Introduction

BOREDOM AND NONSENSE IN WONDERLAND

“What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?” (p. 253)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There pursue what lies beyond and down rabbit holes and on reverse sides of mirrors. But mainly their subject is what comes after, and in this sense the books are allegories about what a child can know and come to know. This quest, as in many great works of literature, unwinds against a larger backdrop: what can and what cannot be known at a particular historical moment, a moment that in Lewis Carroll’s case preceded both Freud’s speculations on the unconscious and Heisenberg’s formulation of the uncertainty principle. Yet because the books were written by a teacher of mathematics who was also a reverend, they are also concerned with what can and cannot be taught to a child who has an infinite faith in the goodness and good sense of the world. But Alice’s quest for knowledge, her desire to become something (a grown-up) she is not, is inverted. The books are not conventional quest romances in which Alice matures, overcomes obstacles, and eventually gains wisdom. For when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she is already the most reasonable creature there. She is wiser than any lesson books are able to teach her to be. More important, she is eminently more reasonable than her own feelings will allow her to express. What comes after for Alice? Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen tells Alice, “Something’s going to happen!” (p. 265).

Quests for mastery are continually frustrated in the Alice books. In comparison with the ever-sane Alice, it is the various Wonderland creatures who appear to be ridiculous, coiners of abstract word games. Yet Carroll also frustrates, with equal precision, Alice’s more reasonable human desires. Why, after all, cannot Alice know why the Mad Hatter is mad? Or why will Alice never get to 20 in her multiplication tables? In Carroll, the logic of mathematical proofs runs counter to the logic of reasonable human desire—and neither logic is easily mastered. To his radical epistemological doubt, Carroll added a healthy dose of skepticism for the conventional children’s story—a story that in his day came packaged with a moral aim and treated the child as an innocent or tabula rasa upon which the morals and knowledge of the adult could be tidily imprinted.

Alice embodies an idea Freud would later develop at length: What Alice the child already knows, the adult has yet to learn. Or to be more precise, what Alice has not yet forgotten, the adult has yet to remember as something that is by nature unforgettable. In other words, in Alice childhood fantasy meets the reality of adulthood, which to the child looks as unreal and unreasonable as a Cheshire Cat’s grin or a Queen who yells “Off with her head!” But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn’t quite yet realize that the adult’s sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children—the dream within the dream, as it were—is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult’s quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms—and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes: “Freud is not really saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. Looking forward . . . is a paradoxical form of looking back. The future is where one retrieves the pleasures, the bodily pleasures of the past.”¹ The Alice books manage to show both these quests—that of the child to look forward, and of the adult to look back—simultaneously, as mirror logics of each other.

Like both Freud and the surrealists, Carroll implicitly understood that a child’s emotions and desires appear omnipotent and boundless to the child—and thus make the adult’s forgetting of them difficult if not illogical. Growing up poses psychological and logical absurdities. The quandary of a logically grounded knowledge constituted out of an illogical universe pervades both books. The questions that Alice asks are not answered by the animals in Wonderland nor by anyone after she wakens. It is likely that her questions don’t have answers or that there are no right questions to ask. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass remain the most prophetic of the nineteenth century’s anti-narratives, inverted quest romances, circular mathematical treatises on the illogical logic of forgetting one’s desires. They display a logic that the child must master in order to grow up. As the White Queen remarks of the Red Queen: “She’s in that state of mind . . . that she wants to deny something—only she doesn’t know what to deny!” (p. 254).

For the child, the future lies undeniably beyond her (in a world of ever more sophisticated language skills), whereas for the adult, the future is something she must remember to return to. Carroll seems to be saying that children, in their rush to grow up, can pretend to be adults too soon; and adults can also, in a very different kind of game, forget how to be children—that is, forget the sensual, even nonsensical desires of childhood, which endure in language as in life. It is not surprising that children love puns and riddles, just as kings and oracles do. Carroll’s books of words and pictures, puns and riddles, indefinitely prolong the time of childhood nonsense. Carroll’s Alice books have a moral nonetheless: Like childhood, they end. And yet both books, which end with measured recollection and memory, seem to continue into the future.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865; Through the Looking-Glass appeared six years later in 1871. The first of the books began as an oral tale, told on a rowboat expedition up the Thames on a “golden afternoon,” most likely July 4, 1862. The party in the boat included Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (the mathematician, logician, and photographer who had already created the storytelling pen name Lewis Carroll), his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and the three Liddell sisters: Alice, who was ten; Lorina Charlotte, who was thirteen; and Edith, who was eight. Carroll was thirty at the time and had been ordained as a deacon the year before. Hardly a recluse, he enjoyed traveling, frequented the theater, took pleasure in giving un-birthday presents on any day of the year, wrote a large number of letters, invented mathematical puzzles, and was an avid amateur photographer who liked “making up pictures,”² often composing his subjects in tableau-like settings that suggested make-believe stories. His sitters included Tennyson, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Millais, Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Leopold—as well as his favorite subject: Victorian children, particularly young girls. He gained First Class Honours in mathematics and produced a number of treatises on mathematics and symbolic logic, beginning with A Syllabus of Plane Geometry, which appeared in 1860. He was a polymath, albeit a conservative one. He considered Tuesday his lucky day.

