Alice 2: Up With The Smoke, And How Alice Flew

If the rule of three should obtain anywhere, it ought to apply to the fairy tale logicworld of the Alice books. Nor am I the first person to think so. I remember buying Gilbert Adair’s sequel to Wonderland and Looking-Glass when it came out in 1984: Alice Through the Needle's Eye: A Third Adventure for Lewis Carroll's Alice. And it’s not bad, considering; though it reads as dilute compared to the incomparable originals. Alice trying and failing to thread a needle finds the eye growing bigger, falls through and into haystack, which turns out to be a stack of the letter ‘A’. The narrative then strings a series of pun-based animal encounters along an alphabetical conceit (she meets a spelling bee, then two cats joined at the tail who recite the poem ‘The Sands of Dee’; then she meets an elephant and—you get the idea). Needle-land literalises metaphor, so that when it rains cats and dogs actual cats and dogs fall from the sky. Yet somehow, and despite Adair’s fertile imagination the worldbuilding never quite reaches the sprightly solidity of Carroll’s. Of course, that’s a high bar to set for any writer.

Now: I’ve been thinking how might I do the same thing. It’s an idle rumination, since no publisher is looking for a new third Alice book right now. On the up-side, I happen to know the only contemporary illustrator who can hold a candle to Tenniel; and I’d be prepared if necessary to give him the third degree and compel his collaboration by Main Force. Auspiciously I am, like Carroll, also called Charles—my middle name, a family heirloom passed from grandfather to father to son and onto my own boy; though by the same token ‘Robert Carroll’ would be a pseudonym too vainglorious and overreaching to countenance. But since I’m engaged only in thought-experimentation and not actual writing, there’s no reason to hold back.

It seems to me that the problem with Alice Through the Needle's Eye is that Adair gets the balance wrong between rigid logic and surreal fantasy. By ‘wrong’ I mean: he doesn’t weight it the way I’d say Carroll would have done, had Carroll actually written a third volume. A rule of three should progress according to its own logic. So Wonderland is set in the summer, in the countryside, and construes its fantasy via the kind of pastime—card games—a young girl is likely to enjoy in that setting. Looking-Glass is set in the autumn, in a more regimented and neatened version of nature (we might say: the suburban garden) and the story parses a different pastime: chess, more suited for indoors play. The third instalment should, accordingly, be set in the winter (let’s say: Christmas, or New Year), in the city, and be structured according to a third game or pastime—I’m going to suggest: snakes and ladders. Adair, though, reverts to summer countryside, and jettisons the game trope altogether, relying instead (shudder) on chores—needlework! Learning one’s letters! His book also lacks any of the sense we get from Carroll’s two books of childhood slipping away; I mean, the way Looking Glass is more autumnal in tone as well as setting. The third book would surely extrapolate this further. Conceivably, this fact alone explains why Carroll never got around to writing it.

One further consideration: Wonderland traces a downward journey, into the underworld (Alice’s Adventures Underground was Carroll’s original title, of course). Through the Looking-Glass is a horizontal transformation, sideslipping into an alt-England. Through the Needle’s Eye is mere repetition of trajectory. Clearly what we need is a journey upwards.

On the other hand, Adair gets several things right. One is his decision to keep the frame of reference as a kind of generic Victorian: nothing too period specific, but certainly no attempt to shoehorn in contemporary childhood references—how ghastly a sequel would be if it included cellphones and Ben-10 references. Adair pastiches the Carrollian style pretty well, though erring a little on the side of tweeness. Will Brooker, in his excellent study of the reception and interpretations of the Alice books [Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (Continuum 2004)], calls it ‘an intelligent fake’, which is right, I think. But he thinks it lacks structure, or lacks the right kind of Carrollian structure. The alphabetical conceit doesn't have enough narrative or imaginative force, and ‘the characters Alice meets do not seem to follow a clear system, like those in Wonderland and Looking-Glass … Jack and Jill are from a nursery rhyme and the Country Mouse from a fable; the Grampus and the Hairdresser have the same rhythm to their names as the Walrus and the Carpenter … but the main theme throughout is simply encounters with talking animals, some of whom take their names and characteristics from a play on words.’ [Brooker, 168]

