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The Columbia History of the British NovelFrom the first in Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll tells us that Alice moves in a dream world composed of words that exist independently of personal will. When the White King exclaims of his pencil, "It writes all manner of things that I don't intend," he is talking about the unmanageable nature of language, and he previews its role in the book, and in twentieth-century intellectual history. And when «Jabberwocky» appears to Alice, we know that we are in a fictional world of sense, absurdity, and wordplay all at once, like a child trying to Fathom language. -601- 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. The verse foreshadows the whole book. The extreme tensions in the poem-between the unconventional use of language (invented vocabulary) and the conventional (normal syntax, grammar, rhythm, and rhyme), between referential significance and self-contained nonsense-define and energize Carroll. «Jabberwocky» puts the focus on the very fact of language itself, whose very existence-as children see and feel-is just as marvelous, just as fantastic, as any of the meanings it conveys ...» |
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