Photograph of the author in early adolescence. (Courtesy of the author)
I HAVE IN FRONT OF ME A PHOTO taken sometime in the early sixties. It shows an adolescent boy lying on his belly on the grass, looking up from a pad of paper on which he has been drawing or writing. In his right hand is a pencil or a pen. He is wearing a sort of cap and hiking boots, and tied around his waist is a sweater. He is lying in the shade of a brick wall next to what seem like stumpy apple trees. A short-legged dog is close behind him, reminiscent of the dogs that lie on stone tombs at the feet of dead crusaders. I am that boy, but I don’t recognize myself in the picture. I know it is me, but that is not my face.
The photo was taken half a century ago, somewhere in Patagonia, during a camping holiday. When I look into the mirror today, I see a tired, puffed-up face circled by gray hair and a jovial white beard. The small eyes, lined with wrinkles and framed by narrow glasses, are olive brown with a few orange flecks. Once, when I tried to cross into England with a passport that stated that the color of my eyes was green, the immigration officer, staring me in the face, told me I should change that to blue, or next time I would not be allowed in. I know that sometimes my eyes look gray. Maybe their color changes from moment to moment, like those of Madame Bovary, but I’m not sure if that change of color, as in her case, has a meaning. Nevertheless, the face in the mirror is me, it has to be me. But it is not my face. Others recognize me in my features; I don’t. When, inadvertently, I catch sight of myself reflected in a shop window, I wonder who that fat elderly man is walking by my side. I have a vague fear that if I truly saw myself one day on the street, I wouldn’t know myself. I’m convinced that I would not be able to pick myself out in a police line-up, nor would I easily identify myself in a group portrait. I’m not sure whether this is because my features age too rapidly and too drastically or because my own self is less grounded in my memory than the printed words I’ve learned by heart. This thought is not completely unpleasant; it is also somehow comforting. To be myself, to be so utterly and absolutely myself that no particular circumstance or point of view can impeach the recognition, grants me a happy sense of freedom from the obligation of following the conditions of being who I am.
According to Dante, Christian dogma decrees that after we die we shall regain our earthly bodies again at the Last Judgment: all of us except suicides, “for it is not just that a man have what he has taken from himself.” Science teaches us that the human body commits a kind of periodic suicide. Each of our organs, each of our bones, each of our cells dies and is reborn every seven years. None of our features is the same today as it was in the past, and yet we say, with blind confidence, that we are who we were. The question is, what do we mean by “being” ourselves? What are the identifying signs? Something that is not the shape of my body, not my voice or my touch, my mouth, my nose, my eyes—something there is that is me. It lies, like a timorous little animal, invisible behind a jungle of physical trappings. None of the disguises and masks that I wear represent myself to myself except in uncertain hints and tiny forebodings: a rustle in the leaves, a scent, a muffled growl. I know it exists, my reticent self. In the meantime, I wait. Perhaps its presence will be confirmed but only on my last day, when it will suddenly emerge from the undergrowth, will show itself full-faced for an instant, and then will be no more.
The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight
Precedes me on the road down which I go;
And should I turn and run, he would pursue me:
This is the man whom I must get to know.
—JAMES REEVES, “Things to Come”
To allow his words not to deny but “gradually to arrive at the conclusion with appropriate slowness,” throughout his journey, Dante, much like any curious traveler, asks questions about the customs and beliefs, the geography and history of the places he traverses. He is especially keen on knowing who the people are whom he meets, and from his first encounter, with the soul of Virgil, he asks the poet to tell him “whatever you might be, shade or real man!”1 Some of the souls, like Virgil’s, answer him directly; others refuse and must be bribed with the promise of having their story told when Dante returns to earth; still others are forced to submit; several more are questioned by Virgil for Dante’s sake. On a number of occasions, Dante recognizes the soul as someone he knew when alive; at other times the transformation in the Otherworld is such that the recognition fails, and the poor soul must tell him who it was.
