because his leitmotif of doublet—mirror image or verbal duality—is never a reflexive and intermediary concept in the “theatre of representation” (DR 10). The inexhaustible mythical power of nonsense in Carroll’s two Alices builds up to “a condition of movement under which . . . [his]
‘actors or . . . ‘heroes’ produce something effectively new in . . . . [t]he theatre of repetition”
(DR 10). “When representation discovers the infinite within itself, it no longer appears as
organic representation but as orgiastic representation: it discovers within itself the limits of
the organized; tumult, restlessness and passion underneath apparent calm. It rediscovers monstrosity” (DR 42). Once difference is carried to its nth power, it ceases to be reflexive and becomes catastrophic (DR 35). As Joyce Thomas observes, “nonsense verse is necessarily confined by the sensible restraints of language”; therefore, it follows that the recurrent themes of the violent or grotesque in two Alices is “a means of testing those restraints or providing a41 What Deleuze means by “reflexive” is definitely different from Lecercle’s “reflexive delirium.” The former’s idea is based on a literal meaning of “reflexive” while the latter’s focuses on its figural meaning. The point can be further borne out by saying that Deleuze’s “reflexive” is the reflection in the mirror image of organic representation whereas Lecercle’s “reflexive” is the rich and imaginative fantasy outside psychiatric contexts.
counter-balance to them” (119). The point can be further borne out by Lecercle’s insight of the dark side of language: “The best picture of it can be admired when the borderline [of national language] is crossed at the ultimate level. . . . When this occurs, no satisfactory global meaning can be obtained, only fragments which can never be synthesized. The system gives way to mere chance, or, in other words, to the semiotic processes of the unconscious”
(PLG 71).
The White Queen’s “jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day” (TLG 150) and Humpty Dumpty’s “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet” (TLG 164) share a similar rejection of boring present and the same liking for whimsical past and future—a point resembling Deleuze’s discussion of Aion, the pure empty form of time that sidesteps the present and stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction: “Always already passed” and “eternally yet to come” (LS 165).42 As Lecercle maintains, “Carroll’s keen awareness of the workings of the language . . . amounts to an intuitive grasp of a philosophical problematic that clearly emerged almost a century after his death” (PN: IVNL 231-32). The vertigo we feel in Carroll’s nonsense is his power of the false that cracks open language and pulls its inside out to establish contact between the Inside (language) and the Outside (life) like “a Möbius strip on which a single line traverses the two sides” (ECC 21). From the above argument, we can say that the mythic power of Carroll’s literary nonsense does refer beyond language to life.
42 In 1929, Heisenberg proposed his famous uncertainty principle. It is a theory to which many Carroll critics like to refer. The general idea of his theory is as follows: “In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In layman’s terms, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known.” When literary critics
42 In 1929, Heisenberg proposed his famous uncertainty principle. It is a theory to which many Carroll critics like to refer. The general idea of his theory is as follows: “In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In layman’s terms, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known.” When literary critics