So, in my thought-game, the third book should be Up. Alice playing snakes-and-ladders with her two sisters before a roaring fire, on New Year’s Eve. She ponders what magic it is in the fireplace that is able to transform so heavy a thing as a massy log into airy smoke and bright upward-snaking flames; and (of course, falling asleep) she swooshes up the chimney. Inside a sooty chimney is a nicely Victorian location, and Alice might encounter a whole society of sweeps. The pillars and banners of smoke can be as serpentine, or as elevating, as the game-conceit needs. However long the chimney flue becomes, lit by the sparkles of fire and containing any number of crisped, sooty or urban characters, Alice would surely eventually emerge into the night sky above. An aerial Alice could move continually upwards, through citied clouds and hairy comets, to an Orlando-Furioso moon, upon which the little dog is still laughing to see such fun. 21st-century readers have enough of a solid sense of Victorian city life to enable a wide range of reference and playful iteration of 19th-century tropes. What title to choose is a poser, mind. Alice Up The Chimney is a touch too double-entendre for our purposes, I think; and Alice Goes Up In Smoke rather suggests that she explodes. After consideration I think I’d go with Up With The Smoke, And How Alice Flew. Flue, see. Flew.

Maybe not.

But there’s one serious, or semi-serious, point in all this fanciful speculation. It relies on the sense, which I argued in the previous blogpost, that Carroll’s playful levity, his lightness of comic touch, is not incompatible with seriousness. On the contrary, comedy (especially English surreality) is a surer ground of seriousness than po-faced gurning. And what this third Alice book would pinpoint is the buried Dantean structure in Carroll’s narrative. In the first part, Alice goes into the underworld, meets creatures transformed into various monstrous shapes by their rigid natures—except that where Dante is all moral and finger-wagging and doleful-countenanced by what he sees, Carroll plays the resulting peoplescape for laughs—not only more enjoyable, but more ethically and aesthetically eloquent. In part two Alice moves horizontally into a more structured environment. Where Dante figures a mountain with seven terraces (one for each deadly sin) followed by a summit that leads the traveller to heaven, Carroll imagines a chessboard where Alice moves through seven squares before passing, in the eighth, into her queenly apotheosis. A third Alice book should surely move, like Dante, up into the sky. And there should be a rose at the end of it. One bubble more? Why not?

Alice 1: Through the Looking-Glass and What Apuleius Found There

To start by approaching one author who had a profound shaping effect upon the younger me by means of another author who had a profound shaping effect upon the younger me. Here's Robert Graves’ poem ‘Alice’ (from Welchman’s Hose, 1925):

When that prime heroine of our nation, Alice,
Climbing courageously in through the Palace
Of Looking Glass, found it inhabited
By chessboard personages, white and red,
Involved in never-ending tournament,
She being of a speculative bent
Had long foreshadowed something of the kind,
Asking herself: 'Suppose I stood behind
And viewed the fireplace of Their drawing-room
From hearthrug level, why must I assume
That what I'd see would need to correspond
With what 1 now see? And the rooms beyond?'
Proved right, yet not content with what she had done,
Alice decided to enlarge her fun:
She set herself, with truly British pride
In being a pawn and playing for her side,
And simple faith in simple stratagem,
To learn the rules and moves and perfect them.
So prosperously there she settled down
That six moves only and she'd won her crown—
A triumph surely! But her greater feat
Was rounding these adventures off complete:
Accepting them, when safe returned again,
As queer but true, not only in the main
True, but as true as anything you'd swear to,
The usual three dimensions you are heir to.
For Alice though a child could understand
That neither did this chance-discovered land
Make nohow or contrariwise the clean
Dull round of mid-Victorian routine,
Nor did Victoria's golden rule extend
Beyond the glass: it came to the dead end
Where empty hearses turn about; thereafter
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 . . .
But further from our heroine not to stray,
Let us observe with what uncommon sense—
Though a secure and easy reference
Between Red Queen and Kitten could be found—
She made no false assumption on that ground
(A trap in which the scientist would fall)
That queens and kittens are identical.

