[In the following essay, Irwin explores the theme of instability in the Alice stories.]

The Alice books are centrally concerned with instability. In Wonderland the heroine suffers alarming shifts of size. In Through the Looking-Glass (1871) there is much straightforward physical disequilibrium. When the White Knight is sliding down the poker Alice notes that ‘he balances very badly’.¹ He and the Red Knight repeatedly fall off their horses. Humpty-Dumpty is doomed to tumble from his wall and defy re-assemblage. In both stories there are strange translations and dissolutions. The Cheshire Cat vanishes and reappears. A baby becomes a pig. The White Queen turns into a sheep, the Red Queen into a kitten. Everyday assumptions about the workings of time, direction, language and personal identity are called into question.

The work itself—the two Alice books considered as a single entity—partakes of this precariousness and advertises the fact that it does so. It casts doubt on its own origins and status through a variety of self-descriptive paradoxes, ambiguities, dualities and circularities. Much of Carroll's subject matter has been assembled rather than invented and retains a residual autonomy. Alice Liddell and other real-life models lurk behind certain of the characters. In Through the Looking-Glass the essential rules of chess are observed. Nursery-rhyme protagonists bring their poetical destinies with them: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are fated to fight, as Humpty-Dumpty is to fall. The ghosts of the poems the author has parodied haunt his transcriptions. Carroll shows a constant awareness that his story is a construct, and that his control over his discrepant source-materials cannot be taken for granted. Altogether Alice can be seen as—indeed proclaims itself to be—an interesting test-case in relation to questions of originality, coherence and autonomy. Is this an integrated, self-standing work of art, child of its author, or does it fragment, on scrutiny, into a concatenation of sources and influences? And if it does so fragment, can it be ‘put together again’?

‘He's dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he's dreaming about?’

Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’

‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘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!’

‘I shouldn't!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’

‘Ditto,’ said Tweedledum.

‘Ditto, ditto!’ cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying

‘Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.’

‘Well, it's no use your talking about waking him,’ said Tweedledum, ‘when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.’

‘I am real!’ said Alice, and began to cry.

‘You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,’ Tweedledee remarked: ‘there's nothing to cry about.’

‘If I wasn't real,’ Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—‘I shouldn't be able to cry.’

‘I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

(pp. 238-9)

Lewis Carroll clearly set some store by this passage. He recalls the problem it poses in Chapter 8, and again in his final chapter: ‘Which Dreamed It?’ Alice puts the problem to her kitten:

‘You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty?’

(p. 344)

The book closes by leaving the reader with the question: ‘Which do you think it was?’

The crux is a famous one, much discussed, and earns a long and interesting commentary in The Annotated Alice. Who is the ultimate dreamer, Alice or the Red King? Could one decide? How would one even set about deciding? Martin Gardner's note on this problem of ‘infinite regress’ invokes ‘that preposterous cartoon of Saul Steinberg's in which a fat lady paints a picture of a thin lady who is painting a picture of the fat lady who is painting a picture of the thin lady, and so on deeper into the two canvases’ (The Annotated Alice, p. 239). Perhaps equally relevant is a picture independently rendered by both Steinberg and Escher which depicts a disembodied hand holding a pencil which is drawing a disembodied hand holding a pencil which is drawing the original hand—a circle rather than an infinite regression.

The simplest application of the dilemma is probably the theological one. ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’ (Annotated Alice, p. 345). It could be argued that the ‘real’ dreamer is God. We are His figments. The obvious counter-claim would be that, on the contrary, we ‘dream’—that is, invent—the God we would like to think invented us. We are obliged to create this alleged Creator in our own image. Is not the very metaphor of dreaming, for example, derived, necessarily, from our own categories of experience? We can conceive only that which we have it in us, as human beings, to conceive. Hence the aphorism: ‘If the triangles invented a God it would have three sides.’

But the paradox has also a literary dimension. In this context the presiding ‘dreamer’ would at first glance seem to be Carroll himself. Neither Alice nor the Red King has an existence outside his fictional creation. Again, however, the simple explanation proves inadequate. Carroll himself can hardly be said to exist. He is an alias, a version, of the real-life deacon and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Behind his fictional Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell—who might be said to have brought Lewis Carroll to life by coaxing Dodgson into becoming a story-teller.

