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Beau-oootiful Soo-oop! The Magic of Sound and the Melodies of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland

Anna Kérchy

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The Magic of Language

1Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a very Victorian text that nevertheless holds a timeless appeal. Alice’s disoriented wanderings both reflect everyman’s journey on an age-old quest for meaning lost in a fundamentally incomprehensible world and resonate with anxieties of the postmodern Zeitgeist. Yet our relentless meta-imaginative scholarly curiosity remains preoccupied with speculations about the way the nineteenth century collective imagination may have conceptualised Wonderland’s oddities, and the way Alice’s dreams—which strategically elude all rationalising interpretations—may have actually looked, sounded, and felt like for Carroll’s contemporary Victorian audiences.

2Whether we adopt a synchronic or diachronic analytical perspective, we can safely assume that the actual protagonist of the novel is language itself. The carefully elaborated storyworld abounds in easily recognisable, memetically reproducible motifs, characters, episodes—from falling down the rabbit hole and mad tea partying to grinning cats, magic mushrooms, and ticking clocks—and even more so, mock-aphoristic nonsensical lines turned into catchphrases, ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’, ‘We are all mad here’. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’, ‘Off with her head!’ which can easily recall, as if by word-magic, the enchanting aura of the fantasy universe.

3Wonderland’s magical elsewhere functions like a Foucauldian heterotopia: conventional laws of spatiality, temporality, and customary habits of embodied, enworlded existence are twisted or suspended in a playground-like carnivalesque realm that is inhabited by grotesque creatures who also use language in peculiar ways. They distort dialogic interactions—Gillian Beer identifies Socratic dialogism as the major structuring device of the novel which plays with deliberately departing from standard conversational scripts (116), and Kiera Vaclavik notes the enormous care with which ‘the texture of these multiple voices and their modes of delivery are delineated’ so as to foreground ‘the slipperiness of language’ in ‘dissident dialogues’ (14‒15)—turned into verbal fencing games, unanswerable riddles, tongue-in-cheek parodies, monologic mumblings, sudden songs, or pure gibberish. The bizarre verbal exchanges in Alice’s dreamworld hold social critical implications, too: they ridicule the discursive automatisms of Victorian England, such as the polite small talk of drawing-room conversations dictated by prudish bourgeois etiquette, the rhetoric of the monarchy’s social discipline, and political propaganda serving the hegemonic interests of the Empire’s colonial powers, or the rigorously elaborated terminus technici of the scientific classification mania.

4The lure of Wonderland largely originates from the ludic destabilisation of meanings. Carroll’s creative experimentation with the nonsense fairy-tale fantasy genre self-ironically foregrounds the inevitability of miscomprehension, our insatiable yearning for understanding as well as the impossibility of absolute meaninglessness resulting from our human meaning-making, pattern-seeking compulsion, explored in depth by Gestalt psychology. Readers find anarchic pleasure in the interpretive confusion caused by unresolved ambiguities. Wandering/wondering like Alice, they inevitably oscillate between the self-reflective metalinguistic recognition of the inherent malfunctioning of the consensual sign system and the revelry in the transverbal, acoustic, musical dimensions of discourse—of sound overwhelming sense—which predominate over the semiotic surface layers of signification (see Kérchy).

5The playfully polyphonic narrative form allows for the hybridisation of discursive modes, styles and registers. From a corporeal narratological perspective we could contend that the rapid succession of Alice’s metamorphic shrinkings and growings are linguistically embodied in the sudden switching from pathos to bathos, from serious philosophising to satirical mockery, from praise of canonical works to defamiliarising demythologisation, from the emptying of meaning to the proliferation of sense.

