great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come today. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry! '). He shows the frustration of intimacy ('She looked back, once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse in the teapot.') and conveys the sense of living on the verge of hysteria ('His voice rose to a perfect scream'; ''I can't stand this any longer! '). He gets at the feeling of existing in a dream or game whose form is constantly changing. He expresses a typical ambivalence toward authority, a rage for chaos (the witty and entertaining 'mad teaparty' in Wonderland and Looking-Glass's wild «coronation» banquet) along with a desire to find and keep order and meaning without losing a sense of humor (the intricate chess-game structure of Looking-Glass). He imagines the relativity of being (sudden size changes in Wonderland), the problems of identity ('Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else'), and of split, diced personality (e.g., Wonderlands 'This curious child was fond of pretending to be two people' and the Carrollian self-portraits in the Gnat, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight -600- in Looking-Glass). He renders for us the fictional nature of reality as it is registered in the inevitably distorting mirrors of our perception ('Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'). He shows us our necessarily equivocal fate as word-centered creatures who experience language both subjectively and objectively. (Alice's comment on the nonsense poem 'The Jabberwocky,''Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-only I don't know exactly what they are!' describes his sense of language perfectly, provided that we stress «exactly» and keep in mind the bizarre, utilitarian richness of those 'ideas.')
Carroll is important as a writer who makes fun of what Jacqueline Rose calls 'the whole ethos of language as always reliable or true.' As the child knows and shows, language is anything but a neutral, transparent medium that simply reflects an existing reality. Linguistic power creates a joyous surge of identity and also a knowledge of otherness, as Alice learns in Looking-Glass when she finds herself alienated from the faun once they pass out of the 'wood of no names' and back into the realm of human language. Carroll stresses throughout both the delight and the farce of misunderstanding that are inherent in words and dialogue. The texts render what children feel about language as they struggle to master it: that it is slippery, confusing, hard, rule-ridden, and frustrating, but also creative, pleasurable, and full of play. Language proves our social being and determines our fate, but, as a child learns, it is also the means for defining and expressing our desires, our individuality, our confusions, our subjective freedom, and our bonds. We live by linguistic fictions. In Carroll, many of the characters act out verbal structures, for instance, Humpty Dumpty, the Tweedles, and even Alice, whose movements in Looking-Glass exactly conform to the predictive words of the Red Queen at the beginning.
Carroll helped to lead in making language a great subject for thought and comedy and literature, but for him it is nothing to be idealized. It can never be a precise communication system because it is inseparable from its users. From the first in Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll tells us that Alice moves in a dream world composed of words that exist independently of personal will. When the White King exclaims of his pencil, 'It writes all manner of things that I don't intend,' he is talking about the unmanageable nature of language, and he previews its role in the book, and in twentieth-century intellectual history. And when «Jabberwocky» appears to Alice, we know that we are in a fictional world of sense, absurdity, and wordplay all at once, like a child trying to
The verse foreshadows the whole book. The extreme tensions in the poem-between the unconventional use of language (invented vocabulary) and the conventional (normal syntax, grammar, rhythm, and rhyme), between referential significance and self-contained nonsense-define and energize Carroll. «Jabberwocky» puts the focus on the very fact of language itself, whose very existence-as children see and feel-is just as marvelous, just as fantastic, as any of the meanings it conveys.
Even as the figure of the child in the last two centuries has called forth interpretation, assertions of authority, and projection, so has Carroll's fiction. Lewis Carroll's work is particularly susceptible to the regressive tendencies of critics and writers who find in it images, words, meanings, and emotions that liberate, clarify, articulate, and give play to their own ideas, longings, and obsessions. Alice defines her readers as their dreams and childhoods do.