The boat trip on that July day covered about three miles. The story that would become Alice, according to Carroll, was extemporized as they went along that day and over several subsequent trips. Carroll remembers how, “in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore,” he sent Alice “straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.”³ On one boat trip, Carroll tried to amuse the girls with a game but was forced to “go on with my interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures.”⁴ With some prompting by Alice Liddell, Carroll began penning the story he initially called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. For reasons that are not clear, Carroll was banned from the Liddell household before completing the book, making the Alice books very much about a child as absent muse rather than as recipient of either of the books. The book—the title now changed to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—was published on July 4, 1865, to commemorate the date of that first boating expedition.

Despite their differences, both books chronicle the adventures of a girl named Alice, modeled on Alice Liddell, whose father was the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Carroll taught. Carroll first came to Christ Church in 1850. He stayed for nearly fifty years. During that time, Dean Liddell was busy attempting to modernize the college, turning it from a kind of genteel seminary into something more like a German university, a process Carroll resisted in characteristic fashion: He produced a series of comic pamphlets in protest. However, he was made a don after only five years, a feat remarkable even then. Carroll met Alice in 1856, when she was four. From that time onward, Carroll took a number of photographs of Alice and her siblings. Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass begin with Alice on the verge of dreaming, but the books transpire in different seasons and evoke different moods.

Alice commences on a warm spring day, while Through the Looking-Glass is set in midwinter. The looking glass—as an analogue for the confusion of things that are knowable—was probably a relatively late addition by Carroll, added at a time when, according to Alice Liddell, the three sisters were themselves learning to play chess and Carroll was entertaining all three with stories about chess playing, among other things. The initial appearance of the looking glass was prompted by Carroll’s meeting with another young Alice, his cousin Alice Raikes, most likely in August 1868. In his biography of Carroll, Derek Hudson recounts the following incident:

The room they entered had a tall mirror standing in one corner. [Carroll] gave his cousin an orange and asked her which hand she held it in. When she replied ‘The right,’ he asked her to stand before the glass and tell him in which hand the little girl in the mirror was holding it. ‘The left hand’, came the puzzled reply. ‘Exactly,’ said [Carroll], ‘and how do you explain that?’ . . . ‘If I was on the other side of the glass,’ [Alice] said, ‘wouldn’t the orange still be in my right hand?’ . . . ‘Well done, little Alice,’ [Carroll] said. ‘The best answer I’ve had yet.’⁵

Carroll completed work on the sequel quickly; a manuscript entitled Behind the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Saw There was posted to Macmil lan in January 1869. It appeared, with its present title, in time for Christmas 1871, though its publication date reads 1872. The book was a wild success, selling out its initial print run of 9,000 copies almost immediately. By 1893 it had sold 60,000 copies.

TAMING CHANCE VS. ENDING BOREDOM

“I can’t remember things before they happen.” (p. 204)

“Can you row?” the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles as she spoke.

“Yes, a little—but not on land—and not with needles—” Alice was beginning to say. (p. 209)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as an oral tale told by Lewis Carroll to the three Liddell sisters, although it is often forgotten that Carroll’s fantasia of reading and upside-down geography lessons begins with a book, and specifically the aversion to reading one. In the first chapter, Alice, bored to tears and sitting on a river bank, peeks at and then turns away from her sister’s book because it lacks “pictures or conversations” (p. 13). She thinks to make a daisy chain, thus taking charge of her own boredom by ending it. Of course, Alice never does make herself a daisy chain, and in this she implicitly acknowledges that it may not be enough to want to end boredom to bring it to an end. It might be more accurate to say that boredom is ended for her by something she cannot entirely provide by herself. Not surprisingly, Alice’s dream, like the landscape of Wonderland itself, feels both expansive and boxed in, wonderfully curious and frustratingly opaque, an imaginary landscape that is located under as opposed to above ground.

For a child, boredom may be the biggest non-event or riddle to solve because its solution must come from without—while seeming to come from within. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for.”⁶ Like the various creatures in Wonderland, boredom is a curious riddle of wanting something to want. Like a good many “acceptable” neuroses, boredom is indeterminate. It resists analysis. Not surprisingly, when Alice first sees the Rabbit she answers as any bored child might: “There was nothing so very remarkable in that” (p. 13). As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests, it may be a pedagogical and therapeutic mistake (Alice in Wonderland is filled with both) to try to cure boredom.⁷

If boredom is difficult to dispel, the boredom all children feel is not easily tolerated by adults, who insist that children have things to do, that they have interests. The field of symbolic logic and the adult’s attempts to eradicate boredom turn out to be equally coercive. Alice’s English and her manners are corrected relentlessly. Alice is bossed about: The rabbit orders her to fetch his handkerchief, a note on a bottle enjoins her to “drink me,” the caterpillar demands that she explain herself, the Queen summons her to play croquet. The result of such coercion is generally terror followed by tears, and there is much crying in Alice in Wonderland. Nearly all the players in Wonderland, with the exception of the Duchess and the Queen, are male, older than Alice, and contentious, imperious, or condescending in their adherence to strict rules. Even in play, logic reigns rigidly in Wonderland in a kind of spoof of the analytical philosophical logic popular at Oxford in Carroll’s day. One of the dangers in ending a child’s boredom is that the adult’s gesture will be, like a bad psychoanalytic session, too coercive, a kind of monstrous bestiary of loud-mouthed creatures and half-human authority figures—like Humpty Dumpty and a tyrannical Queen whose favorite line is “Off with her head!” What is Alice to do with other people’s wishes, other people’s logical desires? As Humpty Dumpty puts it, “The question is . . . which is to be master—that’s all” (p. 219).

