Alice Dares to Know

There was some discussion in Tuesday’s class about Alice as a character. Is she a sweet girl? Is she arrogant or merely assertive and brave? Is it useful (and charming) to think of her as a know-it-all scientist? Although I think that one could reasonably answer “yes” to all of these questions, I am going to put forward another, more general means of reading Alice as a character. Specifically, I want to think of her as the ideal realist character caught in a decidedly non-realist novel. In the post that follows I will first try to present this idea in a compelling way and will subsequently try to find out what this idea helps us to see in the book.

In his really rather good book, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, Philip Weinstein makes a convincing case that (pre-modern) realist fiction grows out of the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment. Specifically, realism tells the narrative that the Enlightenment has worked to establish: the story of “Coming to know” (2). This story plots the progress of a stable, rational subject moving through a stable and rational time and space. In such a story, the ability to understand one’s surroundings and the ability to understand one’s self are mutually reinforcing, or, as Weinstein puts it, “Thanks to the lawfulness of time and space, a subject learns to map the outer world accurately, and, thereby, to achieve inner orientation as well” (2). According to Weinstein, the brilliance of realism is that while it consistently tells the story of a character coming to a greater understanding of selfhood, time, and space, it naturalizes that story fully. While realism assumes the relationship between a knowing subject and a knowable object, it buries this assumption and argues implicitly that the rational space and time that its protagonist moves through is not a representation of space and time but corresponds with the world as it really is.

Weinstein’s premises can, of course, be argued with, but I hope that it is already clear how useful his framework can be to understanding the things that Alice stages. Alice is clearly the perfect Enlightenment subject, the perfect character for the Coming to know plot. She is always trying to puzzle out meanings and always “very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge” (54). Unfortunately, she is in the wrong book. For Carroll disrupts the realist assumptions of a stable and rational subjectood, time, and space as thoroughly as could be imagined.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland features a character who is driven to know, but a plot that involves a continuous coming to “unknow.” Alice is not a stable self: “‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (18), she declares early on. Wonderland does not provide a stable, rational, knowable space: many examples could be cited, but my personal favorite involves puzzling out the physics implied by the statement, “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly” (10). And finally, Wonderland does not provide a knowable dimension of time, as should be clear from Alice’s tea time spent with the Mad Hatter.

To what end is all of this done? When I read Kafka I have no problem accepting that he is purposefully altering the stability of space in an attempt to present a specifically modern viewpoint. Likewise, when I read Faulkner I accept that his playing with time is purposeful. Is Carroll’s? Or is his play just play? Could this children’s book really have been so far ahead of the fictional and scientific curves? so prophetic about the questioning of self, space, and time? Or, to think about this another way, was it the book’s status as a children’s tale that allowed it to be so revolutionary? Of course, in a sense, determining Carroll’s intention is less important than recognizing what his book actually does. And it is my contention that one of the things that it does is to disrupt the “Coming to know” narrative by replacing it with a proto-modernist narrative of uncertainty and unknowing that attacks our “confidence in Western norms for securing identity and funding the career of the liberal subject” (Weinstein 3). And Carroll does so in a particularly devastating manner, never explaining why he is representing time and space in this “irrational” way but positing that time and space simply are this way—naturalizing the irrational in the same way that realism naturalizes the “rational,” (and in the process leading us to question just how “natural” the story of “Coming to know” really is).