experience does not enable him to make sense of the present. Instead, in the second
paragraph Charlie produces a fantastic (mis-)interpretation on the premise that what he
sees is visually isomorphic with another previous experience. The upshot is that, once
again, he seems ‘such a fool’, though that is only a temporary state induced by linguistic
inadequacy, and is set aside by the novel’s congruence of story and theme. As a story,
Low Tide is a treasure hunt gone wrong and then marvellously recuperated; a major
thematic concern, articulated through the child characters’ struggles to make sense of
phenomena, language, and the relationships between phenomena and language, is a
child’s struggle towards competence in his or her socio-linguistic context.
The texts thus demonstrate two very different approaches to the semiotic instability of
language. A third, and very common, approach is to exploit that instability as a source of
humour, and this partly explains why nonsense verse is considered to be almost entirely
the province of childhood. A rich vein of narrative humour also runs from the same
source. In Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop!, for example, humour is created by exploiting
the arbitrary relationship between signs and things or actions, specifically the
instabilities which can result when significations slip, multiply, or change. In the
following extract, Jenny, the Sealyham terrier, has undertaken the task of feeding a
mysterious and uncooperative baby:
Jennie wiped her beard on the rug. ‘If you do not eat, you will not grow.’
‘NO EAT! NO GROW! SHOUT!’
Jennie sighed and neatly tapped the top off the soft-boiled egg. ‘Baby want a
bite?’
‘NO BITE!’
‘GOOD!’ snapped Jennie, and she gulped the egg, shell and all.
Breakfast was disappearing into Nurse, and suddenly Baby wanted some too.
‘EAT!’ she cried, pointing to the cereal.
Jennie thanked Baby and gobbled up the oatmeal.
‘NO EAT!’ Baby screamed.
Sendak 1967/1987:24Signification in this extract pivots on the Baby’s shouted ‘EAT!’, which in its immediate
context is an expression of the Baby’s desire, but becomes an instruction when Jennie
chooses to interpret it as such. Subsequently, ‘NO EAT!’, which initially signifies the
Baby’s act of refusal, shifts to become another instruction. The first line of the extract is
itself a succinct example of how context determines meaning. As a discrete utterance,
‘Jennie wiped her beard on the rug’ would seem to violate two normal social
assumptions: female names do not normally collocate with beards, and ‘rug’ does not
belong to the lexical set comprising objects on which beards might be wiped (towel;
handkerchief; sleeve; etc.). In such an example, ‘correct use in context’ extends beyond
other nearby words and the grammar which combines them into intelligible form to
include the situation of utterance and cultural context. The situation of utterance—the
knowledge that Jennie is a dog—clarifies the focus of reference, but at the same time
foregrounds how the ‘same’ utterance can have a very different meaning in different
contexts. The instability of reference emerges even when we know Jennie is a dog,
60 LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS