ABSTRACT
In the lengthy and unforward-moving conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty, before Humpty's proclamation that “When / use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean—nothing more or less,” there transpires a verbal jockeying-around about choice, about who would choose what subject and at what apparently pointless turn in the conversation each might make that choice. Two things occur on either side of Humpty's attempt to be master of language by declaring himself to be master: first, this jockeying-around, and then his complicating remark that some words are “like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed into one word” (Carroll 198). At stake, of course, for the text and its characters, for its author, and for its readers, is the condition of arbitration which, when called upon as Humpty Dumpty calls upon it, effects a sense of the arbitrary, of an order chosen (perhaps whimsically) by speaker/author while (paradoxically) intimating language's own power by virtue of its portmanteau complexity. Just so, certain narrative structures—choices of order and organization not derived from traditional conventions and experimented with sometimes more freely in creative nonfiction than in other genres—appear arbitrary to readers and critics; yet within them are definitive acts of the mind that seek morphological structure, no less definitive and self-conscious than Humpty Dumpty's, although to somewhat more serious intent.