6I wish to demonstrate here that in the Wonderland text the abrupt changes from prose narrative to lyrical inserts constitute further semioticisations of the somatic crisis emblematised by Alice’s unpredictable shape-shiftings. I argue that the poems, whimsically voiced by Wonderland’s strange creatures as spontaneous outbursts of l’art-pour-l’art creative energies, break the sequence of the storyline, halt the progress of Alice’s picaresque journey, and constitute those repeated ruptures in the signifying process which are paradigmatic of the play with paradoxes of literary nonsense. I wish to call attention to the fact that it is vital to realise that the poems are performed as songs by characters (and meant to be performed as songs by readers). Hence, they stage the impossible blending of either-or alternatives in a cacophonic confusion of prose and poetry, canonical original and rebellious parody, but also of words and music, voice and noise. Carrollian acoustic poetics holds a political potential: allowing the somatic-sonoric energies to overwhelm the semiotic dimensions of signification stages the overturning of fossilised hierarchies (sense/nonsense, sense/sound, voice/noise, word/music, sound/silence) and encourages all to listen to the silenced marginalised.

Alice’s Acoustic Appeal

7The critical consensus agrees on the oral-acoustic appeal of the Alice books. Björn Sundmark locates the four Alice text-versions (the initial manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, then Wonderland, Looking-Glass and Nursery Alice) in the ‘oral-literary continuum’ and identifies traditional storytelling’s oral performative interactive devices as major narrative engines of a tale that started out as an oral improvisation by an Oxford Christ Church College mathematics tutor to entertain the dean’s daughters on a golden afternoon. Jan Susina calls Wonderland ‘a performance oriented text that begs to be read out loud’, and reminds us that the Alice books in the Victorian era—instead of being read solitarily—were more likely listened to collectively in family reading circles, like that of Mrs George McDonald and her children who enjoyed so much the word- and sound-oriented humour that they eventually convinced Carroll to publish his story for a larger audience (Susina 175). I fully agree with Kiera Vaclavik who urges the comprehensive exploration of the sonic dimensions of the Carrollian narrative which could open up new meanings beyond oculocentric scholarship. Passages like the dream of Alice’s sister in the epilogue to the Wonderland adventures reveal how the re/construction of Wonderland in Alice’s dream is essentially a sound-based fantasy: ‘grass-rustling, the mouse splashing, teacups rattling, plates crashing, the pig-baby sneezing, the Gryphon shrieking, a pencil squeaking and a suppressed guinea pig choking’ (Vaclavik 1) create the silly symphonies of the nonsensical storyworld. Moreover, via a multisensorial stimulation even the image-textual dynamics gain acoustic qualities: Sir John Tenniel’s ‘loud images’ depict characters involved in vocal performances, emitting sounds, screams, songs, snores, to test the limits of silent visual representation by undertaking the impossible task of picturing music, and contribute to the nonsensical qualities of the narratives.

8Carroll amuses audiences by defamiliarising and recontextualising in surprising new ways familiar contents. These include natural and cultural soundscapes of nineteenth century Victorian Britain’s everyday rural and urban milieux; like the ones surfacing in Alice’s sister’s dream. The bucolic frame is contrasted with the ‘“honest, common-life sounds” of contemporary industry, transport and material culture’ and the ‘notoriously noisy’ soundscape of a cacophonous Wonderland turbulent with sounds of whistles, trumpets, rattling teacups, crashes and screams (Vaclacik 17). The nonsensical rhymes also create a déja entendu of man-made signs which appeal to the acoustic memory of contemporary readers who will associate the embedded poem-parodies with discursive situations, musical genres and, as I will show, even specific melodies of the original source-text’s musical adaptations echoing beneath the satirical distortions’ lyrics. A careful analysis of the Wonderland poems reveals that Carroll mocks literary traditions but also lampoons a variety of different musical genres, including hymn, lullaby, serenade and quadrille. The songs’ twisted lyrics, grotesque performers, and absurd enactments reject the cultural significations and affective responses traditionally associated with the musical forms: with a simple carnivalesque reversal, lullabies scorn instead of soothing, dances sadden instead of gladdening, love songs stupefy instead of touching, and hymns ridicule instead of adulating. The sonoric surplus of verbally implied tunes, of ‘musical meanings that cannot be expressed in words’ (Varga 1) also enhance the nonsensical effects of the narrative by allowing sounds to predominate over sense, and guide readers to pre- or trans-linguistic territories which Zoltan Varga calls the ‘realm of music, madness, and dreams’, ‘the beyond of language’ that unveils a side of the self inaccessible via rational verbal utterances. (Varga 1)