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 think this is right, but it’s worth dwelling on why. Coveney goes on:

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 E.'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.

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 he 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.

Alice, What's The Matter?

Dates me, that blogpost-title. I know.

Well, if you've been following this blog over the last couple of months you'll know I've been teaching a course on Childrens' Literature at my gaff this term, and posting thoughts on course texts here, or hereabouts, as I've been going along (Rousseau; Gebruder Grimm; Farrar's Eric; Kingsley's Watterbabbies). Right: the next course-text up is Carroll's Alice books, and over the last few days I've been trying to get my ducks in a row with respect to Wonderland and Looking-Glass both. It's proving much harder than I thought it would, for this is the first of the course texts that I truly loved, with a deep and abiding passion, as a child -- and which I still love. So, hmm-yeah, getting critical distance upon it is proving tricky. And disposing my thoughts into snappily framed readable-means-short blogposts is turning out to be beyond me on this one. Accordingly, the rest of this week will involve a series of linked posts, some of which will be lengthy, about these two bewitching novels. Ain't promising nothing, mind.

Thor: the Dark World (dir. Alan Taylor 2013)

[I've been asked to add this: SPOILERS! So now you know]

So, there are Nine Worlds, each one a different planet orbiting in an alternative dimension and all ruled by the pseudo-Viking Asgardians. Because clearly the people you want in charge of an executive and judiciary overseeing the lives of trillions  are Aryan warrior proto-fascist hereditary-monarchical Vikings.* But the Dark Elves attack Asgard, led by Christopher Ecclestone in inch-thick death-pale facial prosthetics and long braided blond hair that make him look like Benedict Cumberbatch playing a panto version of Julian Assange. The plot (about a mysterious energy called Aether that swirls about in the air like cranberry juice poured into water) is mostly garbled, and the tension is repeatedly let down by the deployment of metaphorical get-out-of-jail-free cards: viz., there is NO WAY OUT OF ASGARD! except this one secret way we never told you about. THOR'S HAND IS OFF! CHOPPED CLEAN OFF! oh no, there it is, back on his wrist. LOKI IS DEAD, WEEP MORTALS, WEEP! except he's still alive, it seems. THERE EXISTS NO WEAPON THAT CAN DEFEAT THE DARK-ELVES' MONSTER WARRIOR! except this one we didn't mention before. The effect of all this was not a series of cool twist-and-turn plot surprises, but instead a deflating sense of plot leakage and the sacrifice of drama to the needs of a continuing franchise in which only the non-marketable characters, like Rene Russo's Frigga, can die. The comedy inserts were pretty lame, the lack of chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman borders on the embarrassing, and the whole thing was too long. The special effects were nifty, though; and I liked the design of Asgard, not because it was cool but precisely because it was so naff, the sort of kitsch Heavy Metal Album Cover faux-grandeur that inspired Saddam Hussein to decorate his palaces the way he did.

So, yes, I was more-or-less bored until a twofer between Thor and Anthony Hopkins' Odin about halfway though the movie, when it dawned on me that Hopkins alone of all the cast was pronouncing 'Asgardian' as 'Arse-Guardian', the sly Welshman ('we shall fight to the last Arse-Guardian breath!') After that things perked up, since I was able to make-believe the battle between Thor and Ecclestone's Maleninthdoctor was actually all about protecting the Cosmic Arse.

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*I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, 'actually, Vikings were mostly farmers, thoroughly civilised and artistic and not at all like the raping-and-pillaging figures of popular myth'. To which I will say: which of those two things, dull history or colourful myth, do you think informs this movie?