Lewis Carroll was a teacher of symbolic logic at Oxford, and he loved to make mathematical knots for his pupils to wriggle out of. Carroll’s fondness for mathematical puzzles and classical logic admits of both the curious and trivial. He found logical problems and amusements in port prices, postal calculations, even lawn tennis. In 1883 he published a pamphlet, Lawn Tennis Tournaments, in which he proved, logically of course, that a player who lost in the first round might find that the finalist was an inferior player to herself. The lessons in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are clever impositions upon the logic, which is to say the reasonableness, of a child. Over the course of the two books, what might at first appear to the child as boring lessons in geography, anatomy, botany, astronomy, linguistics, geology (“What volcano?” [p. 161]), physics, and mathematics are transformed into the form most favored by oracles, kings, and children—riddles: Are flowers alive? Can a kitten play chess? Is saying what one means the same as meaning what one says? Is looking-glass milk good to drink? Both books commence with things that cannot be known, and both are thus about the curiosity and the desires provoked by unnamed somethings. In Alice, such somethings take the form of riddle-like creatures like Cheshire cats without bodies and rabbits with pocket watches. They may be something posing as nothing, or vice versa. In the book’s opening chapters, Alice falls literally into a riddle or void of insolubility: She cannot know how long her fall will be nor what is in the bottle on a small glass table, nor what will happen when she drinks from it.

Yet annoying and worrisome enticements are also—and Carroll seems to have understood this perfectly—incitations to desire, curiosity, and empathy—that is, open invitations not to be bored, not to remain the same as one was but to transform oneself, to relate to things and people outside oneself—and thus bring an end to one’s boredom. The book, like a camera obscura, mechanically and miraculously manufactures its exact mirror opposite. Out of Alice’s boredom arises a series of events defined by their whimsical changeableness, a series of frenetic and ridiculous lessons in bringing about the disappearance of the thing known as boredom itself. Nonsense, like boredom, turns out to be vast and chaotic, spanning inside and outside and defying notions of time and place, scale and sense, rightness and rudeness, rightness and leftness. Boredom seems a temporary non-event defined by a span of near-indeterminate waiting. Is Alice bored because she is desiring nonsensically or unreasonably?

In place of the dullness of an unread book and a large tract of time she doesn’t know how to fill, Alice confronts an officious White Rabbit who is worried about being late, a long or slow fall (it is impossible to tell which) down a hole lined with cupboards and empty jars of marmalade, a bottle that might or might not contain poison, and the frightful—that is, illogical—possibility of drowning in a pool of her own tears. Alice’s adventures are mathematically elaborate literary comfits or problem-sets, frustratingly opaque, more or less timeless events that are not quite events, with people who are not quite people, which is to say they are ridiculous obstacles to Alice’s desires.

What is the mirror opposite of boredom? It turns out to be a book, after all, one that mirrors and somehow inverts the most insoluble, and hence unforgettable, problems of the day: the extinction of species, the shifting, relative sizes of things, the loss of one’s identity and gravitas, and the speed of falling bodies. By chapter IV of Alice, “The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill,” Carroll appears to have worked wonders upon his heroine and pupil Alice. In one of her most remarkable early bouts of reasoning, Alice concludes that if she drinks from the bottle, “something interesting is sure to happen” (p. 44). Before the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the good-natured Alice will have been distracted from her boredom and will have experienced a host of emotions, from bewilderment over bottles and the right vs. left sides of mushrooms, exasperation with the Mad Hatter’s table manners, anger over the rudeness of countless inhabitants of Wonderland, enchantment with miniature gardens, fear of an enormous puppy, and loneliness at having driven a mouse away. Like riddles, the creatures generate an odd mix of pity, curiosity, and exasperation in Alice. The opposite of boredom turns out to be unsettling and frustrating. Ending boredom may be more dangerous a pastime than it at first appears. In this way, Carroll suggests that Alice must be careful that her desires don’t turn into worries. The boredom of the world is indeterminate, whereas worrying, because we tend to worry about something, is not—and this suggests that the subject of our boredom is somehow intrinsically insoluble, at least by worry.

One of the many paradoxes of both Alice books is that what at first appears trivial, nonsensical, or even boring might have some quite untrivial and curious lesson to deliver after all, and that the idea of the Victorian children’s book—whose aim is to educate young readers in the world of morality—might be turned entirely upside down and yet somehow fulfilled at the same time. Lessons in change are paradoxical, as Alice attests:

I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (pp. 24-25).

