SOURCE: "Law-Courts and Dreams," in The Logic of Personal Knowledge, The Free Press, 1961, pp. 179-88.

[In the following excerpt, Sewell argues that the "real world" can be found in nonsense literature, particularly in the Barrister's dream in The Hunting of the Snark.]

… Alongside this law-court of dream [in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 87"] I want now to set another: that which is described in the Barrister's Dream, Fit the Sixth of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. Nonsense literature is, I believe, as valid and as closely knit with our ways of thought as any literary genre we have, so this juxtaposition need not, I hope, seem shocking. Its purpose is not to jolt but to help in this investigation, for which these verses provide interesting evidence. Actually, as I have suggested elsewhere, this particular narrative is not pure Nonsense. It admits too much of the real world, which is why it is less successful as Nonsense and highly relevant here and now. Fit the Sixth, like the rest, wavers between flashes of poetry—as in There was silence like night' which has a touch of Milton or of Mallarmé, 'Et l'avare Silence et la massive Nuit'—and an occasional hint of authentic nightmare, 'And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law, in a soft undercurrent of sound.' These are details, however. It is with the Barrister's Dream as a whole that we are concerned, for he dreams, professionally enough, a trial 'in a shadowy Court' where the Snark who is, you may remember, an extremely shadowy entity itself, is Counsel for the Defence on behalf of a pig accused of deserting its sty. The case as it proceeds becomes more and more vague, muddled and self-contradictory. What is interesting is the way in which the various functionaries of the Court abdicate one by one from their functions; the Judge declines to sum up, the Jury refuse to reach a verdict, the Judge cannot pronounce sentence, and little by little the Snark takes on one function after another, returns a verdict of 'Guilty' (although acting supposedly for the defence), and pronounces sentence, 'Transportation for life … And then to be fined forty pound.' Only at the last is it discovered that the pig had in fact been dead for some years before the case began.

This is not the only law-court in Carroll's dream-writings. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which is a dream from start to finish, contains two trials, each resembling the more developed law-court in The Hunting of the Snarkin a number of ways. The trial of the Knave of Hearts at the end of Alice's story proceeds in a no less vague, muddled, topsy-turvy fashion. The jury, lizards, mice and birds as they are, are luckless and incompetent. Witnesses are threatened. The King, sitting as Judge, has no idea of procedure, and due process is subverted—'Sentence first, verdict afterwards.' The second trial in this book occurs earlier and has the look of gratuitous interpolation. This is the Mouse's Long Tale, which runs typographically tail-wise down the page in ever-diminishing print, ending in a whisper as it were: 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.' So ends the trial proposed as a pastime by Fury, the dog, to his mouse-victim. What is interesting is that here, too, Fury, who begins as prosecuting counsel and apparently in fun, absorbs as did the Snark the other functions in the Court, and the trial ends lamentably for the accused.

This gathering up of various judicial roles into one person who then 'embodies the Law' is significant…. this dream fusion of legal personnel in Carroll's law-courts is interesting in two other ways. It is, first, an example of those tendencies towards synthesis in dream which Freud wrote of in his great work The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, a process which he called the 'work of condensation'. Second, such a synthesis is no longer a mere matter of the imagination, but has become, within living memory, cold and recurring fact. What were noted or invented as dream phenomena have become actual practice in certain Courts. The metaphor has come true.

Elizabeth Sewell (essay date 1962)

SOURCE: "Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot as Nonsense Poets," in T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962, pp. 65-72.

[In the following excerpt, Sewell argues the importance of Carroll's nonsense poetry, particularly as an influence on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets."]

I saw the 'potamus take wing.
("The Hippopotamus")

It was Chesterton, that man of marvellous perception and often perverse practice, who announced in 1904 that Nonsense was the literature of the future. It was a brilliant guess. Even now, however, when it is clear that he was right, when the trials in Wonderland and the Snark have become prototypes of real trials from Reichstag to McCarthy, and much of our literature—poetry and criticism—and most of our philosophy is shaped on Nonsense principles, people are slow to recognize its importance, or that of Lewis Carroll. Carroll is no lusus naturae but a central figure, as important for England, and in the same way, as Mallarmé is for France. Nonsense is how the English choose to take their Pure Poetry, their langage mathématique or romances sans paroles: their struggle to convert language into symbolic logic or music. It is a serious struggle, but taken this way it need not appear so. Nonsense? A mere game, of course. This is characteristic of us. We like, you might say, to play possum in these matters.