9It is likely that Carroll was aware of and strategically capitalised on the acoustic appeal of his writings. As an avid theatre goer, and an admirer of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas, slapstick comedy and ‘charming compositions’, he tried to commission Arthur Sullivan to write some songs for a potential musical dramatisation of the Alice book (Letters 637). When Sullivan refused his offer—he told Carroll he would have to charge an ‘absurdly extravagant fee if such setting were bought as copyright works’ but was willing to reconsider if an actual proposal for a stage presentation were made (Jacobs 1984)—Carroll gave permission to William Boyd to set selections of Wonderland to music. After Boyd wrote both Songs from ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1870) and Songs from ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1872), Carroll authorised and contributed lines to Henry Savile Clarke’s operetta Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts, for Children and Others with music by Walter Slaughter that first appeared at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, 23 December 1883 (with Phoebe Carlo as Alice), and became a highly successful production with over thirty revivals during the following forty years. (Richards 2022, Susina 66, Hancock 2)

Listening Closer: Singing Poems

  • 1 Carrollian verbal anarchy peaks in the demythologization of classics. It mocks canonized literary g (...)

10‘How Doth the Little Crocodile’, the first lyrical insert disrupting Wonderland’s prose narrative, is a poem Alice recites while attempting to recall Isaac Watts’s ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’. The parodic revision turns the didactic fable about the exemplary diligence and docility of the little busy bee ‘improving each shining hour’ into an anarchic verse about a cunning little crocodile who is ‘improving his shining tail’ to welcome little fish in his gently smiling jaws’. It mocks the moralising mannerisms, the tedious rote learning method and the black pedagogy disguised as piousness: all flaws of the nineteenth-century educational system.1

11However, to understand the sonoric surplus of the poem, it is also important to note that Watts’s didactic rhyme about the little busy bee was initially included in a collection called Divine Songs attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, a volume that comprised texts written in recognisable hymn form to match the usual psalm tunes so that they might be sung as part of children’s daily worship. Hence, Watts’s version was already a revision that converted a Biblical textual tradition into a somewhat infantilised, animal parable format presumably more accessible for child audiences. This was further distorted by Carroll’s carnivalesque parodic rewrite that changed the words but kept the music in mind, and intended to create a paradoxical effect by twisting the lyrics precisely in order to create a lowly counterpoint to the lofty devotional melody of the hymn readers could recall upon reading the familiar-unfamiliar lyrics. However, the mentally evoked air was not meant to facilitate memorising the moralising guidelines but to offer the sheer delight of musical transgression through placing out of tune the seriousness of authoritarian control by church or school institutions.

12As Cecily Raysor Hancock highlights, ‘Little Crocodile’ like all the other poem-parodies nested in the Wonderland novel clearly carried musical associations to Victorian readers who recognised that the lyrics were meant to be sung rather than read or recited, since the ‘tunes are part of the intended effect adding bathos or zest to the splendid absurdity of (Carroll’s nonsensical) words’ (Hancock 22). Accordingly, the dilemma is not only whether the Carrollian humour is still accessible to today’s readers who are likely to be unfamiliar with the implications and intentions of the original poems lurking beneath and twisted by the rewrites (and necessarily lost or further distorted by translations), but also whether the familiarity with the original tunes associated with the original poems is a prerequisite for understanding the complexity of the palimpsestic meaning-deformations of the nonsense text.

13The bifocal interpretive perspective is enabled by Wonderland editions complemented by philological notes which direct readers’ attention to Watts’s busy bee poem beneath Carroll’s little crocodile verse; however, even Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, an ultimate reference book for Carroll scholars and fans, lacks the musical explanations of the poems mostly called ‘songs’ by Wonderland creatures, and thus fails to encourage the exploration of the intermedial dimensions of signification. This is an unfortunate oversight, since, as Michael Heyman puts it, ignoring the hidden aesthetic of musical elements in poetry would be just as absurd as if we focused only on words without considering images in the picture book medium (Heyman 2018, 164).

