”Stuff and Nonsense!”; Unearthing the Sense of Nonsense in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass



Nonsense: the absence of logic, the disappearance of understanding. If something completely baffles our comprehension of the universe, we cry foul of its validity. It can be frustrating. It rubs against our conventional approaches to life. At the same time, nonsense is a challenge. It forces us to encompass a different mindset, to shift our perspective past the familiar in order to illustrate a concept that is impossible to see otherwise. Nonsense is a tool that can aid us in discerning our reality.

-Shayna S.,Serendip

Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass projects a new way of seeing the world through the eyes of young Alice – a perspective not yet fully confined to the stipulations of convention, nor the limitations of language. As the typical Victorian child, this ever-inquisitive girl crosses the threshold into a world full of absurdities and illogical codes of conduct that preposterously operate under valid reasoning. However, rather than hinder her, such “stuff and nonsense” liberates her from the impossibilities of a fixed system (Carroll 102). In fact, it is the only means by which Alice is able to break away from the confines of Victorian culture in order to consider her own way of seeing the world. Perhaps in an attempt to impose order and reason upon a false construction of reality, nonsense will show us, Victorian conventions have placed limitations upon the way people think. Through the manipulation of social and linguistic conventions, nonsense becomes a tool in discerning reality and illustrating how perspective can be precariously relative to one’s construction of reality.
Alice quite literally tumbles into a strange world that expands beyond expectation and transcends the bounds of social convention. While seven year-old Alice belongs to the Victorian world steeped in strict social codes and stifling propriety, her mind remains impressionable, and apt to accept the consideration of a reality that may or may not operate under the mechanics of the Victorian system. At the Mad Hatter’s tea party, Alice is at first perplexed by the most outlandish twists on a custom familiar to her in Victorian London; no tea is actually served, a dormouse sleeps in a tea cup, and each guest “move[s] a place on,” in order to obtain a clean cup (Carroll 39). While Alice rejects it as “the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life,” she will later determine that such distortions of convention had “got so much out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way" (Carroll 61, 7). As the foundations of ordinary Victorian expectations begin to crumble, Alice is forced to give up all that she has learned at school and must learn to accept the absurd as the new norm.
Paradoxically, the arbitrary customs within Wonderland undermine Victorian ideals by mimicking them in a satirical tone, while simultaneously appealing to the very value system from which it is based. When she begins growing in the court, the Dormouse protests, “You’ve got no right to grow here,” to which Alice boldly remarks upon his hypocriticism: “don’t talk nonsense…you know you’re growing too” (Carroll 93). While the characters of Wonderland hold strong opinions about what constitutes appropriate behavior, their folly – parallel to the absurdity of Victorian ideals - becomes obvious. Such logic, however, is ironically based upon Victorian modes of logic. Upon being offered wine the Hatter doesn’t have to give her, Alice responds, “it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it”. She later replies to an unintended offense: “You should learn not to make personal remarks…it’s very rude”. Alice is appealing to Victorian convention – a system she will find is hardly operational in Wonderland. Later in the tea party, the Mad Hatter’s retorts to a suggested insult made by Alice: “Who’s making personal remarks now?” Alice is unable to reply, as it appeals to the terms of convention by which she appeals (Carroll 53-59). While the characters retort back with nonsensical logical no more absurd than Victorian convention, the relativism of reality raises the question concerning how fluid reality really is (Carroll 102). Obviously, it cannot exist fully in one system or the other, but in shards of each; Alice, then, must sift through to delineate, or possibly reconcile between sense and nonsense. Through the distortion of social conventions, nonsense becomes the norm - the only means of acquiring truth – and perspective becomes precariously relative to one’s construction of reality.
Although Carroll challenges Victorian conventions, the book is not just about chaos.  The power of language in molding perception and shaping culture is consistently exemplified through the limitation of linguistic convention and the liberation of transcending such bounds. In viewing the world through a childlike perspective, unconfined but not unaffected by, the limitations of language, Alice effectively exemplifies how nonsense assumes, as Universita’ Degli Studi Di Bergamo Scholar puts it, an “underlying stability of linguistic structures.” She finds it “curious and curiouser,” as she meets characters who make use of puns and play on multiple meanings of words, inventing words and expressions and ascribing new meanings to words. Alice also questions word meaning in her encounter with Humpty Dumpty:

HUMPTY DUMPTY. "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."
ALICE. "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."  
HUMPTY DUMPTY. "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all." (Carroll 174)

The nonsense of “mak[ing] words mean so many different things” lies in the assumption that language and grammar are fixed systems. Humpty Dumpty challenges the reader to question why Alice should reject Humpty Dumpty’s authority to make up meanings to words, questioning the authority of any official rulebook of a language. Alice’s guilt in having “quite forgot[ten] how to speak good English” diminishes as Alice realizes that it is more nonsensical to assume that words prescribed by a set number of people are the all-end, rather than condemning an unauthorized individual who attempts to assign new meanings to words (Carroll 8). Thus, good English becomes subject to opinion, which validates, even promotes the making up of and ascribing new meanings to words - a rather constant standard in her conversations with characters in Wonderland. In describing his education, Alice banters with the Mock Turtle,


MOCK TURTLE. “When we were little...we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle - we used to call him Tortoise -
ALICE. “Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?” Alice asked.
MOCK TURTLE. “We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily…“You “ught to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question” (Carroll 78)

What, really, is shameful about Alice’s question? Is it her lack of familiarity with such a term in that particular context, or her inability to consider the possibilities of meaning attached to the word? Through the absurdity of word connotation over predetermined meaning, Alice will begin to learn that the construction of language can become a chasm of absolutes that aren’t necessarily as concrete as she had assumed.
When nonsensical word play is set in a system no less logical than the linguistic conventions of the Victorian linguistic system, Carroll not only illustrates the limitations of a set language convention, but also the possibility of breaching such restrictions. The characters of Wonderland are constantly exploring the possibility of language. The turtle names the subjects he studied: “reeling and writhing, or course, to begin with…and the different branches of arithmetic – ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.” The Gryphon contributes: “I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was,” to which the Mock turtle replies, “I never went to him…he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say” (Carroll 79). As language is powerful in shaping ways of thinking and even culture, Carroll suggests affectingly that, in many ways, an expansion of language can lead to an augmentation of perspective and ideas, even ways of being. As language will prove to be a powerful means of definition and perspective even for a child as young as Alice, it is easy to see how it strongly influences modes of thinking. If one lacks the verbalization of a thought, it is difficult to even comprehend the thing. As scholar Shayla S. puts it, “For us, recognizing nonsense is an important part in our construction of our reality. Understanding what something is not alternatively adds to the understanding of what something is. It allows one to question the solidity of our definitions of things, of ourselves, and of the reliability of experience as a foundation of the sensible.”  Thus, Alice will learn that, in a very peculiar way, nonsense tells us more about ourselves than sense ever could. Potentially confining and/or enriching, Carroll utilizes nonsense to illustrate the means by which language wields the very power to shape perception and culture.
As a child, Alice is not yet limited by the dimensions dictated by culture. For Alice, hazy is the line between fact and fiction, between history and fantasy, between rationality and imagination. For Alice and her friends in Wonderland, words can mean whatsoever the user chooses them to mean and conventions are subject to opinion - an idea contrary to traditional education. There lies within such a paradigm something extremely liberating-something I fear we lose grasp of as we grow up - to see, behind those bright blue eyes, the world in absolute wonder and curiosity, and to be liberated from the confinement that the human-construction of linguistic and social convention so often have upon our understanding, identity and thought-process. While such a perception is difficult to acquire, nonsense becomes a vital instrument by which we are able to truly learn about ourselves. Through nonsense, ways of thinking, even sanity becomes relative; as the Cheshire cat observes, when speaking to Alice,

ALICE. "But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
CHESHIRE CAT. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
ALICE. "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
CHESHIRE CAT. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here.” (Carroll 50)


© 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Bantam Bell, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1981. Print.
Cohen, Morton N., Introduction. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. By Lewis Carroll. New York: Bantam Bell, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1981. Print.
Shayna S. “Stuff and Nonsense!” Serendip. 8 Dec. 2010. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu.
Unknown. Alice in Wonderland. Universita’ Degli Studi Di Bergamo. 8 Dec. 2010. http://www.unibg.it/dati/corsi/5871/35499-5.pdf.

No comments:

Post a Comment