Phil Of Language Paper: Jabberwocky

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.

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     [1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 164.

     [2] Ibid., 220.