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5: Decoding Nonsense, Decoding the Child

When the Red Queen, in one of the book’s many ‘knock-me-down arguments’, makes the typically grand claim ‘“I could show you hills in comparison with which you’d call that a valley” ’, Alice contradicts her: ‘“a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense.”’ Not to be put down so easily, the Queen trumps her with, ‘“I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!” ’

Alice rarely speaks nonsense – and rarely enjoys it when it’s served up to her; if the readers laugh, the heroine almost never even smiles. Yet what Freud calls ‘the pleasure in nonsense’,109 for Dodgson was part of the repertoire of childhood – or at least part of the repertoire of tricks, puzzles, games and jokes with which he amused and amazed his child friends. Freud associates the pleasure in nonsense with other infantile pleasures – with word-play, punning, oral thrills of all kinds – and it may be that there is a developmental logic in all this, whereby ‘nonsense’ signifies ‘innocent’ ways of thinking and feeling that are left behind when adulthood is attained. Yet Dodgson’s interest in little girls is of questionable ‘innocence’, and the dream-worlds he devises for Alice, though free from obvious sexual feeling, are often highly disturbing, as many children and adults alike feel.

To see how Dodgson used nonsense in his relations with children, but not with adults, we could look at a group of letters, written in 1870, the year he completed Through the Looking-Glass. Two are to his sister Mary about her son’s christening, written in his role as brother and clergyman. They show Dodgson at his most familial and serious. They are interspersed, however, with two very different letters to one of his little girlfriends, Edith Jebb, written in his role of children’s entertainer. They neatly illustrate the split between the sensible and nonsensical selves of the author, a split that in almost diagrammatic fashion reproduces the more fundamental cultural split between adulthood and childhood.

First a note to his sister, written on 13 January:

My dearest Mary,

I must write one line to yourself, if only to say – God bless you and the little one now entrusted to you – and may you be to him what our own dear mother was to her eldest son! I can hardly utter for your boy a better wish than that!

Your loving brother,

C. L. Dodgson.110

This is a dutiful brotherly note, blessing the arrival of his nephew (and eventual biographer), little more. We might notice, however, the way Dodgson envisages the love of mother and son as a mirror image of his own relationship to his mother, and the way the letter (as such letters often do) foregrounds itself as a speech act: ‘I must write’, ‘if only to say’, ‘I can hardly utter’. The nonsensical letter he writes to little Edith a few days later is very different, as you would expect – though it’s in some ways more sophisticated:

My Dear Edith,

Did you happen to notice that curious-looking gentleman who was in the railway-carriage with me, when I left Doncaster? I mean the one with a nose in this shape (I don’t know any name for that sort of nose) and eyes like this – He was peeping with one eye out of the window, just when I was leaning out to whisper ‘good-bye’ into your ear (only I forgot where your ear was exactly, and somehow fancied it was just above your chin), and when the train moved off he said, ‘She seems to be VS. Y?’ Of course I knew he meant ‘Very sorry. Why?’ So I said, ‘She was sorry because I had said I meant to come again.’ He rubbed his hands together for half an hour or so, and grinned from ear to ear (I don’t mean from one ear to the other, but from one ear round again to the same) and at last he said, ‘SSSS.’ I thought at first he was only hissing like a snake, so I took no notice – but at last it crossed my mind that he meant ‘She shows some sense,’ so I smiled and replied, ‘SSS’ (meaning of course ‘Sensibly said, Sir’) but he didn’t understand