766453

research-article2018
LAL0010.1177/0963947018766453Language and LiteratureLoveday

Article

Language and Literature

2018, Vol. 27(2) 86­–102
The sarcastic implicatures © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0963947018766453
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018766453
Dahl’s Willy Wonka journals.sagepub.com/home/lal

Leo John Loveday

Doshisha University, Japan

Abstract
This study investigates the impoliteness of Willy Wonka, a leading character in the children’s
fantasy novella Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and probes into the workings of his sadistic
innuendo. While the menacing undertones of Wonka’s verbal aggression simultaneously thrill and
horrify, they also deserve an explanation that goes beyond their trite dismissal as the embodiment
of schoolboy humour. This research applies a Gricean framework to Wonka’s sarcastic discourse
to reveal his grotesque violation of the social conventions of conversation. It scrutinises his
covert verbal abuse with the aim of demonstrating how pragmatic resources help to serve
literary characterisation. The analysis demonstrates how Dahl meticulously exploits the tool of
conversational implicatures in order to position Wonka as an ambivalent villain.

Keywords
Impoliteness, conversational implicatures, Gricean maxims, sarcasm, characterisation of a villain,
children’s fantasy literature

1 Introduction
When the BFG, also known as the Big, Friendly Giant in Roald Dahl’s children’s story
of the same name, declares with dialectal charm that ‘What I mean and what I say is two
different things’ (1982a: 41), his assertion significantly echoes the defiant statement that
Humpty Dumpty made a century earlier in Through the Looking Glass: ‘“When I use a
word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to
mean – neither more nor less”’ (1871: 114).
While Humpty Dumpty brags about his dictatorship over the sense of words, Dahl’s
giant boasts about his dexterity at pragmatic manipulation. Carrol and Dahl share many

Corresponding author:
Leo John Loveday, Doshisha University, Karasuma-Imadegawa, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto, Kyoto-fu 602-8580, Japan.
Email: lloveday@mail.doshisha.ac.jp
Loveday 87

affinities, but above all they are remembered for their gift for depicting surreal spaces
where malice and nonsense reign supreme. This study centres particularly on how such
qualities are represented in the unique discourse of Willy Wonka, the eccentric and sin-
ister confectioner who appears in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a phantasmagori-
cal novella¹ created by Roald Dahl (1916–1990) in 1964, the title of which will be simply
abbreviated to Charlie for the sake of convenience here. Moreover, this article is
restricted to Chapter 17 partly due to space limitations and also because it showcases
Wonka’s surreptitious sarcasm for the first time. It depicts the initial elimination of a
child candidate, greedy Augustus, who is sucked up a pipe after falling into a chocolate
river upon which he had been disobediently gorging himself.
This research represents a continuation of my pragmatic focus on the characterisation
of villainy in British children’s fantasy literature (see Loveday 2016, where I examine
the sarcastic utterances of Captain Hook in Peter Pan in relation to Searle’s speech act
theory). However, in this study I apply a Gricean approach based on the Cooperative
Principle to shed light on the effect of impolite sarcasm on the attribution of villainy in
fiction. In fact, the theoretical notions of the Oxford philosopher of language, Paul Grice,
helped lay the disciplinary foundations of pragmatics with his ground-breaking work in
1975. It postulated conventions of cooperation which govern conversation and to which
speakers orientate themselves by either obeying or ignoring them. I suggest that when an
author describes the impoliteness of a character as an attributive indicator of potential
villainy, it actually provides an indirect validation of the Gricean model (1975) because
impoliteness, and its sub-category sarcasm, are inextricably linked to the infraction of
the irenic ideals which regulate interpersonal communication. By critically contrasting
the uncooperative impoliteness of a bad guy with a hero’s irenic speech-style, children’s
stories subliminally inculcate and uphold Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation
and manner.
Sarcasm seriously interferes with and violates all normal interpretation of language as
a formal system. It subverts the consistency, completeness and deductive-based reliabil-
ity of what is communicated, all of which are the essential parameters which guarantee
the sense which we make to each other. Sarcasm ruptures Grice’s Cooperative Principle,
on which conversation is built, by imposing idiosyncratic changes on the value of lin-
guistic symbols. In a covertly perverse manner, sarcasm contravenes the conventions
which underpin the truthfulness and trust built into how we are supposed to mutually
transmit and understand what is said. The interpersonal destructiveness evoked by sar-
casm is directly reflected in its ancient Greek etymology since it derives from the verb
sarkazein, meaning ‘to tear the flesh off a carcass like a dog’.
Today, there exist a plethora of theoretical labels and approaches in relation to sar-
casm, which is the lay metalinguistic name for the phenomenon. Haiman (1998) simply
adheres to this everyday term in his book on the subject, while a decade earlier Leech
(1983) came up with the technical term ‘mock politeness’ to describe it. More recently,
Bousfield (2008) labelled it an ‘off-record strategy of impoliteness’, while Culpeper
(2011: 165) prefers to call it ‘convention-driven implicational impoliteness’. Furthermore,
the seminal work of both these last two researchers, Bousfield and Culpeper, has played
a significant role in the establishment of the burgeoning field of (im)politeness studies in
its own right (see Culpeper et al., 2017a).
88 Language and Literature 27(2)

