Kissing Wicked Things: Alice in Reverse

This is the third response to the Alice books I have written for class. In the previous two, I concentrated on ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, something I always do when I turn to these books either for teaching or for writing about. Shocking as it may be, I do not change my mind about the book year after year after year (I first published on Alice in 1977). But also I have never come to grips with my reaction to THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. This is perhaps strange since I recall clearly one of my first experiences with the book: a reading of the White Knight passage by one of my instructors in my fourth year of undergraduate studies. The course was Romantic Poetry and I have no idea why the professor read this passage without warning one day, although I suppose he made some connection with Wordsworth whose "Resolution and Independence" Carroll parodies in the White Knight's poem, "The Aged Aged Man." The reading was very funny. But nothing of what I have said has any real relevance to this book or to my response to it. What might have relevance is the fact that the instructor who read this passage had the worst speech impediment I have encountered. He had an extreme stutter, so much so that most of our classes with him gave rise to embarrassment both on his part and on the students'. Yet he read through this long episode without so much as a hesitation; he read quite brilliantly. In fact, this was the only time in the entire class that he either spoke or read without stuttering. Perhaps the irony that Lewis Carroll himself was a stutterer was not lost on our instructor, nor the conventional belief that Carroll thought of himself as the White Knight. With this in mind, I might note that the White Knight is one of the few characters (the gnat is the only other one who comes to mind) who elicits sympathy. The incident contains an emotional edge not found in ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.

In any case, how do I explain what happened? Frankly, I can't. I can, however, say that this passage had obviously captured our instructor's imagination. I say "captured" because he quite literally lost himself inside Carroll's text. Is it too much to say that our instructor saw himself as the White Knight? The White Knight's stutter is his inability to ride. Here is a Knight whose function in life includes riding, and he can't ride worth a tiddle. Our instructor's function in life included speaking in public, and he did this with great difficulty, falling from his linguistic seat often. I might also add that Carroll's book is so evidently about language and mastery of language. Who is the master, asks Humpty Dumpty, the speaker or the language the speaker uses? Now Humpty's point has to do with the control of meaning, but in the context of stuttering we might also see the question about mastery as applicable to a stutterer. How can someone who stutters get through such tongue twisters as "Twas brillig and the slithy toves," or "I'll tell thee everything I can"? The answer is--with ease because the book releases the speaker from himself or herself.

Well, this is not a very adequate answer. But I want to keep with the looking-glass theme: reversal. Everything in the looking-glass world is backwards or reversed. Perhaps if we enter this world with a stutter, we find that once we are there the stutter is gone. That's what our instructor found. I like this idea. I like the notion that the text releases us from ourselves and at the same time gives us our real selves. I mean surely the man with the stutter knew that his real self could articulate eloquently, and here in the pages of this book he found that this was true. Reading this passage from THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, our instructor became his own invention, or to put it another way, he invented himself. Or to put it yet another way, he is like the flowers Alice meets early in the book: he can talk when there is anyone worth talking to, or rather when he has anything worth reading out loud.

The White Knight is, after all, an inventor. He fits that line of distinguished inventors that has culminated most recently, perhaps, in the BACK TO THE FUTURE films or the HONEY, I SHRUNK or BLEW UP THE KIDS films. True, the White Knight is not a scientist but he is an intrepid inventor whose inventions protect his horse from sharks and mice, and ensure a person's hair will not fall out. He also invents a discourse, one in which words loosen and begin to mean what he wants them to mean. For example, he says the wind is as strong as soup, and when he speaks of himself stuck inside a sugar-loaf hat, he says he was "fast" as lightning. And of course he sings the beautiful song about the aged aged man a-sitting on a gate.

Alice does not kiss the White Knight goodbye; she shakes his hand. And he is not a wicked thing; he is a dotty thing. But this is what I like. The White Knight, as far as I'm concerned, is little different from the black kitten who unravels the ball of worsted at the beginning of the book. Alice calls the kitten a "wicked, wicked little thing" and then kisses it. In other words, Alice too controls language, makes words mean what she wants them to mean. Imagine kissing wicked things! If we allow words independence, then "wicked" denotes something unpleasant or at least morally reprehensible. In this world we are not encouraged to reward the wicked with a kiss. Alice is, in effect, inside her fictional world before she passes through the looking-glass.

Of course, this reversal effect is a fiction. Nothing is, in fact, reversed. The story moves resolutely forward, and the experiences Alice has within her fictional (or her dream) world are perfectly straight forward within that world. Living backwards entails accepting reversal as its opposite. This entrance into a world with its own rules is what releases us from the strictures and rules of our waking, non literary, existence. When we don't ask questions and simply accept the topsy-turvy world we are free to read without stuttering. Perhaps the only place where the looking-glass world and the real world we live in connect is in the White Queen's remark that the rule is "jam tomorrow and jam yesterday--but never jam today." Now this sounds less like the looking-glass world than the world we inhabit. Hope deferred; rewards deferred; pleasure deferred: this is the way of the world. In looking-glass land deferral is not really the order of the day. If Alice desires to be Queen, she will be queen. Important here is whether this desire, once satisfied, will deliver the pleasure Alice anticipates, and the answer here is, of course, no.

To become Queen is to grow up, and to grow up is to leave the zany life of the looking-glass creatures behind. I don't know why I always avoid confronting this book, but maybe those cold winds and that falling snow always just outside the comforting house with its looking-glass world discomfits me. Also I don't play chess (I did play a little when I was a boy, but I hated the game, its rules and squares, and logic, and strategy, and precision), and the game structures this story. When I say structure, I want to have the force here of a determining structure. The spontaneity of Wonderland seems to me more controlled in this book. Alice's moves are too carefully pre-planned; the dream dissolves are a lie. This is no dream, but a foreordained journey from a state of innocent invention to mature awareness that talking to people is impossible when they always say the same thing.