A version of this dilemma becomes a familiar theme in twentieth-century fiction. The theological analogy has been frequently and variously explored: as God is to Man so is the novelist to his or her characters. Nabokov, Isak Dinesen, Muriel Spark and Martin Amis are among those who have exploited the issue by hypothesizing attempts to break out of, or into, the narrative ‘dream’. Characters rebel against the author in the name of free will, striving to elude the constrictions of the unfolding plot as a human being might attempt to escape a divinely imposed destiny. Conversely, the writer may make an appearance as a character within the world of his or her own novel, perhaps as a gesture towards the surrender of authorial power or as an acknowledgement of its limitations.² The epigram about the triangles suggests this further dimension of the topic. There is a sense in which characters can truly be said to portray their creator. They are, inescapably, aspects or refractions of the author's personality: for all their theoretical autonomy they derive directly from that source. The characters created by a given novelist, taken together, might be thought to offer the possibility of a dot-to-dot picture of the creative psychology which brought them into such being as they have.

A third application of the episode, however, is perhaps of more topical academic interest than either of the other two. The question might be posed: is the ‘dreamer’—the originating force, the controlling power—the author as conscious creator and manipulator, or that author's subconscious impulses and drives (an invisible and uncontrolled internal motor), or the social and historical context which shaped the author's tastes and opinions, and constitutes the current on which he or she, more or less helplessly, drifts? There would seem to be a relevant metaphor in the episode in which Alice steers the White King's pencil, writing for him against his will. The baffled King remarks, with unconscious Freudian humour: ‘I really must get a thinner pencil. I can't manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don't intend’ (Annotated Alice, p. 190).

Carroll himself invites this line of inquiry by making it clear that the Alice books indeed have to do with the subconscious—are in effect a fantastical rendering of the subconscious life of a seven-year-old. The worlds of the two stories are made up of elements derived from the experience of an upper-middle-class Victorian child: governesses, aunts, servants, pets, games, gardens, nursery-rhymes, improving texts. ‘“It's something very like learning geography,” thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further’ (p. 215). The final chapter of Alice in Wonderland offers a coda in which Alice's sister, half dreaming, deconstructs the story she has been told:

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—[…] the rattling tea-cups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs.

(p. 164)

Jonathan Miller's Alice, made for BBC television in 1966, offered a reading of roughly this transcriptive kind. There are similar explanatory hints in the last chapter of Through the Looking-Glass.

But the interpretative reading that Carroll has solicited can hardly fail to register some odd absences from this subconscious world. There is no more than a hint of a reference to friends, and, still more surprisingly, none at all to parents. Could a child's dreams or imaginings plausibly encompass such vacancies? It is hardly surprising that many a critic has taken Carroll's hint but responded to it in a more radical spirit. Yes, the stories told are transliterations, but the notional originating impulses derived not from Alice's mind but from Carroll's, and were partly, or largely, outside his conscious control.

Such an approach might be thought to go some way towards explaining the peculiar intensity of the Alice books. These are emotional stories. There is much melancholy and wistfulness, much sighing and weeping, much anger and aggression:

The Queen turned crimson with fury

(Annotated Alice, p. 109)

wringing her hands in despair

(p. 250)

trembling with excitement

(p. 202)

in a sudden transport of delight

(p. 256)

in a helpless frightened sort of way

(p. 245)

in a voice choking with passion

(p. 240)

screaming herself into a fit

(p. 187)

Alice is regularly cross-questioned, ordered about, patronized, rebuked, insulted. Violence abounds, actual or threatened. The Duchess's cook throws ‘saucepans, plates and dishes’, one such missile nearly carrying off a baby's nose. The baby itself is hurled at Alice, who fortunately catches it. Tweedledum and Tweedledee prepare to have a battle; the Lion and the Unicorn actually have one—as do the two knights. The Queen of Hearts repeatedly orders decapitations. Alice herself kicks a lizard out of a chimney. We are reminded ‘that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that, if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds’ (p. 31). Both books deal in black humour, including jokes about death. The Jabberwock is duly slain; the oysters are eaten; the Bread-and-butter-fly is doomed to perish.