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863)

This is one of those stories many people believe themselves familiar with, but which is actually much, much odder than they realise. Maybe you read it awhile ago and have forgotten just how fuck-off weird it actually is; maybe you read a simplified or bowlderised version that downplayed the oddness. Conceivably, tut-tut, you never got around to reading it -- in which case, get on with it! It's available free online, nicely illustrated; it isn't long, and though it is intermittently bonkers, racist and dyed-to-the-marrow religious, it's also strangely powerful and insistent, and deserves to be resurrected from its general oblivion. Its racism doesn't deserve to be so resurrected, of course; and part of me worries that the antediluvian attitudes to race can't be separated out from Kingsley's larger project. But for its assault on ideas of unfettered Capitalism, its exploration of poverty and childhood, its insistence -- rare for a book of its time, and doubly so for a writer of Kingsley's religious stamp -- that innocence as ignorance is a great evil, and above all its unprecedented and well-nigh unfollowed big Fantasy worldbuilding genius in throwing together fairy tale, Celtic myth, Darwinism and New Science ... for all these reasons, it is worth a read.

Tom is a chimney sweep boy who ‘could not read nor write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for there was no water up the court where he lived. He had never been taught to say his prayers. He never had heard of God, or of Christ.’ [1] He is, that is to say, Kingsley’s version of unaccommodated man, the boy-thing itself: a deliberate mashing together of the categories of ‘innocence’ and ‘ignorance’. Accordingly, theologically, Tom’s story is one of spiritual redemption, inflected via Kingsley’s muscular Anglicanism, and not least of the muscularity of it is the way it burleys straight through centuries-old church debates. So: Tom stumbles into the wrong room when working the chimneys of a north-country manor house; is chased away by a hue-and-cry of pursuing servants.

Away he flees, over the limestone heights, growing more and more parched and exhausted Eventually he falls into a river and drowns—a grim way to start a children’s story, to be sure. But although the lord of the manor weeps tears at the misunderstanding that lead to his accidental death, pays his master £10 compensation (which the wicked old master drinks in a week) and buries Tom’s body in a fine grave, Kingsley insists this is all missing the point. Because Tom has not died; he has been transformed into a water baby, a tiny riverbeast with external gills, perhaps something like an axolotl.

He lives in the river for a while, admiring carefully described dragonflies (another symbol of the rebirth of the dazzling soul from the chaff of the earthly body):

Eventually he washes down to the sea, and has adventures there, not least an encounter with a splendidly stubborn old lobster.

All these talking beasts! So: can the unbaptised get to heaven? The Catholic church (we can imagine Kingsley spitting superstitiously) is not sure: according to the catechism of that faith, baptism by water, by blood (as in the case of martyrs) or—failing that—baptism by ‘desire’, the active will on behalf of the individual to receive the grace of Christ, may be enough. But what of children too young, or like Tom too ignorant, to be able to formulate this latter? Well, says the Catholic catechism, warily, ‘the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God’ [1261]. Kingsley comes at it another way: the whole of Tom’s post-mortem experience is one long baptism, the washing away of sin. Death is itself (the novel is saying) a baptism; a kind of Heracleitan baptism of flow. Kingsley, who got a first in classics at Magdalene, knew very well that the Greek verb βαπτίζω means both ‘clean, wash, ablute’ and ‘plunge, sink, disable, overwhelm, go under, draw from a bowl.' Baptism for Kingsley is neither a sprinkling, nor an immersion; it is a whole new fluid idiom of existence. At sea is meets Ellie again (the girl into whose room he stumbled), goes on a quest to redeem his -- now dead -- old master Grimes, and matures into a spiritual being of selfless love and virtue.

To this deeply figurative stuff on the washing away from sin, Kingsley mixes in great doses of carefully observed observational natural history, and a properly non-teleological Darwinism. Evolution for Kingsley was not a narrative of progress, but of continuous change without any providential direction. Because he is writing a fairy story, he replaces the environmental pressures that power natural selection in The Origin of Species with moral pressures. As a water-baby, Tom’s new life is given shape by the presence of two female spirits, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.

