Alice 4: Riddles, Ravens, Writing-desks

[The last of my Alice thoughts, for now; meant to post it with the rest, last week, but one thing lead to another, which lead to another, which lead back to the one thing, after which I had to have a bit of a lie-down.]

In The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll's Mathematical Recreations (Copernicus 1996) Martin Gardner—the man whose annotations to the Alice books brought many people, myself included, to the books—recalls that he didn’t like Carroll’s writing as a kid:

As a child my greatest reading delights were the fantasies of L. Frank Baum. I tried hard to read the Alice books, but was put off by their abrupt transitions, the lack of a consistent story line, and the unpleasant characters in Alice’s two dreams. And of course I missed all of Carroll’s subtle jokes, wordplay, logic paradoxes and philosophical implications. [ix]

I was very struck by this, reading it recently: because the things Gardner lists here as putting him off as a child were precisely the things that attracted me to the Alice books when I was younger. Perhaps without realising exactly why, I responded joyfully to the way this story about escaping drab mundanity into a world characterised as much by frustration as dream-logic wish-fulfilment (the frustration is important, I think, and I’ll come back to it) was itself written in a form that flouted drab conventionality. I’m struck, too, that all these things—abrupt transitions, distrust of the ‘coherence’ of conventional plot-lead storytelling, unpleasant characters and buried games and wordplay—are in the fiction I myself write and publish. This was not a conscious decision on my part to imitate Carroll, although ‘conscious’ is a tricky word to apply to text and influence of this calibre Gardner adds that he eventually fell in love with the books as an undergraduate (‘unlike many Carrollians,’ he says, ‘I still believe that the Alice books should not be read by children, at least not by American children, until they are well into their teens.’). He goes on to highlight a number of buried riddles and gags that he thinks many people miss. ‘An example of puns so well concealed that they were long urecognized are the three ‘littles’ in the prefatory poem. They refer to the three Liddell sisters:

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.

‘The first Alice book also contains the Mad Hatter’s notorious riddle about the raven and the writing desk. Carroll confessed that he introduced the riddle without having any answer in mind, though he later supplied one: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” Carroll deliberarely misspelled “never” to make it “raven” backward.’ And again, the poem that stands as Epilogue to Looking-Glass:

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

Famously, of course, this is an acrostic: spelling out ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL.

Actual Alice is not impressed

Now, the appeal of the Alice books depends upon the quality and resonance of their imaginative play. Play is vital, something the importance of which children grasp intuitively. Nonetheless, Gardner has a point, I think, when he implies that some kinds of play bore children. Acrostics might be one such. The more abstruse logic and metaphysics (are we all just a part of the Red King’s dream? and so on) may be another.

Whilst we’re on the subject of riddles and gags that no-one has spotted, here’s one that slipped past even Martin Gardner. In Through the Looking-Glass chapter 3 ('Looking Glass Insects') Alice wanders into the forest where nothing has a name:

She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. 'Well, at any rate it's a great comfort,' she said as she stepped under the trees, 'after being so hot, to get into the — into what?' she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. 'I mean to get under the — under the — under this, you know!' putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. 'What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name — why, to be sure it hasn't!' She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. 'Then it really has happened, after all! And how, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was, 'L, I know it begins with L!'

Here's Hugh Haughton, in the Penguin Classics 'Centenary' edition of the novel (he is following Martin Gardner's explanation): 'L is for Liddell', which is the real Alice's surname. But this is surely not right: for when she recovers her name she does not call herself 'Liddell', but 'Alice.' No, the joke is otherwise. She is in a forest, but she cannot remember it is a forest. She meets a fawn, who cannot remember it is a fawn. When it leaves the forest it does remember ('I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight, 'and, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes').

No: 'I know it begins with L!' -- What begins with an 'l' is: lice. The joke is that for a moment she thinks she is member of the lice family. Which is appropriate enough, since this is the chapter in which she has just encountered all the other Looking-Glass insects.

