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Introduction :

Jabberwocky is surely one of Lewis Carroll’s best-known poems. It is found in Through the Looking-Glass. In this sequel Alice has grown up and now ventures into a world where everything is reversed. It is here that she discovers a book that reveals the famous poem. But at first glance, this text makes no sense.

Like us, Alice is immediately confronted with the nonsense of what she reads :

"YKCOWREBBAJ
.evogorob eht erew ysmis llA
;ebaw eht ni elbmiw dna ryg diD
:vlihts eht erew ,gillihtsbirT
.ehtuo rgtuo shtar emom eht dnA" [2]

She now reads:

"JABBERWOCKY

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe." [3]

Faced with these nonsensical sentences, Alice does not lose heart. She remembers that: "it’s a Looking-Glass book ! If I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again." [4] By using the mirror to flip the words back the right way, she manages to give meaning to what had seemed incomprehensible to her.

Yet, even the right way round, the text seems to elude us. We then experience, just as much as Alice, this feeling of the absurd when faced with "portmanteau words" invented by the author, such as " slithy" or "borogoves." But even while understanding only every other word, the story takes shape. How can absurd words still tell a coherent story ?

The answer lies in one distinction : that between the absurd of Camus and the nonsense of Lewis Carroll. For Camus, the absurd is born from the confrontation between "the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." [5] However, one must distinguish the absurd "non-sens" (French) from logical "nonsense" (British). If his words are nonsensical, they conceal a true demonstration of logic.

While critics view Jabberwocky as a gateway to madness, this paper contends that it is actually a locked door against the absurd. In this realm, grammar is a suit of armor rather than a constraint. It turns into the vorpal sword enabling us to handle empty concepts. Thanks to it, readers can cut through lexical chaos without sinking into the dread of the void.

This poem thus has an almost therapeutic function: it is not a "void" poem, but indeed a poem "overflowing" with meaning, which offers us a genuine healing in the face of the unknown. To discover how logical structure protects us, let us, too, cross through the looking-glass.

I) Deleuze : producing meaning with nonsense

The Jabberwocky is a poem renowned for having an incomprehensible lexicon. However, it contains a grammar of great richness. As both a mathematician and a poet, Lewis Carroll has interested the most courageous translators and the most passionate philosophers. Gilles

Deleuze drew upon Lewis Carroll to reveal advanced analyses of nonsense.
In his work The Logic of Sense, the philosopher explains that this poem reconciles nonsense and sense. He devotes several chapters to it. But why does Gilles Deleuze base his theory of the "Logic of Sense" on a poem that stems from "nonsense" ?

In the chapter "11th Series: Of Nonsense," he explains that sense and nonsense do not oppose each other like true or false. He writes: "Nonsense is not the opposite of sense". [6]
Nonsense is therefore not the absence of meaning; it is precisely what allows meaning to be manufactured. From then on, he focuses not on what the words mean, but on what they produce within us : meaning. The Jabberwocky functions like a large machine where the portmanteau words are the cogs of a mechanism that gives meaning to what seems nonsensical.

It is true that the words used are the direct invention of Lewis Carroll. He invents what are called today "portmanteau words", that is to say, words into each of which several others can be packed. To understand the deep meaning of this poem, it is important to differentiate "portmanteau words" from simple "compound words".

The German language is particularly famous for possessing many "compound words". This facilitates learning because several words integrate to form only one, as in "Schneemann" for example. "Schnee" means "snow", and "mann" translates to "man". In German, "Schneemann" therefore literally means "snowman".

But "Schneemann" is not a portmanteau word in the sense of Lewis Carroll. Why ? Because in linguistics, where the compound word juxtaposes two entire terms, the portmanteau word fuses two concepts by sacrificing a part of their form. In Schneemann, the two units remain intact : it is a classic addition, where 1 + 1 = 2. Conversely, Carroll’s portmanteau word follows the logic of the mirror where 1 + 1 =1. This reduction of two realities into a single one is not a mere fantasy : it fuses without adding.

This poem is a problem of logic. Let us not forget that Lewis Carroll was first and foremost a mathematician. If the lexicon is devoid of meaning, the grammatical structure remains intact. The words may well be invented, but we still understand the meaning of the sentence. And this, in any language.

The "portmanteau words" force us to construct a new meaning from an intact grammatical structure. Although the words mean nothing in the dictionary, the grammar is perfectly respected. The words collide, break, and fuse around a common syllable.

Here is the mechanism defined by Lewis Carroll in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark, which Deleuze comments upon: "If to the famous question Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die ! one does not know whether this king is Richard or William, and one answers ’Rilchiam’, there is a portmanteau word operating a disjunctive synthesis " [7]

With this quotation, Deleuze shows that the portmanteau word is an answer to a question that forces us to choose: Richard or William ? If we choose Richard, William disappears, and if we choose William, it is Richard we sacrifice.