When Tom bullies some sea anemones, he is mutated into a hideous prickly creature by the karmically-named latter, and must embark on a long quest to redeem his vicious old master in order, by the sheer power of selfless love, to return to the tender embraces of the former. A Darwinist might object that the river should actually be governed not by these two explicitly moral sisters, but by two far more forbidding clones, Mrs Eatorbeeaten and Mrs Beeatenoreat. But that would only be to translate the idiom of the story from the ethical to the practical realm, and one of the points of The Water Babies as a book is to demonstrate that our practical realm actually only exists in order to stage the ethical drama—because, in Kingsley’s opinion, God created our world on exactly those terms. So, creatures that deny the cosmic necessity of duty and karma are shown as devolving (hence the most offensive of several racist blots on the book, where black Africans are shown as being on the downward devolutionary path towards gorillas because as men they put pleasure and indolence before duty and service); but creatures that are well adapted to a universe shaped by duty and karma move upwards towards a pure shining maturity. It doesn’t describe the actual world, I think; but it gets at something important about the world of Story, and that is a universe through which humans move and which inflects behaviour and beliefs.

Kingsley, sent an advance review copy of The Origin of Species and wrote to Darwin that he had ‘long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species.’ Darwin added a version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that ‘A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.’ Contemporary scientists make an appearance. Here Richard Owen (left) and Thomas Henry Huxley examine a water-baby, but, lacking a place for such an entity in their taxonomy, refuse to believe that it exists.

One of the madder sections of The Water Babies (what can young kids in the 1860s—or, more, in the 1900s, or 1950s—have made of it?) satirises the heated dispute that followed the publication of Origin of Species as ‘the Great Hippocampus Question’. Owen insisted that men have hippocampi in their brains, and apes do not, demonstrating the (divinely ordained) gulf between them. Huxley (correctly) insisted that apes have hippocampi too. The debate raged. Kingsley’s levity is a little plodding on the matter:

He held very strange theories about a good many things. He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions? You may think that there are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an ape too. No, my dear little man; always remember that the one true, certain, final, and all-important difference between you and an ape is, that you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, and it has none; and that, therefore, to discover one in its brain will be a very wrong and dangerous thing, at which every one will be very much shocked, as we may suppose they were at the professor.—Though really, after all, it don’t much matter; because—as Lord Dundreary and others would put it—nobody but men have hippopotamuses in their brains; so, if a hippopotamus was discovered in an ape’s brain, why it would not be one, you know, but something else.

But his point is, in a nutshell, ‘negative capability’; or more precisely a negative-theological version of this somewhat akin to Newman’s Grammar of Assent:

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, “That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature,” you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong.—Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies, ch.2

Otherwise, Kingsley had a bracing and nicely counter-intuitive sense of the glamour, romance and manliness of Science, that sets his book at odds with the tradition then starting up, a tradition that developed into a great delta of texts in the 20th-century in which scientists are troped as weedy geeks. Here, from his non-fiction Glaucus is Kingsley’s idea of Science:

Let no one think that this same Natural History is a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic men. I should say, rather, that the qualifications required for a perfect naturalist are as many and as lofty as were required, by old chivalrous writers, for the perfect knight-errant of the Middle Ages: for (to sketch an ideal, of which I am happy to say our race now affords many a fair realization) our perfect naturalist should be strong in body; able to haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day, uncertain where he shall eat or rest; ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost, and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre; he should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life. [Kingsley, Glaucus (1855)]

Speaking as a man equally effeminate and pedantic, I must say: I like the sound of this. I’ll check with my colleagues in the Science Faculty as to its accuracy.

