Mustard in the Custard: Wordplay and Nonsense in the Works of Lewis Carroll
In his introduction to the Penguin Classics Centenary Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass Hugh Haughton sees the readers of the Alice books as falling into two categories.
"The stories fill our heads with ideas, but we don't know what they are. All the same, readers tend to divide
between those who are content to find the stories 'pretty' - and those who want to know what those obscure
'ideas' Alice intimates really are."1
Either they side with the Gryphon,
who wants "The adventures first. Explanations take such a dreadful time,"2
or they side with the Queen of Hearts who is sure that "even a joke should have some meaning."3 For the
Gryphons, looking for the meaning of the books is a tiresome chore that simply gets in the way of our enjoyment
of them. For the Queens, the enjoyment comes from the interpreting of the stories. Are the stories pretty
and sweet, or should we read them with a sharp eye for the real sense behind the nonsense? The dilemma facing
any reader new to the books is to strike a balance between these two rival schools of thought. The first
time we read about Alice's adventures, we are likely to enjoy them as the Gryphon does, without explanation,
simply as stories. But when we come to reread the books, there is a good chance we will begin to focus
more attention on certain scenes that cannot simply be written off as 'pretty'. The sharp exchanges between
Alice and Humpty Dumpty, for example . . .
And then one night you dream. You dream of a custard so delicious everyone wants some. But of course there
is not enough to go round. So you decide to add to the custard hoping no one will notice the slight deterioration
in the flavour. But you make a fatal blunder: you put mustard in the custard because the colour looks right. You
wake up and you wonder what your dream was all about. Then you remember having recently read the following in a
black book with no pictures and no conversations in it:
"The 'royal road' to the unconscious is dreams. (. . .) Dreams are enough to demonstrate that the unconscious
has the admirable resourcefulness of a lazy, ill-supplied chef, who slings together the most diverse ingredients
into a cobbled together stew, substituting one spice for another which he is out of, making do with whatever has
arrived in the market that morning as a dream will draw opportunistically on the 'day's residues', mixing in events
which took place during the day or sensations felt during sleep with images drawn deep from our childhood."
4
You begin to wonder: did the unconscious throw up the word 'mustard' simply because you had considered adding some
to your wife's salad dressing earlier that evening, but had thought better of it? Or was it rather that 'mustard
in the custard' has a nice ring to it and might well have appealed to the taste of Lewis Carroll? And then you
remember: the two words are not of your own invention. Your unconscious has simply borrowed them. Alice gulps
down the contents of the "Drink Me" bottle which had "a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple,
roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast"5; later the Duchess says, "Flamingoes and mustard both bite"6. Is
this what is meant by unconscious plagiarism?
The two words 'mustard' and 'custard' are the same in all but one letter, and both are foods found in most traditional
English kitchens. Yet one is sharp, and the other sweet. In spite of the close similarity in their spelling, they are,
in a sense, opposites. But when we consider the Alice works as a whole, it strikes us that they too can be said to be
opposites (especially with regard to their structure) in spite of the close similarity between them.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Alice falls down a rabbit hole, and finds there a topsy-turvy world where nothing
is quite as she expects. Everything is thrown on its head. Then she awakes to realise she had simply fallen asleep
and has been dreaming. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice goes through a mirror into another kind of disorientating
realm where things are inverted (to move forwards towards her goal, Alice has to walk backwards; to remain in one place,
she must run as fast as she can). Finally Alice awakes once again to discover it's all been a dream. Structurally, the
two stories are almost identical. But like the small but very significant difference between mustard and custard (with
just only one letter separating the sharp from the sweet), the two Alice tales have a small but significant difference:
in the first Alice the heroine's initial movement is vertical (down the rabbit hole) while in the second Alice it is
horizontal (through the mirror).
On the surface the subject of the two books might appear to be the same (Alice has a dream in which she grows up,
leaving childhood behind her). However, in the first book Alice literally grows up, undergoing many changes in size
(all of them vertical movements), while in the second book her growing up is shown metaphorically with Alice changing
from a pawn (child) into a queen (adult). Her movement is that of a chess piece moving horizontally across a chessboard.