But the journey is not, of course, a mere exercise in reconnoitering: Dante is here to learn about himself and to discover in the mirror of others his own wretchedness and possibility of salvation. The Otherworld is not impermeable: its punished and purged sins, as well as the divine beatitudes, seep sometimes into the visitor and affect him for good or ill. Dante feels in his own heart the anger of the wrathful and the scorn of the proud; in the heavens of Paradise, a glimmer of the divine light shining on the elect is enough to dazzle and transform him. The three-act vision through which Virgil and Beatrice guide him is like an ongoing performance played out for his benefit, in which his own faults, fears, and hesitations, his temptations, errors, and falls, and even his moments of enlightenment are all displayed before his eyes and ears. The entire Commedia is presented to an audience of one, but that single spectator is also the main protagonist. This, in a different context, is what the Jungian analyst Craig Stephenson defines as a place where “still resides the multifaceted ambiguous living archetype of the theatre, with its architecture of memory and liminality, in which are housed the epistemological opposites of acting and observing, of knowing ourselves from within and knowing our world by looking without.”2
Not only by the souls’ stories does Dante discover who they are or once were. Not far from the summit of Mount Purgatory, walking behind Virgil and the poet Statius, Dante reaches the Cornice of the Gluttonous, where the excess of love for the things of this world must be purged through unrelieved starvation. While the ancient poets talk about their craft, Dante, now cleansed of the sin of pride that made him accept Homer’s welcome to the Noble Castle, walks meekly behind his masters, learning from their dialogue:
They went ahead, and I alone
Behind, listening to their discourse
Taught me by discussing poetry.
The three poets are greeted by a throng of pale and silent spirits, their skin stretched over their bones, their eyes dark and hollow like gemless rings. Perhaps it is Virgil and Statius’s talk of poetry that brings to Dante’s mind the idea that things are metaphors of themselves, that in an effort to translate the experience of reality into language, we sometimes see things as the words that name them, and the features of things as their incarnated script. “Who reads OMO in the face of man,” says Dante, “would clearly have recognized there the M.” Pietro Alighieri, Dante’s son, in his commentary to the Commedia, noted that the image evoked was well known in his time: in Gothic script, Os are like human eyes, while M depicts the eyebrows and the nose.3 This accords with the tradition of Genesis by which all creatures carry their name inscribed in their appearance, thus allowing Adam to identify them correctly when God orders him to name them immediately after their creation (Gen. 2:19–20).
Socrates, in Plato’s Cratylus, also believes that names are manmade: to suggest that the first words were given to us by the godhead is, for Socrates, not an explanation but merely an excuse for not having an explanation. The discussion about names in the Platonic dialogue is proposed by two friends of whom we know almost nothing except that they may have been, like Socrates himself, Plato’s teachers. Cratylus believes that the names of things contain “a truth or correctness” derived from nature. Hermogenes, the other participant in the dialogue, disagrees and takes the Sophist position that language is a human creation. “Any name which you give, in my opinion, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old,” he says. “For there is no name given to anything by nature; all is convention and habit of the users.” Socrates argues (or at least, puts forward the suggestion) that “names rightly given are the likenesses and images of the things which they name,” but goes on to say that it is nobler and clearer to learn from the things themselves rather than from their images. In the Cratylus, as in so many of the dialogues, the question under debate remains undecided.4
The letters OMO depicting a human face, copied from a tenth-century Spanish manuscript (British Library, add. ms. 30844). (Photograph courtesy of the author)
A name defines us from outside. Even if we choose a name to call ourselves, the identity purported by the name is exterior, something we wear for the convenience of others. Names, however, sometimes encapsulate an individual’s essence. “Caesar I was, and now I am Justinian,” proclaims the emperor who codified the Roman system of law in the sixth century, and who in Dante’s Paradise sums up the history of Rome for his listener’s benefit. In another instance, later, in the Heaven of the Sun, Bonaventure the Franciscan praises the founder of the Dominican order and notes that Dominic (meaning “belonging to the Lord”) was given this name by his parents when “a spirit from up here moved them to call him / by the possessive adjective of him whose he was all.” And of the names of Dominic’s parents themselves, Felice (Happy) and Giovanna (“Grace of the Lord,” according to Saint Jerome), Bonaventure notes, echoing the creed in the Cratylus:
Oh, his father, truly Felice!