Faced with this dilemma, Lewis Carroll proposes a solution : Rilchiam. This is not an absurd answer; it is an answer that holds both truths together. This is what Deleuze calls the "disjunctive synthesis" : we do not add, we operate a synthesis so as to lose nothing. It is no longer an addition, but a union of two series.

To understand it well, let us imagine a double-compartment suitcase: a single container is capable of housing two distinct meanings. Carroll thus manages to express two ideas simultaneously. This is the very principle of "Rilchiam" (which fuses Richard and William), or in our current daily life, with the word "Brexit" (which unites Britain and Exit).

Applied to the poem, this mechanism gives rise to terms like " slithy" or "borogoves." Although these words are invented, the narrative becomes clear and the action outlines itself.

This is exactly what makes the poem Jabberwocky so mysterious. Lewis Carroll does not content himself with assembling words; he fuses them to form new sounds. For Deleuze, Lewis Carroll manifests an interest in "creating a language within language." [8] By refusing to freeze definitions, Carroll does not produce a void, but stimulates our desire for meaning.

II) Lacan : "Lalangue" of the Jabberwocky

"This language within language" highlights the border between British nonsense and French non-sens. For Jacques Lacan, it is important not to confuse them. Non-sens stems technically from the absurd, as in Camus.

Conversely, British nonsense links writing and pronunciation: the sound creates its own legitimacy. It does not produce a feeling of emptiness, but of desire. No one speaks of it better than the character of Humpty Dumpty. In Chapter VI of Through the Looking-Glass, entitled "Humpty Dumpty", he imposes his own law and definitions.

Humpty Dumpty, easily recognizable by his egg-like shape, introduces himself to Alice as an expert on language. With the word "slithy", he teaches the heroine what a portmanteau word is: "Well,"slithy" means : lithe and slimy. You see, it’s like a portmanteau: there are two meanings packed up into one word." [9]

These words slow our reading. When Humpty Dumpty asks Alice what she understands of the poem, she simply replies : "It’s the story of someone who kills a monster." [10] Grammar thus allows us to follow the story.

Even before entering the second stanza, we identify characters caught in an intimate scene of life : a father warns his son against a dangerous monster named the Jabberwock. For the moment, we know nothing of him, other than that he has "jaws that bite" [11] and "claws that catch." [12]

But the Jabberwocky does not play out only on the reassuring surface of logic. It touches above all the depths of our psychic relationship to language. Behind the figure of this fairy-tale monster hides a much deeper fear: that of losing control of words. To understand why these invented words reassure us as much as they worry us, we must take a detour through Jacques Lacan.

Carroll’s text is the perfect illustration of a major psychoanalytic reversal : the primacy of the signifier (the word, the sound) over the signified (the concept, the meaning). In our daily life, we think we use words to designate pre-existing things. Carroll demonstrates exactly the opposite.

The words " slithy", "frumious" or "borogoves" have no reality in the dictionary, and yet, they act upon us. They prove that language pre-exists us, that it flows through us and constitutes us even before we can understand it through definitions.

To describe this raw linguistic material, Lacan invents a concept : "Lalangue", written as a single word. Lalangue is language seized before its communication or dictionary function; it is the pure sonic materiality of the word, its drive-driven and fleshly dimension. By reading the poem, the reader does not decode a message ; they reconnect with this genuine phonetic enjoyment.

We "taste" Carroll’s neologisms like one savors the musicality of a song whose lyrics one does not master. The sounds produce an effect of affect and an almost physical presence. Faced with the Jabberwocky, we rediscover this primary relationship to a language that affects us bodily through its new sounds, even before being tamed by reason.

But beware! The risk of limitless "Lalangue" is madness. Normally, when meaning slips away, anxiety surfaces. In psychosis, and more particularly in schizophrenia, our intimate dictionary that frames language collapses. But Carroll’s stroke of genius is to offer us a completely safe journey into this potentially dangerous enjoyment of sounds.

By maintaining impeccable syntax, Carroll tames the wild power of Lalangue and transforms it into a tale. He allows us to dive into the pure pleasure of sound without ever drowning in it. This is why this syntactic armor is no longer solely theoretical: it comes to life in the narrative in the form of a heroic confrontation.

III) The death of the Jabberwock: the victory of grammar

The battle finally begins against the Jabberwock with "eyes of flame." [13] This creature represents our panic fear of losing meaning. That is why its death constitutes the victory of logical nonsense over Camusian absurd. Where Sisyphus suffers the tragedy of the absurd in powerless repetition, Carroll’s warrior frees himself from it through syntactic action.

