To elucidate my previous comments: One notable aspect of Carroll’s writing is its play with the so-called arbitrary division between word and object, sign and the signified.
Jabberwocky is the most well-known example of this, but we see it, too, in the following dialogue between Alice and the White Knight:
Quote:
"The name of the song is called Haddocks' Eyes."
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is The Aged Aged Man."
"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called Ways and Means: but that's only what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is A-sitting On a Gate: and the tune's my own invention."
|
There are many more examples throughout his stories and poems. I said “so-called arbitrary division” because Carroll’s neologisms in
Jabberwocky somehow convey their meaning through sound, whereas most words (like
table) are arbitrary sonic demarcations of a specific concept. Carroll is able to do this partly because his nonce words are portmanteaux, so in
galumphing we get a taste of
gallop and
triumph and that influences our conception of the word’s meaning; his ingenuity shows more in words like
vorpal, which does not have the same blend of connotations, yet still produces a specific image in our mind. This breaking-down of the supposed arbitrariness between word and what the word signifies anticipates De Saussure (and later Wittgenstein) and refutes him.
Stevens uses nonsense sounds in a similar way. [Insert here an inventory of them; there are many but I am away from my books]. These sounds constitute a deconstruction of language into its most primitive and basic forms: baby babble, onomatopoeia, animal sounds. Many of Stevens’ poems deal with an enlightened solipsism (“I was the world in which I walked”), as if one’s inner world cannot be described with regular words (since their sounds convey one meaning) and can only be approximated through sounds that have no meaning, in which the connection between the word and the concept behind the word has not yet formed. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” said the Austrian homosexual who chose to remain silent while Stevens chose to speak nonsense – both resist saying something rather than court a specific meaning that falls short of what must be expressed but, ultimately, cannot be.