Several paradigms concerning the workings of impoliteness have been advanced over
the last two decades, among which the most theoretically significant are those posited by
Locher and Watts (2005), Bousfield (2008), Leech (2014) and Haugh (2015). However,
the most widely adopted current framework is that of Culpeper (1996, 2005, 2011, 2016),
who inverted the classic ‘superstrategies’ of politeness postulated by Brown and Levinson
(1987) to create his ‘impoliteness superstrategies’. Unfortunately, space limitations do
not allow for an extensive treatment of these developments here, but, in this regard,
Dynel (2013, 2015) and Haugh (2015) provide authoritative surveys.
One tenet that is agreed upon across the board is that sarcasm is communicated via an
inferable proposition which is not stated directly. This has been called a ‘conversational
implicature’ by Grice (1975), and exactly how and why such constructs are delivered by
Wonka constitutes the main focus here. In fact, sarcastic ‘implicatures’ are achieved
through ‘exaggeration, metaphor … (and) prosodic variation (which intimate) that the
provocation is not to be taken at face value’ (Culpeper, 2011: 166). Implicatures are not
solely restricted to the verbal channel but can be expressed by other means (cf. Loveday
and Kitamura (2016) for how the Japanese employ silent pauses to give indirect hints to
addressees to make sense of a speaker’s intended meaning). Simply put, for sarcasm to
be constructed and construed, it must incorporate implicit suggestions which reverse the
premises contained in an utterance. Such manipulation transgresses the Gricean maxim
of quality, which requires that speakers do not say things which they believe are false and
which Grice posited as a basic condition for conversation to work effectively. It should
be noted that a single utterance can simultaneously violate different maxims, so that in
the analysis which follows the same component of Wonka’s discourse will be shown to
involve more than one maxim infraction.
The distinction between the terms irony and sarcasm is still a matter of considerable
academic contention. Although both terms are usually taken as conveying a meaning that
contradicts the literal one expressed on the surface, sarcasm is increasingly viewed as a
sub-type of irony. This is because (a) sarcasm always implies a speaker’s awareness of
the falsehood of the proposition embodied in the utterance and (b) sarcasm suggests a
speaker’s contempt, which can trigger social conflict.
Current research argues against the popular denunciation of sarcasm as ‘the lowest
form of wit’ and instead stresses the complexity of its cognitive processing (Huang
et al., 2015). This fact is indirectly reflected in the Hollywood preference for British
actors to perform the role of a sarcastic villain due to a presumed association of intel-
lectual sophistication with the English upper-class accent. Equally significant are the
neurobiological findings of Shamay-Tsoory et al. (2005), who demonstrate that the
ability to interpret social cues and the acquisition of a ‘theory of mind’ are fundamen-
tal requirements for the successful decoding of sarcasm. Consequently, small children
experience difficulty in grasping that sarcasm is not a lie because of ‘their difficulties
in inferring the speaker’s belief and intentions’ (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2005: 288),
and seem to need emphatic cues such as a special tone of voice or rolling eyes in order
to recognise it. Recent research further suggests that it is only from adolescence
onwards that sarcasm starts to be successfully perceived (Brant, 2012). It is signifi-
cant that autistic children have trouble in identifying irony due to their inability to
attribute mental states to others.
Loveday 89

A related strand of (im)politeness studies has been on banter, termed mock impolite-
ness by Leech (2014), which refers to the jocular use of offensive language.² While Haugh
and Bousfield (2012) view jocular mockery as forming a continuum between solidarity
and aggression, going from face-enhancing to face-destroying, I find it inappropriate to
label Wonka’s verbal output as banter. However, banter, according to its everyday meta-
linguistic sense, involves insult-laden talk intended as a form of affectionate teasing and
normally employed as a strategy of ‘mock impoliteness for social harmony’ (Culpeper,
1996: 357). It is typically brutal in its direct offensiveness and draws on vulgar and often
obscene language to deliver its punches. Consequently, it is a completely different ball-
game from Wonka’s highly polished register, emphatic lack of affinity with his guests and
his rigid maintenance of clinical formality in the face of agonising crises. As demonstrated
below, Wonka skates on thin ice between inferable aggression and indifferent matter-of-
factness, albeit of an outrageously amoral kind. It is precisely the inability to pragmati-
cally pin down the level of intentionality between Wonka’s menacing implicatures that
gives them their bite and shock appeal. After due consideration, I have come to the con-
clusion that Wonka engages in sarcasm proper and that it occurs when the characters to
whom it is directed, together with the reader, realise that overt dissonance exists between
the literal meaning of an utterance and the deducible implicatures it generates.
It is surprising to note that the copious amount of malevolent impoliteness occurring
in English children’s fiction has hardly received any academic attention. Only a handful
of researchers have probed into this unexpected narratological construct, such as the
examination by Salsa (1994) into the cheekiness of Carroll’s Alice in a time when chil-
dren were to be seen and rarely heard, together with the study by Schneebeli (2013) into
the abnormal degree of rudeness displayed by the fantasy creatures appearing in the same
work, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
This paper investigates the horrific innuendo expressed by the major character of
Wonka, through the lens of impolite implicatures, with the aim of demonstrating how prag-
matic resources serve literary characterisation (see Bousfield, 2008; Culpeper, 2001).
While Haugh (2015) has devoted an entire volume to Im/polite Implicatures, he does not
deal with the literary context. Recently, however, McIntyre and Bousfield (2017) have
extensively surveyed the analytical value of impoliteness, stressing that the violation of
interactional norms by characters may contribute to ‘conflict, dramatic tension, plot devel-
opment (and) humour’ (759). Additionally, Kizelbach (2017) provides a review of the
application of im/politeness in the domain of Shakespearean studies and 18th century lit-
erature. In this connection it is worth considering that while Dahl composed Wonka’s
offensive speech-style most likely to serve as entertaining schoolboy jocularity, mature
readers tend to find its degree of sadistic sarcasm too bone-chilling to accept simply as a bit
of fun and games. Indeed, Roald Dahl once justified his controversial narratives of aggres-
sion by maintaining that children had a coarser sense of humour and were ‘basically more
cruel’ than adults (West, 1988: 75) to vindicate his passion for depicting brutality.

