In trying to answer this ridiculous question, I’m actually going to side step it, as “I’d rather finish my tea” (The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition 116).
In avoiding the question, or rather the answer, I would like to posit that the asking of the unanswerable question is part of the organizing logic of Alice in Wonderland. By puzzling over its unanswerability, by appealing to the public, generation after generation to help answer the puzzlement (including as late as 1991 in The Spectator), it perhaps prolongs time and achieves what very well may have been Lewis Carroll’s goal all along: to quell the anxiety caused by little Alice Liddell growing up, to create an extended or (in the case of Alice at times) elongated multiplicity of time.
By ‘multiplicity’, I mean as Michel Serre posits it in his book Genesis: “The more the human body is young and the more it is possible, the more it is capable of multiplicity, and the more time it has: not time in its length and duration, but the more kinds of time, the more varieties of river beds it has to flow down, the more valleys it has before it” (32). What is important to Serre’s claim as it regards Alice is maintaining the state of youth in order to make more possible the variety of kinds of time, to create more variety in the landscape of Wonderland. In Carroll’s case, as exhibited by the 1859 and 1870 photos, time is the ultimate limit regarding his fondness for not only Alice Liddell, but also his relationship with youth in general.
But what kinds of time(s), what multiplicities or varieties of time are involved in Carroll’s narrative? Is it possible for example, that Carroll’s major concern or anxiety to distort time, “murdering the time”, is to reverse the irreversibility of the time as it “flows down, it flows down from its source to the deltas, from birth towards death” (32). This would not be a literal death in the case of Dodgson or Liddell but rather the death of the relation between the two. Would Carroll’s anxiety or concern with time help explain the many transformations, multiplications that Alice goes through? The proliferation of broken or absurd watches and clocks? Could we see Wonderland as the total displacement or distortion of mathematical time? Could we explain the riddle in terms of time, i.e. the unanswerability of the riddle prolongs time by its very elusion of logic?
In the case of Wonderland as a space that’s measured in time, it is, as all cultures, allowed its own logic or interpretation of time. Stuart Sherman claims in Telling Time that narratively, “Time is peculiarly susceptible of cultural construction. Every report–every means of making time present–will also entail an interpretation. Every clock proposes a temporality–a way of conceiving time, using it, inhabiting it–by its look and sound, its modes of motion and of definition, its placement and purpose, within a culture composed of multiple temporalities operating separately and simultaneously” (x).
In the “Mad Tea Party” for example, Carroll toys with what Serre calls the “capability of multiplicity”, or more kinds of time. It’s possible to identify at least four in the fifth and sixth chapters.
Calendar time
Calendar time is the universal, synchronic, periodical time represented by counting years, days, hours, minutes. In the initial conversation between the Mad Hatter and Alice, “The Hatter was the first to break the silence. ‘What day of the month is it?’…Alice considered a little…’The fourth’…’Two days wrong’ sighed the Hatter’” (71). Gardner notes that between Alice’s earlier acknowledgement that her adventure takes place in May, it must be May 4, Alice Liddel’s birthday. She was 10 in 1862, the year Carroll first told and recorded the story in English calendar time. The Mad Hatter who is two days off is on Lunar time, which in 1862 would have been exactly two days displaced. If Wonderland is near the center of the Earth, solar time would be useless, whereas Lunar time would still be feasible. Also, putting the Hatter on lunar time adds to the “madness” or lunacy of the whole affair yet shows the flexibility, or rather the relativivity of synchronic time in the narrative.
By the time Alice was published, it had been just over 100 years since England moved from the Julian calendar to an amended version of the Gregorian and was still a sore spot, particularly for the working class. G.J. Whitrow’s Time and History explains, “In 1752, when the British government decided to alter the calendar...many people thought there lives were being shortened thereby. Some workers actually believed that they were going to lose eleven days pay. So they rioted and demanded ‘Give Us Back Our Eleven Days’ (The Act of Parliament had, in fact, been carefully worded so as to prevent any injustice in the payment of rents, interest, etc.)”. The process of Calendar reform involved the likes of Galileo, Newton, Leibniz and others. For years after the English Calendar reform, the majority of published works carried two dates; one for the new calendar and one for the old. In some communities Michaelmas in fact was celebrated still by the old calendar, almost two weeks before the rest of the country. Whether Carroll had this in mind or not is pure speculation, but it shows that there is not only a historical precedent for this conflicting sense of time, but also a certain cultural relativity that time can suffer from.
According to Gardner’s annotation, The March Hare’s madness is also tied somewhat to calendar time. “Mad as a March Hare” was popularized by Erasmus and refers to the supposed frenzy they go into during breeding season. Though this was later proved to be false, the March Hare’s frenzied behavior is actually exhibited most of the year and the colloquialism was still current in Carroll’s time.
Phenomenological time
Another time at play in the Tea Party episode is subjective time, the time that we experience rather than count. When an hour seems like a day and an afternoon feels like a minute. The Hatter explains, “For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning…you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half past one, time for dinner!” (73). Here we have duration or temporality explained phenomenologically, the subjective experience of time, a close relationship to time that is felt, “twinkled” rather than an objective, synchronic time that stands apart and over. The Hatter explains to Alice, “you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked” (73). Or as the Hatter remarks with a sigh, “it’s always tea-time” (73). “Twinkling” becomes a handle for the The Hatter as it represents in some ways, his radical subjectivity. In “Who Stole the Tarts”, The Hatter stammers explaining to the King why he has no evidence to present, and cuts short his excuse, “–And what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin–and the twinkling of the tea–“ (114). According to Gardner’s annotation, The Hatter would’ve completed the phrase “Tea–Tray” recounting the earlier song where he “Murdered the time”. Also, the March Hare dipping his watch into “his cup of tea”, effectively stops the flow of chronometric time (71). Returning to Serre, “The surge is always there carrier of a thousand temporalities, chaos is always present to serve as a foundation, noise is always there to invent new musics and new harmonies” (24).
Metered/Musical Time: When The Hatter recites his song, “twinkling” as a parody of “twinkle, twinkle little star” it serves to return the Tea Party to a regulated time, a linear or metered time as the song unfolds like time itself in an organized pattern. “It goes on you know”, as all songs do in regulated, counted time (74). Just as quick as the Tea Party returns to regulated time through The Hatter’s song, the Queen is recalled to have said during the concert, “He’s murdering the time. This colloquialism for mangling the meter of a song returns the scene to a absence of time as, “It’s always six o’clock now” (74). But the irony is that the stopped clock (the actual watch of the Dormouse or the sense of time as in The Hatter’s) is more accurate than Alice’s sense of time as the stopped watch or time will always be right twice a day.
Protean time: Alice’s many transformations, her formal mutability occurs within time, but also through her shrinking and elongating mirrors both the passage of time (growing) and the reversing of time (becoming smaller or little again). Protean time is deformative time, the mutability of form or the ability for it to change within and against time. Protean time for Alice follows no fixed course, as Serre’s master time, “flows down from its source to the deltas, from birth towards death”. Rather, she changes in most instances at will by what she consumes at any given moment. Instead of flowing through time and changing according to its logic, her deforming and reforming accords to her situation, her peril or her need in any scene, as Proteus.
Similarly, the many chiasmic turns throughout the first part of the Tea Party, the “You might as well say” moments further show the mutability of linear time at the level of the sentence. As each character controverts Alice’s claim to “I mean what I say”, they show the relative ease of distorting the verb/object relation. “I see what I eat is the same as I eat what I see”, “I like what I get is the same thing as I get what I like”, “I breathe when I sleep is the same thing as I sleep when I breathe” and “It is the same thing with you” (71).
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