Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [2]
To read the Alice books is to plunge into a world of narrative distortions and nonsensical explanations, and the reader is perpetually caught between the two contradictory positions adopted by Alice and the King, of finding no meaning in it, as she does, or attempting to decode ‘some meaning’ from it all, like the King. Finding meaning, like losing meaning, involves pleasure as well as pain. But then losing meaning, like finding it, does too, as the best nonsense reminds us.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice brings her comparable puzzlement about the ‘Jabberwocky’ poem to Humpty Dumpty. ‘“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir”’, she says, ‘“Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”’6 Humpty Dumpty, an egghead absolutely obsessed with meaning, duly obliges, with an intellectual confidence rare even among critics of poetry: ‘“I can explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented yet”’. He goes on to interpret ‘Jabberwocky’ according to whimsical fiat on the one hand (‘“‘ Brillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon”’) and a theory of ‘portmanteau words’ on the other hand: this enables him to unpack the different meanings he sees packed into one nonsense word (so that ‘slithy’, for example, can be decoded as an amalgam of ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’). Though authoritative, and even seductive, as a piece of off-the-cuff philological commentary upon ‘Jabberwocky’, Humpty Dumpty’s ‘explanation’ of the nonsense idiom of the poem is as nonsensical as his definition earlier of ‘glory’ as a ‘knock-me-down argument’. It is as much a parody of philosophical and linguistic authority as an instance of it, and, as the familiar nursery rhyme warns Alice he will do, this hubristic nonsense commentator comes to a sticky end.
If the problem of meaning – of what Alice’s adventures and what she finds in them means – haunts the text and its heroine, it has also, since the date of its first publication, haunted its readers. Though many readers share the ‘adventures first’ view of the Gryphon that ‘explanations’ are a waste of time, others adopt the viewpoint of the Red Queen that ‘“Even a joke should have a meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke”’. In fact, we could classify readers of the books as either Gryphons or Queens. Those in the first camp simply wish to enjoy the story as a story, as they think appropriate for a book originally written for children, and rebuff all efforts to interpret it. Those in the second, contrariwise, insist that it is meaning and not meaninglessness which makes Carroll’s nonsense expressive, and that all readings of the Alice books are necessarily interpretative. Why should meaningless jokes or meaningless stories be more interesting than meaningful ones?
Historically, the Carrollian editor and biographer R. L. Green falls into the first camp and stands as the prime spokesperson for Gryphonism.7 The poet and critic William Empson stands at the forefront of the latter or Red Queen’s camp, with his ground-breaking essay on ‘The Child as Swain’ setting the agenda for all subsequent Freudian and historical interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s work.8 The editor Martin Gardner, a mathematician and logician like Carroll, is the ultimate exponent of the Red Queen school of thought and in his masterfully Dumptyan The Annotated Alice explains the Alice books with reference to the whole intellectual universe before and since – and the whole intellectual universe by reference to the Alice books.9
These divergent approaches to reading the Alice books reflect something of the enigmatic or hybrid nature of the text itself. These are sophisticated ‘fairy tales’ on the one hand, as Carroll announces in the prefatory poem to Wonderland, and they abound in the spontaneous enigmatic coinings of dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and improvisatory free-association.