I’ve fallen woefully behind in my blogging, but have been making progress–I hope–in my thinking. Since I have a chapter draft due Monday, I’ve decided to update, both to inform anyone interested and to put off the actual chapter writing.
I wrote before about the connection between math and nonsense. This connection led me to an analysis of different categories of nonsense and ultimately to three general categories which will eventually become the three chapters of the thesis: Structural nonsense, ironic/punning nonsense, and linguistic nonsense. The latter two categories rely primarily on individual words or phrases and their effects within a larger work, while the first addresses an overall use of nonsense as a governing feature of a textual world.
The chapter on structural nonsense is what I am working on now. Below is a piece of writing I did for Dara which addresses the idea and discusses some of the specific instances of structural nonsense in Through the Looking-Glass. Warning: its long.
Chapter on Structural/Mathematical Nonsense
While thinking about the possibility of a chapter on structural nonsense, it seems most useful to outline key ideas that the chapter would include and provide some idea of the structure of the chapter. Structural nonsense (I have chosen to call it structural rather than mathematical in this specific imagining, but math is still integral to its definition, as I hope I’ll show) is characterized by a warping of the normal, common sense rules of temporality, spatiality, or—as Carroll often employs it—scale. It is the destruction of the basic physical realities of the real world, where time moves forward at the same rate and people stay roughly the same size. This type of nonsense is most fully utilized in Through the Looking-glass, though it appears in the first Alice book as well.
In a move somewhat paradoxical to the definition of nonsense, the structural nonsense of TTLG seems to serve as a way of predicting the actions or words of characters. TTLG’s most prominent spatial feature is a rigid, well-defined chessboard laid upon the landscape. Each square of the chessboard is its own distinct setting, and characters move and change from square to square. A character that is a Queen in one square becomes a sheep in another. In this unpredictability from place to place lies the nonsense of the situation. By constantly up-ending the rules of an environment, Carroll undermines the concept of any sort of predictable rules. The result requires the reader to be ever defining the governing laws of each particular moment, which both gives the reader a sense of control and strips the control away. This idea is vague—I’ll clarify: A reader of TTLG never knows what the next set of rules may be, or even what the momentary set of rules is, and thus is constantly challenged to divine them. By doing so, the reader feels in control of the text because discovering rules is much the same sensation as making rules, requiring specific things from the text. Yet these rules are inconsistent and the moment of discovery or perceived invention of an ordered world is coincidental with the destruction of that supposed order. In fact, the story begins with the revealing phrase, “One thing was certain,” (TTLG p. 137). Referring to the white kitten’s innocence and the black kitten’s guilt in the unwinding of a ball of yarn, and consequently Alice’s entrance into the Looking-glass world, this phrase nicely encompasses the confusion that characterizes the text. By stating that one thing is certain, the phrase implies that all else we are about to encounter is in fact uncertain, unknown, and unpredictable. The book is warning readers of the structural nonsense to follow.
This phenomenon is more clearly illustrated in specific instances within the text. Structural nonsense’s characterization as warping of physical laws and its function as a manner of redefining a set of rules are displayed most prominently in Alice’s transitions from square to square within the game. The first bewildering movements occur as she crosses six brooks with the intention of seeing the elephant-bees she sees on the other side. But rather than finding the elephants, Alice finds herself in the third square, on a train. The transition is jarring for both Alice and the reader, as the paragraph opening the new square begins simply with “ ‘Tickets, please!’ said the Guard,” (TTLG 169). Not only is Alice in a new territory, but the reader, too is left confused and confronted with new characters and a new setting to sort out. Time and place have not behaved as expected and the result is a confusion of new parameters. Alice, like the reader, begins with no conception of these new rules and is caught without a ticket, traveling in the wrong direction. This same phenomenon occurs as Alice travels into the fourth square, grabbing the goats beard as the train jumps the creek, and as she travels into the fifth square. When Alice leaves the wooded fourth square by crossing a brook in pursuit of the White Queen, she finds herself suddenly in a shop and in the middle of a conversation with a sheep, who, it seems, was once the white queen. The normal rules of travel do not apply. Rather than finding herself on the other side creek where she sees the queen, Alice finds herself in an entirely new location, having an entirely new interaction and must adjust accordingly.
The sheep’s store itself also acts as an example of structural nonsense. Alice is frustrated by the tendency of items on the shelf to constantly move just out of reach: “the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold,” (TTLG, 201). Martin Gardner, in his notes on the book, compares the movement of objects in the store to the impossibility in quantum physics of exactly locating an atom—an interesting application of the physical laws of the real world to the nonsensical laws of Alice’s world. As Alice attempts to understand the parameters of these new laws, she complains that “Things flow about so here!” (TTLG, 201). She is forced to reexamine the rules that she is used to—even forming hypotheses and testing her theories as she attempts to ‘trap’ the items on a shelf by running them up against the ceiling.
A similar instance displays the tendency of other things in the Looking-glass world to move about unpredictably. As Alice attempts to enter the Looking-glass world and leave the confines of the garden, she finds that she cannot navigate the path, despite its apparent direction. While she tries to take the path up the hill, she finds herself back where she began at the front door of the house. Again she experiments, saying, “Well then, I’ll try it the other way,” (TTLG 156), and finds herself at the door once more. Carroll calls this path, “like a corkscrew,” or a mathematical, asymmetrical helix. Only by walking backwards down the path can Alice make any progress with the helix, and only by madly running with the red queen can she stand still in a the next few moments. Normal laws of spatiality are not a work here—one does not make a step’s progress toward a destination with a step, and Alice and the reader must adapt to this change.
Time, too, is upset in the nonsense world. The White Queen baffles Alice by announcing that she lives backwards and that her best memories are of things that happened “the week after next” (TTLG, 196). Startled, Alice struggles to understand this change in the normal temporal progression and, through a brilliant use of punning nonsense, the Queen convinces Alice to believe the impossible.
Alice again is required to redefine rules in a more direct manner as she meets the White Knight. Fighting the Red Knight, the White Knight asks that they observe the “Rules of Battle,” which Alice proceeds to define. “One rule seems to be, that if one Knight hits the other; he knocks him off his horse; and, if he misses, he tumbles off himself—and another Rule seems to be that they hold their clubs with their arms as if they were Punch and Judy” (TTLG, 235), Alice notes. Hardly the rules of a typical joust, but in a nonsensical fight, they apply. Throughout her conversation with the White Knight, Alice is required to rediscover the rules of his language and his location.
In fact, until the final moments of the book, time and space remain inconsistent. Alice grows again (or the chess pieces shrink) and the Red Queen becomes the black kitten, the instigator of the entire mess. Back in Alice’s house, on the correct side of the looking-glass, Alice approaches the world with the same questioning mode she was forced to employ in the Looking-glass house, examining the episode as dream or fantasy. Perhaps this encompasses, in a few simple words, the purpose of the book: to make children question the world around them.
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More to come on other instances of structural nonsense and other chapter topics.
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