The shifts of mood, the anarchy, the aggression, the grief are certainly aspects of the power of the Alice books. It must be conceded that children in general have an uncomplicated appetite for comic violence and extremity. The majority of the incidents alluded to above are no more damaging than a snowball. But in a significant number of cases the snowball contains at least a small stone. I can still remember how, when I read Alice as a child, I felt I was traversing a lot of emotional ground, out of all proportion to the brevity of the action and the reassurance at its conclusion. Serious feelings were being obscurely invoked. It seems reasonable to suspect that these disconcerting energies derived from an aspect of Carroll's personality or imagination at the very verge of his conscious control.

A simple explanation, or part explanation, would relate them to something in the Dodgson family tradition. Here is Charles Dodgson senior, a notably serious and enterprising clergyman, writing to his eight-year-old son. The context is that young Charles has asked his father, who is travelling to Leeds, to buy him a file, a screwdriver and a ring:

As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers—Iron-mongers […]. I will have a file & a screwdriver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling & a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs & babies, camels & butterflies, rolling in the gutter together—old women rushing up the chimneys & cows after them—ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, & fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases—at last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard & stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the Town.³

The passage is reminiscent of the ‘Alice’ books in a variety of ways: the surrealism, the energy, the extravagant verbs (screaming, bawling and tearing of hair), the cheerful murderousness. Even some particular details anticipate Carroll's work—notably ‘pigs & babies’ and the Mayor found in a soup plate. It would seem that there was a common strain of anarchic boisterousness in the imagination of both these apparently staid men of the cloth, something, perhaps, in the Dodgson genes. Certainly the younger man was representing himself as a divided being well before he wrote the Alice books: on the one hand the Deacon and mathematician, Charles Dodgson, on the other the occasional writer, Lewis Carroll or Edgar Cuthwellis (an anagram of ‘Charles Lutwidge’). A case could conceivably be made that Alice represents the transmission of a family tradition of humour, and is hence a good deal less original than it seems at first glance.

But the recent tendency has been to tackle the topic much lower than this—to look for darker forces behind the complexities and intensities of Alice. Much is made of Carroll's notorious, amply documented—indeed self-documented—devotion to young girls (pre-pubertal girls, as commentators tend to say nowadays). On this theme there is the powerful testimony not merely of Carroll's diaries, but of his extraordinary photographs, with their haunting mixture of idealization and eroticism. The passions, the wistfulness, could be transcriptions of the author's own feelings.

On one reading of the books, Carroll's conscious theme is the impossibility of fulfilment. Allegories abound. Alice, like Lolita (1955), dramatizes the elusiveness of beauty. The ‘large bright thing’ in the shop is always just out of eye-shot (Annotated Alice, p. 253). The scented rushes fade when picked (p. 257). The fawn can walk ‘lovingly’ with Alice only so long as their identities are forgotten; at the edge of the wood ‘A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed’ (p. 227). Above all there is the paradox of ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’, which first becomes visible beyond a door at the end of a ‘small passage’ (p. 30). When Alice herself is small enough to get through that door she is too short to reach the key which would open it. When she is tall enough to reach the key she is too big to get out into the garden. Might not this be Carroll's way of insinuating the idea that the girl to whom he has given his heart cannot enter the garden of adult love?

Arguably—the point has often been made—Carroll includes himself in Through the Looking-Glass in the character of the White Knight, the amiable, kindly but absurd figure whose ‘very, very beautiful song’ Alice hears unmoved, before waving goodbye to him and going on her way.⁴ Her response is perfectly reasonable. Taken at face value the White Knight's lay is a nonsense-work, an irreverent burlesque of Wordsworth's ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802, publ. 1807). Since Carroll had published a version of his parody years previously, it can hardly be thought to relate closely to the context. On the other hand the scene is described with a seriousness most unusual in the Alice books:

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.

(p. 307)

Much could be made of the gentleness of tone, the sympathetic presentation of the Knight, the imagery of the blazing armour, the setting sun, the dark forest and the docile beast. Alice identifies the tune of the song as that of ‘I give thee all, I can no more’. Martin Gardner quotes the poem in full, remarking: ‘It is quite possible that Carroll regarded Moore's love lyric as the song that he, the White Knight, would have liked to sing to Alice but dared not’ (Annotated Alice, p. 311). In this spirit one might see Alice itself as a similarly hopeless love-song to ‘the child of my dreams’—the love-song of Edgar Cuthwellis. Beyond the deliberately absurd characterization, after all, stands another foolish knight who vainly served an impossible mistress: Don Quixote. It might well be that Carroll is writing about himself in the protection afforded by double inverted commas.