Oh, his mother, truly Giovanna
If, translated, it means what they say!5
A name, however, does not entirely satisfy the question “Who am I?” and it is not through the knowledge of his name that Dante reaches an answer at the end of his quest. The question of this final identity merits further inquiry.
At the exact midpoint of the Commedia, in the thirtieth canto of Purgatorio, as the chariot drawn by the Gryphon appears in the Garden of Eden, three essential things take place simultaneously: Virgil vanishes, Beatrice reveals herself, and Dante is named for the first and only time in the entire poem. Between the disappearance of his poet guide and the humiliating scourging to which Beatrice will submit him, Dante’s name is pronounced and makes him turn in recognition: “when I turned to the sound of my own name, / which out of necessity is here set down.” Then Beatrice orders him to look at her:
Look at me well: indeed I am, I am Beatrice.
However did you dare approach this mountain?
Did you not know that here a man is happy?6
Contrary to Narcissus, who remained enraptured by his own image in the water, when Dante glances down into the river Lethe he cannot bear the sight of himself, and looks away mortified.
My eyes dropped down to the clear fountain;
But beholding myself in it, I drew them back to the grass,
So great a shame weighed down my brow.7
After having gone down to the depths of Hell and ascended the cornices of Purgatory, Dante discovers his identity, yet this is revealed to him not by the utterance of his name but by the reflection of his image. Up to this point, guided by Virgil, he has only seen others enact failings that he sometimes recognizes as his, but now, for the first time, Dante is conscious of witnessing his own dramatic performance. Dante must weep, he now learns, not for things outside him but for his innermost being, not over the departure of his beloved Virgil, not for love of the beloved Beatrice, but for his own sins, knowing at last who he is so that he may repent of who he was. Then he can drink of the waters of Lethe and forget. In Paradise, there is no memory of sin.
The question “Who am I?” is no more fully answered by a name than a book is revealed fully by its title. The cowardly soldier Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well carries a name that (as Shakespeare’s audience, with a smattering of French, must have understood as an intentional pun) points to his use of words for lying and bragging. Parolles is overheard by two lords as he speaks to himself, seeking a way to escape humiliation, and for the first time in the play, everything he says about himself to himself is true. “Is it possible that he know that he is, and be that he is?” asks one of the lords, amazed that this fool can reason truthfully. He can and he does, because what Shakespeare is attempting with the person of Parolles is to find behind the mask whatever it is that makes him who he is. That is why, when shortly afterwards, the final disgrace comes upon him, Parolles sheds his role of miles gloriosus and becomes utterly his own person: “Captain I’ll be no more,” he says, “But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.”8 “The thing I am”: Parolles’s sudden illumination answers the underlying sense of Hamlet’s much-abused question, and involuntarily echoes the tremendous answer of the godhead to Moses: “I Am That I Am.”
Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost. “I’m looking for the face I had,” says a woman in a Yeats poem, “before the world was made.” Sometimes the shadow of an identity seems like that face, half-remembered, now forgotten, as in those early states of Alzheimer’s in which we lose some part of the assurance of being whatever it is we are. Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, proposed that human beings were of three sexes, males born from the sun, females from the earth, and hermaphrodites from the moon, which partakes of either sex. The hermaphrodites were the strongest and in their vanity tried (like the builders of Babel) to scale the heights of heaven and attack the gods. To prevent this, Zeus split each hermaphrodite in half, causing the male half to desire to be reunited with the female half, and the female half with the male. This resulted in three kinds of couplings: the sun-males desired the sun-males, the earth-females desired the earth-females, the lunar hermaphrodites, now cloven in two, became the heterosexual humans who long for the half they had lost. “And so,” Aristophanes concludes, “we are all like pieces of the coins that children break in half as keepsakes, making two out of one, like the flatfish, and each of us is forever seeking the half that will tally with himself.” For Plato’s Aristophanes, love is the impulse bred from these longings, the desire to know who we are by recalling who we have been.9