14Some of the tunes matching the Wonderland poems are easily identifiable, some can be guessed at on the basis of the score of Savile Clarke’s 1906 operetta adaptation, the origin of the other tune remains undecidable and ambiguous. Carroll consistently claimed acoustic authority over his storyworld; and implied that the familiarity with ‘the notes which the writer attaches to the words’ (Hancock 3) was vital for making out the right sense of nonsense. As Bellido and Bowrey suggest, he acted as a genuine ‘orchestrator of the Alice experience’, ‘akin to an author-director’ with a creative vision who tried his best to ensure that Wonderland ‘was experienced as he had personally envisioned and heard as he wrote it’ (23). Carroll’s stipulations concerning the proper sound of his text constitute a curious counterpoint to his metatextual commentaries which celebrated the interpretive freedom granted to readers of nonsense. (In a letter to a child friend about the Hunting of the Snark he famously stated that he did not mean anything but nonsense and contended that all meanings are right meanings since ‘words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant . . .’ (Letters 1: 548).

  • 2 ‘“On our way back we generally sang songs popular at the time, such as “Star of the evening, beauti (...)

15Carroll insisted on keeping the already existing ‘well-known tunes’ (Letters 168) of the old nursery songs he recycled. These ‘sweet old airs’ (Letters 637) of popular songs belonged to the common acoustic repertoire of Victorian audiences who widely performed these melodies—Alice Liddell Hargreaves herself recalls singing some of them on the famous summer rowing expedition when the story was born (Gray 276 in Hancock 1).2 Yet the vague allusions in Carroll’s letters and diaries to his musical preferences are no longer that easy to decode for contemporary readers who can only speculate what were the ‘right tunes’ that fitted the words that the author (and his initial audience) had in mind.

16Among the odd lullabies the Wonderland creatures sing, ‘Twinkle, twinkle little bat’ turns the sublime into grotesque on its recital at the mad tea party as a rewrite of ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’—commonly believed to be based on Jane Taylor’s poem ‘The Star’ first published in 1806 Rhymes for the Nursery and sung to the tune of the French children’s song ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, maman’ as recorded in The Singing Master: First Class Tune Book in 1838 and in Song Stories for the Kindergarten in 1896, popularised by Mozart (Hancock 22). Hancock calls the do do sol sol la la sol theme wedded to Taylor’s poem, an ‘international nursery rhyme tune’ that rings familiar to all readers, but Graham questions the matching melody, claiming that lullabies did not have fixed music at that time, and ponders if the original tune to ‘Twinkle twinkle’ might have been a hymn (‘In the kingdom of Thy grace’) sung at Victorian magic lantern shows or the ‘sleepy tunes of (the so-called) Spanish Chant’ (Hancock 5). Heyman doubts that the Twinkle Twinkle melody Carroll had in mind was the one we are familiar with today, since Carroll claimed that ‘his tune fit so well the endless repetitions of the sleeping Dormouse’, but in the contemporary version the musical leap is not that easily accomplished repeatedly for the endlessly echoed words. Written musical evidence for authentic sounds is scarce for multiple reasons, including a funny episode about Clarke being so irritated by Carroll’s pedantic instructions concerning the musicalisations of the Wonderland poems, that he rather had the Mad Hatter recite his song without any music in the operetta adaptation. Therefore, we can only guess what ‘Twinkle twinkle’ was meant to sound like in Carroll’s view (Heyman 2018, 162).

17With a similar carnivalesque reversal and a proliferation of ambiguities the gentle lesson on the importance of nurturing affection and linguistic politeness in David Bates’s lullaby ‘Speak gently’ is transformed into the shockingly aggressive ‘Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes’. The lullaby originally sung to the tune of the hymn composed by James Walch for a children’s anniversary in 1857 is mocked and drastically distorted in the end into the inarticulate howl of ‘wow wow wow’ in the Duchess’s performance.