In theory, lessons are imposed so that eventually they may be learned and mastered. Humpty Dumpty claims to be the master of the universe he discourses about. Such a position is precarious. The Liddell sisters would understand the failures of mastery from their scientific geography and mathematical books, some of which Carroll most likely copied into the Alice books. Alice’s various encounters and conversations, the mock trials and sporting events—such as croquet games with flamingos as mallets—tend not to go anywhere conclusive. Races are conducted that nobody wins. People sit down to dine but end up not eating anything. Alice or one of her interlocutors will simply walk away from a conversation. These episodes suggest an alternate and much less rational model of our lives, a cornucopia of blunders, non-conversations, and frustrating encounters. Beneath our rational, day-to-day arrangements and reasonable expectations lies something else entirely: a kind of slapstick psychopathology of our own everyday lives. Mastering boredom turns out to be no easier than mastering desire.

WELL-MEANING SPEAKERS AND THE MASTERY OF LANGUAGE

“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying.” (p. 197)

Unlike most of the creatures in Wonderland, Alice tries to use words, perhaps illogically, to express concern for those around her. When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty a question about the relative safety of the wall vs. the ground because she is worried about the likelihood of his falling off the wall, Humpty Dumpty answers that “there’s no chance of ” (p. 215) his falling off, and then proceeds to explain what will happen if he does. In this exchange, which Alice feels is not like a conversation because Humpty Dumpty never “said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree” (p. 214). Alice’s questions, unlike Humpty Dumpty’s, are asked not “with any idea of making another riddle,” or a kind of linguistic dueling, “but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature” (p. 215). Morality, like laws and manners, are ways of living with one’s own and others’ desires. Yet Humpty Dumpty in his rudeness may be right. Perhaps all desires are riddles, especially to others. For if our desires are inexpressible, then the language with which we try to communicate our desires will appear, at least to others, as a kind of linguistic nonsense. The words for our anxieties may be an incomprehensible poetry of which only the speaker is master.

Although Alice’s feelings for others are almost never reciprocated, they are bizarrely like the creatures she speaks to, who could also be said to be too literal and perhaps too trivial for ordinary words. After her various encounters, Alice probably wonders what would it mean for her feelings to feel real? Wonderland abounds with rules, but are there any logical rules to having feelings? How should Alice talk to a Cheshire Cat or a Mad Hatter or a pet kitten named Dinah? Children tend to see animals as fellow creatures and are quite as comfortable talking to them as they are to people. It must be remembered that the kitten does not answer Alice’s questions and most of Alice’s conversations are unsatisfying:

She quietly walked away: but she couldn’t help saying to herself as she went, “Of all the unsatisfactory—” (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) “of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met—” She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end (p. 225).

Like chess and a logical argument, a conversation is a game having a beginning, middle, and end, and is conducted according to certain rules or rituals (manners). Most of Alice’s non-human interlocutors (chess pieces, mice, eggs, toads, walrus, lion, unicorn, flowers), however, seem to be playing a different game than Alice. They claim to not know what Alice “means” or else proclaim, as Humpty Dumpty does, that a word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less” (p. 219). Alice’s conversations, when they don’t end unsatisfactorily in silence, tend to go in a circle.

For the child, the ability to have and share feelings might even be inversely related to language acquisition, so that paradoxically the more skilled the child is in language, the less able she is to express the intensity of her first feelings, which are by definition primal and non-verbal. The creatures of Wonderland, from kittens to mad hatters, constitute a kind of mute allegory for the things like hunger, love, and sex that Alice feels, and they seem difficult to communicate to her interlocutors. An unsure speaker is simply one whose words don’t feel real. But in Alice what is real and what is fantasy? Language enables the child to name the world and exert mastery over it; but in relation to feelings, language can seem impoverished, like a starving of one’s desires. The language of one’s own dream may not be all nourishing, after all. After waking, Alice’s sister tells her to run in and have some tea. And in Looking-Glass, Alice promises the kitten a breakfast accompanied by a tale of the Walrus and his oysters—as if poetry were nourishment.

In Alice tears are shed, creatures are taken for a stroll and then devoured, and Queens scream their heads off. Yet if strong feelings and unreasonable desires abound in the Alice books, understanding the feelings of others is scarce. In chapter I of Looking-Glass, the Queen, after looking at the King’s memorandum book that Alice has written in, proclaims to the King: “That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!” (p. 163). After the mouse tells his sad tale of persecution, Alice asks, “But why do you call it sad?” (p. 36). Having feelings is one thing; understanding someone else’s is another. After hearing Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s story of the Walrus and the Carpenter, even the compassionate Alice says: “I like the Walrus best . . . because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters” (p. 195). Alice is uncertain what amount she should feel, which is to say her feelings feel like guesses. Alice first spied the Mock Turtle

sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock. . . . She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon. And the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.” . . .

“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”

“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone. “Sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, “I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin” (p. 108).

When is a feeling not a feeling? Perhaps when you want to share a feeling that you can’t. Alice’s feelings and her conversations go nowhere because they have no one to go to. Alice generally experiences her emotions by herself—that is, her emotions, like pity, are usually rapidly substituted by a chain of dissatisfaction and worry. For this reason, they appear shallow and unreal.

