What is Logic? A Nonsensical Approach.

‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.’ So says Alice, or rather Lewis Carroll through her, before tumbling down the rabbit hole into a world where absurdity governs with unnerving consistency. But nonsense, in Carroll’s hands, is never chaos. It is patterned and recursive. The apparent disorder of Wonderland conceals a rigorous, if estranged, relation to logic. What appears illogical is often hyper-logical: stretched to its breaking point, looped through paradox, or turned back on itself.

Carroll’s work is based on linguistic and logical fallacies, creating a form of incongruity that challenges and plays with ubiquitous understandings of logic. While Edward Lear’s nonsense disregards all logic, Carroll’s nonsense obeys rules on logic, but rules which are different from our normal ones. Indeed, dialogues in the Alice stories exhibit impeccable logic, exemplified by Alice’s encounter with the Caterpillar in Chapter Three of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, where she professes, ‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir, because I’m not myself, you see’, prompting the Caterpillar’s retort, ‘I don’t see’. Subsequent chapters feature the Mock Turtle reprimanding Alice for disrupting his narrative and misunderstanding his play on words between ‘Tortoise’ and ‘taught us’. In Through The Looking Glass, the Frog cannot understand how one could answer the door if it has not been asking for anything. Indeed, these instances exemplify a coherent logic within its framework—the Caterpillar cannot physically ‘see’ that Alice is not herself, and the Mock Turtle and Frog’s puns are evident. In other words, while Carol’s incongruity is initial, upon closer examination, it becomes evident that these narratives are intricately constructed on a foundation of logical, almost rational, reasoning and coherent structure that lies in taking conventional or hackneyed expressions to uncover latent, counterintuitive, or incongruous layers of meaning.

First edition of Lewis Carroll’s classic, published by Macmillan in 1907, featuring illustrations by John Tenniel (1820–1914).

Carroll’s logic goes further in chapter one of Through The Looking Glass by abstaining from commonplace expressions in favour of inventing a novel lexicon devoid of meaning all within a meticulously arranged narrative. The ‘Jabberwocky' poem employs a familiar form and narrative structure, yet it is articulated through markedly unconventional language; it adopts the ballad form, comprising quatrains, full rhymes (ABAB pattern) and a regular iambic meter (iambic tetrameter) anchoring it within a traditional framework (lyrical ballad). Yet, one can easily infer the implied significance of the terminology. For instance, the term ‘snicker-snack’ evokes a swift slicing action of a sword and the neologism ‘galumphing’ amalgamates elements of ‘gallant’, ‘gallop’, and ‘triumphant’. Carroll’s approach mirrors the procedures of formal logic and mathematics, not in pursuit of truth or coherent meaning, but in service of fantasy, disorder, and playful subversion. A poem like Jabberwocky dazzles with the grandeur of its structure, yet resists any stable interpretation; it gestures toward significance while withholding it entirely. What’s striking is that many episodes in Alice do not abandon logic but remain deeply entangled within its frameworks. The confusion Alice experiences stems less from the irrationality of Wonderland than from her own unwavering commitment to the logic of the everyday world. It is this mismatch—her attempts to impose conventional reasoning on an internally consistent, if unfamiliar, system—that renders her the absurd one among characters who, though surreal, follow an order of their own. The apparent nonsense of Wonderland, then, is not a collapse of logic but its transformation into an estranged, and often more exacting, form. It is the profound absence of chaos, rather than its presence, that contributes to the seemingly illogical nature of these works.

Wim Tigges, in his all too great Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, similarly asserts that ‘it is more useful to take notice of the fact that Carroll makes use of nonsensical reasoning, reasoning which is nonsensical because it is logical’. But the language is capricious. At times, it operates with total disregard for coherence—as in the exchange between the Cat and the Pigeon—while elsewhere it is so pliable that meanings can be reassigned at will. For the quintessential Victorian child raised in a culture that prised moral clarity and linguistic precision, such creative liberties are unfamiliar and unsettling. In Through The Looking Glass, Alice’s journey is exceptionally logical. Upon becoming a pawn in the chess game, Alice adheres to the movements characteristic of such a piece: initiating her journey from the Second Square, following the rules allowing pawns to advance two squares on their first move, she swiftly transitions to the Fourth Square. She progresses in a manner consistent with expectations, ultimately reaching the Eighth Square where she is transformed into a queen. The Knights in chess, confined to an L-shaped trajectory, provide an explanation for the White Knight’s repeated dismounts from his horse, as his motion is inherently non-linear. The Queens, endowed with the capacity to traverse any number of squares in any direction on the board, account for Alice’s repeated encounters with the Red Queen and the White Queen across various locations.

Actions are perpetually fixed, and when Humpty Dumpty in chapter six of Through The Looking Glass contemplates the possibility of a fall, he confidently asserts that the King himself has assured him of assistance (‘To send all his horses and all his men’); he is destined to fall, just as we as assured that the Lion and the Unicorn’s contention will unfold amid scenes of white bread, brown and plum-cake. Same goes with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Although the fight is interrupted in Carroll's tale before it can begin, the setup and the characters' behaviours are heavily influenced by the expectations set by the nursery rhyme. From a semantic perspective, there exists a profound underpinning of logic and mathematics. Alice’s struggles to understand and assimilate the fluid Carrollian logic underscore a broader critique of linguistic arbitrariness and the power dynamics inherent in language use: ‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less’. Meaning is relational and contingent upon the learner’s immersion into its syntax and semantics. There is no such thing as nonsense.

The Lion and the Unicorn, from 'Old Mother Goose's Rhymes and Tales', published by Frederick Warne & Co. c.1890s.