2 Dahl’s misfortunes and misanthropy

In his autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, Dahl (1982b) describes at length, and not
without a certain fascination, the merciless beating and bullying that he experienced at
90 Language and Literature 27(2)

the hands of both teachers and fellow pupils at boarding school. Without doubt, there lies
a connection between the callousness displayed by Willy Wonka towards his guests and
the barbaric attitude of those in authority who occupied the educational institutions Dahl
attended.
There was a succession of deeply disturbing experiences which brought Dahl to the
point where he became fixated on the morbid and macabre. When he was three, Dahl’s
father died of pneumonia and then at nine he was separated from his family to be packed
off to boarding school. It is worth noting that the father of Charlie, the hero, makes all
but the briefest of appearances in the tale, his role supplanted by a grandfather who
accompanies him on the factory tour. On top of a troubled childhood at school, Dahl had
to confront many other forms of physical distress, such as his nose being almost wholly
severed from his face in a car accident when he was 10. Later, when working as a fighter
pilot for the Royal Airforce, he was forced to crash-land his plane in the Libyan Desert,
which involved not only his nose being damaged once more but also the fracturing of
his skull, severe facial burns and nearly crippling spinal injuries. Above all, the plane
crash exercised a negative effect on Dahl’s mind: ‘Nowadays doctors might well have
diagnosed Dahl as suffering from what is called “post-concussive syndrome” … His
sense of embarrassment – already minimal – was further diminished, his sense of fan-
tasy heightened, while his desire to shock became even more pronounced’ (Sturrock,
2010: 135–136).
In addition, Dahl was dealt more than his fair share of misfortune during his adult
family life. As a father, he lost his first daughter at the age of seven to measles; his
baby son suffered severe brain damage after a car accident and his first wife was struck
down by a paralysing intracranial aneurysm that left her unable to walk, properly talk
or even see.
One of his fondest childhood memories involved playing a naughty prank with a dead
rat on a tuck shop owner. This resulted in severe corporal punishment and being singled
out for his defiant attitude as ‘the cheekiest of the bloomin’ lot’ (Dahl, 1982b: 49).
Probably the most salient biographical element which features in Charlie is the fact that,
while at school, Dahl was given the regular task of critically tasting new products that
were being developed for the Cadbury company. Moreover, in Dahl’s autobiography he
confesses that, since his earliest days, ‘sweets were [his] life blood’ (Dahl, 1964: 34) and
that, as a teenager, he often daydreamed about concocting new candy flavours

I have no doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second
book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates
inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl,
1982b: 149).

The name Willy Wonka also originated in his childhood and derived from a boomerang
an older brother had crafted for him and which he christened ‘Skilly Wonka’. Much later,
Dahl declared that by ‘changing two letters only I arrived at Willy Wonka’ (Dahl, 2011).
The usual pattern is for a person’s name to be applied to an object in order to humanise it,
but the opposite onomastic direction from object to human is rare indeed. Just as a boo-
merang knocks out prey while leaving its thrower unharmed, harrowing ‘accidents’
Loveday 91

successively take out the flawed children but leave Wonka and his production intact. The
alliterative patterning of the name provides genuine comic appeal, but it also evokes an
association with the colloquial adjective ‘wonky’, denoting something ‘uneven’ and
‘imbalanced’; was this a private allusion to a warped and twisted personality?
Certain critics, such as Chalou (2007) and Rasmussen (2005), claim that Dahl’s grue-
some vision in Charlie is the execution of divine punishment for such deadly sins as
gluttony, sloth, pride, anger and envy, which are embodied individually or combined in
the figures of the children who are eliminated. However, Dahl emphatically defined him-
self as an atheist due to the catalogue of agonies he had to endure during his life and
adamantly denied any suggestions that he had attempted to craft a morality play with
Christian allegoricism.