This may seem a minor point of only academic interest, but it is illustrative of how carefully Carroll has constructed
his stories so they balance and yet do not bore us. His playing on the expression 'growing up' is not just punning for
the sake of punning. By contrasting the physicality of the growing up in the first Alice with the mental development of
the weak pawn becoming the powerful and independent queen in the second, Carroll is using language creatively to show
us just how elastic language can be. He illustrates how words can mean much more than their surface meaning, and how
confusing this can be at times. This playing with language can sometimes seem to be frivolous and merely playing for
laughs; however what appears on first reading as mere nonsense is rarely without meaning. In the course of this paper
I will try to show what meaning there is (or may be) behind the nonsense.
"Curiouser and curiouser!"
When Alice falls down the rabbit-hole, everything she accepts as 'normal' no longer seems to apply. As she falls,
she has time to look around, to take things off shelves and put them back, as if gravity no longer had its usual
force. She finds her body shrinking and growing at unusually high speeds. Her memory is no longer what it was, and
she is unable to do even the most basic arithmetic. She feels disorientated. But perhaps the most significant change
in Wonderland is the strange way language is used, even by Alice herself, even though she is not always aware of
this change.
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised that for a moment she quite forgot how to speak
good English).7
The non-standard form of the comparative (curiouser) used here would appear to be nothing more than a grammatical
mistake. Just as Alice can no longer remember the right words for things (she mistakenly says "Antipathies" for
"Antipodes"), she can no longer remember the correct form of the comparative for the word 'curious' (more curious).
But is that the end of the matter? If we think back to the change Alice herself is undergoing as she makes this slip
of the tongue, we might see things in a different light. As she extends 'curious' to make the non-standard 'curiouser',
she is herself at the same time extending in a most non-standard (i.e. unusual) way: "Now I'm opening out like the
largest telescope that ever was!"8 In effect her sudden and unexpected growth is being mirrored in the sudden and
unexpected growth of the word 'curious'. The language she uses is changing in accordance with her own physical change.
As she gets bigger, so do her words. Put in such terms, this strikes us as obvious: as you grow up and get older,
your vocabulary extends. You use bigger words (i.e. ones with more syllables), and also you use a much larger number
of words. Carroll is illustrating this extension of vocabulary as being a literal process as well as the figurative
one we might normally think of.
"O Mouse!"
When Alice begins her descent into the chaotic, back-to-front world under ground where everything stands like Father
William on its head, she sleepily says to herself:
"Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either
question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.9
Because Alice does not know the answer to either question, for her the two sentences have effectively the same
(i.e. no) meaning. The change in the word order with the subject becoming the object of the verb, and vice versa,
is immaterial. Yet as any student of English will be able to tell you, word order in English determines the meaning
of the sentence. Though there are exceptions, in most cases, the subject (S) comes before the verb (V), which in
turn precedes the object (O). The reason why word order is so important for determining meaning is that English nouns
do not change their shape or spelling depending on their function in the sentence. A cat is a cat whether it is the
subject or the object of a verb (pronouns do change, however, as can be seen in this simple example: He likes her, but
she does not like him). In other languages, such as Latin, the nouns are said to decline (I know there is a Carrollian
pun in here somewhere, but I'll decline the chance to test your patience any further). This means the form of the word
changes depending on its function in a sentence. When, for example, the Latin word 'city' is the subject of the verb,
it is 'urbs' (as in the things Americans put on their food); when it is the object, it becomes 'urbem'. As the two forms
are clearly different, it should be obvious that word order in Latin is much more flexible than in English.
When Alice finds herself in danger of being drowned in a pool of her own tears, she addresses a mouse thus: "O Mouse!"10
This stilted phrase is how many traditional Latin grammar books, such as the one Alice's brother uses, have sought to
render into English the vocative case, used when addressing someone. The most famous example of this vocative case is
probably the line "Et tu, Brute?" which Julius Caesar is supposed to have uttered when he realised even his protege
Brutus was betraying him and literally stabbing him in the back. 'Brute' is the vocative of Brutus, but to translate
this as, "And you, O Brutus?" would be absurd (nearly as absurd as a seven year old girl addressing a rodent as "O Mouse"!).
