The Mouse’s Tale 
“Fury said to a mouse
that he met in the
house, ‘let us
both go to law
I will prosecute
you – Come I’ll
take no denial:
We must have
a trial; For
really this
morning I’ve
nothing to do.’
Said the mouse
to the cur,
‘such a trial,
dear Sir, with
no jury or
judge would
be wasting
our breath.’
‘I’ll be
judge, I’ll
be jury,’
Said cunning
old Fury,
‘I’ll try
the whole
cause, and
condemn
you
to
death.’”
– Lewis Carroll
Last week we explored the way literature can employ techniques of the fantastic and enter the realm of child’s play as a way of making serious commentary and judgment on the real world. We focused William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as an illustration of how writers employ the allegorical to make criticism of the immediate society. Lord of the Flies and other such works as Animal Farm are deceptive in the use of these techniques which adopt the form of or a story about little boys or the fable to aim criticism and damning political analysis at the present society. We noted that these apply with much relevance to the immediate Guyanese society.
A further illustration is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the way it explored these allegorical and fairy story devices to satirize nineteenth century Victorian society. A good example is “The Mouse’s Tale” taken from the novel. It does not require too much imagination to see how this apparently nonsensical poem can reflect on a satire of Guyana’s current-day politics. The poem makes a mockery of the abuse of the law and can reflect on the possibilities when those who are rigging an election are put to supervise the counting of the votes.
“The Mouse’s Tale” is an unapologetic, nonsense verse that can evoke humour. But mark how it gave rise to a form of modernistic poetry tried out by poets today. In keeping with the irony and satire in Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Flies, and Animal Farm, it puns on the mouse’s tale/tail. When the mouse tells Alice that “mine is a long and sad tale”, she thinks he means “tail” and says, “it is a long tail, certainly”, but could not see why he says it is sad. That is the kind of pun and irony that Carroll uses, because of the deception he employs. The novel, its storyline and characters are indeed fairyland and often laughable, but the satirical reflection of society is sad.
The form of poetry here is what is known today as concrete, shape, or graphic poetry in which the physical appearance of the poem on the page takes the shape of its subject – in this case, note the shape of the tail of a mouse. Interestingly, although this is regarded as a modernist device, Carroll was using it in 1865 and William Blake was associated with images and pictorial expressions with his poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Blake was a visionary and a visual artist, so his exploration of the shape, the concrete and the graphic is understandable as a part of his art. But Blake was taking this seriously, unlike what Carroll was doing in “The Mouse’s Tale”.
Furthermore, George Herbert turned to graphic poems long before Blake in the seventeenth century in such poems as “The Altar”, shaped like an altar in a church, and “Easter Wings” that offers the imagery of the wings of a bird. Herbert was a metaphysical poet who, also, took this device seriously, and it blended with his metaphysical thinking.
So, what was pursued earnestly by these poets in antiquity became child’s play for Carroll in Victorian times and later as fanciful modernism for others in the twentieth century. Great modernists like Dylan Thomas and Edward Estlin Cummings (who styled himself e e cummings) in the first half of the century, played with shapes and used spacing and lineation to effect in the way poems were printed. Cummings was unconventional and would see the graphic effect of placing and spacing of words on the page as organic to his art.
Carroll was a bit more mischievous. He played with the shape in keeping with his employment of a work seemingly meant for children to hide his deeper political intentions. It is delightful to entertain with the visual effect of the tail and the whole situation will evoke some laughter. But in the end, Carroll was just as deeply solemn with the technique as Herbert or Thomas.
Alice misunderstands the mouse when he said “tale”, and truly could not understand how a “tail” could be sad. She is focusing on the visual, the obvious and the superficial in her childish innocence, just as a reader would focus on the funny and the fantasy. Carroll’s weapon is deception. The use of humour is a part of it. The mouse tells a tale of Fury, the dog who sets out to take advantage of him in a deceptively playful make-believe court.
It starts out in the guise of a whim in an idle moment: “let’s both go to law” because “really this morning I’ve nothing to do”. But dogs and mice are natural enemies, and, in the plot, the mouse does say his story will reveal why he hates dogs. There is no fairness or justice in the litigation. It is to be a mock trial which will end in the death of the mouse. Yet there’s a hint Carroll might be satirizing the judicial system of Victorian England. There is corruption, there is futility, there is really no justice for the litigants. The cur’s proposal is just like putting the riggers to count the votes. “I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury . . . I’ll try the whole case and condemn you to death,” says the dog.
Elsewhere in Victorian literature the same is articulated. Many lawyers appear in the novels of Charles Dickens, and they provide as many villains as worthy characters. Nowhere is there a gloomier picture of the Victorian law as in Bleak House. One recalls that when one confronts this humorous vignette of the judicial system in the poem. Elsewhere in Alice in Wonderland, we encounter the court, and the swift, decisive justice dispensed by the Queen of Hearts. All cases that come before her, even before they are tried, conclude with the judgment “Off with his/her head”.
At one point in the novel, the whole court of the Queen of Hearts is knocked over and rendered as a mere game: as unreal – “You’re nothing but a pack of cards”. If we are to take this tale seriously – and we are advised to do so, these are unflattering pictures showing no humane or enlightened development in royal courts since the mediaeval kingdoms of feudalism and the absolute monarchy.
Carroll takes us through the “long sad tale” of the mouse with Alice pursuing in vain, the white rabbit through a fantastic, fairy-like, but grotesque environment. It is a damning judgment of Victorian England, and a reminder of modern society – even of the political dilemma in contemporary Guyana.