But an aggressive late-twentieth-century reading would deny Carroll this degree of control over his private story. There has been a relentless poring over diaries and letters, a terrier-like pursuit of unconscious symbolism. The claim is that Carroll is saying far more than he is consciously aware of saying about his ‘condition’. The Alice books, of course, are a gift to the Freudian, proliferating as they do in holes, tunnels, doors, locks, keys, fluids and size-changes. That game is all too easy. It is disappointing to see how commentary a good deal more controlled can drift in the same direction. Morton Cohen asserts ‘It is mean-spirited to attribute the Alice books […] entirely to a suppression of natural drives, to a flight from [Carroll's] real troubled self’. Yet fifty pages earlier he himself has ventured: ‘If Charles Dodgson's suppressed and diverted sexual energies caused him unspeakable torments, and they did, they were in all probability the source of those exceptional flashes of genius that gave the world his remarkable creative works.’⁵ The former comment is the more persuasive. ‘Mean-spirited’ seems an apt term for an attempt to explain a work of art in terms of the mud from which it might conceivably be said to grow.

This kind of approach, whatever view one takes of it, locates the creative ‘source’ firmly within Carroll's psychology. Another kind of twentieth-century reading would locate it without—would see the Alice books as deriving from a variety of external influences and pressures. Two such influences might be the fairy-tale tradition, often cruel, often metaphorically suggestive, or nursery-rhymes, both surrealistic and violent:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon
When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose
She cut off their tails with a carving knife
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

Generations of children have spent hours in this strange world and taken the extravagance and ferocity for granted. Is not Lewis Carroll—was not his father?—drawing on common stock, manifesting certain widespread fancies and urges? Are they not belated practitioners in an old folk mode?

One might produce a rather different ‘explanation’ by pulling the string tighter. In a much narrower chronological sense, Carroll's idiosyncrasies were far from singular. He was representative of an age which idealized children with a passion psychologically maiming. The trend may perhaps be seen to find its culmination shortly after the turn of the century with the appearance of Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). Derek Hudson points out that Kilvert, the diarist, a clergyman contemporary with Carroll, responded very similarly to young girls.⁶ The psychological and even legal restraints on such relationships were much weaker than they are today. Morton Cohen usefully reminds us that in the middle years of the nineteenth century girls could marry at twelve. He points out that Carroll's own brother, Wilfred, at the age of twenty-seven, fell in love with a fourteen-year-old, and indeed married her some years later.⁷

Clearly Carroll eventually had misgivings of some sort about his nude photographs of children; why else should he have had almost all of them destroyed? On the other hand he seems to have been originally frank and unembarrassed about such activity, clearing it with his own conscience. He was scrupulous in obtaining parental permission for the pictures to be taken—which he could hardly have done without winning the total confidence of those concerned. It must have been a relevant factor that, despite the pruderies of the age, unclothed children were somehow deemed acceptable in painting and illustration, particularly in fairy-tale or vaguely pastoral contexts. This category of nudity was sanitized or even sanctified.

More particularly Carroll was very much an admirer of Dickens, who had regularly idealized and eroticized small girls. Florence Dombey and Little Em'ly are specifically presented, in their infancy, as potential sweethearts respectively for Walter Gay and David Copperfield. Above all Nell Trent may have provided Carroll with a precedent: a young girl who is seen in the shadow of the sexual threat represented by Quilp. The Alice books echo The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1)—particularly the Mrs Jarley episode—in a number of particular ways. More generally Dickens structures his novel on an allegorical plan which Carroll proceeds to borrow. His heroine, like Nell, is Innocence moving among monsters.

It would seem, then, that there is a case—a case merely sketched in the preceding paragraphs—for claiming that Alice was very much a product of its time. Carroll was arguably not an anomalous but in some sense a representative figure, formed by the tastes and the pressures of his age. Was it not ‘Victorianism’ that steered his pencil?