On one level Carroll is simply poking fun at the ridiculous nature of the Latin grammars used in 19th century English
public schools. But, on another level, he is drawing our attention to the significance of word order. English does not
have a vocative, a dative or an ablative case (the genitive is shown by the apostrophe 's', as in 'This is George's book'),
and so the order we say or write our sentences is vital if we wish to be correctly understood. However, reversing word
order can give rise to arresting statements that make us sit up and pay attention. As the old adage says, "'Dog bites man'
isn't news. 'Man bites dog' is."
I mean what I say = I say what I mean
In the Mad Tea-Party the problem of word order in English is developed. Alice is looking forward to having some fun with
riddles when all of a sudden she finds herself being scolded:
"You should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the
same as 'I eat what I see'!"11
The confusion caused by the inverting of the word order is compounded by the multifarious meanings of the word
'mean'. Words cannot always be simply translated or understood in isolation; sometimes they form part of an idiom
or set phrase. Earlier we looked at the words 'grow up', and saw how the literal meaning of the two individual
words 'grow' (= get bigger) + 'up' (= vertically) means a physical movement, while the figurative meaning of the
phrasal verb 'grow up' means 'to move towards adulthood'. Here, the March Hare's rebuke of "You should say what
you mean," means "You should state clearly what it is you are trying to say." Yet when Alice says, "I mean what
I say," she unwittingly is using a set phrase whose meaning is "I'm serious about what I say" and which is
generally used as a threat to warn others to back off.
The problem she faces is one of semantics versus pragmatics. Semantics is concerned with the meaning of
individual words, while pragmatics looks at what the speaker of an utterance is trying to communicate to
the listener. If two people are in a room together and one says, "It's a bit stuffy in here," the semantic
meaning is "It is hot and rather airless in this place." Seen in this light, this utterance is simply a
statement of fact. The speaker is telling the listener something about the nature of the room's interior.
In this situation, however, most of us would realise there is more to the utterance than merely a communication
of information. We would realise the speaker wanted the window opened. The pragmatic meaning is "Would you please
open a window before I suffocate and pass out!" Set phrases such as "I mean what I say" are used almost exclusively
in this (pragmatic) way. Instead of stating something directly (e.g. "Open the window, please!" or "This is a final
warning! Don't make me angry!") we use circumlocutions to avoid confrontation. Pragmatics is the study of how we
moderate our language to maintain a mutually acceptable level of politeness. The irony here is that the Hatter
appears to be aware of the difference between semantics and pragmatics, and nevertheless he makes no effort whatsoever
to maintain an acceptable level of politeness. Along with all the other argumentative characters Alice meets on her
journeys, the Hatter is a stickler in his use of language, whilst at the same time a terrible conversationalist. The
Hatter uses words, not as tools to aid communication, but as weapons with which to score points against the unwitting
Alice.
Elizabeth Sewell in her book The Field of Nonsense argues that Carroll's Nonsense is a carefully constructed world of
play, and that "since Nonsense is made up of language, its play things will be words."12 She goes on to state that
"play consists in establishing mastery over something."13 Carroll's argumentative characters, of whom the best two
examples are perhaps the Hatter and Humpty Dumpty, are clearly playing a game in which they attempt (and largely
succeed) in establishing mastery over Alice by their clever manipulation of language and words. As Sewell goes on
to point out, "the only feeling appropriate to a game, in fact essential to it, is a love of power and a desire
to win."14 Seen in this light, we can begin to understand the Hatter's behaviour and appreciate why he is so hostile
towards Alice. It is not simply that she is an unwanted and uninvited guest at his Tea-Party; she is in effect
an opponent in the game of Nonsense, and must be treated as such. No affection or kindliness is to be shown.
Indeed in the Alice books there is really only one character who breaks this rule, and that is the White Knight,
who guides Alice to the Eighth Square in Through the Looking-Glass, before sadly bidding her farewell. As has
been pointed out by numerous scholars, this kindly old man who keeps falling off his horse and making useless
inventions is clearly meant to represent the author himself. The White Knight is Charles Dodgson, sadly watching
as his beloved child-friend Alice Liddell leaves him behind as she grows up into adulthood. This growing-up is
symbolically expressed by Alice's assuming her Queen's crown.
"The question is which is to be master"
The most formidable opponent Alice meets on her travels is undoubtedly Humpty Dumpty. He is the self-proclaimed
master at using language, and is only too glad to show off this mastery to Alice when she asks him to explain the
meaning of the Jabberwocky poem. His explanations are fired off with great conviction and ingenuity, and Alice
seems close to striking up a rapport with him, as she assumes the subservient role of student to his teacher.
Indeed when she chips in with her own additions to his discourse, Humpty even goes so far as to say, "Exactly so"15,
for once not contradicting her but actually granting that she is right in her judgement. For one brief moment it
seems as if the two are no longer two opponents in a game, but are on the same side, batting for the same team. But,
inevitably, this brief encounter of like minds cannot last for long. As he starts reciting some poetry for her, he
breaks off after a couple of lines to say:
"Only I don't sing it," he added as an explanation.
"I see you don't," said Alice.
"If you can see whether I'm singing or not, you've sharper eyes than most," Humpty Dumpty remarked severely.
Alice was silent.16
The mood returns to one of confrontation and point-scoring. It is as if the teacher has sensed the student is
becoming too uppity, and decides to re-establish who is boss. Alice uses the expression 'I see' to mean 'I understand
or realise' (which incidentally is its most common meaning in everyday English). Alice's 'I see' is simply a way
of saying 'That is obvious'. Humpty, being the pedant he is, takes the word 'see' literally, to mean the act of
perceiving with one's eyes. He maintains that to see with one's eyes that a person is not singing (and is merely
reciting poetry) is next to impossible, as that is something that can only be appreciated by means of our ears.
We can hear the difference between a song being sung, and poetry being recited, but according to Humpty we cannot
see this difference. I am not much of an expert about lip-reading, but I would have thought the movements of our
lips might in fact alert an observant person to whether we were singing a song or reciting poetry. Surely the former
involves greater facial movement?
This pedantic, nit-picking intransigence of Humpty's might be seen as a satire on teachers who demand linguistic
exactitude while not caring a fig for other people's feelings. Humpty's sitting on a high wall looking down on Alice
could easily be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the relationship between teachers and their students.
Humpty's looking-down on Alice is not merely literal, but also figurative. He pours scorn on her use of language,
and as Alice bids him farewell, he only deigns to offer her one of his fingers to shake (a habit adopted by arrogant
members of the aristocracy who felt shaking hands with their social inferiors would be below them). Humpty the
master of language can also be seen as a (school)master of the old school, of the type who demanded absolute obedience
and servile humility from their students. He can also be seen as a master looking down upon the great unwashed below
with barely disguised distaste.
The playing with words at which Humpty excels makes of him a master practitioner in the world of Nonsense, which
Elizabeth Sewell defines as "not a universe of things but of words and ways of using them."17 Humpty Dumpty's use
of words though breath-taking in its inventiveness is seriously flawed. He flaunts one of the first rules of language,
that it must be mutually intelligible. Effective communication can only be successful if we all agree to use language
in more or less the same way. When I say 'dog', I have a picture in my mind of some kind of four-legged furry animal
that answers to the name of Fido. Your idea of a dog may differ in certain details (you may think of a more sensible name
like Rover, for example), but essentially my idea of what the word 'dog' means should be more or less the same as yours
or anybody else's who uses English as a means of communication. If I decide unilaterally that from now on the word
'dog' means 'fish and chips with clotted cream on', the chances are I might have difficulty winning the top prize
at Crufts. Humpty doesn't let such pedestrian concerns stand in his way. For him, words are his playthings, and
so it is only fit and right that he should do with them as he pleases.
"There's glory for you!"
