Through the Looking-Glass As a Satire of Logocentrism
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Transcultural Studies, 6-7 (2010-2011), 91-101. JESSICA DURHAM JABBERWOCKY AND DIFFÉRANCE: THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AS A SATIRE OF LOGOCENTRISM I argue that Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass may be read as a satire of logocentric thought. In this essay I apply Jacques Derrida’s theorizing of différance and G. W. F. Hegel’s insights into the relational structure of meaning in a reading of excerpts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871), with a particular fo- cus on the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.” Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who published under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician and logician who taught at Oxford for much of his life. Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871 as a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. The sequel contains the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” which is one of the most famous nonsense-poems in English literature. I begin with a reading of an early scene from Alice in Wonderland which I argue exemplifies the relational structure of subjectivity, first theorised in Hegel’s Phenomenolo- gy of Spirit. I then apply a selection of insights from the work of Derrida and Hegel to the opening scenes of Through the Looking-Glass. I examine the way “Jabberwocky” supports Derrida’s theorizing of meaning as the product of difference. Finally, I conclude with a reading of the character Humpty Dumpty as a satire of logocentric literary criticism. I will begin with a definition of logocentrism. Derrida critiques what he calls the logocentrism in the systems and methods of knowledge production in the Western tradition, including philosophy and critical theory. Logocentrism relies on presence, a term for the various centers around which our knowledge systems have been built: an origin, center, truth, certainty, identity, essence, a stable point, a fixed point, a foundation.1 ‘Transcendental signified’ is Derri- da’s term for this central element that does not change when its system does, that is itself the reference that grounds these systems.2 Derrida states: The center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, of terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation of the transfor- 1. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. 25th anni- versary ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007), p. 92. 2. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 280. 92 Transcultural Studies mation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden.3 The other elements of a system can be substituted or altered, yet the center remains: this is the way in which logocentric systems of knowledge operate. Previous knowledge systems produced ontologies, taxonomies, and hierar- chies. Each system was intended to solve the problems emerging in the previ- ous systems by producing better, more inclusive taxonomies, and new sets of more useful hierarchies. Derrida comments: The entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix... is the determination of Be- ing as presence in all senses of this word.4 The history of literary theory exemplifies this. The contemporary study of literature has its origins in the study (exegesis) of Biblical texts to determine their meaning. Prior to the twentieth century, the primary methods of textual analysis were by reference to the author’s biography or the historical condi- tions of the author’s society.5 With the rise of Russian formalist literary theory and New Criticism in the early twentieth century, meaning was thought to be best determined through a close-reading of the language of the text alone.6 In each of these systems we find emerging a desire to fix the meaning of a text, to quell its alarmingly infinite readings, to find the definitive reading with refer- ence to the stability of an authority, successively: God, the author’s life, or linguistic devices. Among the great insights of deconstruction, and poststructuralism, is the idea that discourse produces the effects it apparently describes. What this means is that the way we frame a question, an issue, or a body of knowledge – the exclusions we perform in order to constitute that body of knowledge – cre- ate the knowledge that is contained, the knowledge we have ostensibly “found.” Previous thought systems did not acknowledge this. Exclusions and acts of framing were performed, then denied. Exclusions were made blindly, without a corresponding self-critical function. Insides and outsides were creat- ed, both of whose objects these systems would comprise, and which were priv- ileged within their hierarchies. It was then argued that what remained inside had the prediscursive features of a logocentric center: truth, origin, reality, sta- 3. Ibid., p. 279. 4. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 5. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 6. .