Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded Read online

  THE POOL OF TEARS.

  “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

  And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must go by the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look!

  After a short time, though, Alice ceases crying and rebukes herself in an odd manner. “ ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you,’ (she might well say this), ‘to go on crying in this way!’ ” Beyond the fact that Alice has tripled in height, why does Carroll have the child chide herself with these words?

  “A great girl” makes sense if it is placed in the mythological context of Alice’s adventures, and take a hint from the author who—just before Alice’s sudden growth—observes that “this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.” Here, it appears, Alice has taken on the identity of that other “great girl,” the great goddess Isis, who is known as “She who weeps,” and whose tears are the source of the Nile River.

  Alice’s right foot, esq.

  Hearthrug,

  near the Fender,

  (with Alice’s love).

  Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

  Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.

  Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.

  After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, “Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, “If you please, sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.

  Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

  This dual personality also makes sense of why, a little later, Alice is feeling literally not herself—she wonders if she has changed into one of her friends—and why “her voice sounded hoarse and strange.” And why, as the Great Goddess, her recitation in a séance-like voice transforms an innocent poem about a busy bee into a sinister rhyme about a crocodile in “the waters of the Nile.” And perhaps it is also a reminder that the source of the entire fairy tale is a journey on the river Isis.

  Alice’s deliberations are interrupted by the sudden appearance of the dapper but somewhat harried White Rabbit. When Alice asks for help, the startled animal drops its white gloves and fan and dashes off. Alice picks them up and begins to fan herself as she ponders her predicament.

  Alice’s growth in physical size appears to provoke her into embracing larger thoughts and ideas. Carroll soon has her puzzling over a number of riddles and conundrums. Yet all of these ultimately seem to relate to one large question: “ ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” It is, of course, the great puzzle that has occupied the minds of humans since the dawn of time.

  Alice had already immersed herself in the deepest of metaphysical waters when she found herself shrinking down to nearly nothing and worried about “going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” Alice’s musings on the candle flame are as simple and profound as those of all the great philosophers and mystics who have ever meditated on the existence and nature of the human soul. Where does the flame go when it is blown out? What becomes of the flame of the soul after life is extinguished?

  “I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘How doth the little—’,” and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:—

  “How doth the little crocodile

  Improve his shining tail,

  And pour the waters of the Nile

  On every golden scale!

  How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spread his claws,

  And welcome little fishes in,

  With gently smiling jaws!”

  “I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh, ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it; if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! 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’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”

  Alice comes to understand that memory is a critical aspect of identity. Consequently she attempts to orient herself by trying to remember rules of grammar, historical and geographical facts, logical arguments, mathematical tables and recitations.

  Mentally exhausted, she continues to puzzle over the question of her identity. She is so frustrated, she wishes someone would simply tell her who she is, “and if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.”

  But then Alice discovers she is once again fluctuating in size. She has now become so small that she finds the White Rabbit’s little gloves have somehow slipped onto her own hands. Measuring herself
against the height of the glass table, she estimates she is now about two feet tall.

  St. Augustine: He and Alice thought along similar lines.

  ON MEMORY AND TIME

  Alice becomes “curiouser and curiouser” when she experiences a separation of mind and body and grows so rapidly that her feet “seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off.”

  Alice’s experience is reminiscent of an observation by the first great Christian philosopher, ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (AD 354-430). In Book XI of his Confessions (AD 398), Augustine asked: “When the mind sets itself before itself to express what it sees, does the mind see part of itself with some other part of itself as we see parts of our body with another part of it, the eyes, by putting those parts in the eyes’ line of sight?”

  St. Augustine was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa during the last days of the Roman Empire. Lewis Carroll knew the Confessions intimately, in both Latin and from the 1838 English translation by Edward Bouverie Pusey—his mentor and his father’s college friend. Indeed, Augustine’s practical amalgamation of scientific truth with religious belief (as well as his rejection of eternal damnation) was influential in the formation of Carroll’s own moral philosophy.

  Let us compare Alice’s thoughts during her descent down the rabbit-hole with those of Augustine in his Reflections on Memory and Time, where he speaks of himself as a man who when he “plunges into the depths of his memory,” finds “it is vast and frightening and yet it is only his own mind, his self.” Alice similarly plunges into the depths of her own mind, albeit in a dream.

  Alice’s rabbit-hole is described as a dark and “very deep well” lined with all manner of things: “bookshelves and cupboards … maps and pictures.… Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?…I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth.”

  This is similar to Augustine’s “depths” with their “uncountable expanses, hollows, caverns uncountable filled with uncountable things of all types … darting this way and that” as he finds himself “plunging down as far as he can go, and reaching no bottom.…”

  All this, and in a passage reminiscent of Alice’s question, “Do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats?” Augustine observes that “Memories are in motion, elude him, flying in unbidden like bats in a cave.”

  Once in Wonderland’s hall, Alice’s confusion is comparable to Augustine’s: “What is my makeup? A divided one, shifting, fierce in scale.” Just as Alice can’t make up her mind whether she is herself or somebody else, or what she felt and where and when she did it, Augustine says: “This is where I bump up against myself, when I call back what I did, and where, and when, and how I felt when I was doing it.”

  Augustine, like Alice, understands that “memory is a guide to conduct,” and consequently both attempt to orient themselves by way of memories. Alice becomes especially perplexed by the fact that she can positively remember that she has forgotten things she used to remember.

  Augustine ponders exactly the same paradox: “I cannot understand myself when I am remembering, yet I cannot say anything about myself without remembering myself. And what am I to make of the fact that I am positive that I remember having forgotten?”

  Both tie themselves up in mental knots. Augustine asks himself, “Who could say or think anything sillier?”, and concludes: “… [this is] the purest nonsense.” Alice reprimands herself with: “Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking.”