Interestingly such a question would not have seemed strange to Carroll himself, a proto-modernist with post-modernist premonitions. In Sylvie and Bruno (1889) he envisages a future era of linguistic exhaustion or repletion: ‘“Instead of saying ‘what book shall I write?’ an author will ask himself ‘which book shall I write?’”’⁸ In the Preface to the first part of that same work, he claims that some of the ideas for it seemed to spring from nothing: ‘specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, “an effect without a cause’”. But others he could ‘trace to their source’—for example ‘as being suggested by the book one was reading’ (Sylvie and Bruno, p. 255). Later he adds that ‘Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature […] is to write anything original’. He does not know whether he can claim originality for Alice in Wonderland: ‘I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it’ (Sylvie and Bruno, p. 257). It would seem, however, that in some areas at least he was content to work generically: he acknowledges, for example, that the Red Queen is ‘the concentrated essence of all governesses’.⁹ More interestingly he says of the White Queen: ‘There is a character strangely like her in Wilkie Collins' novel No Name: by two different converging paths we have somehow reached the same ideal, and Mrs Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters.’¹⁰ The inference is that Carroll and Collins, with no thought of portraying an accepted ‘type’, have distilled social observations sufficiently akin to sponsor similar results. Within the confines of a given social or historical environment such coincidence need not seem far-fetched. Conceivably a writer might be reduced to wondering ‘which character shall I create?’ The notion of ‘originality’ would resolve itself back into a complex of possible social ‘origins’, generic antecedents: we are returned to the dilemma of the Red King's dream.

Many other images in the Alice books imply a similar reflexivity: ‘once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself’. Tweedledee tries to fold up an umbrella with himself inside it (Annotated Alice, p. 241). The Unicorn tells Alice: ‘if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you’ (p. 287). An especially intriguing example is the sheep in Through the Looking-Glass knitting with fourteen pairs of needles at once—a vision of rampant auto-cannibalism not remote from the self-consuming toils of the Artist (Annotated Alice, pp. 253-4).

It seems likely, then, that Carroll's preliminary answer to the question ‘Did you write these books or were you written through?’ would be ‘Both’—but that if pressed he would concede to the inescapability of derivativeness. Even the odd ‘effect without a cause’ would be seen as ultimately explicable.

Indeed this is a conclusion which can hardly be confuted. As Artists or anything else we can only dispense what by one means or another has been fed into us. That much is axiomatic. But since this truism, too crudely insisted upon, can be demeaning in its implications, especially with regard to the autonomy of the artist, it should not be accorded undue respect. I would like to conclude by tying some tin cans to its tail.

It must first be asked whether the proposed deconstruction of a literary work into its component elements has any status beyond the merely conceptual. A cake could be considered as a cultural construct or as an assemblage of separable ingredients. But it is not so considered. We eat it. That is what it is for.

The claim that originality is in absolute terms unfeasible may in any case come to seem uninteresting in the light of the complex relative position. The Gryphon, for example, could not be described as an original creation: he has antecedents, albeit of a mythical kind. The Cheshire Cat is less obviously derivative: Carroll has lent substantiality to what was previously a mere form of words. The Mock Turtle, which has no ancestry, comes yet closer to being a conception plucked out of the air. It is brought into some sort of theoretical existence, from nothing, by the shift of a notional hyphen—‘mock turtle-soup’ becomes ‘mock-turtle soup’. As an invention it very much recalls Carroll's reference to a thought ‘struck out from the “flint” of one's own mind by the “steel” of a friend's chance remark’ (Sylvie and Bruno, p. 255). Here the thought is solid enough for Tenniel to draw a picture of it. Carroll's transactional image defines the case rather neatly. Even if it is accepted that the ‘chance remark’ and ‘one's own mind’ are socially (or otherwise) determined, the unpredictability of the encounter allows for a randomness so extreme as to be effectively indistinguishable from ‘originality’.

Attempted dismemberment of Alice may be inviting in terms of the self-proclaimed fissility of the work, but it is likely to prove in practice a curiously self-defeating enterprise, itself trapped in reflexivity. Here is a children's book which children (or so it is repeatedly claimed) no longer read. Has it not therefore largely lost its intrinsic life? Why not leave it alone and forget it? What is sought from it? Why the manifest eagerness to ‘explain’ it? Might it be explained away? If this happened, would we miss it? What is ‘it’?

