Jesse Ball’s other novels include Samedi the Deafness and Silence Once Begun. He’s won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and his been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches in the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA in Writing program, and he spoke to me by phone.

Jesse Ball: When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.

We had a very tight-knit little family, and we lived on the outskirts of a Long Island town by these train tracks. My brother and I would run around in the woods all day, and when my father came home it was always a big event. We were pretty poor, and my mother always tried to turn little things into big events—so my father coming home from work would be a big thing. As we ran out of the woods to meet him, he’d come up and would always say:

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

This was very exciting for my brother and me. I don't think I thought I was a “beamish boy” per se, but I certainly liked to think I'd been out slaying jabberwocks in the woods.

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me. At one point, there was a psychological evaluation—which I actually saw about a year ago, when we were going through boxes at my mom's house. It was a very lengthy test, and it scored all my different attributes and proclivities and possibilities. I scored very low indeed. In fact, the assessment was that potentially I had some kind of cerebral damage, which—well, luckily, if it's true, I've managed to carry on all this time.

But there was one attribute that I scored extremely high on, in fact, exceeded all adult levels for: the repeating of long, nonsensical phrases. I guess I was not only above my age group but above all possible results on the test. That was very notable for me looking at this now, because nonsense has been at the heart at my lifelong, ridiculous endeavor.

There’s a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are—the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not “not sense”—it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense—at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.

I believe Carroll first wrote “Jabberwocky” as a stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry. (Nonsense tends to play off and puncture some known landscape.) Here, he's playing off the language of all these wonderful things from The Canterbury Tales to The Pearl to one of my personal favorites, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As well as older texts like the Exeter Book riddles. He’s tapping into those wonderfully alliterative verses, that rich history of sound, within the Old English and Middle English traditions. What comes out is this:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

It’s not in favor of some other sensical thing that could be said. In fact, it's very precise. You couldn't supply another object that would do a better job of what it's doing in its place. The poem preserves a truth Carroll feels within himself of the sounds of those Anglo-Saxon words, their color and direction.