INEDIBLE PUNS AND WORDPLAY IN WONDERLAND

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.” (p. 219)

It is not surprising that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, like any drama about growing up, is also a drama of the arbitrary, nonsensical, and unending transformations and erasures that characterize games, conversations, and literature. Thus Alice is a novel of growing up that is populated with twins and twinned occurrences, speakers who repeat exactly what another says, people appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, birthday presents that don’t feel like presents, and Carroll’s parodies of conventionally didactic school verses. Many of the characters in Alice don’t just speak in rude puns and insoluble riddles—they are puns and riddles that have been transformed into characters. Both characters and narrative events are at times indistinguishable from nonsensical linguistic transformations. In the Humpty Dumpty chapter in Looking-Glass :

The egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when [Alice] had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It can’t be anybody else!” she said to herself. “I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!”

To which Carroll disingenuously adds: “It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face” (p. 214).

Growing up, like writing a pun or falling in love, is the occasion for perhaps some of the most absurd of human feelings. These feelings are suggested by the non-conversations, questions answered with riddles, and wordplay of the Alice books: paronomasia, linguistic substitution, antanaclasis, anagrams, punning, palindromic progression and erasure, repetition with minor variation, spurious etymological derivations, and reverse mirroring. These linguistic “events” take place in a time that is not clearly the present (“in about half no time!” [p. 106] as the Queen puts it ) but which seems to reference an endless becoming. Such activities are related to Alice’s erroneous multiplication tables, the “sweet little nothings” whispered by lovers, Alice’s unwitting jibes, and the unforeseen appearance of the Cheshire Cat’s grin. A short excerpt from one of the Duchess’s speeches in “The Mock Turtle’s Story” is exemplary. The passage begins with an injunction not to imagine something, passes through the vicissitudes of understanding, and finally ends with an entreaty to not speak; this series of transformations is similar to growing out of childhood itself, which is suggested here by a birthday present one doesn’t want to have:

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’ ”

“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I ca’n’t quite follow it as you say it. . . . Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.

“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.”

“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad people don’t give birthday-presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud (p. 105).

Growing up, which is what Alice is in the midst of, is a strange, nonsensical, and paradoxical event in which boredom and interest, possibility and probability, childish fantasy and adult reality intermingle. If possibility is about desire, then probability is about its limitations, the things Alice can’t say or do. And that is where nonsense, which is where the probable becomes indistinguishable from the possible, comes into play, along with anxiety, misunderstanding, puns, and death. Our desires, like puns, are absurd to think about, imagine, speak, or exchange. Moreover, our desires are almost impossible to realize. The things that happen in the Alice books are not quite events or exchanges; they are more like meta-events, things that are logically conceivable within a specified range of actions (possible) or things that are logically likely within a range of actions (probable). All events in the Alice books thus feel like non sequiturs. What kind of sense does growing up make to the child trapped in a present that has not yet become future? “I don’t know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time!” (p. 190). Freud noted in The Interpretation of Dreams that “in the unconscious, nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.” ⁸ As Adam Phillips notes, for children, “answers merely interrupt questions.”⁹ The opposite of endless waiting may be endless and infinite becoming, with Alice growing larger one moment and shrinking the next. If Alice’s wishes were merely boring repetitions of things she already knew, rather than nonsensical re-expressions or puns of her never-ending desires, she would have nothing more to be curious about or quibble with—in others or in herself—and not being able to do these things, she would be left with something anomalous and inhuman.

In the second “fit” of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, the poet calls attention to the division, seen as a kind of “interruption,” inherent in the (verbal) definition of a thing. The narrator of the poem proposes “one” of the characteristics of a snark but like a magician ends up by specifying two: “It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: / And it always looks grave as a pun.” With its doubled meanings contained (accidentally) in a single word, the pun suggests the inexpressible, a kind of irreducible argument that takes shape as a single word which, rather than repeating its meaning, splits violently into two senses. Like desire, the pun is inexpressible. Its meanings sprawl endlessly, non-purposively, and violently. Our wishes, which take grammatical form as questions,¹⁰ are a kind of metaphysical nonsense about the unspecified things they may become. Childhood desires exist to be transformed into something else: a book, a pet kitten, a lover, a grown-up sister, even a Cheshire Cat or a White Knight.

The story of Alice is a story of what her desires, her curiosity, will find and how, in the process, they become something else.” Elizabeth Sewell notes of nonsense words, “If a word does not look like a word . . . , the mind will not play with it.”¹¹ Yet nonsense, like fertility, “has a fear of nothing.”¹² Or, as Jacques Lacan noted, “the signifier is stupid” and in the pun engenders “a stupid smile.”¹³ In a world where desires are like puns, the dispute between true versus false becomes absurd, like a puzzle without a solution, a game without rules, effects without causes, desires without satisfactions—or a grin without the cat. Such a condition is grave; the Queen, upon witnessing the chaos of a croquet game, demands to trump the untrumpable by having “everybody executed, all round” (p. 99). Carroll conceived of the Queen “as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.”¹⁴ Thus much of the nonsense, curiosity, and desire of the Alice books can be answered only with silence or death—or other radical misinterpretations. But, of course, one wants to know if death is a misinterpretation of nonsense—or is it the other way around? To put it in terms relevant to Alice, is death nonsensical, or is nonsense a cloak for death? The Mouse’s tale is at bottom something to read. It is an emblematic poem about injustice, shaped like a mouse’s tail. It begins on a Monday morning with Fury having “nothing to do” (p. 37) and culminates with the unspeakable: Fury’s illogical persecution of and condemnation of a mouse to death—a deadly joke about the literal and figurative end of a tale/tail, which is to say a joke about nothing.

