“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.”
Humpty Dumpty (HD) is a character in an English nursery rhyme, portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though never explicitly described as such in the original text. In other interpretations, he is humpbacked, clumsy, corrupt, or a metaphor for a siege weapon, but still there is a viewpoint of something being concealed, be it ability or intention. Additionally, a structural metaphor pervades HD as being entirely enclosed, encapsulated, that of an egg. In a Newtonian viewpoint, he can be seen as an example of entropy; the availability of a system's energy, condensed, the lack of order or predictability, compressed. So he falls, releases.
In Lewis Carrols Alive in Wonderland, the character of HD is a true Heraclitean, asserting by definition that there must exist an opposite to a birthday called an un-birthday, defining his view towards the philosophical controversy of whether Non-Being, like Being, exists. Something is only as you say it is. Alice does indeed enter HD’s world through the looking glass, and like most mirror worlds, everything has its opposite.
“'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully.
'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.'” -Lewis Carol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice’s conversation with HD wonders through the meaning of language being dependent upon the user, language-games, and semantics in general. But it also holds potential for HD’s iconic imagery and verse to set the table (no hatter pun intended) to understand a bit about pre-Socratic philosophy.
In the 6th Century B.C. some Greeks, later called 'pre-Socratics', began to ask new questions and propound new answers about the nature of the universe. Empedocles, a famous philosopher for his pre-Socratic works on cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements, proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix and separate the elements, respectively. Marshal McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher, stated there are influences of fragmentary texts of the Presocratics (especially Empedocles) on a group of modernists, tracing the literary dissemination of Empedocles’ philosophy-in-verse to Lewis Caroll’s Humpty Dumpty, who impersonates the Sphairos (the cosmic egg) of Empedocle’s metrical thinking.
Sphairos is a complex, structured form. It is not a merely perfect, albeit quite amorphous mixture of the four primary constituents of Empedocles' cosmos, rather it has its own mutually distinguishable parts, as is clearly confirmed by some of the immediate fragments of works (LC’s HD) that are a preserved mixing of the basic elements and the gradual emergence of ever more complex things and organisms.
“Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.”
According to the present interpretation of Empedocles', this process of mixing should climax - in the time when the creative and synthesizing Love gains ascendancy over Strife - in the emergence of a huge, internally variegated, complex and thinking "superorganism". This superorganism is at the same time identical with the whole cosmos and in it are joined and combined all the lower and simpler organisms which have emerged in the prior phases of the "zoogony". That is, the development of animals on visually similar semantic notions of the development of the universe/cosmos as an ever-evolving self re-encompassing egg like structure in nature.
HD’s mind, therefore, is an invitation to that of the logician Carol, but also a poetic vision of Carol’s - “the Nursery world of myth and mutations was where Empedocles first established a beachhead in the Victorian age” reflecting a conversion to Pythagoreanism; the problem of the cosmic cycle is solved by proposing that it consists of a cycle of the sequence of stages, Sphairos—invasion of strife—dominance of love—invasion of strife—Sphairos.
“All the king's horses and all the king's men.”
The technologies, the arts and inventions of man show the bias of the eye and its divisive and exclusive powers; the integral egg, the integral sensorium (sensory apparatus or faculties considered as a whole), falls from the ‘magazine wall’; man’s accumulated specialist extensions and innovations, as they accumulate, stretch upwards higher and higher…titters…and Humpty plunges down and shatters with the specializing of human ingenuity and enterprise. The age of hardware and specialism has then begun.
All technologies, by virtue of their compressed linguistic character, are digressions from the language of their contexts. In terms of rhetorical division and unification, parts of the egg; Humpty Dumpty, cannot be fully reunited. The initial splitting up of sensibility, the fragmentation, persists throughout nature and culture alike. HD is the psychosexual reunification of the sexes to the sensorium.
“Couldn't put Humpty together again.”
The magazine wall ‘fall’ is a royal divorce of the senses when vision becomes matriarch. HD’s conversation with Alice makes clear distinctions between auditory and visual imagination. HD symbolizes the integral body and more important the integrity of the sensorium that is shattered by falls in this and subsequent thunders. HD is fragmented nature who symbolically cannot maintain his places, falls, and shatters again.
“And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care.” - Eric McLuhan, Finnegans Wake
Citations:
Pinhas Ben-Zvi: Lewis Carroll and the Search for Non-Being, website
Daniel Tiffany: Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance, book
Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, book
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, book
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, book
Eric McLuhan: The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake 4. The First Thunderclap: The First Technologies Requires Authentication, book