It should not be surprising that Carroll's artful circularities have the capacity to entangle those who seek to unravel them. But there is a specialized sense in which this particular work is calculated to deconstruct the deconstructers. The contemporary obsession with some of the issues concerned has its dubious aspect. An unhealthy flush tends to suffuse the face of late twentieth-century criticism when it gets a whiff of the possible sexual tensions of a bygone age. It must be doubted whether we can see such issues straight. How coolly can we assess the psycho-sexual stresses of the Victorian period from the vantage-point of an age of obesity, anorexia, body-building, body-piercing, silicone implants, AIDS and The Sunday Sport? Can we lodge our analytical scales and microscopes on firm ground? Might not Carroll be at least as likely to expose our prurience, our assumptions about the relationship between desire and art, as we to expose his?

The medium of the Alice books is peculiarly difficult to penetrate. In The White Knight, Alexander L. Taylor makes the brilliant comment that they recall the assumed madness of Hamlet or Edgar.¹¹ Of the two, Edgar offers the apter comparison, incidentally as recalling Edgar Cuthwellis, chiefly because his brand of ‘madness’ seems less explicable, more in excess of its apparent function, than does Hamlet's. His extravagant verbal arias in the third act of King Lear could be interpreted as verbal camouflage, an aspect of his disguise. But they might be uncontrolled, a kind of delirium, obliquely self-revelatory. The text offers no explanation. Who can confidently say what Edgar ‘means’ or where he is coming from? Much of his speech is, or might be, aleatory. So with Carroll's surrealistic creation.

Two essential kinds of material in Alice are particularly resistant to reductive analysis, since they involve plural and even self-contradictory effects. One is parody, an odd species of inter-textuality in that around what is written there hovers, by intention, the ghost of what has been altered. ‘The Aged, Aged Man’, for example, is coloured, however absurdly, by ‘Resolution and Independence’. Only the reader who misses the point can escape the associations. The effect is rather like that of whistling two tunes simultaneously.

Then there is the use of sound. Repeatedly, verses which are ostensibly absurd are given a curious charge of dignity or pathos by their musical quality. In some cases—as with ‘The Aged, Aged Man’—a known melody may be invoked; more often what is in question is a sustained pattern of euphony. Thus ‘Jabberwocky’ conveys hints of genuine portentousness, and ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ has an undertow of true melancholy. Should the prospective deconstructor seek, in such cases, separate sources for the discrepant effects, or rather an explanation for the capacity to combine them?

It must finally be observed that the main constituents of Alice—including idealized children, nonsense, pathos, pedantry, paradox, puzzles, comic verse, emotional intensity, violence, sentimentality—are all present in the large-scale work Sylvie and Bruno, which Carroll produced in the 1890s. It might have been assumed that a work sufficiently similar in general intention, and subject to the same ‘influences’, internal and external, would be roughly comparable in overall effect. In fact Sylvie and Bruno, by common consent, is a laborious work, often embarrassing and even painful to read. The various ingredients separate out. From the same defining circumstances Carroll has produced a very different result. The book doesn't ‘work’. An attempt to analyse why it fails to cohere, and why the Alice books do cohere, would by definition have to proceed from a tacit reinstatement of the autonomy of all three works. It would call for an analytical study in the traditional modes of the discipline of English Literature.

Notes

1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, in The Annotated Alice, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 190. Further references are given in the text by page number in this edition. For those who wish to pursue issues developed in this essay, Annotated Alice probably offers the best starting point. For more recent perspectives see Donald Rackin, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (New York: Twayne, 1991). It includes a full and helpful selected critical bibliography.

2. For example: Amis appears as (more or less) himself in his novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), while Nabokov's Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1960 in English) at one point physically takes himself to pieces, from the head downwards. In Muriel Spark's The Comforters (1957), the heroine, Caroline Rose, a writer and critic, comes to realize that she is herself a character in a novel—from which she struggles to break free. For further comment on Nabokov and related observations on Isak Dinesen see the final section of my ‘Facts and Fictions’ in Exploring Reality, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Michael Irwin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

3. Quoted in Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography (London: Constable, 1976; repr. 1982), p. 35.

4. See Annotated Alice, pp. 296-7, n. 4.

5. Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 280, 231.

6. Hudson, Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography, p. 212.

7. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, pp. 101-2.

8. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: Nonesuch Library, 1939), pp. 251-674 (p. 537). Further references are given in the text by page number in this edition.

9. See Annotated Alice, p. 206.

10. See Annotated Alice, p. 245.

11. Alexander L. Taylor, The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1952), p. 144.