Read what has been written about Carroll and you find a wonderland of interpretation. It has been argued, for example, that Queen Victoria wrote the Alice books, that Alice is a phallus, that she is an imperialist, that she is an existential heroine, a killjoy, a sex-tease, or a symbol for what every human being should try to be like in the face of an outrageous universe; it has been claimed that her pool of tears represents the amniotic fluid, that the Caucus race parodies Darwin, that it sports with Victorian theories about the Caucasian race, that the Alice books may contain a secret history of the Oxford movement, that they allegorize Jewish history, that the 'Pig and Pepper' chapter is a description of toilet training, that the White Queen stands for John Henry Newman and the Tweedles for Bishop Berkeley; that these tales are dangerous for children, that they are literally nonsense and do not refer to the real world; that Carroll was a latent homosexual, an atheist, a schizophrenic, a pedophile, a faithful Christian, a fine man. Some of this criticism is brilliant, some is lunatic, some is both by turns, some is hilarious, much of it is fascinating and insightful, nearly all of it is entertaining, and most of it is offered with the dogmatic surety of Humpty Dumpty, who says, 'I can explain all the poems that ever were -602- invented-and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.' My purpose here is not to patronize other commentators but to show that something in the nature of the writing itself-some vacuum of indeterminacy-sucks in a wide variety of reaction and engagement. Children are subject to authority, but Carroll puts authority in doubt and questions it. The Alice fiction deals with the crisis of authority in modern life, and readers are drawn to solve it. People project their wishes and beliefs and concerns onto these fictions as they lay them upon children. Like the parables of the Bible, like dreams, like depicted fantasies, Carroll stimulates a hermeneutics of subjective ingenuity and a multiplicity of views. These malleable texts resist closure of meaning; they remain open-ended and dialogical.
Of course, I am giving my own interpretation of Carroll, and obviously it stresses his use of a problematic dream-child in an antiauthoritarian, carnivalesque literary comedy and centers on the way that child opens up the play of language, the unconscious mind, and floating, contradictory desires. The world he creates is both referential and nonreferential, both like the world we live in and a different, fantasy world of nonsense. When the Mock Turtle tells Alice that in school he learned 'Reeling and Writhing' and the different branches of arithmetic, 'Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,' the text offers both an example of nonsensical, creative wordplay that breaks free of «reality» and a satire on what real children actually do learn in real schools. Through the child, Carroll gets across his sense of a fantastic, alternative world of being, a sense of rebellious knowledge of actuality, a sense of humor (i.e., putting life in a play-frame), and a sense of the importance and imprecision of language. The comic fantasy of chapters like 'The Mock Turtle's Story,' 'A Mad Tea-Party,' and 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee' have the improvisation, the inventive drive, the Dionysian upswing of the best twentieth-century comic ensembles, such as the Marx Brothers and Monty Pythons Flying Circus. This whirling dialogue of whimsy, wisecracks, puns, nonsense talk, and verse moves to overthrow the drabness of routine and predictability.
In 'The Emperor's New Clothes,' a child exposes the ruler's nakedness by cutting through lies and illusions to give people the perspective they need for seeing their own gullibility and the ruses of power. That's how Carroll works. He makes the child his protagonist, her dreams his narrative; and he pretends that children are his only audience so that he can rid himself and others of inhibitions and repressions. Through the -603- child, he strips away both personal and social conventions and prejudices (e.g., you must not think or talk disrespectfully of parents, royalty, or «sacred» things; life should make sense; we all speak the same language; personalities are coherent; poetry is elevated; a well-brought-up little girl does not harbor murderous thoughts; the world of childhood is simple); he holds them up to ridicule and sets loose possibilities for imagining the unthinkable (e.g., original words and fantastic physical beings, the pleasure of the obliteration of others, the animation of the inanimate, the stupidity of mothers and fathers; the joys of madness). In the reversed looking-glass of his art, Carroll uses Alice to show up the silly childishness-in its pejorative sense-and the arbitrary limits of the so-called adult world. He proves in the Alice books that even in the most outwardly conventional and time-serving of adults