3 The depiction of villainy

Among the most typical features of antagonists appearing in the fantasy genre is their
outstanding status as social outsiders and disturbed loners who have no relatives. For
instance, Captain Hook despairs that no children love him, Lord Voldemort in the Harry
Potter series is brought up in an orphanage and Willy Wonka refers to himself as an ‘old
man’ with ‘no family at all’ (Dahl, 1964: 157). In keeping with the fantasy formula, at the
start of Dahl’s fable the protagonist Charlie is found residing in a harsh environment of
deprivation before being permitted access to the dream factory. Entry into the chimerical
wonderland of fantasy fiction traditionally begins with a contrived artifice, which here
turns out to be a special golden ticket permitting access to a magical assembly line for
manufacturing confectionery. Also true to the genre, the trip into Wonka’s sugar-coated
paradise all too soon dissipates into a dystopic roller-coaster ride.
The reading of Wonka as a villain is not supported by the story’s ending, nor does
there appear anywhere an explicit identification of him as a villain. Wonka remains an
enigmatic character whose motives are mysterious and who reacts to the cruel accidents
which befall the imperfect children on his premises as if he had no hand in them. In his
favour, Wonka’s generosity is initially attested by the fact that he saved his dwarf employ-
ees from annihilation by allowing them to reside in his factory and eat as many cocoa
beans as they desire in return for their labour. Originally, Dahl had conceived of them as
African pygmies but was forced to alter that portrayal after accusations of racism. On the
other hand, when it comes to the fate of the flawed children, the reader must wait until
the penultimate chapter to discover whether they have been snuffed out or not. It is only
then that the ‘four silly children’ (Dahl, 1964: 156) re-emerge departing the premises,
albeit in a shameful, distressingly altered physical state. Since Charlie is selected as the
factory’s heir because he is ‘a good, sensible and loving child’ (157), it has to be con-
ceded that Wonka does not stand on the side of evil. However, Dahl’s positioning Wonka
as a protagonist takes 30 chapters to be confirmed, and for most of the narrative Wonka’s
biting sarcasm constantly raises the spectre of imputed villainy.
Today, the villain with a British English accent has evolved into a stock character of
the cinema to such an extent that actors such as James Mason, Peter Cushing and Alan
Rickman have made impoliteness delivered in upper-class tones almost generic for a
sophisticated baddie. Related to this image was the extreme displeasure expressed by
92 Language and Literature 27(2)

Dahl at the selection of the goofy US performer, Gene Wilder, for the role of Wonka in
the 1971 film adaptation because the latter did not correspond to his vision of the quin-
tessential Englishman who possessed a specific sardonic enunciation.
When cast for the role of Wonka, the fastidious actor Gene Wilder accepted it on the
condition that he make his first entrance with baffling panache:

When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk
toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper
to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one
of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until
I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I
do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause (Perkins, 2012).

Most telling of all is Wilder’s further clarification that this opening act would demon-
strate to the audience that ‘from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the
truth’ (Perkins, 2012). The disturbing ambivalence of this opening performance encapsu-
lates the enigma running throughout the narrative: to what extent Wonka is guilty of
deception.
Additionally, it is interesting to observe how verbal aggression as a mode of contem-
porary entertainment has transformed television celebrities such as quiz and talent show
hosts into popular ‘villains’ of mass culture whom viewers love to hate. While provoking
humorous reactions, the application of sarcasm can significantly boost the authority of a
speaker (Culpeper, 2005). Among its infamous practitioners are the likes of Anne
Robinson, who hosted The Weakest Link, and Simon Cowell, the caustic judge on
American Idol and The X Factor, both of whom have gained notoriety for their abrasive
treatment of contestants. It is interesting to compare these real-life intimidating inquisi-
tors with Willy Wonka’s sarcastic treatment of the ticket-winners and how it bolsters his
superior position. Throughout Charlie, power asymmetry conspires with sarcasm in
order to inflate the degree of psychological pain inflicted by Wonka.

4 Grice’s maxims of conversational cooperation

The theoretical model selected here to interpret Wonka’s sarcastic discourse is that laid
down by Grice (1975), where speakers use their skills of inferencing to access suggested
meaning. Grice’s notion of ‘implicature’ was first disseminated in 1975 with his para-
digm-shifting account of language processing based on implicit assumptions underlying
communication. Grice divided ‘implicatures’ into either the ‘conventional’ or the ‘conver-
sational’ kind. This study concentrates on the latter type because they are taken by lan-
guage philosophers as the principal instruments for signalling irony and sarcasm. Grice
postulated four general maxims that govern rational, cooperative behaviour operating in
social interaction, each of which will be applied to Wonka’s acutely ambivalent speech:

1. QUANTITY: Be as informative as required.

2. QUALITY: Make your contribution true and do not convey what you believe
false.
Loveday 93

3. RELATION: be relevant.
4. MANNER: avoid ambiguity.

Since its original publication, Grice’s account has been expanded and supplemented
by various theorists.³ Leech (1983), for instance, came up with his own six maxims of
politeness, each of which are discernibly violated by Wonka. For example:

1. Wonka violates tact by escalating the potential horror of the outcome.

2. Wonka offers no generosity by outrageously maximising the cost of the tragedy
to his company’s profitability.
3. He expresses no approbation with regard to Augustus by claiming that the boy
would taste disgusting as confectionery.
4. He shows no modesty in praising his own products as ‘most delicious’.
5. He is never in agreement with Mrs. Gloop.
6. He doggedly abstains from proffering any sympathy for the victim and his
parents.

