Alice in the Margins

The first school play I took part in was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice was played by a small boy who went on in adulthood to be a judge: evidence if you like for the determinism of early experience, for Alice is the only character, at the climax of the story, to stick up for due pro cess in the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Like most children she has sharply twitching antennae when it comes to injustice or unfairness, both of which she meets on every side. In his Annotated Alice, the editor Martin Gardner draws parallels with Kafka, and there is much in that. Neither author depicts a world with out rules: it is just that the rules are incomprehensible.

To look into The Annotated Alice and its sequel The Annotated Snark is quite an addictive experience. You soon forget any business at hand and become absorbed not just in Carroll’s beguiling texts but in Gardner’s heroic efforts to pin them down: the violent confusions of Wonderland, the inverted landscape of the Looking-Glass, the Snark hunt’s choppy seas. There is much additional information too. Would you like to read the French translation of ‘Jabberwocky’ (‘Il brilgue: les töves lubricilleux . . .’) or the German one (‘Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven . . .’)? Look no further. Or the missing ‘wasp in a wig’ episode, which Carroll left out on the insistence of his illustrator John Tenniel (‘I can’t see my way to a picture’)? There it is, in an appendix. Gardner’s copious marginal notes to Alice first appeared in 1960 and landed Gardner with a huge postbag of corrections and new suggestions, resulting three decades later in his More Annotated Alice (1990) and, after another decade, in a combined ‘definitive’ volume (2000). This incorporates much of his correspondents’ input, all duly acknowledged. In both stories Alice must repeatedly negotiate between sense and nonsense, except that there really is no negotiation. She is in a fight in which sense is pummelled, shaken, dissected, distorted and scrutinized from every point of view. In literary terms, the products of this are parody, satire, wordplay, chop logic, jokes and puns, all worrying at Victorian culture, whether in the nursery or an Oxford college’s Senior Common Room. One of Gardner’s strengths is in efficiently satisfying the reader’s passing curiosity. What is a treacle well? Why are hatters mad? What does an Irish person mean by ‘digging for apples’? But he was, among other things, a semi-professional puzzler and conjuror, and he thought carefully through the conceptual obscurities, puzzles and dilemmas Alice comes up against. Which way should she go, she asks the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland. ‘That depends very much on where you want to get to,’ the cat answers, whereupon Gardner points to the structural characteristics of scientific method which, unlike ethics, ‘cannot tell us where to go but, once the decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there’. But Alice’s trouble is that, while there is nowhere in particular she wants to go, she does want to go somewhere, and there is no direct route from nowhere to somewhere. The nowhere of Wonderland is underground, a place of darkness and uncertainty into which the dead go (there are many references to death in the book), but it is also a surreal place where ‘normal’ social and legal conventions are twisted or melted out of shape, like one of Salvador Dalí’s watches. ‘We are all mad here,’ says the Cheshire Cat. There is a significant conceptual difference between the crazy somewhere/nowhere of Wonderland and the more precise topos of the Looking-Glass. The latter is a chessboard-battlefield, whose forces stand as mirrored reflections opposite each other, and where logic is not mauled but often simply turned on its head in paradoxes and inversions, in a kind of surrealism more in the style of René Magritte than Dalí. Magritte too loved to play around with the world within the mirror. The Magrittean parallel, like the Kafka one, is anachronistic, but if you place the donnish Humpty Dumpty’s discourse on language besides Magritte’s painting of a pipe, entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe, it is practically irresistible. ‘When I use a word,’ says Humpty, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.’ As a clergyman Carroll was well aware of Nominalism, whereby abstractions (‘universals’) like Good and Evil were seen by certain medieval theologians as labels rather than real things (which actually are things and, furthermore, real). The question might then arise, to what extent are words a matter of individual choice without universal meaning, as Humpty argues? Or do the demands of human discourse require us to give them meaning, not least the big abstract words such as ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’? Or for that matter ‘logic’? Humpty Dumpty is a linguistic dictator rather than an anarchist. He insists that words must be kept on a tight leash in case they run out of control. This is glossed by Gardner with a wonderful quote from the philosopher Roger W. Holmes: ‘in one sense, words are our masters, or communication would be impossible; in another we are the masters, or there could be no poetry’. ‘Jabberwocky’, a poem containing rather more meaning than at first appears, occupies Gardner’s longest string of side-notes. His lexical analysis identifies Carroll’s own coinages – chortle and galumph, but not snickersnee or whiffle – but cannot tell what sort of poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is or where it comes from. Elsewhere he does success fully cite the origins of the verse lampoons. We learn for example of the Philadelphia businessman David Bates whose ‘Speak Gently’ was written for recitation by dutiful Victorian children to their parents at tea-time:

Speak gently to the little child Its love be sure to gain; Teach it in accents soft and mild. It may not long remain.

