The Bounds of Romance

Magic and Faërie have their limits

JABBERWOCKY

(From Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass the Project Gutenberg edition, online at http://www.gutenberg.net lglass19.txt version.)

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!’

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
  He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘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, ever 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—’

‘It’s RATHER Hard to Understand!’

Carroll wrote ‘Jabberwocky’ as a nonsense poem, a ‘looking-glass poem’ that Alice found printed backwards, so she must hold the page up to a mirror in order to read the letters and make what little sense of it she did. Since Alice is a child, we could look at the poem and her effort to make head or tails of it simply as how a child feels upon facing a particularly difficult adult text, which holds so many unfamiliar words that it borders upon nonsense. Many scholarly texts delight in abstruse words, and faux-antiquarian works of Carroll’s time would often employ obsolete, middle-english words that would send even fairly well-educated adults of the day to their dictionaries. We will look upon the poem only as a tale of Eartherea, however, and see if it can stand as such.

To begin with, we must distinguish between words in their tasks as parts of speech. Nouns the talesman coins, such as ‘toves,’ ‘borogoves,’ and ‘Jabberwock,’ are common fare in the glades of Faërie. They are indeed necessary to name those beasts, tools, objects, plants, and other things that have no Earthly counterpart. And we in the audience delight in the strangeness of them, in the magical Other world they conjure in our heads.

Verbs like ‘whiffling’ are more of a problem. Here Carroll makes them work when the words sound like something; we assume that ‘whiffling’ is some action that creates a sound such as the speaking of ‘whiffling’ will produce. He does not coin many of them, and when he gives us one that has no clear sound-sense such as ‘brillig,’ it is as much as reading a stone.

Adjectives are also troubling. ‘Frabjous’ and ‘mimsy’ and ‘frumious’ give a wonderful sense of the strange, which is part of the ‘sense of wonder’ so vital to works treating of Eartherea. But still we get no notion of what he means. The nouns are needful and we accept ‘Jabberwock’ though we have no guide as to what a jabberwock is or looks like, and we usually want such things. But an adjective such as ‘frabjous’ acts rather like a weed in the garden of the tale. It may smell nice and herby, but it rather slows us down.

Then there is the question of proportions. A phrase that holds only one of these coined words, the rest being familiar, we will accept with ease. The words we know serve to support and give us clues to the meaning of the words that are strange. But when all or almost all the words are new-coined, and we hear them for the first time, we wonder what it is we are hearing or reading. At least when we read the line we can be clear that the words are indeed strange; when we hear them, we will wonder if we heard aright, and our minds will seek feverishly to hear the words as words we know. A line such as,

All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

gives us so little to go on, that we are shoved back to the overall context of the scene to try to make sense of what the borogoves and mome raths were doing — even then it can be no more than a guess.

Plunge or Dip?

When a talesman begins a tale of Eartherea, he may plunge us headfirst into the strangeness and wonder of that unknowable land, or he may lead us slowly in, an inch at a time, deeper and deeper, so that we may accustom ourselves with the first bits of the strange before we take on the next. The plunge can be a wonderful tonic to the toils of our dusty everyday life, bracing and intoxicating. It can also leave us so dizzy we give up the tale. The gentle dip on the other hand leads us deeper and deeper into the strange, but it might seem at first so commonplace that it fails to satisfy the need that drove us to an Earthereal tale in the first place.

The talesman must feel his way through this difficult passage, and rely upon his own sense, and his knowledge of his audience.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 19, 2008)