through the looking glass PDF

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the special attitude to language in through the looking glass explains its appeal for an adult readership. discuss with examples from the text. ...

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ASSIGNMENT Through The Looking Glass The special attitude to language in Through The Looking Glass explains its appeal for an adult readership. Discuss with examples from the text.

Through The Looking Glass  is a children’s novel published in 1871 by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll was an English logician, mathematician, photographer and novelist, famous for his novel Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through The Looking Glass  (1871). By the time of Carroll’s death, the Alice series became the most popular children’s book in England. As we all know, Through The Looking Glass  is a sequel to Alice’s adventures In Wonderland, one of the most noticeable things about it is the way it mirrors the first edition in all aspects. Infact, one of the most prominent and persistent themes of the novel is reversal. Reversal of ideologies, logic and language. One of the most significant aspects of the novel which draws upon a lot of adult readership and attention is the use and attitude towards language, “an attitude brilliantly used as a weapon of social commentary.” (Spacks, Logic and Language in Through The Looking Glass). Carroll suggests that the disorder and lack of discipline in the real world seems worse when compared to the apparent chaos of the dream world and that perception and values play a huge role in the perception of appearance and reality. The looking Glass world is a world consciously upside down, backwards and where language and logic are considered ‘nonsense’ , a world more like a mirror to reality but in the process of this reflection, certain aspects of the real world are altered. As Jean Buadrillard wrote, “ the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subjects like his other,which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again…” in other words, it is a world where rules of logic, identity and language are fundamentally altered in every way possible and reconstructs it in a way that is the same yet different from our reality at the same time. W.H. Auden says, “we can lie in language and manipulate the world as we wish. But the lie must make sense as a grammatical proposition.” As Alice enters the Looking Glass world, her self constructed hyperreality, the paradigm shift is already apparent. She finds herself in the idle of a garden which has flowers that talk. The rose speaks to her and tells her that the tree in the middle of the garden is their protector when Alice asks them if they ever feel frightened. Alice asked the Rose what the tree could do if they were ever in danger to which the Rose replied, “ it could bark!” “It says ‘ Bough-wough,’” cried a Daisy: “That's why its branches are called boughs!” Carroll uses simple puns with an intend to establish a context and relation between the word and its meaning. In the topsy-turvy world of The Looking Glass, words are given more regard

unlike the unaccountable and arbitrary use of language in the real world where no relation exists between the words and the meaning behind them. Another example is Alice's surrealistic encounter with the insects of the Looking Glass world. Names which made sense to us are completely distorted and they appear to be a grotesque amalgamation of real and man made objects, configured literally according to their name. So, instead of a common horsefly, we encounter a rocking horse fly made of wood and a snap dragon fly whose body is made up of plum pudding instead of a regular dragon fly. Unless Alice is made to question her own self in the woods, where things have no name, she does not recognise the implications of the literal constructions of identity and selfhood. Alice forgets her name as soon as she enters the forest but her memory recovers when she comes out of it, as does the fauns’ she ran into while in the forest. It is like the standard relationships and their hierarchies were dismantled in the woods. As long as the Faun does not remember who Alice is, he exhibits no fear of her. As soon as he remembers and becomes aware of his fear of humans returns. Carroll tries to imply that by categorising and confining relationships between humans and nature to formal structures, we damage them. When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, she hopes that the master Deconstructionist could help her interpret the poem of the Jabberwocky. They break it down for her and she realises that here too, objects and ideas are pushed together to invent new things. Slimy and Lithe are combined to form “slithy” and “toves”. The function of hyperreality is to process, combine and synthesize reality and this is done through the amalgamation of ideas in Through The Looking Glass. When Humpty Dumpty says, “ The question is, which is to be master- that’s all.” , Alice finally begins to understand the logic of the Looking Glass world. She realizes that in this world, language is broken down into its most basic form and analyzed, that it has a power of its own. Through the satiric stance that Lewis Carroll takes via this novel on human communication being logical and accurate, he leaves us wondering about the “assumed existence of some realms of absolutes.”...