Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)

A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”

Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)

JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :

(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side

Translation between / intersection of worlds. #2 works at two levels at once; it’s a cartoon that (as I’ve put it in earlier postings) translates between two worlds, so that its characters exist in two worlds simultaneously, and we might think of the worlds as intersecting. There is a basic world — some slice of the real world with human characters in an everyday situation — and a fictive world, complexly mapped onto the basic world. In the basic world, let’s suppose, we have a couple having dinner in a restaurant, being served by a waiter ; while in the fictive world, all the characters are anteaters and they can order an ant farm for their meal. That sort of thing.

In #2’s basic world, we have a couple, man and woman, having a meal of something in bowls. The character on the left is male, wearing belted trousers and sturdy shoes; the character on the right is female, with delicate facial features and breasts, wearing a low-cut dress, with bare legs and petite shoes.

Meanwhile,  the two characters are eggs, which have no sex of their own (though the embryos they carry do), and one of them is being cracked open by its chick. That one  must then be Humpty Dumpty, and male. In the now-standard version of the nursery rhyme —

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

— HD’s sex is conspicuously avoided, but in earlier versions of the rhyme, HD is identified as male, and so it is in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

We are then invited to think of the two worlds as intersecting, and to think of HD and his partner simply as anthropomorphic eggs. They get dressed, they eat with spoons out of bowls (you hope that they don’t have bacon and eggs for breakfast), presumably they talk: HD will swear in pain, and his partner will be horrified and solicitous as she watches him crack into empty bits of shell, become a hollow man — T S Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, taken literally.

The Chestbuster. From Wikipedia on the movie Alien:

After the crew returns to space, Kane [played by John Hurt] awakens and seems well. During a final crew meal before returning to stasis, he suddenly chokes and convulses as a small alien creature bursts from his chest and escapes into the ship.

So much for Kane. He’s toast in space.

You can watch the scene on YouTube here. It’s masterfully cut, with just enough of the monstrous little creature, raw red, all teeth and venomous fury, to disgust and alarm you, but not so much as to overwhelm you. This description is a warning; the scene sticks with you.

This entry was posted on November 21, 2025 at 11:08 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.