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - until I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice
knock-down argument for you!'"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -
neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."18
Yet for all its flying in the face of conventional wisdom concerning language and effective communication,
what Humpty says has a grain of truth in it. Though it is a commonplace that language is democratic, in that
we all share in the consensus as to what each individual word means, it is nonetheless true that those in authority
have the power to influence our use of language. This is clearly illustrated for example in such works as George
rwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. In the latter work, the pigs who have taken control of the farm amend their earlier
"All animals are equal" to the nonsensical "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."19
Nothing can be 'more equal' than anything, as 'equal' means 'the same'. But for the other farm animals to question
this (mis)use of the word 'equal' would be pointless and indeed foolhardy in the extreme. The pigs are more 'equal'
than the rest, in that they have the power.
Humpty talks of words not only as if they were his playthings, but as if they were his workers: "Adjectives you can
do anything with, but not verbs - however I manage the whole lot of them! (. . .) When I make a word do a lot of work
like that, I always pay it extra. (. . .) You should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night (. . .) for to get
their wages."20 He is proud of his ability to make them dance to his tune, but his self-confidence is misplaced.
In his explanation of the Jabberwocky poem he tells Alice that the word 'slithy' is "like a portmanteau - there
are two meanings packed up into one word."21 His theory sounds convincing enough at first, and Alice accepts it
without a query. It falls to Elizabeth Sewell to point out the fallacy in his argument:
It seems curious that Humpty Dumpty should have got by so easily on his portmanteau theory, for when one looks at it,
it becomes very unsatisfactory. It would fit a pun well enough, in which there are precisely that - two meanings
(or more than two) packed up in one word. But 'frumious', for instance, is not a word, and does not have two meanings
packed up in it; it is a group of letters without any meaning at all. What Humpty Dumpty may have meant, but fails
to say, is that it looks like two words, 'furious' and 'fuming', reminding us of both simultaneously. It is not a word,
but looks like other words, and almost certainly more than two."22
Perhaps given a little more time in the Looking-glass world Alice might have come to realize this herself. As she
finally reaches the Eighth Square and becomes a Queen, it is noticeable that she has gained in self-confidence,
and feels strong enough to contradict the orders of the Red Queen, summoning the waiter to bring back the pudding.
Indeed from the moment Alice finds she has become a Queen, she begins to act in a much more forthright (if not
to say stroppy) manner. As she stands outside the arched doorway over which her name appears, unable to get into
her own party, she berates the very old Frog who comes to her aid. Their ensuing conversation is much like any other
one in the underground and Looking-Glass worlds Alice enters into on her two adventures - instead of effective
communication we only find verbal sparring with words and language being used as weapons, in a game where there
can only be one winner.
Yet in one small but significant detail, Alice's encounter with the Frog is different: this time her antagonist
is not someone in a higher position than her. Here towards the very end of her adventures Alice is finally in a
position of power, able to lord it over someone of lower rank than herself. The Frog is old, he hobbles, he wears
enormous boots, he speaks in a slow drawl, and he speaks in dialect - he is clearly supposed to be an old
country-bumpkin of a servant. And yet in spite of this, he still manages to get the better of Queen Alice
in their brief exchanges.
If this were a traditional romantic adventure the Princess would kiss the frog, and he would suddenly be
transformed into a handsome prince. But this is Carroll's world of Nonsense, where things are thrown on their
head, turned inside-out, and the opposite of what they normally are. Instead of the princess (Alice) helping
the frog-prince to find a happy end, it is an old, hoarse frog-farmer who helps Alice complete her transformation
into a Queen.
Notes
- Hugh Haughton, Introduction, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Harmondsworth, 1998.
- 'The Lobster-Quadrille', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 10.
- 'Queen Alice', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 9.
- Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition, Oxford, 1996, p. 137)
- 'The Mock Turtle's Story', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 9.
- 'The Pool of Tears', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 2.
- 'The Pool of Tears', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 2.
- 'Down the Rabbit-Hole', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 1.
- 'The Pool of Tears', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 2.
- 'A Mad Tea Party', Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 7.
- Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 26.
- Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 28.
- Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 131.
- 'Humpty Dumpty', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6.
- 'Humpty Dumpty', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6.
- Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 17.
- 'Humpty Dumpty', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6.
- George Orwell, Animal Farm, Harmondsworth, 1945, chapter 10.
- 'Humpty Dumpty', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6.
- 'Humpty Dumpty', Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6.
- Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 120.