Unlike the endless substitutions of the pun, death “confronts us with the fact that, despite the capacity for substitution that development, in psychoanalytic terms, depends upon, there are no substitutes.”¹⁵ The joke and pun put up a shabby, even stupid resistance to things that must die, and so they are a paean to continuing misinterpretation. The pun is grave; but so is all language, which ceases at the borders of rudeness in order to conceal the fact that after a certain point, there are no more things to be said, that talking is a nonsensical covering for the rude silence that cannot be concealed. As Freud noted, unlike the child, the “civilized adult . . . can hardly even entertain the thought of another person’s death without seeming to himself hard-hearted and wicked.”¹⁶ Alice mentions her cat Dinah and unwittingly brings silence to her interlocutors. Alice is not yet fearful of death or bodily changes. She is learning that to be subjected to the desires of others is to be subjected to unbearable puns and nonsensical commands. To the Queen’s frantic calls for a beheading, and to her query about why people are lying face down on the ground, Alice responds:

“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no business of mine.”

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming “Off with her head! Off with—”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent (p. 93).

Alice is not surprised by what she doesn’t know because she has no desire to know it (“It’s no business of mine”), and this serves as an antidote to the Queen’s fury. But fury may be no less and no more expressible than the other emotions Alice has. One can no more choose to be or not be angry than worried or curious. Among many other things, good manners may be Alice’s pragmatic way of living within her own wishes. Saying no is merely a polite way of saying no to more nonsense than the mind can bear.

INDETERMINISM AND THINGS NOT EATEN

“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” (p. 195)

A world consumed by non-stop punning is an indeterministic world where chance rules and creates what the nineteenth-century French statistician Poisson termed the very rare event—what became known as the Poisson distribution. Following such a mathematical curve, all events in the Alice books are equally unexpected concatenations, and many characters are improbable hybrids of animals and people and insects, most of whom speak reasonably well. Being a pragmatist, Alice wonders, and then worries, about what she will eat. She also, less normally, wonders and worries if she will be eaten, though she fails to realize that for something to eat, something else must be eaten. Thus she mentions her cat Dinah to a mouse and birds. Many of the creatures behave like strange recipes for inedible foods, food that would prefer to talk back than be consumed. The tove is a badger with the “short horns of a stag,” and a borogrove is an extinct “kind of Parrot” that “lived on veal.”¹⁷ Wonderland and the world beyond the looking glass is home to a Rocking-horse-fly that is made of wood and swings from branch to branch, a Dragon-fly whose body is formed of plum pudding, and a Bread-and-butter fly whose wings are thin slices of bread and whose head is a lump of sugar. Edible lobsters dance the quadrille. The chief ingredient of Mock Turtle soup sings a rather sad and piquant song, and Alice travels in a carriage compartment that holds a goat, a gentleman dressed in white paper, a horse, a beetle, and a gnat that is large as a chicken but whose voice sounds like that of a horse. All this follows upon Alice’s seeing a “regular bee” that was quite irregular: “in fact, it was an elephant” (p. 177).

These cross-pollinated creatures are sui generis beings who resemble another strange creature in Carroll’s works: the portmanteau word—the highly individuated, one-of-a-kind linguistic phenomenon that is predictably unreliable at communicating meaning. Like most things whose actions are improbable, such creatures can hardly be believed. They appear to be governed neither by rule nor by law. In this sense, very little can be inferred about their nature or their genus. The contemplation of life forms turns out to be frustratingly abstract; the creatures are as unpredictable as unsolved problems. And like most anomalous specimens and unappeasable desires, they seem to have gone extinct before their proper time, as witness the Dodo and borogrove. Yet such is the accidental nature of organic life itself, the life of desire, which the French philosopher Bichat noted defies “every kind of calculation, for it would be necessary to have as many different rules as there are different cases.”¹⁸ In this sense, Wonderland is a belated nineteenth-century ecosystem, a pastoral mathematical formula on the verge of logical extinction. In this system, determinism, as an immutable law, is being subjected to the twentieth century’s “laws” of chance. There is a simpler way to state this: Many creatures in the Alice books are edible things that remain inedible to Alice: lobsters, mock turtle soup, a rabbit, a duck, a pig, a fish, oysters, a whiting, an egg—Alice has no desire to eat them. Our appetites are arbitrary. If our desires are not surprising to ourselves, they probably don’t work very well as desires. One of the first things Alice eats is something that is, from a botanical standpoint, neither living nor dead and so, from a logical standpoint, incapable of having desire: a mushroom.

For all her worrying, Alice does little eating, and this suggests three things: that her desire to eat remains unresolved (a kind of self-punning on her wants); that her consumption patterns are anarchic rather than habitual; and that she is too reasonable with her appetites, conversing with foods (that she should be eating). Being a pragmatist with one’s emotions is dangerous play. Instead of feeling, Alice tends to worry, just like the White Rabbit who is a parody of an adult male who worries too much. Worries are a form of policing one’s desires, often before they become desires. Yet worries are not easy to see for what they are. Like a pun, the White Rabbit keeps disappearing. Worries are almost feelings. Like minor disturbances, they disappear and begin again and disappear and begin again. They are the feelings we don’t want to be having—but are.