The first inkling of our identity comes early. In Jacques Lacan’s description of what he called the “mirror stage,” typically between the ages of six and eighteen months, a child, still unable to speak and control its motor activities, is confronted with an image of itself in a mirror. Its reaction is one of jubilation because the image shows the child a functional unity which it has yet to achieve. The child identifies with that which it will become, but at the same time the image is an illusion, since the reflection is not the child. The child’s realization of who it is begins as both recognition and misrecognition, as the physical apprehension of identity and also an imaginary creation. The mirror, like the imagination, sets upon a stage a character who uses our first person singular. Rimbaud intuited that paradox when he wrote: “Car Je est un autre,” “Because I is another.” Alonso Quijano is both an old infirm gentleman with a taste for novels of chivalry and a courageous and just knight whose name is Don Quixote; when at the end of the book he allows himself to be convinced that his literary incarnation is a delusion, he dies. We are all, in this sense, Doppelgängers: seeing our double and rejecting it signals our end.10
In order to know who we are integrally, in all our components, even that part of ourselves we call the unconscious (and which Carl Gustav Jung defined as “reality in potentia”), we question ourselves throughout our lives, seeking for clues. The unconscious, according to Jung, feeds us with such clues in our dreams, “backward-looking dreams or forward-looking anticipations,” which, he says, have always, in all cultures, been read as intimations of the future. As images from the unconscious become conscious, telling us something about ourselves, they add to our sense of who we are, like the pages that are already read in a book. In the third century, Augustine compared the process to the recitation of a psalm. “Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm I know,” he suggests in the Confessions. “Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of my expectation and relegated to the past, now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has passed into the province of memory.” Unlike the psalm, however, the fathoming of the unconscious is never exhausted. That lifelong quest, the embodiment of intuitions and revelations about ourselves, Jung calls “individuation.”11
In a 1939 essay published originally in English under the title “The Meaning of Individuation,” and later rewritten in German and much revised, Jung defined individuation as “the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘in-dividual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole’” of all parts assembled and coherent, including those that feel unfathomable and unfamiliar to the person. Jung’s first definition of individuation was given when he was sixty-four. Almost two decades later, five years before his death, he put together, partly in conversation with an acquaintance and partly in chapters written by himself, a kind of intellectual autobiography. Towards the end of the book, Jung takes up again the idea of individuation, but this time it is not the knowable and painfully known self that interests him but that other vast uncharted space of his own cartography. “The more uncertain I have felt about myself,” he writes, “the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”12
“The meaning of my existence,” Jung wrote, “is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.”13 The quest to find out who we are, as whole and singular human beings, the attempt to answer life’s question is responsible, in some measure, for our delight in the stories of others. Literature is not “the world’s answer” but rather a trove of more and better questions. Like the tales told to Dante by the souls he meets, our literatures provide more or less efficient mirrors for discovering our own secret features. Our mental libraries are composite maps of who we are (or believe we are) and who we are not (or believe we are not). To admire, as did Freud, the early scenes of Goethe’s Faust, or to be drawn to the inconclusiveness of Faust’s ending, as was Jung, to prefer Conrad to Jane Austen, as did Borges, or to choose Ismail Kadare over Haruki Murakami, as did Doris Lessing, is not necessarily to take a critical position in literary theory but more likely to respond to a question of reflective sympathy, of empathy, of recognition. Our readings are never absolutes: literature disallows dogmatic tendencies. Instead, we shift allegiances, prefer for a time a certain chapter of a certain book and later other chapters; one or two characters hold our fancy, but then others take their place. The enduring love of a reader is a rarer thing than we imagine, though we like to believe that our most considered literary tastes change little with the passing of the years. But we change, and our tastes change as well, and if we recognize ourselves in Cordelia today, we may call Goneril our sister tomorrow, and end up, in days to come, kindred spirits with Lear, a foolish, fond old man. This transmigration of souls is literature’s modest miracle.
Of all the miracles, however, that pinpoint the histories of our literatures, few are as astonishing as that of the birth of Alice in Wonderland. The well-known story is worth repeating. On the afternoon of 4 July 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, accompanied by his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three young daughters of Dr. Liddell, dean of Christ Church, on a three-mile boating expedition up the Thames, from Folly Bridge, near Oxford, to the village of Godstow. “The sun was so burning,” Alice Liddell recalled many years later, “that we landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of ‘Tell us a story’ and so began the ever-delightful tale. Sometimes to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till next time.’ ‘Ah, but it is next time’ would be the exclamation from all three: and after some persuasion the story would start afresh.” When the boating party returned, Alice asked Dodgson to write out the adventures for her. He said he would try, and sat up nearly the whole night putting down the tale on paper, adding a number of pen-and ink illustrations; afterwards, the little volume, Alice’s Adventures Underground, was often seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery. Three years later, in 1865, the story was published by Macmillan in London under the pseudonym of “Lewis Carroll” with the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.14
Reverend Duckworth recalled the excursion precisely: “I rowed stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Miss Liddells were our passengers, and the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’” Inventing Alice’s adventures “as we go along”: the truth is unbelievable. That Alice’s fall and explorations, her encounters and her discoveries, the syllogisms and puns and wise jokes should, in all their fantastic and coherent development have been made up then and there in the telling seems almost impossible. Osip Mandelstam, commenting on the composition of Dante’s Commedia, says that it is naive of readers to believe that the text they have in front of them was born full-fledged from the poet’s brow without a long mess of drafts and trials in its wake. No literary composition, says Mandelstam, is the fruit of an instant of inspiration: it is an arduous process of trial and error, helped along by experienced craft.15 But in the case of Alice we know it wasn’t so: precisely such an impossibility seems to have been the case. No doubt Carroll, in the back of his mind, had previously composed many of the jokes and puns that pepper the story, since he loved puzzles and word games, and spent much of his time inventing them for his pleasure and that of his child friends. But a bagful of tricks is not enough to explain the strict logic and joyful avatars that govern the perfectly rounded plot.
Alice’s Adventures was followed six years later by Through the Looking-Glass, a story that did indeed benefit from the usual desk time, and yet the looking-glass chess game of the latter is not better constructed than the mad card game of the former, and all the wonderful nonsense in both stories obviously stems from that single invented “extempore” fantasy told on the primordial afternoon. Mystics are said to receive in full dictation from the godhead, and the history of literature boasts of a few celebrated examples of such in toto compositions—Caedmon’s “Hymn of Creation” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” are two examples—but we almost never have an unbiased witness of these poetic miracles. In the case of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Reverend Duckworth’s testimony seems unimpeachable.
No miracle, however, is entirely unexplainable. Carroll’s tale has deeper roots in the human psyche than its nursery reputation might suggest. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not read like another children’s story: its geography has the powerful reverberations of other established mythical places, such as Utopia and Arcadia. In the Commedia, Matilda, the guardian spirit on the summit of Mount Purgatory, explains to Dante that the Golden Age of which poets have sung is a forgotten memory of a paradise lost, a vanished state of perfect happiness; perhaps Wonderland is the unconscious memory of a state of perfect reason, a state which, seen now through the eyes of social and cultural conventions, appears to us as utter madness.16 Whether archetypal or not, Wonderland seems always to have existed in some form or other: one never follows Alice down the rabbit hole and through the Red Queen’s labyrinthine kingdom for the first time. Only the Liddell sisters and Reverend Duckworth can be said to have been present at the creation, and even they must have felt a sense of dejà vu: after that first day, Wonderland entered the universal imagination much like the Garden of Eden, a place we know exists without ever having set foot in it. Wonderland (“it is not down in any map; true places never are,” as Melville noted of another archetypal location)17 is the recurrent landscape of our dream life.
