Read an Excerpt
From Tan Lin's Introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass
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!"
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!"
