i'm in love with words

in case you haven't noticed. and to back up that statement, i shall now ramble at you about the children's book that influenced me more than i ever realized (until i got all growed up n realized how much it influenced me).


i know i say it all the time, but if you haven't read it, READ IT, and if you have read it, read it again. it's only more awesome and fun as a growdup. i'm, of course, talking about norton juster's THE PHANTOM (em-eff-ing) TOLLBOOTH.
this SUPER FREAKING AWESOME NOVEL was intended, clearly, to teach kids about words and math and silliness. the world is boring. milo drives through the mysterious tollbooth, and SHAZAM, the world is ridiculous. not unlike what alice encounters in wonderland, in, yanno, alice in wonderland. and similarly, milo feels he's the only sane one in the place. however, like alice, he learns much more than he bargained for. 


to wit:

'Pardon me for staring,' said Milo, after he had been staring for quite some time, 'but I've never seen half a child before.'

'It's .58 to be precise,' replied the child from the left side of his mouth (which happened to be the only side of his mouth).

'I beg your pardon?' said Milo.

'It's .58,' he repeated; 'it's a little bit more than a half.'

'Have you always been that way?' asked Milo impatiently, for he felt that that was a needlessly fine distinction.

'My goodness, no,' the child assured him. 'A few years ago I was just .42 and, believe me, that was terribly inconvenient.'

'What is the rest of your family like?' said Milo, this time a bit more sympathetically.

'Oh, we're just the average family,' he said thoughtfully; "mother, father, and 2.58 children - and, as I explained, I'm the .58.'

it continues into hilarity and awesomocity, of course, but i'll let you discover (/rediscover) that on your own. Milo also jumps to Conclusions (an island), and learns that both math and words can be quite confusing. 'only when you use a lot to say a little,' as the watchdog Tock tells him (don't ask why he's not called Tick). also, the fun of puns taken seriously can make both kids and adults titter with 'zomgz.'



i've absotively no idea when i first read this book. i know it stuck on me like glue, and i know my buddy Milo was named after the main character, and i know that plays on words have always made me laugh (and feel smart). i know the illustrator made me comfortable because the illustrations of jules feiffer reminded me of the illustrations of quentin blake's illustrations in roald dahl's novels...(you know, charlie and the chocolate factory, matilda, the bfg...)


aaaaanyway. the book is based on puns, which i freaking love, so, so should you. soso. he saves princesses! their names are Rhyme and Reason! for cryin out loud. ok, anywho. basically, zelda beta, for wordnerds, times a billion, the book. 



ready, GO.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I was just going to giggle and ramble a bit about finding sense within nonsense (for isn't that what we all do with everything every day all the time? impose structure to find meaning? after all, disorder is just the order we weren't expecting.) using Carroll's Jabberwocky as the most appropriate and awesome example, but upon revisiting the Alice books, my mindgrapes have exploded into a veritable barrel of wine-worthy stompables. 


so i suppose the royal we shall begin by saying we shall attempt to avoid the roads most traveled in overall investigations into Alice's adventures, and focus instead on language, as, in case you haven't yet noticed, it is one of my most favoritest things. i must also point out that i am addressing the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll; not the Disney movie or the more recent Burton adaptation (or any of the countless mini-serieseses or tv shows or video games), though all are fantabulous and worthy of the attention of inquiring minds. 


and now for the branches: finding sense within nonsense, and subjectivity to language. these are branches like the trunks of two trees that grew up too close together, and now share a base. i'm going to try not to get super poststructuralist-y, but fair warning: i'm going to quote Foucault (who would not like to be called a poststructuralist, thank you). 


portmanteau: fantabulous
so much of these novels is encompassed by language and logic games that are silly and nonsensical. but it's not entirely nonsensical or it wouldn't make any sense, would it? and it does, doesn't it? (cue a 'that reminds me of' regarding Waiting for Godot.. i won't do that to you.)


i had to memorize Jabberwocky when i was in 6th grade. we were studying phonics, because apparently some 6th graders cant read..? i dunno, it made absolutely no sense (ha!), and was totally out of context, and we didn't even read these books in class. we didn't discuss the literary characteristics. yay public school! but anyway, what i find now is that it doesn't really matter, because it totally made sense anyway. if you're not familiar with the poem Alice find through the looking glass and Humpty Dumpty later explains, the full text can be found here. here's the beginning, for poops and guffaws:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe. 

nonsense, no? we, as readers, can suspend disbelief enough to assume the author is telling us about some dreamt-up creatures, but what's with the dreamt-up adjectives and adverbs? as Humpty explains, this poem utilizes portmanteau. portmanteau is when you mash two words together to make a word that means both, like 'fantabulous' (fantastic and fabulous). in this excerpt, Humpty explains 'slithy' to be a combination of lithe and slimy, where 'mimsy' is flimsy and miserable. 


Alice, however, throws a little hissy fit over it, because she's been raised with a proper education and questions whether one can just make words, and make them mean things. 

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

this is just one of the plenty of word games Carroll uses to poke fun at our culture, morals, etiquette, use of language, and sense of logic (such as the bread-and-butter-fly who lives on weak tea with cream in it), but i don't want to go there. ps, remind you at all of Phantom Tollbooth yet?

'Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose in learning them at all.'

anywho, on to the mastery of language and it's mastery over us.


structure and subjectivity: you are language's tool
we apply logic and structure to everything in order to understand and categorize it. language is the most common tool at our disposal to do so. so what happens if you accidentally say 'gregarious' (sociable) when you mean 'egregious (very bad indeed)?' you've done gone changeded history, you have. one little word changed the meaning of the sentence, which changed the meaning of the story into which that sentence was written. and it's a story because we impose that beginning, middle, and end on everything because that's how we understand things because that's how we learn them and what a fun little circle that becomes, noooo?


Humpty Dumpty refuted Alice's critique of his making words mean whatever he wanted them to mean by questioning 'which is to be master.' he asserts that he is the master of the words:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

he's the master of words, which is all well and good, except no one else knows what the words mean to him until and unless he explains the meanings he has attributed to them. this is bordering on Sapir-Whorf again, sorry. but i suppose this does fall into the realm of linguistic relativity so ON WE TREAD!

the Caterpillar is a favorite character who gets only a couple pages and lines, and that's all he needs. when Alice encounters him he asks who she is, and she can't answer, because she's changed (sizes) too many times to be sure who she is. he demands she explain herself.

'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'

shortly thereafter, as a test of her self-doubt, the Caterpillar asks she recite a particular poem, which she does, but not quite right. after her recitation:

'That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.

'Not quite right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly: 'some of the words have got altered.'

'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly; and there was silence for some minutes.

what Alice saw as an alteration of a few words changed the entire poem 'from beginning to end' to the Caterpillar. it was therefore, not the same poem. the problem is that we are not the masters of language. we cannot assume what others will hear when we say what we think we mean, if we even know what we think we mean, or think we're saying it. one last quote, the prophesied Foucault, from his Discourse on Language (of course):

Inclination speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.' Institutions reply: 'But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it - a place that both honours and disarms it; and if it should have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.'

the individual is raging against being misinterpreted, and wants to be and discuss and understand. but institutions (culture, academia, business, whatever realm or institution is affronting and depriving the individual of the purest form of discourse at any given moment) won't allow it. discussion, understanding, debate, all rely on others' interpretations of meaning, which are never quite right. therefore, we have institutions to define things for us, and put language and 'discourse' as a whole in its place. further, it is not the individual, but the institutions who give discourse power. hmmmmm....


back to Humpty Dumpty - are we the master of language?