Responses to \'Alice\': Nonsense Made of Nonense

Responses to Alice: Nonsense made of Nonsense Ramkrishna Bhattacharya I don’t know what made you choose this topic, ‘Delving into the Adult’s Concern of Children’s Literature’ preceded by ‘Songs of Innocence’ with an intriguing question mark. I presume that you had various adult responses to the Harry Potter novels in mind. Recently Ben Macintyre said: “Poor Harry Potter. He has survived dementors, goblins, werewolves and Lord Voldermort himself only to run into that most cunning and baffling of foes: the French intellectual.” (Anti-globalist Child of Seattle? The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, 18 July, 2004, reprinted from The Times, London). The hero of J. K. Rowling’s novels has been re-presented as a capitalist oppressor or a neoliberal apostle of Anglo-Saxon social brutalism. A philosophy professor on the contrary insisted that Harry is truly a creature of the left, opposed to free markets, supportive of the weak and oppressed, a drinker of ethically- produced coffee ( does he not have the same spectacles as Trotsky?). Some others have again accused Harry of being a prisoner of Thatcherism, and hence a proEstablishment stooge. He has been branded as a Nietzschean, or a Stoic, or a Nazi, or Jesus himself. A lawyer, Susan Hall, has gone to the trouble of analyzing the wizard legal system only to arrive at the conclusion that the Ministry of Magic contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights. All this reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton apprehended in 1932, the centenary of Lewis Carroll’s birth. “Poor, poor, little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others. Alice is now not only a school girl but a school mistress….There will be lots and lots of examination papers with questions like: (1) What do you know of the following; mimsy, gimble, haddocks’ eyes, treacle-wells, beautiful soup? (2) Record all the moves in the chess game in Through the Looking-Glass, and give diagram. (3) Outline the practical policy of the White Knight for dealing with the social problem of green whiskers. (4) Distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” (qtd. Martin Gardner, Introduction, The Annotated Alice, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 7). Sukumar Ray has fared no better in the hands of Bengali intellectuals. Some of them have found the whole universe of quantum mechanics, general theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle/Principle of indeterminacy, Lorentz-Fitzgerald’s transformation/contraction, and what not in Ha ya ba ra la (Gauriprasad Ghosh, Sisuswapnaloke natun bijnaner chhaya, in Ha ya ba ra la, ed. Siddhartha Ghosh, Subarnarekha, 1407 BS (2000), pp. 29-51, reprinted from Prastutiparba, Sukumar Ray Special Number, October 1982). Why is it that a piece of rich nonsense is not accepted by some adult readers as what it is, a piece of rich nonsense? Why is it that every piece of nonsense is taken as an allegory and people having nothing better to do indulge in interpreting rich nonsense by producing poor nonsense? As you can see, I find nothing worthwhile in adult’s concerns of children’s literature. Such concerns, I believe, are of no value at all. Moreover, they tend to blur the area of children’s literature as such. What is an allegory? I could say, following the definition given in a recent handbook of rhetoric, that it is “an extended or continued metaphor” (P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 396) but it will mean little or nothing to most of you. I prefer to follow Quintilian (a first-century Roman expert on rhetoric) who explained allegory as a figure of speech expressing one thing in words and another in meaning. (David Herman and others (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 11). An allegory contains two stories, one explicitly said, the other implicitly suggested. Do the two Alice tales contain anything of that sort? Some people think they do. Which is why attempts are made to bring out the implicit suggestions from Humpty-Dumpty’s proud bearings to teach the moral: Pride goeth before a fall. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are not what they are but representatives of two political parties, which in spite of their separate existence are not only look-alike but also mean-alike. And so on and so forth. Then there are the Freudians who find sexual nuances in every word and action, although Freud is said to have admitted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Can the Freudians be right, even when they forget this simple truth? ‘Unconscious’ is a hold-all term which can be resorted to for serving any purpose. Allegory is a conscious piece of art. The author seeks to convey more than meets the eye. There are enough hints in the tale to make it clear that the tale itself is relatively unimportant: it is the tale behind the tale that really matters. If people ‘discover’ allegory when such an intention has never been there on the part of the author, they go beyond the text and manipulate it to show their own ingenuity. When Bertrand Russell in The ABC of Relativity referred to four lines from the White Knight’s song in Through the Looking-Glass in relation to the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis, he was simply trying to give a literary parallel, nothing more. It is interesting to observe that Arthur Stanley Eddington quoted the same four lines with a different significance: nature has the habit to conceal from us her basic