I like that gag, and am surprised nobody even spotted it. But that’s how the ludic element works. Maybe the issue is: it’s a gag. And maybe I’m sensitised to things like gags and riddles (two formally, and indeed semiotically, rather similar things) because I’ve just published a book on Riddles and Tolkien. And because I always like Fozzie Bear’s terrible jokes. I mean, even as a kid I understood that the point was to laugh at Fozzie, because he thinks his terrible jokes are funny; but I found them actually funny. There’s a defect in my comedy gland, I daresay. So: maybe I’m seeing riddles in my latest re-read, where the consensus is the books are actually about ‘Nonsense’.

Nonsense is certainly interesting. It has a long pedigree. Indeed, in oral form (‘Hey Diddle Diddle’) its pedigree vanished into the backward and abysm of time; but even its more scholarly and textually ludic forms can be traced—as Noel Malcolm does, in his excellent The origins of English nonsense (1998)—to Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. Carroll and Lear stand as the Beatles and Stones (or: the Tennyson and Browning; or: the Spielberg and Tim Burton; or the to sweep back around to my original analogy, the McCartney and Lennon) of English nonsense—to quote David Langford:

Carroll’s Alice books offer a kind of intellectual nonsense based on perverse ‘Read-the-Small-Print’ interpretations of logic and idiom, while Lear exploits disconcerting whimsies, non sequiturs and unexplained nonce-words like “runcible”. G K Chesterton, argued in ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ [in The Defendant (1901)] that this made Lear the superior fabulist, a view not universally shared. [Langford, ‘Nonsense’, in Clute and Grant (eds) The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), 691]

Not universally shared, indeed. It’s the difference between the fluent polish and pleasantly murderous violence of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ as against the jarring estrangements of ‘I Am The Walrus’, although in an irony that speaks neatly to my subject today, in writing this latter song Lennon was, of course, directly channelling Carroll, not Lear.

So that’s all fine and dandy; but riddles are a different matter. Riddles are sense wearing the clothes of nonsense; they’re nonsense that only appears to be nonsensical until you light upon the key, when strong sense suddenly blares forth. There are those who feel that all nonsense is like this, that once we have found the golden key that unlocks the box of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ then it will all come clear. I think the raven and the writing desk operate according to the principles of a different kind of avionic escritoire. What they have in common is a trivial matter of surface appearance—they both begin with the phoneme /r/—and all attempts to delve into deeper significance are quite deliberately derailed.

Delving in the fertile fields of Tolkien made me ponder just how deeply riddling Anglo Saxon culture was; and therefore how riddling was The Hobbit. Not just the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter, but all the way through, from Bilbo’s unexpectedly riddling ‘Good morning’ (‘what do you mean? that it is a good morning, or a morning for me to be good on’ and so on) to the meaning of ‘hobbit’ itself. Indeed, I think the heart of the success of The Hobbit is the extent to which Tolkien was able to recreate an Old English or Old Norse idiom in this modern form (the children's novel). As I argue in the book, I take that culture to have been in a profound sense a 'riddling' one, ironic, playful, funny, brave in a deliberately careless way.

But it’s surely a long way from the Old English—stomping about with hessian cloaks and swords scratching at the lice in their hair—to well-dressed, well-scrubbed, ever-polite Alice. From such Old English beasts as riddling ravens (‘war-gull’ is an Anglo Saxon kenning, or riddle, for raven: grennir gunn-más “feeder of the war-gull” = “warrior”) to the writing-desks from which issued all Carroll’s other riddles. Or perhaps the vector runs the other way: from the Victorian tea-party hair and hatter of Wonderland to the Old English Haigha and Hatta of Looking Glass

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name is Haigha.' (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with 'mayor.')

Why is a raven like a writing desk? What links the riddling culture of the Anglo Saxons with the material of nineteenth-century England? Riddles themselves. Riddles are like sides of the mushroom, like the comestibles on offer down the rabbit hole. Ingest one, and it may shrink signification (just a solitary bird; just a piece of furniture). But, try another and it may make you soar, fly like a raven, generate masterpieces of literature.