  • 3 Since the estimated publication date of Hudson’s sheet music in 1815 and Howitt’s poem was not publ (...)
  • 4 ‘It would take a very good composer to write anything better than the sweet old air of “Will you wa (...)

18The Mock Turtle’s Song, also known as the Lobster Quadrille or ‘Will You Walk a Little Faster?’, is a rewrite of Mary Hewitt’s cautionary moral fable about the Spider and the Fly that adapted for junior audiences a popular music hall song ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ published in Comic Songs by Thomas Hudson.3 The comic effect in Carroll’s rewrite results from the fact that his song features sea-animals—whiting, snail, lobster, porpoise—deprived of allegorical significations, who are reluctant to join the merry dance in the English channel perhaps for fear they might end up as victims of the French cuisine. The warning against the dangers of passion (Hudson) or flattery (Hewitt) or even predation (implied in Carroll) disappears, as the lyrics are reduced to a counting-game-like, catatonic repetition of the eponymous rhetorical question that foregrounds language’s rhythmical qualities: ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’ Although Carroll refers to his fondness for the ‘sweet old air’ (Letters 637) as a counterargument against new musical adaptations, the song evokes multiple tunes.4 Besides Hudson’s frivolous comic music hall song based on the fiddle tunes of a country dance ‘Will You Come to the Bower?’ copied down in the 1820s by the poet deacon John Clare (hence Carroll’s reference to the ‘old air’) (Hancock 7), the basis of the poem’s first version in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground ‘Salmon come up’ was an American negro minstrel song ‘Sally Come Up’—authored by Ramsey and set to music by E. W. Mackney in 1863—that was associated with a cherished personal acoustic memory for Carroll: he recorded in his diary hearing the Liddell sisters sing this song with ‘great spirit’ just the day before the boating trip where he improvised Alice’s tale (Gardner 133 in Kelly 228). Hence, a black-face comedy and a music hall tune lurk beneath ‘the old air’ turned into a ridiculously solemn dance of strange sea creatures who dance round and round and round while the Mock Turtle sings veeeery slowly and sadly the originally cheerful lines, melancholically brooding about the likely impossibility of communication, asking ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’

  • 5 In Savile Clarke’s dream play Beautiful Soup appeared with the tune of Beautiful Star in the score (...)

19The Mock Turtle’s other song ‘Beautiful Soup’ is a parody of ‘Star of the Evening’ an amorous confession James M. Sayles, member of St Paul’s choir, wrote at seventeen for a young lady’s autograph book, that became a popular sentimental melody ‘sung by all the beaux and belles’ of the time, performed ‘in countless places of amusement and whistled on the street’ (as Sayles’s obituary stated), and ‘introduced from America by the Christy Minstrels’ (Hancock 10). Funnily enough, the divinely Beautiful Star5 turns into a mundane culinary delight, a ‘beautiful soup’ in a song performed by the chimeric animal creature who is to be turned into food himself as the main ingredient of a dish grounded in gustatory delusion. The mock turtle soup imitates the texture and flavour of expensive green turtle meat with seasoned beef bones (calf’s head) to provide a gastronomical equivalent of nonsense pretence play: through strategic multiplications and emptyings of meanings, a cycle of defamiliarisations, it sounds/looks/tastes like something but turns out to be something completely different…

20Beyond Alice, Carroll’s oeuvre abounds in further instances of lyrics embedded within prose narratives: for example, ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’ nested in Sylvie and Bruno reveals how the enhancement of nonsensification, the play of misrecognition and revision may even imply intermedial transition whereby the visual record of an acoustic impression is mistaken for a verbal sign: ‘He thought he saw an Elephant, that practised on a fife, He looked again and found it was a letter from his wife’. Marnie Parsons defines nonsense exactly along the lines of this ‘converging, intermingling, transliterating that moves in and out of various sign systems and, in doing so, takes with it the residues of those systems’ (Parsons 25 in Heyman 2022, 236).

