PREVIEW: The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll

T H E WA L R U S and THE CA R PEN TER

Q lew is car roll preface by a da m g o p ni k with new illustrations by j o h n hu t ton

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“The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by lew is car roll , 1 87 1 or igi na l i llustr at ions copy r ight © 2 0 13 by john hut ton pr eface copy r ight © 2 0 13 by a da m g opn ik

he meaning of a modern poem is often obscure; its moral is typically quite apparent.

In slow crawling puzzlement, we make our way through “Four Quartets” or “New Year Letter” or “The Age of Anxiety” or for that matter “Finnegan’s Wake,” counting that, too, as a kind of poem. But when we come to the end of any of them, we more often than not find a point that is less paradoxical than plain: Joyce tells us that family life is the best, and that male and female are eternal principles of life; Eliot, to go to church; Auden, to have anonymous sex with our neighbors and then to go to church.

In this way, Lewis Carroll, to use the permanent pen name of the Oxford don Charles Dodgson, is a model of a modern writer. All of his great nonsense poems remain wonderfully ba ling, resisting any reduction to a neat allegory. And yet we take away from them not the random music of chance but the haunting sense of revelation. We don’t know what the Snark is or why the Bellman goes in search of one — and we know that we

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can’t explain it simply. (The Snark isn’t Disraeli, or Gladstone, or the Oxford movement.) But we all know instantly when one of the Snarks we’ve been hunting in life suddenly becomes a Boojum, and we know that a blank map is the map we followed to hunt it.

Of all Carroll’s comic poems, perhaps the best loved and yet least “interpreted” is “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” The poem has given a handful of imperishable lines and oft-recycled phrases to the language: “Pigs have wings”; “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things…”

But it is not, I think, really a considered poem.

Carroll’s poems all present challenges because we know that no one reading of the particulars of the poems will ever quite settle. As with Shakespeare, it’s what keeps them fresh; we don’t have to work to interpret them, reuse them, we almost have to work not to apply them to our lives.

So when we ask, “What does it mean? ” we’re not asking, “What is each element intended to refer to? ” We’re asking, “What does the whole somehow manage to suggest? ” There is a fine line between clever and stupid—and a finer one

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between overreading and underreading. On the one hand, the poem has no allegorical intent. On the other, it was written in one place by one man at a certain time, with meanings that bubble up from the bottom of his mind and era as flavors bubble from the caramelized savories at the bottom of the pot.

First, some facts. (And let me add here that I am immensely indebted for much information on the Victorian background of the poem to Matthew Demakos’ fine, sadly as yet unpublished “Annotated Walrus and Carpenter.”) The poem first appeared in Chapter Four of “Alice Through the Looking Glass”—Carroll’s 1 87 1 sequel to his 1 8 6 5 self-published hit “Alice in Wonderland.” It is related as a poem within a poem, told by Tweedledee, one of the pair of quarrelsome brothers who Alice has been talking to in her journey as a pawn towards Queendom in the Looking Glass World. Most of the poems in the Wonderland books are specific parodies of Romantic poetry or moralizing rhymes. The White Knight’s “A Sitting-On-A Gate” is a parody of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”; “The Voice of

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the Turtle” is a parody of “The Voice of the Sluggard.” In each case, Carroll-Dodgson “subverts” the earnest morality and makes them sly, selfcanceling and funny. But “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” like “The Hunting of the Snark,” has no original.

The comedy of the poem is simple: everything the Walrus and Carpenter say is in the language of disinterested debate; everything they do arises from the self-interested impulses of appetite. All of the styles of high-minded intellectual inquiry that Carroll knew in his decades at Oxford make an appearance. The Walrus and Carpenter share reflections on natural theology, engage in the higher criticism of texts, indulge in abstract logical puzzles, take part in philosophical inquiry into the apparently obvious, and even offer displays of empathetic sympathy of the kind beloved of the Ruskinian aesthete and Tennysonian maiden. (“I weep for you,” the Walrus said, “I deeply sympathize.”) And all of it ends in oysters getting eaten. This precious pair begin by raising high-minded questions about nature and man— seven maids, seven mops—propose educational

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schemes, walks on the beach, instructive tours.

All they really want is dinner. The poor oysters, thinking them guides, philosophers, and friends, discover that they are their exploiters, and then their executioners.

In different ways, this is the relationship, distinctly modern, between politician and party faithful; or between capitalist and worker, or between commissar and kulak. (“This has been proved by Science, comrades,” as Orwell has the pigs say to the other farm animals.) That is, not one of simple exploitation based on power but of complicated rationalization cloaked by argument: we’re doing it for your own good. (“You can’t break eggs without making an omelet.

