Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Lewis Carroll
© Eric Walker
Few Words About Lewis Carroll
Presumably everyone in the English-speaking world knows of Alice in Wonderland and
thus of Lewis Carroll. But if you have never read the books themselves, or have
not been back to them for a long time, these few notes may be useful.
With Carroll, there is a massive temptation to get sidetracked discussing the
man rather than the works--for he was a thoroughly interesting person--but that
is not to our purpose here, nor is a recounting of how the stories came to be (a
familiar tale anyway), interesting as that too is. So I will stick to the books
and, as always, will write as if you were not familiar with them.
The Alice Books
Alice is so
well-known an image that it is easy to forget that she is given to us in two
quite distinct books, not a single "Wonderland" book. The original, the one that
established her and Carroll's fame, was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland;
the successor, like and yet very unlike, was Through the Looking Glass and
what Alice found there.
A great number of the best-liked and best-remembered "Alice" images, which too
many people vaguely associate with Wonderland, are actually from Looking-Glass
Land: Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, The Walrus and the Carpenter,
plus the White Knight, the Red Queen and all the chess-piece characters.
Perhaps the single most important thing to convey about such well-established
works is that there is a great deal more in them than what they are too commonly
taken for, which is sheer delightful nonsense. There is no harm, and often great
good, in sheer delightful nonsense, as
L. Frank Baum's Oz books demonstrate in excelsis; but neither
is there harm, and often even greater good, in apparent nonsense that turns out
to have a wonderfully clever sense to it after all.
Much of the cleverness of the Alice books is now invisible, owing mainly to two
causes: what we now call "in" jokes--for many of the references you need to be
English, for a fair part of those you specifically need to be from Oxford, and
for even a good part of those you need to have been in Carroll's immediate
circle of friends--and the passage of time, in that so much has changed since
Carroll's day that what were once obvious, commonplace references (not just
words and phrases but poems and even political affairs) are now obscure or
simply meaningless. There is no remedy for those problems save knowledge gleaned
from relevant investigation, which is why I so strenuously recommend Martin
Gardner's edition of the two books, published as The Annotated Alice, in
which much that would otherwise be obscure is made clear.
Beyond that which Carroll deliberately put into the tales there is what he may
have put in unknowingly. There seems an unscratchable itch in some brains to not
leave well enough alone; we cannot read and enjoy Alice, we must have a
psychoanalytic explanation of the meaning or meanings of all the unusual
things--which is virtually everything--that Alice finds in the strange worlds
she visits. Those who fancy that such stuff is interesting, or in fact anything
but swill, are welcome to their opinion, which is obviously not mine.
It helps to recall that Carroll was immensely fond of logic and of witty logical
problems. Much of the strange passages in Alice have beneath them a bedrock of
logic. Consider, as but one example, this passage from Through the Looking
Glass, as Alice is shown the sleeping Red King (a chess figure) by
Tweedledee (of Tweedledum and Tweedledee--you see how much of Carroll is become
a part of the heritage of all English speakers?):
"He's
dreaming now," 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 realer 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.
Of that
passage--which (as Gardner points out) parallels the famous, or notorious,
position of Bishop Berkeley on reality and Sam'l Johnson's equally famous or
notorious rejoinder--Bertrand Russell remarked "A very instructive discussion
from a philosophical point of view, but if it were not put so humorously, we
should find it too painful."
Then there is the passage in which the White Knight proposes to comfort Alice by
singing her a song:
"Is it very
long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that
hears me sing it--either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else--"
"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddock's
Eyes'."
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel
interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's
what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'."
"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called?'" Alice corrected
herself.
"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and
Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely
bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting on a
Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
Now that is
formal logic served up with an apple in its mouth! Those familiar with
programming computers in higher-level languages will see there a clear
delineation of the difference between a datum, the symbolic name of that datum,
the address at which the datum is stored, and the symbolic name of that address.
