My favorite chapter

My favorite chapter is from Through the Looking Glass, and it is Humpty Dumpty. It is a very interesting chapter where Humpty discusses the meanings of words with Alice. He uses language to convery his own meanings, demonstrating both the arbitrariness and the importance of word. He employs words, like Shakespeare does, telling Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less. When I make a word do a lot of work like that I always pay it extra." Humpty also explores identity in this chapter, asking Alice what is in a name? Alice wondered, "Must a name mean something?" Humpty argues that words have an intrinsic relationship to the things they name, and that an abstract face would do more in defining a person than any anatomically correct face. He also describes words (verbs, adjectives) as having human characteristics, such a pride, glory, or impenetrability. Here he exemplifies that some words have fixed meanings and are universally understood. But elsewhere he argues that names are entirely arbitrary, adding an aura of nonsensicality where one thing cannot mean something and nothing at all. His explanation of Jabberwocky, though conceptually correct, he imagines the scene to be more fantasmagorical and Seussesque. According to a note in my book, the literal translation of the first stanza of Jabberwocky 'Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves/Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:All mimsy were ye borogoves; And ye mome raths outgrabe means "it was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots, and the grave turtles squeaked out." But is there ever a literal translation? Humpty describes to Alice slimy badgers with corkscrew probosci, parrots with mpos on their heads, and, like the dream we heard on Wednesday, mom raths a homesick green pigs.

Also featured in this chapter is math. 365 - 1=364 is clearly drawn out. I wondered what the relationship is between the meanings of names and mathmatical figures and why Carroll would have wanted to write out its process. Then I came upon a Northrop Frye quote from The Educated Imagination and it reads: "From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination...It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary expreience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can...one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have." Northrop Frye distinguishes the imagination from consciousness as seeing something as it is as opposed to seeing something as you want it to be. Do you recall from Alice in Sunderland on page 303 when he says "The city is reinventing itself. Old industries are replaced by new. The biggest Nissan car factory in Europe is here. New buildings are springing up on post-industrial land. Rival developers, each with their own vision of the Sunderland of tomorrow..." But my question was, why is math one of the languages and is that why we find mathematical instances laced through Wonderland? Humpty Dumpty confirmed Alice's calculations as being correct when he was reviewing it upside down. Can numbers be arbitrary as words may be? Do we use numbers do see and reinvent the world as we do with language?