Culpeper and Terkourafi (2017: 27) have recently called Grice’s formulations ‘lousy’
because meaning is ‘co-constructed’, ‘not a stable private act’ and ‘social implications
are conveyed in addition to implicatures’. In his defence, it needs to be recalled that
Grice originally intended his formulations only as a tentative and exploratory explana-
tion of conversational exchanges on a philosophical level and never claimed that it
accounted for all verbal behaviour. This study aims to demonstrate how the Gricean
model still has a lot going for it when it comes to the practical analysis of a text within
the domain of literary stylistics. For me, Grice’s classic stipulation concerning conversa-
tional implicatures offers the most insightful and illuminating tool for unravelling the
pragmatic dynamics behind Wonka’s literary characterisation. Significantly, corrobora-
tion for the psychological validity of Gricean maxims has come from research by Eskritt
et al. (2008), who discovered that even preschoolers as young as three possess an aware-
ness of the Cooperative Principle and show sensitivity to its violation.

5 Madness or malice?
The exasperating challenge for those taking part in the tour is their inability to gain a
sufficient confirmation as to whether Wonka is deliberately violating the Cooperative
Principle as a covert abuser or whether he is incapable of observing it due to some men-
tal disorder. Thus, if Wonka were conclusively out of his mind, he could then not be held
responsible for his sadistic innuendo and thereby escape the charge of villainy. While
young children sometimes produce offensive comments due to their inexperience and
ignorance of pragmatic implications, they are usually excused for their conversational
gaucheness and impolite outspokenness because of their lack of experience. Furthermore,
in real life such pragmatic exoneration is also extended to the mentally handicapped, the
elderly suffering from dementia and even the inebriated. Above all, the most perturbing
aspect of Wonka’s discourse is his emphatic indifference to the urgency of the situation
and his refusal to take any responsibility and express any sympathy, in addition to a
94 Language and Literature 27(2)

barely disguised delight in the suffering of his guests. The conclusion made by the visi-
tors very early on is that Wonka must be suffering from insanity:

‘He’s gone off his rocker!’ shouted one of the fathers, aghast, and the other parents joined in the
chorus of frightened shouting.

‘He’s crazy!’ they shouted.

‘He’s balmy!’

‘He’s nutty!’

‘He’s screwy!’ (Dahl, 1964: 90–91).

Paradoxically, by reporting the parents’ diagnosis in such a way, Dahl encourages the
reader to suspend judgement and absolve Wonka’s violation of conversational norms.
The reader is subliminally persuaded not to take the visitors’ diagnosis as accurate but to
give Wonka the benefit of the doubt regarding the intentions behind his interactional
style. In fact, throughout the novella Dahl never offers any clarification of whether
Wonka is consciously violating Gricean maxims or not.

6 Wonka’s sarcastic implicatures

According to Grice (1975: 49), a speaker who violates a maxim ‘will be liable to mis-
lead’ others because it is very difficult to determine whether s/he is intentionally gen-
erating a duplicitous implicature or not. Furthermore, an accurate interpretation of an
implicature always requires an intimate familiarity with the speaker’s way of thinking,
something which the new arrivals at the chocolate factory utterly lack. Moreover, real-
life cases discussed in current psychiatry provide copious evidence that a groomed
victim’s conscious mind prefers to overlook and ignore the attacks of covert aggres-
sors, refusing to recognise their true intentions even after years of being tormented (see
Shannon Thomas, 2016). Of special relevance to this study is Haiman’s (1998: 20)
perceptive observation that a ‘sarcastic implicature’ is always knowingly constructed
and constitutes ‘overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal
aggression’.

6.1 The maxim of Quantity

Culpeper (2011: 166) has observed that offensive and sarcastic implicatures are frequently
transmitted through ‘exaggeration, metaphor [and] prosodic variation [which intimate]
that the provocation is not to be taken at face value’. Once Augustus has vanished, Wonka
disregards the maxim of quantity, requiring speakers to make their contribution as inform-
ative as possible. Instead, he disparagingly downplays the fate of the disobedient glutton:
‘Augustus has gone on a little journey, that’s all. A most interesting little journey. But he’ll
come out of it just fine’ (Dahl, 1964: 80). Wonka’s minimising metaphor of ‘a
Loveday 95

little journey’ is much more than a superficial rendering of the British stiff upper lip. His
utterance aggravates the suffering of the Gloops instead of reducing it. Moreover, the
semantic mitigation expressed in ‘a little journey’ inversely functions on the illocutionary
level as an ominous forewarning, suggestive of a fatal outcome. More unsympathetic
downgrading is added by the dismissive understatement ‘that’s all’ to refer to the mortal
danger in which Augustus is placed. The ‘just’ in the assurance that ‘he’ll come out of it
just fine’ equivocally implies either that he will emerge unharmed or that, similar to the
completion of a recipe, he will be perfectly reconstituted as factory confectionery, an
intolerable prospect for any parent. Throughout this episode Dahl invites us to relish Mrs
Gloop’s reactions of snapping, shrieking, screaming and crying out in response to Wonka’s
total defiance of the Gricean Cooperation principle.4
Above all, Wonka’s glacial callousness reaches its heights with his off-hand farewell
to Mr and Mrs Gloop: ‘I’ll see you later’, which ends their interaction in Chapter 17. This
curt sendoff omits any expression of commiseration about what has happened to their
son and constitutes a hurtful violation of the quantity maxim; it eerily echoes the imperi-
ous voice of a teacher simply dismissing students at the end of class.

