Today’s edition of “Friday Faves,” features a dive into Lewis Carroll’s trippy poemesphere. If Carroll’s name is ringing a bell but you can’t place it, he’s the Alice in Wonderland dude. By the way, poemesphere is a portmanteau. (OK, it’s actually just my lame attempt to make Carroll’s poetic universe a portmanteau, but let’s just pretend it is for the sake of this post. Are you still with me?) “Portmanteau, how very French of you.” And, “My, what is a portmanteau?” you ask.

 

Portmanteau is one of those words I see on occasion and blow by because recall on meaning is zero. Every so often when I come across it using my Kindle, I’ll use the happy-dappy dictionary feature, nod in ascent upon reading the definition, and then forget it as quickly as I “learned” it. It’s actually the name for something pretty cool though, check it.

 

When portmanteau isn’t busy being a large trunk or suitcase (you can apparently thank the Brits for that), it moonlights as two words all smashed together to create their own thing. The famous example is that time smoke and fog got together and had a baby named smog. Smog, the portmanetau, grew up and shares his time equally between Beijing, Santiago, and LA so I hear.

 

If I were more determined, I’d dig up how on earth a big ol’ suitcase became the moniker for word-smashing, but alas, I’ll just have to make something up on the spot. You see, people didn’t move around like lunatics like they do now from house to city to apartment to town. When they moved it was a BFD. They packed all their crap into big-ass trunks, loaded them onto carriages or boats and moved. Cedar chests eventually turned into big ol’ hard-covered suitcases. They got handles and got smaller. Military action was happening in pretty much every time period with humans, and those guys needed supplies but they sure as hell weren’t toting massive chests with personal effects, right? They needed a softer but still super durable material. Enter the duffel bag. Wait… that’s not getting us any closer to portmanteau, is it? (Btw, I just looked it up… Duffel is a town in Belgium that made the heavy-duty fabric in the mid-17th century. Bet you didn’t know [or care about] that.) But the duffel was a personal tote, which I’m guessing is akin to the portmanteau? So maybe it’s just wiping everything off your manteau (mantle) into a burlap sack and porting it around? There’s no saving this paragraph, let’s just keep smog in our heads as an example of a portmanteau and move on.

 

“The Jabberwocky” was a poem Carroll included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There – it was the sequel to the one we all know and (maybe) love, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. “The Jabberwocky” was one of my absolute favorite poems as a kid and at some point, I actually memorized it as part of an elementary school class. Now, when I try to recite it, I wind up with a mash up of it and something from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet I think?). I don’t know which wires crossed in my brain, but the Shakespeare stuff must have a similar meter or cadence to “The Jabberwocky” because it just seems to flow. It goes like this: “‘Twas brillig in the frithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe, whose misadventured piteous overthrows, doth with her death bury her parents strife.” From ‘Twas to wabe is all Carroll… then things go south and I suspect we’re talking about the Capulets losing Juliet? I’m fuzzy.

 

What I loved about “The Jabberwocky” as a kid and even now was that it was all made up and crazy and you didn’t have to know what half the words meant to get a pretty good idea of what was going on. It was an action scene with a kid as the protagonist – straight out of David and Goliath, but way cooler! And it kind of flew in the face of aduIts. There they were with their spelling bees and vocabulary tests and dictionaries and big words, and then along came Lewis Carroll breaking all the rules. He rocked my world and exploded my imagination with this single poem. Take a quick read-through with me since I’m guessing it’s likely been a good while since you have. Be sure to don your cape and sheathe your sword as you go. Courage, dear boys and girls!

 The Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy. 

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

 

What was Carroll doing with this nutty poem? Effing around, I suppose. Probably poking fun at traditional Anglo-Saxon poetry. Some say his aim was “to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics.”[1] That may all be true, but mostly, I think he was just having fun! Let’s just grab one example of one of his portmanteaus and take a look at how he said it came to be.

“Take the two words ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming’, you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards ‘furious’, you will say ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘fruminous’.[2]

 

Some of Carroll’s brilliance became cannon too, which I think is pretty awesome. His made-up word ‘galumphing’ is in the Oxford English Dictionary. “It is attributed to Carroll and is defined as a combination of ‘gallop’ and ‘triumphant’, meaning ‘to march on exultantly with irregular bounding movements’.” I’m pretty sure my dog galumphs at times. Similarly, the word ‘chortled’ also landed in the dictionary, “where it is defined as ‘a blend of chuckle and snort’.”[3] Take that, English language!

 

Think portmanteaus aren’t relevant anymore? What about Brexit? And I‘m sorry, is that a goldendoodle or a labradoodle you have there? Do you remember Bennifer, or worse, Brangelina? There’s a new docuseries coming out on PBS all about infomercials. I can keep going.

 

Who’s the shady McDonald’s character from the 80s… the Hamburglar? I’m sorry, I’m headed to the movies to see a romcom and then off to Jazzercise. I’ll be taking my moped to brunch with my spork to eat tofurkey. How about Bollywood? Affluenza? Man boobs are moobs. A man purse is a murse. Sexting, shart, skort, staycation, cyborgs, wookie, telethon, hangry, workaholic, emoticon, telemarketing, fudgsicle, and Spanglish. And let’s not forget Texarkana, Tribeca, Soho, RiNo and Hotlanta. It’s ridiculous. We’re ridiculous! And somehow… I still like us because if nothing else, we can be creative as hell.

 

But… we can also be ridiculous in other ways. Check out Wikipedia’s entry on “The Jabberwocky.” It cites these two “adults” just tripping over themselves trying to analyze and expound on the masterpiece that is “The Jabberwocky.” Read it and laugh… or weep… (I’d try to combine those two words, but linguistically I’m striking out.)

1. Linguist Peter Lucas believes the “nonsense” term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than “non-sense”, allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.

 

2. Marnie Parsons describes the work as a “semiotic catastrophe”, arguing that the words create a discernible narrative within the structure of the poem, though the reader cannot know what they symbolise. She argues that Humpty tries, after the recitation, to “ground” the unruly multiplicities of meaning with definitions, but cannot succeed as both the book and the poem are playgrounds for the “carnivalised aspect of language”. Parsons suggests that this is mirrored in the prosody of the poem: in the tussle between the tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and trimeter in the last lines, such that one undercuts the other and we are left off balance, like the poem’s hero.[4]

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling way more off-balance after reading them than I ever did reading “The Jabberwocky”! Peter, you can take your “lexical allusions” and put them on a shelf. Marnie, you’re brilliant, but perhaps a little over dramatic with a “semiotic catastrophe”? Also… that tussle? I don’t know…

 

In Caroll’s novel, Humpty Dumpty recites “The Jabberwocky” to Alice. So what did Alice make of this smashing piece of art in Carroll’s novel? Well, she did better than the “adults referenced above”. I’d say she took it like a champ… with maybe a little too much pride, but we can forgive her… she’s human too.  

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”[5]

 

Beware the Jabberwock, my son! And this weekend… don’t worry so much about the proverbial definitions of gyre, wabe or vorpal in your life. Just go with it. Have some fun.

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Sources

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

[2] http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/analysis/poem-origins/jabberwocky/

[3] http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/analysis/poem-origins/jabberwocky/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

[5] Carroll, Lewis (2010) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass pp 64–65.

Blog image: The Jabberwock, as illustrated by John Tenniel