I am going to look
primarily at two passages from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass—1.) the Jabberwocky poem and 2.) the
Humpty-Dumpty pericope—and analyze them in terms of Gricean and Davidson
machinery. Of particular interest here is the first (and last) stanza of
Jabberwocky which appears in both passages:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I think most of us
would agree with Alice that this stanza has all the appearance of meaning
something, but that that meaning, if present at all, is unknowable without some
form of help. “It seems very pretty,” she says after her first read, “but it’s rather
hard to understand. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t
exactly know what they are.”[1]
Some chapters later Humpty Dumpty gives Alice his somewhat dubious interpretation
of the stanza, explaining the meaning of all the obscure words. For example, he
explains that toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like
lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”[2] In
a way his interpretation does not feel like much of an improvement on the
first, blind reading. But the very strangeness of the poem and their
conversation about it are, I think, what make it worth analyzing in Gricean and
Davidson machinery. Grice’s model supplies us with some basic materials to make sense of Alice and
Humpty’s conversation--including the nature of speaker’s intentions, a
Cooperative Principle, and implicatures. Davidson, who both builds on and takes
Grice to the extreme, touches more directly on words for which interpreters
lack a lexical knowledge (like toves), explaining that only what he calls a ‘passing theory’
sufficiently explains our ability to guess at these types of meanings.
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
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