From a Darwinian perspective, many creatures of Wonderland are both inedible and extremely rare. Yet they exist. They constitute a bestiary of related things, though their family lineages are murky. They inhabit the same world and dine at the same table, yet they are antithetical to community. They do not share their feelings, and this makes them likely to be forgotten. For Carroll, like most nineteenth-century probability experts, eccentricity is another word for deviance, opposed to the normal, and bad for reproduction. The identical twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum threaten to become the victims of a fratricide. Not surprisingly, when Alice sees them she wonders if they are alive. The same could be said of Wonderland and the world beyond the looking glass, which, like childhood and the life of a gnat, verge on expiration. Unlike a bored child, the White Rabbit is in a very big hurry, in a race with the watch he carries on his person. In a gesture of compassionate conservation, Carroll terminates Through the Looking-Glass with a manual of extinction, his unending desire couched as a memorial poem for Alice herself: “Long has paled that sunny sky: / Echos fade and memories die: / Autumn frosts have slain July” (p. 272).

Near the end of the books, Alice angrily calls quits to the pack of cards and pulls the tablecloth out from under the diners’ meal. Indeterminism creates a world where there is no end to worrying about what Alice was unable to consume, and the most non-consumable thing about ourselves is our own passions. What is to be done with them? Desire resembles a game not with subjects who reciprocate our feelings but with losers and winners. Both books end violently, with the upsetting of a table and of a pack of cards, acts that suggest the end of an unsuccessful game and the figurative death of Alice’s desires. So the final book ends—with a poem that signals Carroll’s farewell.

PROBABLE ENDINGS AND IMPROBABLE BEGINNINGS

“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” (p. 197)

Both Alice books begin with dullness, pass through fantasy and end with waking (back to dullness). Boredom is a part of the indeterminate stuff of this world, a kind of question that cannot be answered by our desires. The various animal and human-like creatures in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are in the end difficult to locate in any real place. Yet Carroll fastidiously brackets each book to suggest that the vagaries of dreaming and nonsense occur within the boundaries of a book and the head of a sleeping child. Alice wakes to a world of dull reasonableness, which is to say that chance has yet to become the chief quality of the world out there, what the philosopher Ian Hacking terms “objective chance.” Yet for the child, curiosity, like love, is defined by boundlessness. Dullness without, chaos and wonder within—or is it the other way around?

Alice and Looking-Glass are nineteenth-century works; they regard disorder and chaos as problems to be tucked away in regressive moments of dreaming and remembering. And yet, as Ian Hacking points out, the problems of one century become the solutions of the next. The dangers of possibility and chaos in the nineteenth century become the immutable laws of chance and uncertainty in the twentieth. Determinism erodes throughout both books: The world becomes a place not where things happened but where fantastic things might have happened. But then, of course, looking at it from the nineteenth-century perspective of Alice’s looking glass, they might not have happened at all. Alice is unsure if it even was her dream.

The final chapter of Alice, “Alice’s Evidence,” ends with the Queen’s coercive command for “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” followed with Alice’s reply: “Stuff and nonsense!” (p. 140). The line between “stuff” and “nonsense” is not so clear, although Alice tries to make the distinction. Precisely at this moment the nonsense, after reaching an insufferable level, ends, and Alice awakens with her head in her sister’s lap. She tells her sister her dream, whereupon her sister dreams Alice’s dream. But this second dream is different from Alice’s, for it is a dream in which the dreamer is half awake and acknowledges that the dream cannot last forever and will “change to dull reality” (p. 143). Alice, her sister surmises, will wake and grow up into everyday reality, within which the dull and boring world no longer seems opposed to desires but must be reconciled to them. Earlier the extinct Dodo had solemnly called for “more energetic remedies” (p. 35), but clearly the time for such remedies has passed. Alice’s sister entertains one last image of Alice, another invention but more tempered than earlier ones: “Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (p. 144).

It is a mistake to read these books, as many critics have, as lessons in growing up or in mastering or coercing experience (particularly boredom), through play or other means. If anything, the books suggest what the reasonable Alice, at the end of the book, still doesn’t know. It is, after all, not Alice but her sister who sees in Alice’s waking a probable future that Alice has herself yet to experience. Mastery turns out to be a communal rather than solitary affair. Alice’s sister has a reminiscence of Alice the child before Alice has taken leave of childhood. Thus do inexorable probabilities creep in and replace the highly improbable creatures of Alice’s dream. The reader knows that Alice’s sister is probably right: Boredom and dull reality will return when Alice wakens and then grows into an adult. And yet a memory that is not yet a memory is a highly improbable event. What control over the things we remember will we ultimately have? What for Alice has been lost but not yet lost? Of course, we often seem to know something is lost before we lose it—and this feeling suffuses childhood and the adult’s recollection of what that childhood was, which is probably the only childhood he or she can have. Such is the nature of desire: One desires things that have yet to be and that are in some sense already lost to the moment of desire. When the Queen pricks her finger, Alice asks why she doesn’t scream. The Queen replies, “Why, I’ve done all the screaming already” (p. 206).