The genre or game of Nonsense has strict rules. The aim is to construct with words a logical universe of discourse meticulously selected and controlled; within this playground the mind can then manipulate its material, consisting largely of names of things and numbers. The process is directed always towards analysing and separating the material into a collection of discrete counters, with which the detached intellect can make, observe and enjoy a series of abstract, detailed, artificial patterns of words and images (you may be reminded of the New Criticism), which have their own significance in themselves. All tendencies towards synthesis are taboo: in the mind, imagination and dream; in language, the poetic and metaphorical elements; in subject matter, everything to do with beauty, fertility and all forms of love, sacred or profane. Whatever is unitive is the great enemy of Nonsense, to be excluded at all costs.

The pure practice of Nonsense demands a high degree of asceticism, since its very existence in the mind depends on limitation and infertility. Nonsense is by nature logical and anti-poetic. The Nonsense poet, therefore, faces a constant paradox of self-denial. Something of the effects of this can be seen in the work of … Carroll…. With Carroll we move from pure Nonsense in the Alices through The Hunting of the Snark to Sylvie and Bruno, … Carroll is the best interpreter we have for Mr. Eliot, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Mr. Eliot's overt Nonsense work, is not a chance production, the master in a lighter mood. It is integral to the whole body of his work, and a key to his poetry and his problem.

Mr. Eliot couches his own autobiography in Nonsense terms, but at one remove, for he parodies Lear's Autobiography into "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!" He is an extensive parodist as Carroll was, and in each case this is a device for handling what might otherwise be dangerous for Nonsense. It is a matter of affirming and denying, and in his autobiography Mr. Eliot affirms and denies Nonsense in its relation to himself. He has told us that he drew from Alice in Wonderland that rose-garden with which the first of the Four Quartets opens, leading into the image of the rose which pervades and closes the last of them. In his 1929 essay on the Dante he so greatly reveres he says that we have "to pass through the looking-glass into a world which is just as reasonable as our own. When we have done that we begin to wonder whether the world of Dante is not both larger and more solid than our own." Nonsense goes deep in Mr. Eliot. One does not describe one's life, even ironically, construct an image system in serious poetry, nor interpret an honored poet in terms of something one considers trivial. It is we who would be at fault in seeing Nonsense so. What Mr. Eliot is doing here is working at the dilemma of his vocation as a Nonsense poet. The Four Quartets epitomize the problem. They are religious poems; yet one of their main images comes from classical Nonsense, the Wonderland rose which becomes the Paradiso rose drawn in its turn from a poet to understand whom, according to Mr. Eliot, we have to go through the looking-glass. And Nonsense as a pure systematic art form of mind and language excludes both poetry and religion.

Lewis Carroll, much less of a poet than Mr. Eliot but no less devoted a churchman, faces the same problem. He had, however, two advantages: first, he had an official status in the matter; second, he was luckier in his period. He had a triple identity, as the Reverend Charles Dodgson, as a professional mathematician and symbolic logician, and as a Nonsense writer. The last two, closely allied as they are, were allowed to meet; the first was sealed off, at least up till the Sylvie and Bruno period. And the age in which he lived, a pre-Freudian era in which more modern meanings of "repressions" or "integration" were unknown, made possible such a separation and that which resulted from it—the perfection of the Alices. (The Snark is already much more ambiguous.) It is a pattern that Mr. Eliot might almost envy, if only for its true Nonsense quality. He, in his Nonsense autobiography, describes his own features as being "of clerical cut," and it is remarkable how character after character in the plays is impelled towards Holy Orders. Mr. Eliot's difficulty is that nowadays religion and other such vital subjects cannot conveniently be affirmed and then closed off. One has to be Nonsense man, poet, and churchman all at once. Carroll's hippopotamus, secure in its Nonsense bounds, can remain of the earth, earthy; but Mr. Eliot's has got into the poetry and has somehow to be got into heaven. Yet despite the superficial differences between them, to us readers it is a great help to have one such quadruped by which to measure a second, and Carroll is the best point of reference we have for understanding Mr. Eliot.

Anyone interested in drawing minor parallels between earlier Eliot poems and the Alices will find material ready to hand: the reminiscence of the Frog Footman in "Portrait of a Lady" ("I shall sit here …"); the executioner who haunts Sweeney Agonistes among the playing cards as he does the Queen's croquet game; the echo, also in Sweeney, of the riddle of the Red King's dream ("If he was alive then the milkman wasn't"); the reversals or full stops of time in the two writers; the endless tea party, interminable as the Hatter's, in "Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Mr. Apollinax," "Hysteria," "A Cooking Egg," The Waste Land where the typist comes home at tea time, the first scene of Family Reunion, Skimbleshanks in Old Possum, till only the tea leaves are left in "The Dry Salvages"; and so on. These are not uninteresting, but they are very minor affairs. It is in the major poems, as it should be, that Carroll and Nonsense begin to be really helpful.