Because Wonderland is, of course, our world, or rather a stage on which the things of our world are played out for us to see—not in unconscious symbolic terms (in spite of Freudian readings), not as an allegory of the anima (according to Jungian interpretations), not as a Christian parable (in spite of the serendipity of names on the storyteller’s journey, from Folly Bridge to Godstow, “God’s Place”), not as a dystopian fable like those of Orwell or Huxley (as certain critics have argued). Wonderland is simply the place in which we find ourselves daily, mad as it may seem, with its quotidian ration of the heavenly, the hellish, and the purgatorial—a place through which we must wander as we wander through life, following the instructions of the King of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning,” he tells the White Rabbit, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”18
Alice (as we have said of Dante) is armed with only one weapon for the journey: language. It is with words that we make our way through the Cheshire Cat’s forest and the Queen’s croquet ground. It is with words that Alice discovers the difference between what things are and what they appear to be. It is her questioning that brings out the madness of Wonderland, hidden, as in our world, under a thin coat of conventional respectability. We may try to find logic in madness, as the Duchess does by finding a moral to everything, but the truth is, as the Cheshire Cat tells Alice, that we have no choice in the matter: whichever path we follow, we will find ourselves among mad people, and we must use language as best we can to keep a grip on what we deem to be our sanity. Words reveal to Alice that the only indisputable fact of this bewildering world is that under an apparent rationalism we are all mad. Like Alice, we risk drowning ourselves (and everyone else) in our own tears. We like to think, as the Dodo does, that no matter in what direction or how incompetently we run, we should all be winners and we are all entitled to a prize. Like the White Rabbit, we give orders left and right, as if others were obliged (and honored) to serve us. Like the Caterpillar, we question the identity of our fellow creatures but have little idea of our own, even on the verge of losing that identity. We believe, with the Duchess, in punishing the annoying behavior of the young, but we have little interest in the reasons for that behavior. Like the Mad Hatter, we feel that we alone have the right to food and drink at a table set for many more, and we cynically offer the thirsty and hungry wine when there is no wine and jam every day except today. Under the rule of despots like the Red Queen, we are forced to play mad games with inadequate instruments—balls that roll away like hedgehogs and sticks that twist and turn like flamingoes—and when we don’t succeed in following the instructions, we are threatened with having our heads chopped off. Our education methods, as the Gryphon and the Mock-Turtle explain to Alice, are either exercises in nostalgia (the teaching of Laughing and Grief) or training courses in the service of others (how to be thrown with the lobsters into the sea). And our system of justice, long before Kafka described it, is like the one set up to judge the Knave of Hearts, incomprehensible and unfair. Few of us, however, have Alice’s courage, at the end of the book, to stand up (literally) for our convictions and refuse to hold our tongue. Because of this supreme act of civil disobedience, Alice is allowed to wake from her dream. We, unfortunately, are not.
Fellow travelers, we readers recognize in Alice’s journey, as we do in Dante’s, the themes ever present in our lives: pursuit and loss of dreams, the attendant tears and suffering, the race for survival, being forced into servitude, the nightmare of confused self-identity, the effects of dysfunctional families, the required submission to nonsensical arbitration, the abuse of authority, perverted teaching, the impotent knowledge of unpunished crimes and unfair punishments, and the long struggle of reason against unreason. All this, and the pervading sense of madness, are, in fact, a summary of the book’s table of contents.
“To define true madness,” we are told in Hamlet, “what is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” Alice would have agreed: madness is the exclusion of everything that is not mad, and therefore everyone in Wonderland falls under the Cheshire Cat’s dictum (“We’re all mad here”). But Alice is not Hamlet. Her dreams are not bad dreams, she never mopes, she never sees herself as the hand of ghostly justice, she never insists on proof of what is crystal clear, she believes in immediate action. Words, for Alice, are living creatures, and thinking (contrary to Hamlet’s belief) does not make things good or bad. She certainly does not want her solid flesh to melt, any more than she wants it to shoot up or shrink down (even though, in order to pass through the small garden door, she wishes she could “shut up like a telescope”). Alice would never have succumbed to a poisoned blade or drunk, like Hamlet’s mother, from a poisoned cup: picking up the bottle that says “DRINK ME” she first looks to see whether it is marked poison or not, “for she had read several nice stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them.” Alice is much more reasonable than the Prince of Denmark and his family.19