In a paradoxical way, the book suggests that one has desires in order to forget them and thus grow into the future rather than merely repeat one’s past. In the moments before Alice wakes, both books delineate unsatisfying and indeterminate chaos: In Through the Looking-Glass, the guests are being devoured by their foods; in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Queen orders Alice’s execution and a pack of cards flies upon poor Alice, who finally exclaims, reasoning backward as it were into a realm of diminishing possibilities: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (p. 140). Here Alice reverses the logical argument of the earlier chapters, in which she (or something inside her) turned nothing into something. After this point, the story of Alice’s “real” life is set to unfold. This suggests that Alice is no longer trapped in someone else’s dream (of her). Like a good many children who are on the verge of not being children, Alice is learning forgetfulness, as a prelude to something (the future of one’s desires) that cannot be known with certitude. Childhood desires thus comprise a nonsense of a different order.

For Carroll, boredom still manages a moral impetus: It teaches the adult (Alice is an adult before her time) that nonsense is both possible and necessary; it also teaches the adult that nonsense is a regressive fiction that one wakes from and waking from, then mourns. For an adult, the nonsense of childhood is the nonsense of its loss. Competing necessities govern the end of each book, and they govern the strategies involved in regulating one’s desires, which also need to be forgotten so they can be retold. Only by forgetting childhood desires can a certain amount of sense be gained. But, of course, the absence of those desires has to be regulated too; perhaps boredom is a preemptive strike at desires we may never have. None of the games that Alice plays suggests mastery, a narrative thread, the end of conflict, the resolution of a misunderstanding, or a satisfying answer to the questions her desires pose. It is Alice’s sister who forgets for her, rather than Alice herself.

Of the two books, Through the Looking-Glass is the bleaker; it ends with a question, whereas Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends with a sister’s loving reminiscence, delivered in Wordsworthian fashion as a premature eulogy for a childhood not yet lost, a lost childhood whose losses were already being deferred, as it were, by a familial caretaker. One of the ways to learn to give up an unbearable personal fantasy (and Alice can barely bear hers) is to make it the subject of a story. But once that is done, a mystery ends and with it a part of desire. What story can be told to get desire back? Perhaps storytelling offers a clue to deferring desires for something that has not yet arrived. To speak is to speak, as Carroll does, of imaginary things. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is, after all, a story told by Carroll to children, and Alice in turn tells her sister her dream, another kind of story. At the close of both Alice books, the adult reader/listener again confronts Alice the child, someone on the verge of becoming someone else, someone the grown-up reader knows well, someone who is “loving and gentle . . . courteous to all, high or low . . . trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood.” ¹⁹ Understanding desires turns out to be a communal rather than a solitary experience. For Alice’s dream language to make sense, Alice must escape it first. The easiest way to escape is to make it the subject of a sharing; the language of the dream must be given to someone else.

Like Alice’s sister’s act of remembering, the reader’s recognition is a repetition with a difference, because the repetition involves retelling. Repetition is about eternity and stopping time; repetition with a difference presupposes change and time passing. Carroll tellingly pairs impossibility with curiosity—even if such impossibilities are something not entirely forgotten. The adult is a child whose childhood desires are something she hasn’t learned to forget. Such acts of forgetting, like acts of mastery, turn out to be equally contingent as the futures the child hasn’t yet had. The problems Alice confronts, for all their seeming reality, are the stuff of fantasy, but the fantasy may be merely a screen for banal fears and anxieties the adult world generates: how to put on shoes when your feet are too far off; how to get into a door that is too small; how to reach a golden key; how to get out of a pool of one’s own tears? In this sense the nonsensical obstacles of childhood, the things known as fantasies, become the more reasonable problems of adulthood, but they remain problems to be solved nonetheless. If the problems we have never go away and are in some sense insoluble—that is, unforgettable—what moral stories might we tell as consolation? One of the things the adult imagines is, of course, an adulthood that never quite arrived to take the place of Wonderland.

Tan Lin is a writer, artist, and critic. He is the author of two books of poetry, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, and BlipSoak01. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1 Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 134-135.

2 Mark Haworth-Booth, “The Photographic Moment of Lewis Carroll,” in Morton N. Cohen, ed., Reflections in a Looking-Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer (New York: Aperture, 1998), p. 127.

3 Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography (London: Constable, 1976), p. 114.

4 Hudson, p. 114.

5 Hudson, p. 152.

6 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 105.

7 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 78.

8 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 1.

9 Phillips, Terrors and Experts, p. 1.

10 Adam Phillips, Promises Promises (London: Faber, 2000), p. 175.

11 Elizabeth Sewell, “The Balance of Brillig,” in Alice in Wonderland, edited by Donald J. Gray, second edition (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 384.

12 Sewell, p. 384.

13 Gregory Ulmer, “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in On Puns, edited by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 176.

14 Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), p. 109.

15 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. xx.

16 Phillips, On Flirtation, p. xx.

17 Gardner, p. 191.

18 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14.

19 Hudson, p. 156.