  Reflections on Memory and Time is the earliest recorded meditation on our ability to travel in “mental time”—an ability which is at the heart of human consciousness and cognition.

  In this dream-world dimension of shifting realities, as in the waking world, Alice arrives at something akin to Augustine’s conclusion in his Truth in Religion: “Even if I am in error, it is true that I have to exist in order to be making the error.”

  Or as Augustine more succinctly stated in City of God: “Even if in error, I am.” It took another twelve hundred years of pondering to produce the slightly more precise philosophical starting point of René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

  For Alice, as for any philosophy student, all else will have to follow logically from that beginning. And when doing so as Augustine advises, it is best to “house yourself in the humble person’s heart.” Or, as Carroll has done in Wonderland, in the heart of a child.

  ALICE’S MULTIPLICATION TABLE

  In attempts to recover aspects of her identity through memory, Alice tests herself with multiplication tables. But when she begins, she finds to her astonishment that the one she’s reciting is entirely foreign to her: “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!”

  At first glance, this example of Wonderland mathematics doesn’t seem very promising; as Alice herself observes, “The Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify.” But actually, it signifies a great deal about the way Carroll’s mind worked. Alexander Taylor, in his 1952 biography of Carroll, The White Knight, was the first critic to take Alice’s multiplication table seriously.

  “Mathematicians,” he wrote, “will have no difficulty in recognizing this as a problem based on scales of notation, but even the non-mathematical should make an effort to follow the explanation I propose to give, since this is proof positive that Dodgson was … doing something quite different from what he was pretending to do in this apparently guileless story for children.”

  What was the explanation? Let’s start with what Alexander meant by “scales of notation.” In our everyday use of numbers we use a scale of notation (or base unit) of 10, in which 52, for instance, is a numerical notation for (5 × 10) + 2. However, alternative scales of notation can be constructed using other base numbers. For example, in our everyday (base 10) arithmetic, 4 × 5 = 20 and 4 × 6 = 24.

  However, the Wonderland table begins 4 × 5 = 12; 4 × 6 = 13; 4 × 7…This is correct if we use different base numbers for each multiplication level—namely, bases 18, 21 and 24, respectively. So we have:

  4 × 5 = 20—but in base 18 it equals (1 × 18) + 2,

  which is written as 12

  4 × 6 = 24—but in base 21 = (1 × 21) + 3,

  which is written as 13

  4 × 7 = 28—but in base 24 = (1 × 24) + 4,

  which is written as 14

  This is a perfectly sound multiplication system so long as we continue to increase the base number by 3 each time.

  4 × 8 = 32—but in base 27 = (1 × 27) + 5,

  which is written as 15

  4 × 9 = 36—but in base 30 = (1 × 30) + 6,

  which is written as 16

  4 × 10 = 40—but in base 33 = (1 × 33) + 7,

  which is written as 17

  4 × 11 = 44—but in base 36 = (1 × 36) + 8,

  which is written as 18

  4 × 12 = 48—but in base 39 = (1 × 39) + 9,

  which is written as 19

  So far, so good. The next step would seem to be 4 × 13 = 20. However, the next base number is 42—and this number wrecks the logical progression of Wonderland’s table:

  4 × 13 = 52—but in base 42 it equals (1 × 42) + 10, which is written 1X, because in base 42, X is the symbol for 10. Consequently, Alice is entirely correct in her belief that she “shall never get to twenty at that rate!” The only way base 42 could produce a result of 20 would be to jump to 4 × 21 = 84. But in base 42, that would equal (2 × 42) + 0, which is written as 20. However, this calculation destroys the validity of the table.

  Alexander Taylor saw the Wonderland multiplication table as “proof positive” of what Lewis Carroll was up to mathematically in the book. Scales of notation were “exactly the kind of problem to interest Dodgson”; indeed, a contemporary of Carroll’s at Oxford noted his penchant for “testing the veracity of multiplication tables.”

  Taylor was the first to detect the existence of this particular Wonderland mathematical riddle (some five decades after the author’s de
ath), and commented that Carroll “never told anybody what he had done and he did not refer to it in his diary. Nevertheless, it can hardly be a coincidence; nor could he invent such a problem in a kind of day-dream, without knowing what he was doing.”

  He went with the flow: Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher.

  DOCTRINE OF FLOW Swept away in the flood of tears, Alice encounters a truculent Mouse in these salty waters. The most likely candidate for a philosophical Mouse would be HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS (535–475 BC), known as “the weeping philosopher” and the subject of a famous Greek epigram: “Among the wise … Heraclitus was overtaken by tears.”

  So both the Mouse and Heraclitus are “overtaken by tears”—which seems appropriate enough when you consider that Heraclitus’s most famous philosophical theory was the Doctrine of Flow. This doctrine is famously stated in the motto “You can never step twice into the same river.” Or more precisely, “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.”

  Also known as the Doctrine of Flux, it maintains that the one thing that is eternal is that all things flow and transform—which is exactly what happens in Wonderland. As Alice is caught up in the flow of her tears, the landscape and entities around her constantly change and transform.

  The Mouse’s bad-tempered, quarrelsome nature is in keeping with Heraclitus’s reputation for melancholia and misanthropy, and the Mouse’s conflict with cats possibly relates to the philosopher’s belief that “all things come into being by conflict of opposites.”

  And the Mouse’s disdain for Alice is a match for Heraclitus’s disdain for most of the human race, which he believed (quite accurately in the case of the dreaming Alice) “live like sleep walkers, in a dream world of their own.”

  This interpretation may also explain the Mouse’s extraordinary leap from the flow of tears. Heraclitus believed it was the philosopher’s task to examine life in such a way that its “underlying meaning can leap up—like the solution of a riddle.”