6.2 The maxim of Quality

Wonka provides a barrage of offensive cues that indicate his refusal to observe the maxim
of quality, which demands, above all, the avoidance of false information in interaction.
Accordingly, his sarcastic implicatures gnaw away at his trustworthiness and corrode the
convention of truthfulness upon which conversation is built, as well as threaten the face
of his interlocutors with its duplicitous distortions. In addition, the reader can observe
Wonka engaging in semantic inversion by means of exaggeration, as when he makes the
following assurance:

‘And I do promise you, madam, that your darling boy is perfectly safe’ (italics mine) (82).

The employment of the italicised term of endearment in this pledge implies that
Augustus is really a pest. Even though a written text cannot provide access to intonation,
which constitutes one of the primary cues for detecting sarcasm in speech, readers with
a feeling for British English patterns of tone, pitch and melody can almost hear Wonka’s
contemptuous suppression of the fundamental frequency in the stressed syllable of
ˈdarling. In addition to the sarcastic effect of the prolongation of the first accented syl-
lable of this word, it is highly likely that many readers would internally ‘hear’ a certain
degree of nasalisation together with extra slow delivery when they imagine Wonka artic-
ulating darling. The subvocal application of such prosodic features contributes to the
inversion of the semantic value of positive words and thereby flouts the quality maxim.
In a similar vein of sarcasm, the appearance of the hyperbole perfectly in the above
utterance flagrantly compromises the truth. After his half-hearted attempt to reassure
Mrs Gloop, Wonka immediately summons his workers to hurry and extricate Augustus
from the boiler. If Augustus was so perfectly unharmed, why would Wonka immediately
command the Oompa-Loompas to rush to his rescue? All too soon, the penny drops: it is
to protect Wonka fudge from being ruined. Wonka’s panic, expressed in exclamation
96 Language and Literature 27(2)

marks by Dahl, cancels out the potential truth value of his earlier commissive speech act
that Augustus is safe:

‘Go straight to the Fudge Room … and when you get there, take a long stick and start poking
around inside the big chocolate-mixing barrel. I’m almost certain you’ll find him in there. But
you’d better look sharp! You’ll have to hurry! If you leave him in the chocolate-mixing barrel
too long, he’s liable to get poured out into the fudge boiler, and that really would be a disaster,
wouldn’t it? My fudge would become quite uneatable!’ (italics mine) (Dahl, 1964: 83).

The veracity of Wonka’s language is sabotaged by the twisted ambivalence of his

incessant stream of nullifying sarcastic implicatures. For instance, when he declares ‘I’m
almost certain you’ll find him in there’ (italics mine), Wonka juxtaposes the proximative
adverb ‘almost’ with the adjective ‘certain’, again cancelling the truth value of the state-
ment. When a speaker persists in violating the quality maxim, s/he will be viewed, at the
very least, as unaccommodating and uncooperative but, most typically, as purposefully
unkind. It becomes increasingly conjecturable that, by toying with the truth, Wonka is
actually toying with Mrs Gloop – and savouring her resulting suffering.
Why does Wonka contravene the maxim of quality to such a provocative degree? By
constructing implicatures which allow for Wonka’s covert abuse to be simultaneously deni-
able (see Culpeper et al., 2017b: 342), Dahl allows Wonka’s malevolence to blur into
ambivalence. While bearing witness to his veiled aggression, Wonka’s defiance of conver-
sational conventions may indirectly help children to appreciate the value of straightforward
honesty. It definitely jacks up their level of excitement and guarantees their attention.
After Mrs Gloop’s ‘shriek of fury’, Wonka makes yet another incredulous revelation
that everything he has so far said has been untruthful:

‘I’m joking,’ said Mr Wonka, giggling madly behind his beard. ‘I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. I’m
so sorry. Good-bye, Mrs Gloop! And Mr Gloop! Good-bye! I’ll see you later…’ (Dahl, 1964: 83).

On top of this, Wonka’s cavalier recitation of the mitigating formula ‘I’m so sorry’
smacks of semantic inversion. It implicitly signals indifference to the boy’s disappearance.
Wonka’s apparent placatoriness would be appropriate if addressed to someone who had
failed their driving test rather than having lost a son but, on the contrary, this hollow-sound-
ing apology throws up the question of whether Wonka is capable of any empathy at all.
When Dahl describes Wonka as ‘giggling madly behind his beard’ during his farewell
to the Gloops, readers are presented with a non-verbal indication of Wonka’s warped
attitude which seriously contests the truthfulness of his repeated apologies. Most of all,
the incongruity of giggling while expressing remorse undermines sincerity and implies
irresponsibility. Not only does it highlight a distressing contradiction between Wonka’s
words and thinking, it also throws a spotlight onto the existence of sarcasm, which young
children lacking in metalinguistic awareness find so difficult to register.