Like Hamlet, however, Alice must have wondered, crammed in the White Rabbit’s house, if she too might not be bounded in a nutshell, but as to being king (or queen) of infinite space, Alice does not merely fret about it: she strives for the title, and in Through the Looking-Glass, she works hard to earn the promised dream-crown. Brought up on strict Victorian precepts rather than lax Elizabethan ones, she believes in discipline and tradition, and has no time for grumbling and procrastination. Throughout her adventures, like a well-brought-up child, Alice confronts unreason with simple logic. Convention (the artificial construct of reality) is set against fantasy (the natural reality). Alice knows instinctively that logic is our way of making sense of nonsense and uncovering its secret rules, and she applies it ruthlessly, even among her elders, whether confronting the Duchess or the Mad Hatter. And when arguments prove useless, she insists on at least making the unjust absurdity of the situation plain. When the Red Queen demands that the court give the “sentence first—verdict afterwards,” Alice quite rightly answers “Stuff and nonsense!” That is the only answer that most of the absurdities in our world deserve.20
However, Alice’s journey is one from which she emerges not with answers but with an open question. In her underground adventures and later through the looking-glass, Alice will be tortured with the thought of not being who she thinks she is, or even of ceasing to be, which leads ineluctably to the terrible conundrum posed by the Caterpillar: “Who are You?” “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” she answers shyly. “At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” The Caterpillar sternly tells her to explain herself. “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” she says, “because I’m not myself, you see.” To test her, he asks her to recite things from memory, but the words come out “different.” Alice and the Caterpillar know that we are defined by what we remember, since our memories are our biographies and hold our image of ourselves.21
Waiting to see the effect produced by the beverage in the bottle that says “DRINK ME,” Alice asks herself whether she might end by “going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” The answer is given in Through the Looking-Glass by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, when they point to the Red King asleep under a tree. “And what do you think he’s dreaming about?” asks Tweedledee. Alice says that no one can know that. “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaims. “And if he left off dreaming about you where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” Alice answers confidently. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorts contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”22
Alice wonders if she might not be Ada or Mabel (but “she’s she, and I’m I,” she reflects, distraught); the White Rabbit takes Alice for someone called Mary Ann; the Pigeon believes she’s a serpent; the Live Flowers take her for a flower; the Unicorn believes that she is a fabulous monster, and proposes that, if she’ll believe in him, he’ll believe in her. Our identity seems to depend on the belief of others. We gaze into the screens of our electronic gadgets with the intensity and constancy of Narcissus gazing into the pool of water, expecting to be restored or affirmed in our identity not by the world around us, not in the workings of our interior life, but through the often inane messaging of others who virtually acknowledge our existence and whose existence we virtually acknowledge. And when we die, and our fleeting communications are inspected for clues of who we were, a little fable imagined by Oscar Wilde will become pertinent:
When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.
And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, “We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.”
“But was Narcissus beautiful?” said the pool.
“Who should know that better than you?” answered the Oreads. “Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.”
And the pool answered, “But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.”23
Alice conceives of a different way of deciding for herself who she might be. Trapped down the rabbit hole, Alice asks herself who she really is and refuses to be anyone she doesn’t want to be. “It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say, ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.’”24 If things don’t appear to have meaning, then Alice will make sure that she chooses a meaning (an identity that will denote that meaning) for herself. She might be echoing Jung: “I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” Alice must make the Caterpillar’s question her own.
And yet, in spite of its apparent madness, our world, like that of Wonderland, tantalizingly suggests that it does have a meaning and that if we look hard enough behind the “stuff and nonsense” we will find something that explains it. Alice’s adventures proceed with uncanny precision and coherence, so that we, as readers, have the growing impression of an elusive sense in all the surrounding absurdity. The entire book has the quality of a Zen koan or a Greek paradox, of something meaningful and at the same time inexplicable, something on the verge of revelation. What we feel, falling down the rabbit hole after Alice and following her through her journey, is that Wonderland’s madness is not arbitrary, nor is it innocent. Half epic and half dream, Carroll’s invention lays out for us a necessary space somewhere between solid earth and fairyland, a vantage point from which to see the universe in more or less explicit terms, translated, as it were, into a story. Like the mathematical formulas that fascinated Carroll, Alice’s adventures are both hard fact and lofty invention.
This is true of the Commedia as well. Guided by Virgil’s hand through the treacherous terrain of Hell or by the momentous smile of Beatrice through the adamantine logic of Heaven, Dante undertakes his voyage on two planes simultaneously: one which grounds him (and us, his readers) in the reality of flesh and blood and one in which that reality can be reconsidered and transformed. This double reality is like that of the Cheshire Cat perched on its branch, drifting from something bewilderingly visible to the miraculous (and reassuring) ghost of a Beatrician smile.