Philosophers will see "meta-languages" and the self-referential problems being
side-stepped with them, an effort going back to the classical Greeks. The whole
thing looks to the casual reader a total nonsense, but it's not: the song is
A-sitting on a Gate; the song is called 'Ways and Means', but what it
is called is not what its name is (as, for example, the once-popular song named
"In Other Words" is usually called "Fly Me to the Moon"); the proper name
of the song is 'The Aged Aged Man'; but--and here we go beyond
commonplace usage but not at all beyond logic--the name of the song has
its own nickname, 'Haddock's Eyes'. Confused? Carroll wasn't.
Both the books share this quality: they are, both literally and figuratively,
dream-like. Few have captured the essence of dreaming as most people really
experience it--a thing very different from the usual literary presentations of
it as relatively lifelike--so well as Carroll. Things and situations drift and
transmute with little or no logic save that peculiar logic of the subconscious,
which is (and modern neurology seems to support this on a scientific basis) more
or less playing random-association games. That is true of both books, but it is
markedly truer of the second (which, as you may have gathered from the
references to chess pieces, is actually laid out, in concept and exactly in
narrative, as a more or less playable chess game). Look, for instance, at this:
"Then I hope
your finger is better now?" Alice said very politely, as she crossed the
little brook after the Queen.
"Oh, much better!" cried the Queen, her voice rising into a squeak as she went
on. "Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!" The last word ended in
a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.
She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in
wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn't make out what had
happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really--was it really a sheep
that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub as she would, she could
make nothing more of it: she was in a little dark shop, leaning with her
elbows on the counter, and opposite to her was an old Sheep, sitting in an
arm-chair, knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through
a great pair of spectacles.
It is regrettable
that length prohibits full presentation of the rest of that remarkable scene, in
which Alice sees things on the shop shelves but which she cannot make out when
she tries to look closely, and in which eventually the shop turns into a rowboat
with Alice and the Sheep in it. But that is the very stuff of dreams, and
Carroll has caught it as few before or since.
Both tales are, we are led to believe, dreams from which Alice eventually wakes;
but the second tale, the more "constructed" one--consider its design as a
playable chess game--has more overt references, some of which I have illustrated
above, to the philosophical questions of dream and reality, of epistemology
generally, and is more thought-provoking for adults. The first book, the
original Wonderland book, strikes me as more a series of ideas that
popped into Carroll's head (which, however, was richly furnished with raw
materials) as he told it, a sort of "stream of consciousness" tale; the second
book, the Looking-Glass book, is also dreamlike, but the transitions more
deliberate and thought-out. The two slightly differ in flavor but are equally
delightful.
Carroll was also extravagantly given to puns and similar word-play, and is
often, beneath a calm and sober narrative, being uproariously funny. Here is yet
another famed scene (Carroll is in this respect like Shakespeare: the works
appear to be made entirely of famous quotations stitched together), occurring
right after Humpty Dumpty has taken his cosmically required fall--Alice and the
White King are speaking:
"I've sent
them all!" the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. "Did you
happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?"
"Yes, I did," said Alice: "several thousand, I should think."
"Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number," the King said,
referring to his book. "I couldn't send them all the horses, you know, because
two of them are wanted in the game [the steeds for the White Knights]. And I
haven't sent the two Messengers, either. They're gone to the town. Just look
along the road and tell me if you can see either of them."
"I see nobody on the road," said Alice.
"I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be
able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to
see real people, by this light!"
All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road,
shading her eyes with one hand. "I see somebody now!" she exclaimed at last.
"But he's coming very slowly--and what curious attitudes he goes into!" (For
the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came
along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)
"Not at all," said the King. "He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger--and those are
Anglo-Saxon attitudes."
(Better yet: when
able readers manage to recover sufficiently to pick themselves off the floor and
recover their breath and wipe enough of the tears from their eyes to carry on,
we discover that the two messengers bear the quite Anglo-Saxon names Haigha and
Hatta, which--when pronounced correctly, Haigha being "hayor"--make us aware
that they are our old friends from the last book, the March Hare and the Mad
Hatter, transmuted.)
Well, look--if this hasn't been enough to send you running for copies of those
books, nothing will be. End of thesis.
