Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass forces readers to engage in language acquisition, renegotiating their personal sets of language and expanding their identities. While the novel is famous for its nonsensical phrases and illogical propositions, this nonsense is not meaningless. Though the term commonly implies a complete lack of meaning, literary nonsense is a specific genre that playfully subverts linguistic norms to explore the very nature of sense-making. By employing this method, Carroll deliberately disrupts the reader’s trusted relationship with language, compelling them to look beyond the surface and consider how we construct meaning itself. This process transforms a whimsical children’s story into an exploration of language and identity.
To understand the stakes of this process, it’s helpful to consider the work of renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, who, in a 2019 interview, described language as “the core defining feature of modern humans, the source of human creativity, cultural enrichment, and complex social structure” (Brand). Chomsky’s observation underscores the profound importance of language acquisition - the process through which we learn to associate concepts, real or abstract, with words. What exists for an infant as a world of arbitrary matter, we learn to define into objects, families, and societies. Language is the tool through which we find identity and purpose. As individuals develop their language, they create new connections in a growing web of meanings, broadening their ideas. Consequently, the process of assigning new meanings or reconsidering existing ones should not be underestimated - it is fundamental to how we think and grow.
Take, as an instance of Carroll’s nonsense, the first stanza of “Jabberwocky”:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. (17)
The poem’s unfamiliar words position the readers in a pre-linguistic frame, where they must reason through Carroll’s language and either construct meaning or fail to understand. The poem, without understood meanings populating every interpretation, prompts the reader to consider what remains: how the words look, sound, and feel. In Art and Illusion (1960), art historian Ernst Hans Gombrich proposed what is now a foundational idea in art interpretation: the role of the audience in determining meaning. When viewing increasingly abstract art, the beholder has a growing share in what the art means to them (147). Based on existing mental schemas, each viewer’s interpretation is unique (147). For example, one viewer might see personal turmoil in the active brushstrokes of van Gogh’s Starry Night where another finds mystic wonder (157, 159). These personal interpretations create meanings for the painting unique to each viewer. Gombrich argued that instead of being singular and fixed, art’s meaning is personal and created during interpretation (147).
Gombrich’s ideas apply directly to Through the Looking Glass. The reader’s experience with “Jabberwocky” mirrors an encounter with abstract art, painted in printed letters and mixed-up syllables instead of pigmented oils. Each reader finds footing in words that look, sound, or feel familiar to approximate the poem’s meanings; they make inferences based on linguistic cues. However, one potential interpretation for “brillig” only by chance aligns with another. To one reader, it might be a quality of crisp morning air, but to another, it could be a foreign summer holiday. The poem has often been described as a kind of literary Rorschach test, where each reader’s unique mental schema constructs personal meanings (Gombrich 147). Dissonance exists between the reader and Alice, too. Although the reader follows her journey, they encounter its nonsense independently. Alice’s imagination conjures personal language for herself, but her process of language acquisition is shaped by the dream logic of the Looking-Glass world. For the reader, the experience of constructing language occurs in their conscious life, increasing their potential to reconsider language. Carroll’s nonsense words compel every reader to construct personal definitions, thereby engaging in humanity’s defining process: language acquisition.
Alice’s reaction introduces another way Carroll’s work engages readers. Thrust back into her narrative, readers next encounter:
“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.) “Somehow 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—” (18)
While a reader’s encounter with the poem may have generated a response identical to Alice’s, it is unlikely. Most feel a disconnect between what they made of the story and what Alice shares—they may have read further into the poem or have come up with concrete meanings for different sections. Having encountered the same material, they recognize the distance between themselves and Alice. Moving on, Alice’s interaction with Humpty Dumpty offers a clearer example of uneven interpretations:
“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (57)
Carroll uses this absurd exchange to highlight the arbitrary nature of language, and it spurs a constructive process for both Alice and the reader. As Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, dialogue between characters who possess different sets of language constantly reshapes their understanding and constructs each character’s identity in relation to the other (6-7). Analyzing this dialogue through Bakhtin’s lens reveals more value than initially appears. Alice and the reader share a set of language, English. Humpty Dumpty’s language extends to include his own private definitions. As their languages collide, Alice and the reader construct their identities as people who don’t understand Humpty Dumpty. Conversely, Humpty Dumpty affirms his identity as the only one who understands his own language. It is their dialogue and uneven uses of language that construct their understandings of themselves in relation to each other.
Carroll’s writing also provides examples of how dialogue can reshape one’s language and expand their identity. Later in Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty, she begins to understand some of the Looking-Glass world’s language:
“Slithy?”
“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
“I see it now,” Alice remarked (58).
Here, rather than their incompatible languages creating distance that defines their identities in opposition to one another, Alice begins to understand Humpty Dumpty. She adds the word “slithy” to her vocabulary, expanding her identity to belong a little more in the Looking-Glass world. Understanding their language, starting with one word, makes her feel a greater kinship with its inhabitants.
Although Alice can be seen as a proxy for the reader, sharing certain expectations and customs, she is not their clone. Because Carroll was writing in 1871, an inevitable gap exists between his Victorian schoolchild protagonist and the story’s modern audience. As the reader encounters Alice’s responses to Humpty Dumpty and “Jabberwocky,” a one-way dialogue is created, and the reader constructs their identity based on their similarities to and differences from Alice. While interacting with “Jabberwocky” mirrors language acquisition in its power to create new meaning, Alice’s interaction with Humpty Dumpty mirrors identity formation. As they witness this interaction, readers form their own identity by measuring their own reactions against Alice’s. The identity formation that the reader both witnesses in Alice and experiences personally is brought about by Humpty Dumpty’s use of language, even though his communication itself is nonsensical.
Carroll’s writing, through “Jabberwocky” and Alice’s interaction with Humpty Dumpty, drives the reader to reconsider and expand their language and identity. Rather than being a story that can be regarded as simply playful and humorous, Through the Looking Glass invites the reader to contemplate the very process of language acquisition during interpretation. Carroll’s writing proposes that meaningful growth stems from contact with nonsense. In fact, he suggests that nonsense language and ideas are worth our attention. For as shown in Through the Looking Glass, even if an idea itself seems meaningless, an encounter with it can construct productive meaning.
Works Cited
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation - Millennium Edition. Princeton University Press, 1969. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5425926. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt22727z1. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.
Brand, Amy. “On Language and Humanity: In Conversation with Noam Chomsky.” The MIT Press Reader, The MIT Press, 12 Aug. 2019, thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/noam-chomsky-interview/.