6.3 The maxim of Relation

When the conversational maxim of relation is violated, the logical connection between
the turns of interlocutors is disrupted, resulting in the generation of seriously negative
Loveday 97

implicatures. A speaker who consistently fails to respond appropriately to what another

person has said will be viewed, at best, as lacking in social sensitivity and, at worst, as
suffering from a serious mental breakdown.
Due to space limitations only two instances of conversational irrelevance will be
considered here, although Wonka generates a host of them. When Mrs Gloop is terri-
fied that her son is going to be turned into chocolate fudge, Wonka responds in the
following way:

‘I wouldn’t allow it!’ cried Mr Wonka.

‘And why not?’ shrieked Mrs Gloop.

‘Because the taste would be terrible,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Just imagine it! Augustus-flavoured
chocolate-coated Gloop! No one would buy it.’ (Dahl, 1964: 82).

Wonka flouts the maxim of relation with his response that ‘the taste would be terri-
ble’. For one moment before this riposte it almost looked as if the chocolatier was capa-
ble of some empathy and willing to save Augustus from being turned into fudge. Instead,
Wonka’s response concerning how terrible Augustus would taste contains a diabolical
implicature involving the commodification of human life. By blatantly responding with-
out regard for Mrs Gloop’s feelings, Wonka displays a shocking lack of both conscience
and compassion. He sets up numerous amoral implicatures, for example that the taste of
his fudge takes precedence over human life, the tragedy of Augustus’ death is inconse-
quential and, most heinous of all, cannibalism is acceptable. Furthermore, his response
incorporates a pragmatic twist that turns sarcasm on its head. Instead of drawing upon
the metaphorical distaste for a person, as sarcasm typically does, Wonka declares that
Augustus literally tastes awful. Then he goes even further by equating him with a faulty
ingredient that would damage the company’s product quality and dehumanises him with
the third person singular: ‘No one would buy it’ (italics mine).

6.4 The maxim of Manner

This broad maxim covers numerous features of conversation that are not captured by the
preceding three and often co-occurs with them. In fact, Wonka’s violation of manner was
observed above with his incongruent giggling. Another discordant characteristic is his
employment of a hyper-formal register to deal with the life-threatening emergency: ‘I do
promise you, madam, that your darling boy is perfectly safeʼ (italics mine) (Dahl, 1964:
82). When a child’s life is in jeopardy after falling foul of possibly deadly machinery,
Wonka’s formal tone is undeniably out of place and verges on the antagonistic. His
choice of the address form ‘madam’ imputes an inappropriately clinical distance towards
Mrs Gloop.
A further impolite violation of manner is Wonka’s fondness for vague and euphemistic
wording as previously noted in the utterance ‘Augustus has gone on a little journey. A
most interesting little journey’ (Dahl, 1964: 80). Such obscuring of information is not only
highly distressing but its lack of explicitness violates the conversational requirement for
98 Language and Literature 27(2)

clarity from the highest authority over the factory operation process. Moreover, Wonka’s
employment of the positive adjective ‘interesting’ in this context implies an abnormally
detached way of viewing the matter.
Grice included the value of conciseness in this maxim, but Wonka consistently disre-
gards it. To everyone’s distress, he revels in linguistic repetition at the most disturbing
moments. For instance, the reiteration of the minimising metaphor of ‘a little journey’
insidiously rubs more salt in Mrs Gloop’s wound. Over and over again Wonka exploits
this manner of aggravating his interlocutors’ pain as, for example, when he declares:
‘There is no danger! No danger whatsoever!’ The more Wonka repeats himself, the less
truthful his solace sounds. The utterance ‘I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. I’m so sorry’
(Dahl, 1964: 83) seems to cruelly imply the opposite. Wonka’s reiterations and grating
vagueness create the impression of an unruffled manner of business-as-usual approach in
the face of the gravest of circumstances.

7 Conclusion
This research has focussed on how, during the first tragi-comic calamity to occur in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka breaks every rule in Grice’s book. It provides
an illustration of how Gricean maxims actually underpin literary characterisation, espe-
cially when it comes to the depiction of an ambivalent villain and his torrent of veiled
torment. Wonka’s discourse is composed of a deliciously mystifying equivocality that
defies his absolutely conclusive identification as a villain. This study has identified how
Wonka inhumanely fails to comply with the Cooperative Principle in the following ways:

1. He withholds information in taunting implicatures that traumatise the Gloops in

their violation of the quantity maxim.
2. He makes hollow-sounding declarations of amiability and reassurance which
violate the quality maxim.
3. He fails to express genuine sympathy and take any responsibility, which not only
violates the relation maxim but, above all, casts suspicion on him as a villain.
4. He maintains a bone-chilling indifference to a boy’s horrific entrapment in his
destructive machinery, which violates the Gricean maxim of manner.

