Two Alice Poems

Reflections on reflection

From Olives (2012) Alicia Stallings’ third collection of poems, and indeed, from the final section of that volume entitled ‘Fairy Tale Logic’, here is ‘Alice in the Looking Glass’. The volume has to do, inter alia, with Stalling’s young son, reading him bedtime stories, introducing him to fairy tales, and with her own age. This sonnet is, obviously, about the children’s classic Through the Looking Glass (1871); we need to know the story, about the girl Alice who passes through a mirror in her house into Looking-Glass Land where nonsense is the logic and things are back-to-front, to understand the poem. But this poem is about the poet Alice, who writes it and who observes herself in the mirror in her house. She is full grown (she was 44 when she published this poem): the opening suggests that where she might once have been able, when she was a girl—when she was the age Carroll’s Alice is in the story—to pass through the glass, now she is an adult it is too late. We cannot go back to childhood: time doesn’t run that way. Yet there is her alter ego, the Alice in the mirror, in her backwards world, reading right-to-left rather than left-to-right as we do (for Western version of ‘we’). Where Carroll’s Alice discovers a shire-sized chess match being played with full-sized pieces, Stalling is only moving little red and white jars on her dresser top. Where Carroll’s Alice is neatly dressed and blonde (in Tenniel’s illustration that is: the actual Alice Liddell was a brunette), Stalling’s blouse is askew and her hair is going grey. The observation in the poem is about contrasts, about inversions. It is a reflection upon reflection, and Stalling elegantly works contrasts into the form of the piece—the poem playing with mirrorings as it describes mirroring: the first line ends with the ‘time’; so does the last line The other line-endings match their words up in contrasting pairs: lines 2 and 13 ‘there’/‘here’, 3 and 12 ‘left’/‘right’, 4 and 11 ‘top’/‘bottom’, 5 and 10 ‘Still’/‘[dis]quiet’, 6 and 9‘pass’/‘stay’, and 7 and 8 ‘why’/‘because’. The four ‘corner words’, top left, right bottom left and right—the frame points of the mirror—can be read ‘no time’ horizontally or diagonally, and ‘nowhere’ vertically. The first mention of time is a statement of its passing (‘the time/is past’); the second a statement of its persistence (‘save for time’). Alicia Stalling stalls mirror-Alice, in the sense of penning her, keeping her ‘locked inside’, in the shallow space of the mirror’s surface—mirrors are silvered, just as Alicia’s hair is—and there is perhaps a pun on Liddell in the ‘little jars’ Alicia moves around. Carroll’s book is called Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There: Stallings reverses the order of the title, putting ‘Alice’ before ‘Looking Glass’, and changing ‘through’ to ‘in’. Verse about reversing, as per the final line.

It is a poem about time, about aging, and about ‘passing’, as the poet passes by the mirror in line 6, as time passes in lines 1-2, as we look forward to the ‘passing’, which is dying, that is before all of us. We can’t turn back time, even if everything else is turned, or inverted, or upended. No going back. The mirror’s disquieting power doesn’t include that possibility. Or perhaps it does. Nicholas Schilero’s essay ‘Gödel, Einstein, Carroll: Parallels and Crossovers’ [in Franziska E. Kohlt and Justine Houyaux (eds), Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion (Peter Lang 2024)] argues that ‘Gödel, Einstein and Carroll are looking-glass reflections of one another’ sharing ‘reinforcing themes of madness, aberrant time and inescapability’. Gödel discovered an ‘Alice in Wonderland-like solution for Einstein’s General Relativity’— ‘the solution’s closed time-like curves describe a possible model of the universe where backward time travel is possible’ [Schilero, 73]

Here's Robert Graves’ poem ‘Alice’ (from Welchman’s Hose, 1925):

This is a specifically postwar poem; Graves, still shellshocked by his experiences, looking back on one of his favourite childhood books and finding everything it had meant to him turned contrariwise by the trauma of conflict. It’s a poem about the way travelling to a land of unreality (a land of death) estranges normalcy; and it’s also about the White Goddess, in nascent form—1925 was before Graves had properly formulated his ideas on this, but it’s interesting to consider the extent to which the sexless inviolability of this ‘prime’ female figure feeds into Her; the way She is not the same thing as her mundane-life, feline analogues. ‘The dead end where empty hearses turn about’ is an especially resonant phrase, I think. Not the mud of the trenches, but the paraphernalia of a High Victorian funeral. It intimates, without being too literal-minded about it (and the whole point of this poem, as of Graves’ whole poetic output, is also what he finds as the ground of the appeal of the Alice books: namely not taking the world too literally or scientifically)—this poem intimates that the world behind the mirror is a kind of afterlife. Which of course it is. To fall from a great height is to die; to crash through glass is to die; to eat strange foods and mushrooms is to risk of being poisoned; to approach wild animals is to risk fatal mauling; to plunge unprepared into the salt sea is to risk drowning. All these things happen to Alice, and yet she does not die.

That Alice’s adventures have, in some sense, to do with death has been argued before. Back in the 1950s Peter Coveney insisted that there was something fundamentally unhealthy in Carroll (and J M Barrie’s) preference for children over adults. And we can hardly deny that there was something a bit oddball about Carroll the man: the stammering, shy-mannered, purple-handed fellow—he stained his hands purple-blue working with the chemicals necessary for his photographic pursuit, and always wore white kit gloves as a result—expending all his emotional energies on pre-pubescent girls. Nowadays we’re most likely to frame our sense of disquiet about this in terms of paedophilia, the great moral panic of our generation. Coveney sees in it broader but rather more morbid terms:

The justification of secular art is the responsibility it bears for the enrichment of human awareness. The cult of the child in certain authors at the end of the nineteenth century is a denial of this responsibility. Their awareness of childhood is no longer an interest in growth and integration, such as we found in The Prelude, but a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world. One feels their morbid withdrawal towards psychic death. The misery on the face of Carroll and Barrie was there because their response towards life had been subtly but irrevocably negated. Their photographs seem to look out at us from the nostalgic prisons they had created for themselves in the cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan. [Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: the Individual and Society: a Study of the Theme in English Literature (1957; 2nd ed 1967), 241]

I don’t agree, but it’s worth dwelling on why Coveney thinks so:

The innocence of Alice casts its incisive but delicately subtle intelligence upon Victorian society and upon life. But it is not simply that. It is not simply anything. Even in this first and greatest work, there is a content not far removed from nightmare. Alice in Wonderland has the claustrophobic atmosphere of a children’s Kafka. It is the frustrated ‘quest’ for the ‘Garden’ which in the event is peopled with such unpleasant creatures.

It’s not that this is wrong per se, I think; it’s only that it misses the quality of joy in the Kafka. I’m tempted to say that Carroll brings out the fun in Kafka better than Kafka does himself (Deleuze, in his Coldness and Cruelty book, says that when Kafka first read his stories out to people in Vienna, the audience fell about laughing. Which is very possible).

But, look-see: the elephant had padded into the room. There are several ways of addressing the ‘paedophilia’ angle as far as Carroll was concerned. One way, of course, would be simply to sweep him into the box marked Monster and refuse to engage with his tainted art. I think that would be a pity, not because I’m certain that his heart was perfectly pure when he took his photographs of naked nine-year-old girls, but because the art itself doesn’t seem to me tainted. The paedophile’s fantasy (I assume) is that of the sexually available child; but the striking thing about Alice is how unavailable she is, how far she resists attempts to assimilate her to our agendas. That she is her own person is the ground of her splendour. Her curious inviolability is integral to the way she works in these stories. I also tend to think that the best reading of the ‘Freudian’ symbolism of the books—all those vaginal doors, tight entrances, all those phallic swellings and shrinkings, swimming through seas of bodily fluids, the oedipal anxieties of the Queen of Heart’s pseudo-castrating cry of ‘Off with his head!’—that the best reading of all that stuff is William Empson’s ‘The Child as Swain’ chapter in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson engages enthusiastically with all the ‘Freudian’ symbolism in the books, but does so within the conceptual framework of Some Version’s larger agenda: putting the complex into the simple; the ironies of class; the relationship between heroic and pastoral modes. In fact, recently re-reading ‘The Child as Swain’ was a revelation to me. It brought home to me how far the account is from being a straightforward Freudian decoding of Carroll's books, despite the fact that Empson, tricksily, insists that it is (‘the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms’, 253). In fact Empson’s stress is on the way the (sexual) world of adulthood becomes nonsensical when it is, in Empson's rather brilliant phrase, ‘seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness.’ That’s right, I think.

Instead of this, I think, we can read Wonderland and Looking-glass-world, Graves-ishly, as that place where:

Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,
The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass
Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,
Where young Gargantua made whole holiday . . .

Apuleius and Rabelais could also be construed as Kafkaeque nightmares if they weren’t so joyful. And I’d say that Apuleius is closer in tone to Carroll’s, because both Asinus aureus and Alicia aurea understand the extent to which desire is construed by frustration. Gargantua is a creature of giant appetites which he indulges on a giant scale. Apuleius’s ass is a man reduced to mule-ishness, repeatedly baulked of his yearnings as he travels through a land of fantastical adventures. And this latter is the logic of the Alice books. After arriving in Wonderland Alice peers through the door to ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’ (‘How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and cool fountains!’) But she cannot get to it. She is much too big to fit through the door. Then she finds a way of magically shrinking herself, only to realise that she has left the key to the door on the table and out of reach. She grows too tall again, and then shrinks down. She has the ability to alter her body, to enlarge it, to shrink it, and yet always seems to find that whatever size she thinks she wants is the wrong one. When she meets a group of animals she scares them away by talking about how her pet cat likes to eat such beings (‘I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!’ she says at the end of chapter 3, as if it wasn’t something under her control!) She approaches a table with many empty seats and places laid for tea and tasty food, but the Hatter, hare and dormouse sing out ‘no room! No room!’ Upon finally arriving at the beautiful garden she discovers it in the possession of a homicidal monarch (‘Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any time’). When she tries to play croquet, the mallets—being flamingos—keep twisting away from the shots she wants to play. In Looking Glass frustration becomes, as it were, a formal principle of the story-world: one must go backwards to go forwards, must run as fast as possible to stay in the same place, and vice versa. Reversals.

The reason the books themselves don’t feel frustrating to read, despite being stitched together out of frustrations, is that Carroll understands how far our desires are structured by what thwarts them. Alice encounters a delightfully varied, diverting, idiosyncratic and funny succession of individuals, but at a deeper level her story is a general story. To quote Adam Phillips:

All our stories are about what happens to our wishes. About the world as we would like it to be, and the world as it happens to be, irrespective of our wishes and despite our hopes. Our needs thwarted by the needs of others; our romances always threatened by tragedy; our jokes ruined by the people who don’t get them. The usual antagonism of day-dream and reality. [Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (Faber 1998), 1]

Phillips’ argument in this book is about growing up, about how we accept disillusionment as the price of adulthood, how we shed childhood’s vitality—or indeed whether we do these things. His point is more than than ‘desire without something that resists it is insufficient, wishy-washy, literally immaterial’ [4], although that’s obviously part of it (Phillips adds the concomitant: 'a world that too much resists my desire is uninhabitable, unliveable in’). Of course it is only my hunger than can transform food into a satisfying meal. But it’s more than that. It is that children understand desire in a more forceful way than adults ever can.

Children are fervent in their looking-forward to things; whereas adults can lose a sense of what is there for the taking. The child, it seemed to Freud, was the virtuoso of desire. [6]

That’s true in a general sense, I think, but particularly true of the Alice books.

What do we find, through the Looking-Glass? We find what Apuleius found: a queen. I first read the Golden Ass in Robert Graves' splendidly counter-intuitive, yet (I still think) effective 1951 Penguin Classics version; counter-intuitive because Graves deliberately renders Apuleius's ornate, game-playing, fancy Latin in plain, expressive English. It shouldn't work, yet somehow it does. And by the time he came to translate that book Graves had reached his crucial, intensely personal conclusions concerning the White Goddess. Apuleius' Lucius ends his asinine peregrinations by receiving a vision from The Queen of Heaven: he can be returned to human shape by eating the crown of roses being carries by the priests of Isis in procession. He does so, and afterwards becomes an acolyte of the goddess, worshipping her in Rome as Campensis. Why does she have three names (Regina Coeli/Isis/Campensis), I hear you ask? That's because she's actually the triple goddess. All this had personal resonance for Graves: his own bestial manliness, his bashed-about youth, his eventual female-determined sanctuary, all of which undeniably informs his translation. But it has resonance for Carroll's text, too, which retells this fantasy narrative from, as it were, the other side. The human-beast mutations happen to other people, not Alice. What happens to Alice is that she reveals her true nature. She is Al-Isis; she is the new White Queen. She is the White Goddess. That's why this blogpost starts with that splendid Tenniel illustration of the three queens, the three goddesses, all one as maiden, mother and crone.