The Waste Land is comparable to the Alices and to them alone, as Mr. Eliot's nearest approach to pure Nonsense practice. He admits certain elements into his subject matter—myth, love, the poetry and beauty of the past—which are dangerous, but he employs classic Nonsense techniques to control them. Thus the fragmentation in the poem is not to be regarded, in this light, as a lament on our modern condition. It is the Nonsense poet's way of analyzing his subject matter into discrete parts, "one and one and one" as the Red Queen says, to make it workable in Nonsense terms. The same is true of the sterility the poem deals with. This, too, is the Nonsense poet carefully setting up the conditions necessary for the exercise of his special art. To hold the whole poem together, the two classic Carroll frameworks are employed, playing cards and chess, the digits and moves of a game substituted for those dangerous and un-Nonsense entities, human relationships. The Nonsense rules procure the necessary working conditions—detachment of mind from subject matter, analysis of material, manipulation of patterns of unfused images. Into this careful systematics, highly intellectual as Nonsense is, even potentially subversive material can be fitted and held, and the result is probably Mr. Eliot's masterpiece.

With the Four Quartets, the situation is made more difficult by what is now the poet's increasing emphasis upon unitive subjects, particularly love and religion. We need here, as points of reference, the Alices and the Snark, with a glance forward to Sylvie and Bruno. The over-all Nonsense control of The Waste Land has gone; in its place we have Nonsense procedures still operating, but used now as defenses against particular dangers. We will consider four of these: poetry, words in their nonlogical functions, and the two central images, roses and dancing.

Traditional forms of poetry are admitted into the Quartets from time to time, with their complement of metaphor and nonlogical speech so antithetical to Nonsense. When they appear, however, they tend, as in the Alices, to be pounced on and immediately subjected to critical analysis. See Part Π of "East Coker," for instance, where the passage "What is the late November doing" is followed at once by

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory. A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion.

So Alice says to the Caterpillar after repeating some verses, "Not quite right, I'm afraid…. Some of the words have got altered," and receives the reply, "It is wrong from beginning to end." Poetry is dangerous to Nonsense, even if unsatisfactory, even if parodied, and it is as well to reduce it to criticism at once. No one interested in the present hypertrophied condition of literary criticism should overlook the importance of the Caterpillar and Humpty Dumpty as spiritual ancestors of this development….

A rose is about as dangerous an image for Nonsense as could be imagined. It implies an immense range of living company—beauty, growth, the body, sex, love. Roses in Nonsense will need special treatment, and Carroll begins to operate on his immediately, with pots of paint wielded by playing-card people or animated numbers. Mr. Eliot adopts a different but no less effective technique, sterilizing his rose in his turn, at the beginning and end of "Little Gidding," with ice and fire which cancel one another out and wipe away with them the living notion of the rose, leaving only a counter or cipher, suitable for Nonsense, behind.

Lastly, there is the dance, a dangerously living and bodily image, too. Carroll's attitude to it is always insecure. The cavorting Mock Turtle and Gryphon are clumsy and tread on Alice's feet; three times round the mulberry bush is enough for Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Carroll's most revealing dance occurs in one of his letters, where he compares his own dancing to a rhinoceros and hippopotamus executing a minuet together. Carroll is the reluctant dancing hippo. Mr. Eliot is a reluctant dancer also in the Quartets, even though dancing is the way to heaven. The dance is constrained: "At the still point, there the dance is," restricted as the circling round the Mad Hatter's table or the crocodile walking up his own forehead in Sylvie and Bruno. The best comment on this inhibition of free movement comes in the Snark. "In my beginning is my end or say that the end precedes the beginning"; it runs in "East Coker" and "Burnt Norton," and the Bellman, familiar with this condition, describes it as being "snarked," a state when "the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes." Movement in Nonsense is admitted only to be annulled, if the control and pattern are to be preserved.

Where then can we go now? It seems only towards Sylvie and Bruno, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk. There is already a surprising similarity between Part II of "The Dry Salvages,"

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers

and so on, and the prose poem with which Sylvie and Bruno ends, with its chilly mists and wailing gusts over the ocean, its withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the injunction, to the hero sailing for India, "Look Eastward!" as the Eliot poem bears us on to Krishna and Arjuna. Yet this is not Mr. Eliot's last word as Nonsense poet. He will talk about love and God and heaven in the later Quartets and plays, as Carroll does in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, but this is not the answer, nor the way in which the hippopotamus can enter heaven. Mr. Eliot's answer is more direct and much more surprising; one hesitates, with any writer calling his book Old Possum, to suggest that it seems also largely unconscious. He implies that the way for a Nonsense poet to reach heaven is by Nonsense itself; and so we have Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.