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Alice's Journey to the End of Night

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald Rackin
Donald Rackin*
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia, Penn.
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Extract

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , October 1966 , pp. 313 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 All references in my text to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are to The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York, 1960).

2 See, e.g., Alexander L. Taylor, The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (London, 1952), pp. 46–47.

3 Alice's twisted nursery verses often make far more Darwinian sense than do their original models. See William Empson, “Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swain,” in English Pastoral Poetry (New York, 1938) for some comments on the Darwinian theory behind much of Carroll's subversive satire.

4 See, e.g., Phyllis Greenacre, Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (New York, 1955).

5 Harry Morgan Ayres, in Carroll's Alice (New York, 1936), pp. 63–65, points out that these misunderstandings derive from a peculiarity of English—“it is rich in homophones.” This peculiarity, Ayres feels, accounts for the particular verbal nonsense which characterizes English humor. Ayres also states that effective communication depends to a great extent on the emotional attitude of the listener: since words are “mere sounds thrown out to a listener as clues to the mental state of the speaker with respect to things or actions,” all the speaker can hope is that “the listener will piece these clues together intelligently and above all sympathetically.” Is it possible, then, to assume that Alice's misunderstandings (tale vs. tail, not vs. knot, etc.) hint at the beginning of Alice's revolt against the maddening chaos of Wonderland? Is she here being covertly antagonistic and playing the same game that Wonderland plays all along—that is, asking her opponent to do what is finally impossible?

6 Ch. iii foreshadows another feature of linguistic confusion that will reach its absurd apex in the hilarious final pages of the book. The Mouse's tale, printed emblematically in the shape of a mouse's long tail, is about the law; and certainly our ordinary conceptions of the law depend in great measure on the common assumption that language, at the bottom of most law, is potentially unambiguous. The word trial itself ideally connotes a suspension of judgment as well as a final decision. But in the Mouse's tail-tale, as in the final trial of Alice (and in many trials of expressionistic fiction since 1865), the prosecutor can also be the judge and jury, and the judgment can be passed before the trial has begun.

7 Quoted by Roger Lancelyn Green, The Lewis Carroll Handbook (London, 1962), p. 281.

8 Note how the Mock Turtle's song that accompanies the Lobster Quadrille twists the sadistic original—“ ‘Will you walk into my parlour?‘ said the spider to the fly”—into an innocuous nursery rhyme. This parody demonstrates that Wonderland refuses to be consistent to itself: if the above-ground rhymes tend to hide or deny Darwinian theory, Wonderland's poems will be vengefully Darwinian; but if above- rhymes admit the cruelty of nature, then Wonderland produces harmless nonsense verses where the creatures of the sea join in dance or where owls and panthers share pies.