Cumulatively, Wonka’s discordant construction of sarcastic implicatures should take

a reader from enchantment to revulsion. However, Dahl’s outlandish fancifulness, farci-
cal absurdity and linguistic flair help us to digest and even relish Wonka’s nightmarish
malignance. Nevertheless, the warped incongruity between what Wonka says and what
he intends to mean leaves a nasty aftertaste that lingers long after the tale has ended.
As for the denouement, the author administers no retribution for the abhorrent sadism
Wonka’s implicatures have imputed. Instead, Dahl miraculously succeeds in suspending the
attribution of villainy while meticulously describing the sticky ends of all but one of the
Golden Ticket holders. As always happens to those caught in a web of cognitive dissonance,
the magnetic charisma and superman illusion of a master manipulator make it very hard to
reject and denounce him. Due to the difficulty of reconciling the image of an omniscient,
childlike wizard with that of a virtuoso in SF violence and psychological torture, Wonka gets
Loveday 99

away with surrealistic murder. Wonka’s covert verbal abuse is allowed to triumph over
children’s naughtiness as his shrouded predatory nature is given the benefit of the doubt.
Ultimately, the reader learns that villainous attributes deriving from sarcastic implica-
tures can be exonerated when deeply flawed children need to be straightened out, fantas-
tic technology screws up and goodness prevails. The extraordinary genius of Dahl is that
an ambivalently malevolent character who profoundly lacks empathy made Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory his most popular work and elevated it to the stature of an all-time
classic of English children’s literature.5

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. Dahl’s novella offers intriguing correspondences with another children’s classic,
Struwwelpeter, which was written in German by the psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffman (1845).
This overtly didactic book of limerick-style verse sets out the tragi-comic fates of 10 naughty
children with a horrific dose of Schadenfreude. Many similarities exist between the two
works, such as the fact that Dahl’s early draft of Charlie lined up a group of 10 children, the
same as the number in Hoffman’s set, although Dahl eventually reduced this number to five.
Hoffman’s work also featured a fat boy named Augustus, who dies from refusing to eat up
his soup, unlike the Augustus in Charlie whose misdemeanour is to disobediently overin-
dulge himself in liquid chocolate. An English translation appeared as early as 1848 and went
through numerous editions, while a Norwegian translation came out in 1921, both of which
Dahl could have had access to.
2. Culpeper et al. (2017b: 324) provide a comprehensive survey of research into banter, for
which a multiplicity of labels have been proposed, including ‘jocular abuse’, ‘under polite-
ness’ and ‘over politeness’ and even ‘mock politeness’.
3. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, I can only briefly mention here important revisions
to Grice’s model of everyday conversation based on the principle of mutual cooperation. In
fact, I totally agree with Pinker’s (2007) observation that pure cooperation is an unrealistic
idealisation or naive assumption, but it nevertheless forms the underlying principle according
to which conversation is tacitly constructed. This principle has been, of course, violated and
exploited for all kinds of purposes since the dawn of human history. Its validity is evident
in the fact that verbal aggression can only work because it is recognised and interpreted as
a denial of the implementation of the Cooperative Principle (CP). One of the first revisions
to Grice’s model began with Horn’s (1984) argument that all Gricean maxims (except that
of quality) should be collapsed into the Q(uantity) principle and the R(elation) principle.
Another revision was offered in the Relevance Theory postulated by Sperber and Wilson
(1995), where hints purposefully dropped by a speaker bear on the interpretation of utter-
ances, which takes into account the interactants’ cognitive and contextual factors. Levinson
(2000) argues for a highly logical distinction between the minimisation of content and the
100 Language and Literature 27(2)

minimisation of form by postulating the Q-principle as ‘Do not provide a statement that is
informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, unless providing a stronger
statement would contravene the I-principle’ (76) and the I-principle as ‘Say as little as neces-
sary, that is produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communi-
cational ends (bearing the Q-principle in mind)’ (114). Currently, second and third wave (im)
politeness models have distanced themselves from Gricean formulations to concentrate on
the processes of the interpretation of the hearer and the co-construction of meaning. Recently,
Terkourafi (2015) has introduced the notion of conventionalisation as a three-way relation-
ship between expressions, context and speaker.
4. I thank one of my reviewer’s for pointing out that Wonka is also engaged here in the violation
of Leech’s (1983) tact maxim, which requires speakers to minimise the expression of beliefs
which imply cost to another.
5. According to the findings of a 2012 survey conducted by the University of Worcester, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory ranked as the fourth most popular book for British adults to
have read as children, after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe and The Wind in The Willows (The Telegraph, 2012).

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Author biography
Leo Loveday has been Graduate School Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Letters
of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, since 1991. He obtained his PhD in Sociolinguistics from
Essex University in 1990 and holds a Master of Philosophy in Linguistics from Cambridge
University (1979) and B.A. in Modern Languages from Bradford University (1977). He is the
author of three books: The Sociolinguistics of Learning and Using a Non-Native Language,
Oxford: Pergamon (1982); Explorations in Japanese Sociolinguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins
(1986) and Language Contact in Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996). He has published
extensively in international journals and books specialising in semiotics, applied and anthropologi-
cal linguistics, pragmatics, mass media and multilingualism. His first study of the literary con-
struction of a sarcastic villain, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, appeared in Ways of Being in Literary
and Cultural Spaces in 2016 published by Cambridge Scholars Press, for which he was also the
co-editor.