Abstract
The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein’s world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein’s example of a nonsensical scale in his Philosophical Investigations (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in this paper it is claimed that Alice’s (mis)adventures with nonsensical language in Wonderland both problematize and provide fresh insights into the use of language in our actual world. Several passages in the Alice books are analysed in order to show how the curious uses of nonsensical language function to negate any theory of the ordinary use of language that is based on the assumption that there is an exact correspondence between words and meanings. This article represents an effort to understand the ways in which nonsensical narratives can throw light on the way we use language in the world. The extraordinary uses of language in narratives like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provide a challenge to those theories of language that do not sufficiently take into account the ambiguous and imprecise nature of our ordinary use of language.
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Notes
See for instance Aaron Schiller and Denise Schiller (2012) for an application of Wittgenstein’s “language games” to Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest. For other discussions and analyses of nonsense in relation to Carroll’s Alice books and his other work, see Michael Holquist (1969) and Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1994). An insightful study that sees Carroll’s use of nonsense as a response to Victorian theories of language and philology comes from James Williams (2012).
See especially Sainsbury’s (2017) insightful discussion of the parallels between literary and philosophical thought-experiments.
The caveat is that there is not much use for (mental) pictures in the work of the later Wittgenstein. We might, on the other hand, allow for more use of conversations in the later Wittgenstein insofar as conversations may be understood as language games based on publicly acknowledged (or acknowledgeable) rules.
I would like to emphasize that, throughout this article, I use the word “Wonderland” to refer to the fantastic and nonsensical world in which Carroll’s Alice fictions take place. Therefore, my references to Wonderland concern not just the fictive setting of Carroll’s first Alice narrative, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but also that of his second narrative, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. The passage about Alice’s loss of her identity that is chosen for analysis belongs to the first, whereas the passages from “Jabberwocky” and Humpty Dumpty’s interpretation of the poem belong to the second. Inspired by Carroll’s title to his first Alice narrative, I will assume that both sets of passages take place in Wonderland.
See Ahmet Süner (2016) for an extended discussion of Wittgenstein’s theory on the correspondence between words and pictures in his Tractatus.
John Hollander (1987, p. 146) articulates such a fuzzy interpretation of the poem in more literary detail: “Jabberwocky is a great heroic tale, and the son, the ‘he’ of the poem, is one of the tribe of Cadmus and Beowulf and Siegfried and Redcrosse, and his song of sallying forth, preparatory meditation, conquest, and triumphal return is framed in the identical stanza of prologue and epilogue, a cluster of stage-setting details which Humpty Dumpty …so memorably annotates.”
Humpty Dumpty is surely a great artistic inspiration; in fact, according to Jeffrey Stern, his portmanteau words may have inspired the surrealist technique of verbal collage (1982, p. 143). According to Holquist, Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake is inspired by Humpty Dumpty’s portmanteau technique (1969, p. 145). Both Stern and Holquist discuss further connections between Carroll and the French surrealists, such as André Breton, Louis Aragon and Antonin Artaud.
Humpty Dumpty is often considered to be either the proponent of the private language argument in analytical circles (Catherine Talmage (1996) and Alfred MacKay (1968)), or a creative user of language who breaks free from the conventions of language (Dasenbrock, 2002, p. 343). See also Donald Davidson (1991) on the relation between James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty.
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Ahmet Süner is a Turkish scholar and an Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey. He has two Ph.D.s, one in Comparative Literature (2006, University of Southern California), the other in Structural Engineering (1999, Duke University). His publications include essays on the work of Wittgenstein (Acta Philosophica), Heidegger (Oxford German Studies and the Journal of European Studies), Jean-Luc Godard (Studies in French Cinema), Pedro Almodóvar (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies), Matthew Lewis (Journal of Yaşar University), James Joyce (ANGLIA), and Hugh Walpole (Atlantis). He is currently interested in exploring the intersections between philosophy and literature.
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Süner, A. The Elucidatory Uses of Wittgenstein’s Scale of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Narratives. Child Lit Educ 50, 178–192 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9325-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9325-7