The Revolutionary Soundfulness of Words

21The subversive intent and multifocal perspective invited by the palimpsest of source-text and parody in Wonderland become clear once we guess at the musical genres embedded in it and notice how Carroll deviates from the original performative purposes of the songs. The original tunes’ sublime, soothing, swooning, sparkling melodies evoked by the hymn, lullaby, lovesong serenade, and quadrille forms are contrasted with the brutal, gloomy, dark grotesquerie of the twisted lyrics. Even if we are unfamiliar with the original tune, we assume that conforming to the illogicality of nonsense, sound is meant to clash with sense, and the melody provides an absurd contrast to the twisted lyrics.

22As Gillian Lathey puts it, we expect these lyrics to be singable (even in translation!) because music, even if implied and/or inaudible, is part of the emotivity of the reading situation, just as nonverbal text elements, acoustic allusions are part of the phonological gestalt of the narrative (Nord in Lathey 94). This is an essential subversive component of the Wonderland narrative: in a moment of discursive defamiliarisation—a break in the interpretive process, an engulfment of the symbolic semiotic by the sonoric—as we sing the songs in our mind, we audiate them, we recognise how songs (words created for music) disrupt the flow of the prose narrative (words created to be read), and how lyrics generate different cognitive responses. Characters performing these rhymes to the tunes of implied melodies invite readers to do so, thus intensifying the urge to interact with the storyworld.

23The songs in Wonderland perfectly illustrate Carroll’s penchant for allowing the preverbal pleasures of sounds to overwhelm the verbal narrative: his poetic rebellion foregrounds rhyme, rhythm, repetition, melody, but also tone, pitch of voice, and acoustic malfunctions. (Speech defects were a sensitive issue for the stuttering author). Glitches of vocal performances remind us of the embodied oral/aural experience of what a text sounds like (beyond what it means or how it toys with meaninglessness).

24As Kiera Vaclavik notes, sounds issued from bodies constitute vital components of Wonderland’s soundscapes: ‘the books are liberally peppered with ughs and ohs!, with panting, sobbing, and shrieks’ which express a ‘wide range of emotions from pleasure and amusement to sadness, pain, distaste, surprise and fear’. They confuse readers’ affective cognitive responses with ambiguities involved in the Gryphon’s neologistic ‘Hjckrrh!’, Alice’s giggle decently masked with coughing, or the baby’s howling combined with sneezing or the ominous sounds of bodies falling (thump! thump!) and feet pat-a-pattering. ‘Edging into the bestial and mechanical, they can also morph into music and song’ (Vaclavik 16).

25Similarly, corporeality is reintroduced into the text as sounds emanating from bodies corrupt the polite performances of the songs, and allow noise to overwhelm sense to create new (non)meanings: the Mock Turtle sings with ‘deep sighs’ ‘in a voice sometimes choked with sobs’: ironically, the distortion-disruption of the words in the refrain ‘Beau-ootiful Soo-oop! Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!’ stages the moan of the animal but also imitates the approved method of singing a lovesong with its holds and sentimental stress upon the last words to vocally enact romantic longing, the physical/psychic torment of desire. The Mad Hatter chants along with the Dormouse who mumbles in his sleep mindlessly repeating in a decrescendo the fading refrain ‘twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle’ until words lose their meaning, become grunt-like to culminate in snores until somebody pinches him to make him stop. The Duchess’s shouts are mingled with the howls of the baby she keeps violently tossing in an effort to put him to sleep, and as the sneezing cook joins in the chorus, the words of their lullaby become undecipherable to culminate in an onomatopoeic ‘wow wow wow’.

