I feel like I left the way into Wonderland six years ago or so when I gave up math classes for other pursuits. I’ve been trying to figure out a few linguistic things in Alice, and since I haven’t been able to pull them together in a useful way for myself, in this post I’m just going to cite a few moments and make some speculations.
I initially latched onto the combination of Alice’s question as she falls down the rabbit hole about whether cats eat bats or bats eat cats and the moment in which the caterpillar points out that each side of a perfectly round mushroom performs a different function. As Alice falls, we’re told, “And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it” (6, Franklin Library edition of Alice). I took this initially as a critique of logical positivism, the approach to meaning which suggests that statements that have no way of being tested empirically is not just useless but meaningless (later, it was statements that couldn’t be falsified; then still later broken into strong and weak verification principles…). I took this as a critique, because the question is posed by a mean, silly, not to mention groggy, little girl.
I thought this critique somewhat confirmed by Alice’s later encounter with the caterpillar, or if the critique wasn’t confirmed, I thought at least it confirmed some (at least) passing concern with positivism in Alice. When the caterpillar remarks about the perfectly round mushroom, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow smaller,” Alice finds it to be a “very difficult” problem, but unlike the question of feline bat consumption, the question itself of what constitutes sides of a circle (or sphere) is meaningful because it’s testable (62). So even though the notion of sides of a circle (possibly made intelligible by drawing a single diameter through the circle, but again not intelligible because there are an infinite number of diameters to choose from) is a fairly useless notion, the concept is testable and therefore meaningful. Alice, the agent of positivist science, does test it and after a few hectic moments, is rewarded. I intended to draw the tea scene with the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse into this reading, thinking that there is a specific and recurring kind of nonsense of happening which that scene also participated in.
So I returned to the question of cats and bats, suspecting that the particular nature of meaningless/nonsensical statements simply involves the interchangeability of subject and object, and I was going to speculate on the implications of that observation when I noticed that, first, that has nothing to do with the geometrical nonsense of the caterpillar’s statement, and that the exchange in the tea scene is of verbs, not nouns. Perhaps, I speculated, the question in Alice is one of action: who cares if cats eat bats or vice versa; what matters is the eating, the verb. This brings me to my current state of confusion. I was focusing too closely on individual parts of speech, not their relations. I suspect now that all of these questions simply indicate some kind of laxity in the connection between subjects and action. In that case, it doesn’t matter who eats what in the case of cats and bats, nor does it matter who eats what at the tea party when the participants all shift over a place. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that the Hatter’s words are English when he explains his watch’s similarities to Alice’s. The narrator tells us, “Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English” (88). Though the words are English, their relation to each other is loose and confusing to Alice.
This weird laxity of linguistic form, I think, has two implications. If the connection between subject and verb is uncertain, and the effect of that action is also uncertain, then I think the book calls agency into question. For the same reason, I think Alice questions causation. In some ways, I think this concern manifests in the Cheshire cat’s floating head over the croquet field and, earlier, the grin without a cat by appearing as only a head, the thinking part of his body is detached from the part that can manifest action. The opposite is true, perhaps, in the grin without a cat: action without the appearance of the housing for the rational faculties.
I haven’t worked all the details out here, and one of the complications is that there doesn’t seem to be any real lack of causation in Alice. For instance, in the early scenes of the book, the bottles and the cake seem clearly to cause growth and shrinking. Of course, Alice often fails to achieve what she intends in the way she intends to achieve it. Things seem able to directly act and affect other things, but Alice seems to have no such power.
I suspect all this nonsense has to do something with probability in a way that I can’t see because I was never good at dealing with probability. Somehow I think this all also comes back to experimentation and action. Perhaps in a Nietzschean kind of way (Beyond Good and Evil, I think) in which the subject is only really its action—things are only what they do, not what they are. In any case, I don’t fully understand the implications of any of this, though I’m working through it.
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