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structural plan (Gardner, 311-12). There was no such claim that Carroll had anticipated the existence of the superluminal particle, Taschyom, in the relativistic space travel of Udho and Budho in Ha ya ba ra la, as Ghosh (47) asserts. Allegoresis (allegorical interpretation), the interpretive counterpart of allegory, ought to be viewed with distrust. Even Chesterton, otherwise a level-headed critic, sometimes fell victim to what may be called ‘allegorrhoea’ (to rhyme with diarrhoea). “Every great literature,” he once declared in an essay purporting to be a defence of nonsense, “has always been allegorical – allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.” (Defence of Nonsense, Stories, Essays, & Poems. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935, 126). It is a dangerous statement, extending as it does the area of allegory to cover all great works. It shows how strong the tendency is to treat any work as an allegory. But this can’t simply be true. Books like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are meant to be funny, not allegorical. Doubtless there are elements of the satiric in both of them, as there is satire on the judicial system in Ha ya ba ra la. An adult reader cannot fail to notice such elements in children’s literature, but the true target reader, a child or an adolescent, does not and cannot regard them so. It is worth remembering that apart from Alice in Wonderland Carroll also wrote The Nursery “Alice” in 1889. This was meant for children of the age group 0 to 5. One may venture to say that the fully coloured illustrations constitute the main attraction of this book. Carroll rewrote the whole piece, omitting much of the original text, addressing his very young readers off and on, guiding them through the pictures and often offering his own comments. As expected The Nursery “Alice” is much shorter, printed in larger font size and many of the clever word-plays are taken out. Still there are the two chapters on the Cheshire-Cat and the Mad Tea Party. The Grin without any Cat may still suggest an allegory of the soul independent of the body and the appearance of the Mad Hatter may very well remind the adult reader of Bertrand Russell. But the only objection is that a child does not know what the soul is (even adults are not in a better position) nor would he/she recognize Russell (unless the child belonged to the Russells or was their neighbour). Incidentally, Norbert Wiener, the mathematical wizard, in his autobiography Ex-Prodigy described Russell in this way: “It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter…the caricature of Tenniel (sc. Sir John, illustrator of the Alice books) almost argues an anticipation on the part of the artist.” (Gardner, 94).The word ‘almost’ is significant. The similarity between Tenniel’s representation of the Mad Hatter and Russell is surely striking but it was not meant to be so. The similarity is purely accidental. Whatever resemblance there may be between some passages in the Alice books and the discoveries in modern physics should not be over-emphasized. If a teacher utilizes these passages in the classroom to explain the intricacies of relativity or some such topic he/she is welcome to do so. Such touches of humour would enliven the atmosphere in the classroom. Nevertheless, it should be clearly understood that such resemblances are purely accidental and whatever might have been in Carroll’s mind, he had no intention to communicate those complex ideas to his young readers through his tales. Overinterpretation does violence to the text and allegorizing is an enemy of fun. I would urge you to remember Umberto Eco’s delightful works, Limits of Interpretation (1990) and Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), which teach the same lesson. Nonsense fiction as a genre was created by Lewis Carroll. There is no classical or medieval precedent of it. We should not forget that Victorian England produced not only Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, but also, besides Lear and Carroll, such authors as Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula .They all created new genres that cannot be treated as allegories. Secondly, purely subjective approaches, such as treating works of art a-historically, seeking to find contemporary implications in older works, etc, are not to be encouraged. Similarly, “politically correct” viewpoints, suspicion of male chauvinism, etc. are hindrances to the understanding and appreciation of all works of art, including children’s literature. Let me conclude with what R. P. Winnington-Ingram, a classical scholar, wrote in the preface to his Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. x-xi): Toward more fashionable lines of interpretation I have no hostility in principle, but merely a certain reserve (due partly to ignorance) and a strong conviction that the possibilities of a more conventional approach are by no means exhausted; that it is still possible to say helpful things about society without being a Marxist, about sex without being a Freudian, and about structure without being a ‘structuralist’. Indeed the more one is concerned with structure in the sense of form, the further ‘structures’ seem to retreat into their subliminal fastnesses. For structure is something imposed by the artist, deliberately, upon his material; and the greater the rational

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control, the more sense it makes to ask what the artist ‘meant’; and, with a poet and dramatist, patiently to study his text in the hope of discovering what he ‘meant’.

Winnington-Ingram positively refused to grant ‘polysemic’ interpretation in case of the Greek tragedians. I would say the same of the authors of children’s literature. Use their works as illustrations of anything you like (as Russell and Eddington did) but please don’t try to interpret them by going beyond their well-defined domain. Alice and such like works exemplify a modern genre: nonsense. They are consciously written with a view to evoking a definite effect. The old genre, dream vision or dream narrative, quite common in medieval European literature, is here employed, at first to create an unreal world and at last to dismiss it as a mere dream, as found both in Alice and Ha ya ba ra la. ‘Interpreting’ them in every conceivable and inconceivable way is to betray the trust that authors expect from the readers. POSTSCRIPT

Why mad as a hatter? Martin Gardner does not provide any annotation, yet it is not self-explanatory, as in the case of sober as a judge, drunk as a lord, or even jolly as a shoe brush. The answer is that Roger Crabs, hatter at Chesham in the mid-seventeenth century, following the advice of Jesus, sold all he had (which was not much) and gave it to the poor. “Naturally all good Christians thought him mad.” (Christopher Hill, The Mad Hatter, Puritanism and Revolution, London: Panther Books, 1968, p. 303).