26These inarticulate cries stage a linguistic subversion: voice is reduced to noise, words are transformed into ecstatic chant, an echolaliac, rhythmic, rhyming, repetitive, polyphonic incantation. Rhythm predominates over melody to stage the disintegration of coherent subjectivity and a surfacing of a sonic Doppelgänger resonate with subconscious corporeal vibes through musical vibrations which elicit an ecstatic explosion of textual meanings. Words are reduced to mere acoustic patterns where we seek meanings in vain, as the sonoric overwhelms the semiotic through what Michael Heyman calls ‘a manipulation of meaning-(un)making through a messy relation between words and (sounds/)music’ (Heyman 2022, 235). These moments of cathartic cacophony stage a simultaneous intensification of the soundfulness of words and the meaningfulness of sounds, to use Don Ihde’s terms. I wish to argue that in these Carrollian songs the deconstruction of discourse into proto-words imitating musical sound effects—beau-ooootiful soo-oop, twinkle twinkle twinkle, wow wow wow—recall the so-called ‘nonsense moment’ defined in Richard Elliott’s seminal book The Sound of Nonsense. This shift from words to music often accompanied by a shift to nonsense opens up the space for a ‘musicalised sense-making’ (or a semiotically invested musicalisation) within verbal meaning-construction: this is ‘a moment in perception when one is beyond, between or ahead of the moment of ascertaining sense. It is a glitch moment, a temporary period of blurring, the point in the process of code-switching where the codes are muddled’ between sound and sense (Elliott 3, Heyman 2022, 236).

27The musicalised semiosis on the lyrical inserts which intensify the melodic-material dimensions of discourse can be associated with Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘revolutionary poeticity’. By activating the genotextual deep layers of semiosis beyond phenotextual surface meanings, they disrupt conventional language use to ridicule the meaning-making-compulsion of didactic narratives, and to liberate child readers from what Maria Nikolajeva calls the ‘aetonormative’ ideological discipline. I believe that the sudden shifts from prose to lyrics, from semiotic to sonoric aspects invite young readers to revel in rebellious non-signifying (or rather mock-signifying) practices which facilitate the exploration of empowering identity formations grounded in constant destabilisations instead of fossilised hiearchisations.

28I argue that the peculiar rhetorical ambiguity of literary nonsense—its creative conjoining of metalinguistic self-reflection with trans-verbal somatised sonorous joys, its blurring of the proliferation and the nullification of meanings—uses language games to explore the subversive potentials of subjectivity put in process/on trial. In Wonderland various creatures’ misrecital of familiar songs destabilises Alice’s sense of self and anthropocentric worldview.

29Already Alice’s first attempt to recite ‘How does the little busy bee’ is meant to test whether she is still herself or has become someone else as a result of her strange adventures. The performance fails: ‘she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to’. A twisted version is created accidentally via her unconscious slip of the tongue as she misremembers the poem she learnt by heart at school. The nonsensification of the text coincides with a micro identity-crisis and an acoustic estrangement, the experience of the disembodied voice reduced to the noise of the other not-me. Later, the acoustic performances of twinkle twinkles and wow wow wows and especially the Mock Turtle’s beau-oootiful soo-oop, also poke fun at the human illusion of mastering language as an instrument of domination—of adults over children, of homo narrans over the speechless non-human lifeworld, of sense over senselessness.

30However, hearing the other in/as me also suggests the potential of a good vibration from a communal touch binding us together through a revitalised language: this activates a wordmagic Karen Coats defines as the very engine of children’s poetry. Besides constituting a poetics this ‘communicative musicality’ holds a political potential in so far as ‘it can articulate that part of our humanity that does not make sense even to ourselves, and it can dare . . . to speak to and for those who have been excluded from society’s shared game of sense-making: children, the insane, dreaming sleepers, slaves, women, inspired poets, queer people, animals, things’ (Barton & Williams 1). Perhaps the essence of nonsensical epiphany is the recognition of a multiplicity of meanings in what has been erroneously identified with an absence of sense (Tigges 47), a willingness to play by ear the songs of the silenced.

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Bibliographie

Barton, Anna and James Williams. ‘Introduction: Companionable Nonsense’. The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense. Ed. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh UP, 2022. 1‒13.

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Nikolajeva, Maria. ‘Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory’. Neohelicon 36 (2009): 13‒24.