With a precise gesture, " The vorpal blade went snicker-snack !". [14] The monster is decapitated. Brandishing its head is the very trophy of an intellectual conquest: the hero has reduced the ungraspable monster to a simple grammatical object that can be manipulated. The logic of syntax has struck down the madness of the lexicon.

The writer Antonin Artaud proves that this poem is situated far from the madness for which it is criticized. In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze reveals the tumultuous relationship between Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud. The latter accuses the author of Jabberwocky of plagiarism. The accusation brought by Artaud is fascinating: he feels as though Carroll stole his "cries" to turn them into "funny words."

Afflicted with schizophrenia, Antonin Artaud could not bear Carroll’s lightness. In 1945, from the Rodez asylum, he undertook to translate the Jabberwocky, but he ended up making it untranslatable.
He wrote:

"One can say that the Jabberwocky is the work of a coward who did not want to say his name." [15]

For Artaud, who underwent electroshock therapy at Rodez, nonsense is not a recreation; it is a torture. Artaud reproaches Carroll for having transformed "cries of the tortured" into "words for children." But this hatred of Artaud for the poem is for us the ultimate proof of Carroll’s success: the Jabberwocky is not a work of madness, but a work against madness.

If Artaud rejects Carroll, it is because the latter refuses to sink. Carroll maintains meaning at the surface, which the suffering schizophrenic cannot bear. Thanks to the play of grammar, Lewis Carroll succeeds in civilizing the absurd. This decapitation by structure is an Oulipian act before its time.

Raymond Queneau defined the members of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle as "rats who themselves build the labyrinth from which they try to escape." [16] The Oulipian writer is not the warrior of the narrative, but Lewis Carroll himself: he ventures into the labyrinth of lexical nonsense, and emerges victorious by respecting the order of syntax.

It is in this that Carroll is a true "plagiarist by anticipation" of the Oulipo. Long before the official birth of the movement in 1960, Carroll was already applying its fundamental principle: the liberating constraint. Though Lewis Carroll did not know the S + 7 method (which consists of replacing each noun in a text with the seventh following it in the dictionary) invented 90 years later by the Oulipian Jean Lescure, his method is similar.

Lewis Carroll invents his own constraints to create his poem. By imposing strict external rules upon himself, the Oulipian writer frees himself from the anxiety of the blank page, which is an absurd fear of the void, by transforming creation into a rigorous space of play.
This is where the gesture becomes therapeutic, as much for the author as for his reader: we no longer suffer the anxiety of language; we become its craftsman.

When the warrior returns, he is celebrated: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy !" [17] Joy then changes nature. It is no longer the simple sonic enjoyment of sound; it is the triumphant joy of the adult who has finally tamed music through play.

Conclusion :

In Albert Camus, " One must imagine Sisyphus happy." [18] despite the absence of meaning in the world. With Lewis Carroll, reading makes us happy precisely because of the absence of meaning, for it frees our imagination. Happiness is born from the fact that grammar (structure) secures us sufficiently for the unknown (lexicon) to become a playground and not a threat. Nonsense allows, in a way, the healing of the absurd through grammar.

Here we are, now armed. Carrollian "nonsense" is in reality a hyper-logical structure which, far from losing us, teaches us to inhabit language with courage. Ultimately, Carroll cures us of a modern obsession : that of absolutely wanting to translate and decode the world in order to possess it. The Jabberwocky teaches us a deeper wisdom: one can not understand everything and yet not be lost. Grammar is that invisible armor that allows us to embrace the strangeness of reality with joy.

This is why Lewis Carroll decides to end his poem by repeating exactly the first stanza. If the monster is dead, the looking-glass world remains the looking-glass world, just as strange as ever. The world has not changed, but we, the readers, have evolved. We do not understand any more words at the end than at the beginning, but we no longer worry about it. The monster of incomprehension is tamed: we have finally "decapitated" the anxiety of not understanding.

Copyright © 2026, Cogito-escritum. All rights reserved.

Bibliography :

Books :

– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Trad. Justin O’Brien, New York, Vintage Books, 2018

– Lewis Caroll, Through the looking glass, Ed. Peter Hunt Oxford University Press, 2020

– Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester, "Eleventh Series: Of Nonsense," New York, Columbia University Press

– Antonin Artaud, Letter to Henri Parisot, September 22, 1945, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. IX, Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

Raymond Queneau, in Oulipo, La Littérature potentielle : créations, re-créations, récréations, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, coll. "Idées," 1973

Articles :

– Marie-Anne Thomasset-Kraft, “L’exercice du non-sens, exercice du désir,” Lacan Université, (accessed June 7, 2026) URL : https://www.lacan-universite.fr/lexercice-du-non-sens-exercice-du-desir/