That’s what they tell the eggs,” in Randall Jarrell’s mordant aphorism.) And Carroll adds the additional true, and shrewd, joke that the Walrus and Carpenter at some level believe in what they’re saying and cannot convict themselves even of hypocrisy. They remain pious to the end. And so the poem has perhaps the clearest satiric point of any of Carroll’s great comic work. In a loveless universe, one of the things that we can but laugh

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at is appeal to reason on the part of the rapacious.

The poem begins, significantly, where Genesis, or indeed any account of the creation of the world, begins: with the sun, the moon, the ocean, the animals and then man: “The sun was shining on the sea, / Shining with all his might: / He did his very best to make / The billows smooth and bright— / And this was odd, because it was / The middle of the night.” The moon then inserts her resentment—“It’s very rude of him to come and spoil the fun”—upset not by some Miltonian violation of the cosmic order but by the sheer failure of etiquette on the sun’s part. This universe is one where the essentials—sun, moon, stars, and sand and sea—are neither mere accidents of a yawning time nor inventions of a willing God; they are Victorian ladies or Trollope’s clergymen, jealous of their little prerogatives and neurasthenic about their courtesies.

It is into this world that the Walrus and Carpenter walk. Now, we know from a surviving letter that Dodgson gave John Tenniel a choice of three three-syllable words, all stressed on the last syllable, to illustrate the Walrus’s partner

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as he chose: carpenter, butterfly and baronet. I wonder, though, if this wasn’t partly an exasperated joke on Carroll’s point, who was often fed up by Tenniel’s fretfulness. Carroll, I’m sure, wanted a carpenter. After all, a butterfly would fit the rhythm, but utterly spoil the point, as it can’t eat anything, least of all oysters. A baronet, on the other hand, would have made the poem too heavily symbolic, one of the rich of preying on the poor. So, between the butterfly and the baronet, comes the carpenter, and blessedly so. The Walrus is slow moving, awkward, pompous, and digitally unskilled; the carpenter silent, inwards turning, and dexterity is his definition. A walrus looks, to human eyes, pompous and officious; the carpenter looks sour and vocational.

The action of the poem is familiar. After speculating on the regulation of nature and lamenting its impossibility, the Walrus and Carpenter entice a bed of oysters to go for an educational walk. “‘O, Oysters come and walk with us!’” they cry, and though the eldest oyster is wise, the younger ones are not. How much of the comedy, here as elsewhere in the poem, comes from the under-

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statement of the impossible! “Their coats were brushed, their faces washed / Their shoes were clean and neat— / And this was odd, because you know, / They hadn’t any feet.” Language too diffident for its circumstance is the cause of Carrollian comedy.

The walk proceeds, ominously, and we arrive at the most memorable lines in the poem. “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— / Of cabbages—and kings— / And why the sea is boiling hot— / And whether pigs have wings.’” Why are these lines so incised on our imaginations? Partly because we know the Walrus doesn’t want to talk; he wants to dine.

His is the voice of one of Nabokov’s dictators, toying with his victims, pretending to intellectual curiosity even as he licks his chops. The Walrus and Carpenter are playing with their food.

If the lines had simply continued the seemingly random list, and read, say: “ ‘Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— / Of cabbages—and kings— / of seas and boats and lobster pots— / and pigs with ostrich wings,’ ” they would have

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been funny but flat. It is the turn towards impossibility (“ ‘And why the sea is boiling hot?’”) that pretends to deepen the inquiry while making it plain, to any listening oyster, that this a fateful moment: what is to be discussed can’t be discussed since it isn’t remotely true. The Walrus is inviting his listeners into a conversation that can’t take place.

But after this philosophical preamble, the conversation glides effortlessly into the real purpose of the walk: We can begin to dine. “ ‘But not on us!” the Oysters cried, / Turning a little blue. / ‘After such kindness, that would be / A dismal thing to do! ’ / ‘The night is fine,’ the Walrus said. / ‘Do you admire the view? ’” The only response to the semi-desperate wail of those about to be eaten is (fake) aestheticism. The poor cry out, and the aristocrats look at the sunset. As the Walrus and Carpenter begin their feast, the Walrus remains both mawkish and greedy: “With sobs and tears he sorted out / Those of the largest size.” (On the perennial, vexed question of what is and is not sentimentality, one might say that Carroll defines it perfectly: sentimentality is the Walrus’s weeping for the oysters.)

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