Richards, Catherine. ‘What is Missing from Henry Savile Clarke’s Musical Dream Pay Alice in Wonderland’. Theatre Notebooks 76.3 (2022): 154‒73.

Sundmark, Björn. Alice in the Oral Literary Continuum. Lund Studies in English. Lund UP, 1999.

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Notes

1 Carrollian verbal anarchy peaks in the demythologization of classics. It mocks canonized literary genres or socially sanctioned communicational acts which are defamiliarized in silly reiterations. The preachings of Roberth Southey’s pious old man (‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’) are converted into a mock-educational dialogue with old Father William whose greatest feats include his incessant capacity to stand on his head and to balance an eel on his nose. And the romantic clichés of William Mee’s ode to Alice Gray are parodically transformed into abstract formulas of legal discourse during Wonderland’s final trial scene. (The White Rabbit’s Verse).

2 ‘“On our way back we generally sang songs popular at the time, such as “Star of the evening, beautiful star”, and “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, and “Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly”, all of which are parodied in the Alice’ (Gray 276).

3 Since the estimated publication date of Hudson’s sheet music in 1815 and Howitt’s poem was not published until 1829, musicologists suppose that Hewitt was rewriting Hudson’s song for a junior audience. See: http://folksongandmusichall.com/index.php/spider-and-the-fly-the/.

4 ‘It would take a very good composer to write anything better than the sweet old air of “Will you walk into my parlour, said the Spider to the Fly”’ [Letters 637]. In response to a letter from Savile Clarke, Carroll wrote more mildly, ‘As to retaining the tunes, it was hardly worth while to trouble you. I find there are only four pieces that have known airs, viz;—(in “Alice”) “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. “Will you walk into my garden” [sic]. “Beautiful Star”—&, (in “Looking-Glass”) “Bonnie Dundee”’ (letter dated 6 September 1886, in the Alfred C. Berol Collection, Fales Library, New York University) (Hancock 2) ‘“Will you walk” is the only air I am really anxious to have preserved. It is a favourite air with me, & the only one that realises to me the idea of the dance. I should be sorry if any other melody, however pretty in itself, were substituted for it’ [28 November 1886, Berol Collection] (Hancock 3)

5 In Savile Clarke’s dream play Beautiful Soup appeared with the tune of Beautiful Star in the score printed in 1906. (Hancock 3)

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Anna Kérchy, « Beau-oootiful Soo-oop! The Magic of Sound and the Melodies of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 100 Automne | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 11 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15168 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/132re

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Anna Kérchy

Anna Kérchy, PhD DrHabil Dsc is Professor in English Literature at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She is interested in Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, gender/body studies, feminist literary theory, posthuman and humanimal ethics, subversive children’s/YA literature, and inter/transmedial dynamics of cultural representations. She authored the monographs Alice in Transmedia Wonderland (2016), Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter (2008), Essays on Feminist Aesthetics, Narratology, and Body Studies (2018), The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Nonsense (2024) and (co)edited 10 essay collections among them Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (2011), The Fairy-Tale Vanguard (2019), and Transmediating and Translating Children’s Literature (2020). With Béatrice Laurent she co-edited the 94th CVE issue on ‘Sounds Victorian’.
Anna Kérchy
est Professeur de littérature anglaise à l’Université de Szeged, en Hongrie. Elle s’intéresse à l’imaginaire fantastique victorien et postmoderne, aux gender/body studies, à la théorie féministe littéraire, à l’éthique posthumaine et humanimaliste, à la littérature de jeunesse subversive, et à la dynamique inter/transmédiale des représentations culturelles. Elle a publié Alice in Transmedia Wonderland (2016), Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter (2008), Essays on Feminist Aesthetics, Narratology, and Body Studies (2018), The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Nonsense (2024) et co-dirigé une dizaine d’ouvrages parmi lesquels, Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (2011), The Fairy-Tale Vanguard (2019), et Transmediating and Translating Children’s Literature (2020). Avec Béatrice Laurent, elle a co-dirigé le numéro 94 des Cve, ‘Sounds Victorian’.

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