Alice in Wonderland’s Duchess gives Carroll’s sharp rebuttal to Bates’s sentiment.

Speak roughly to your little boy And beat him when he sneezes. He only does it to annoy Because he knows it teases.

This cheerful cruelty is given added piquancy when we know Carroll’s statement that ‘I like all children, except boys.’ Gardner treats the fights, beatings, imprisonments and beheadings that recur throughout the Alice books with notable tolerance: ‘the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least,’ he writes, although he goes on, with a smile (or perhaps a chortle), to say that Carroll’s books ‘should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis’. Indeed Carroll could take a very alarming view of his more extreme characters. In the case of the Queen of Hearts, he wrote, ‘I pictured to myself a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury.’ Gardner’s opinions, acute as they sometimes are, occasionally betray his prejudices. His jibe about psychoanalysis is characteristic of his whole attitude to Freudians and Jungians, or any other sub- species of Carrollean scholar digging for unconscious or symbolic meanings. He takes as an example the scene where Alice gets hold of the White King’s pencil as he writes, and writes with it for him. ‘In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations. Whether Carroll’s unconscious had any of them in mind is an altogether dubious matter.’ But Gardner, who cut his teeth as a writer exposing charlatan scientists, does not himself consistently avoid speculation and pseudoscience. In one note about the White Knight, the kind old codger in Through the Looking-Glass whose inept horsemanship touches Alice’s heart, he wonders if the Knight may be ‘a caricature of Carroll, perhaps Carroll’s vision of himself as a lonely, unloved old man’. In other words, since Carroll at this time wasn’t old, he was the victim of his own unconsciously troubled psyche which made him feel ill-fitted for conventional society. Gardner at this juncture is rather hoist by his own petard. After the cheerful but amoral violence she witnesses at the house of the Duchess, Alice goes on to face further ethical problems. In Looking-Glass, having listened to Tweedledum’s recital of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, she tries to decide which of the two characters she prefers, and plumps for the Carpenter because, as she says, he hadn’t eaten quite so many oysters. ‘But he ate as many as he could get,’ Tweedledum points out. Gardner’s gloss is that ‘Alice is puzzled because she faces the traditional ethical dilemma of having to choose between judging a person in terms of acts or intentions.’ Another philosophical issue arises almost immediately, when Tweedledum suggests that Alice’s existence may be no more than a figment of the sleeping Red King’s dream and ‘if that there king were to wake you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle’. Gardner’s note refers us to the idealism of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, by which material objects, including ourselves, are only ‘sorts of things in the mind of God’. Gardner thinks that Berkeley’s ideas sorely troubled Carroll, but I wonder if, contrariwise, he was rather attracted to them. Both Alice books (as well as Carroll’s almost forgotten novel Sylvie and Bruno) are dream stories exploring the unstable border between dream and reality. Again, in The Hunting of the Snark, the troubled dream of the barrister occupies almost a whole ‘fit’. The Snark was written in 1874, three years after Through the Looking-Glass. It is a nonsense ballad of 130 four-line stanzas regularly and wonderfully rhymed, and arranged into six ‘fits’. It tells of a ship borne expedition to find a dubious shape-shifting creature which is called a Snark but which might, in fact, turn out to be the far more terrifying Boojum. The ten expedition members are a crew of misfits and dimwits, though treated by Carroll with great sympathy. In his edition of The Snark Gardner’s grasp of the text’s philosophical underpinnings is less sure than it is with Alice. The introduction cites several possible ways to read the poem, but his favourite, with out any detectable irony, is that it is ‘a poem over which an unstable, sensitive soul might very well go mad . . . a poem about being and non-being, a poem of existential agony’. He also links it, implausibly, to another neurosis of the 1950s, fear of the atom bomb. Amidst all this exegesis, possibly but not apparently tongue-in-cheek, Gardner seems blind to the obvious: that the Snark is a satire on science and, in particular, on scientific expeditions such as Franklin’s fatal Arctic voyage or Darwin’s explorations aboard the Beagle. When himself asked for the Snark’s general meaning, Carroll would shy away. Gardner might profit ably have done the same for he is at his persuasive best, here and with Alice, when he gets down to the detail. The poet A. E. Housman, who himself produced meticulous editions of obscure texts – Latin ones in his case – warned that all editors should tread carefully, in case they ‘murder to explain’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Robin Blake 2025