There’s a good discussion of the novel in Colin N. Manlove’s too-little-known Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (CUP 1975). Manlove notes that

The most striking feature of The Water Babies is the amount of what we can call for the moment irrelevance. There is much material in the book which has little relation to Tom and his history—as much, in fact, as takes up one quarter of the whole. There are, for instance, long descriptions of the curious architecture of Harthover House (20-3), the geological make-up or Vendale (45-9), or the structure of St Brandan’s Isle (with history of the saint attached, 193-6). When Tom reached the salmon river, Kingsley asks, ‘what sort of a river was it?’ … and there follows a page-long account of the nature of Irish streams, the quality of the fishing and the characters of the ghillies; after which he proceeds in the same way to try Wales, Hampshire and Scotland, until after three pages in all he announced, ‘No, it was none of these, the salmon stream at Harthover’. (117-22)

This is in part taken from Rabelais, a writer Kingsley admired (hence the fondness in The Water Babies for long lists of bizarre things, and galloping knight’s-move shifts in narrative direction). Though many critics, and more readers, have thought this only a kind of sloppiness, Manlove makes a good case that ‘the very violence by which the carpet is continually pulled from under us suggests that the method could be deliberate.’ [21] ‘Kingsley is being patronisingly nonsensical for his chid readers, or else the nonsense has real artistic function in his fantasy.’ [23]

I’m going to make the case for deliberate design in the novel by picking out one of its features: the way the prose keeps being tugged back into a buried set of rhythms. This, it seems to me, marks the transition from sin to repentence. Bunyan’s Christian (one of Kingsley’s textual models) carries his sin as a great pack on his back, which drops off at the foot of the cross. We might think that Tom carries his sin externally: blackened by his life up chimneys, like Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ his soul is white; and washed clean by the river this becomes apparent. But in fact, even after he has drowned Tom carries a propensity for wickedness inside. And the rhythms of the book’s prose carry, inside them, a mode of marking this.

I’ll explain what I mean. The first thing we hear Tom say is in response to seeing his master Grimes wash himself in a stream Tom ‘stopped, quite astonished’ and said ‘Why, master, I never saw you do that before.’ Let’s lose the Master, because if the novel is clear about anything it is that Grimes is not Tom’s true Master and we have a strange line of decasyllabic verse:

Why I never saw you do that before.

The second thing Tom says is reported as saying is:

I wish I might go and dip my head in.

Which starts with two standard iambs, but then jolts awkwardly about to close on three trochees. And pre-water-baby Tom is prone to speaking in decasyllabic lines of verse littered with wrongfooting trochaic emphases:

Poor man—and he looks so kind and quiet.
But why should the lady have such a sad
Picture as that in her room? Perhaps
It was some kinsman of hers, who had been
Murdered by savages in foreign parts,
And she kept it there for a remembrance.

What prevents us from recognising this as blank verse, howsoever crude, is the way it repeatedly throws out the iambic rhythm, presumably because Tom’s rough-and-ready being-in-the-world is not up to such refinements yes. Occasionally an iambic pentameter will fall onto the page:

I must get out of this or I shall stay …

But only to be knocked-back by the unmetrical follow-up:

I must get out of this or I shall stay
Here till somebody comes to help me—which
Is just what I don't want."

But as we get closer to the death-baptism, the metre starts to regularise in interesting ways. Dying Tom believes it to be Sunday, though it’s not. Asked why he thinks so, he replies:

Because I hear the church-bells ringing so.

The refrain ‘I must be clean, I must be clean’, which is repeated several times to incantatory effect, is two strong iambs, and falls into blank verse easily.

I must be clean, I must be clean, I must
be clean, I must be clean, I must be clean.

And, seeing the stream that will become the medium of his transformation, Tom becomes more metrically eloquent.

I must be quick and wash myself; the bells
Are ringing quite loud now; and they will stop
Soon, and the door will then be shut.

After his transformation, Tom speaks this way most of the time: ‘you are an ugly fellow to be sure!’; ‘And where do they come from? And what are men?’; ‘Oh stay! [Oh] Wait for me! Down to the sea?/For everything is going to the sea’; ‘I only want to look at you; you are/So handsome’; ‘“So there are babies in the sea?” cried Tom/“Then I shall have some one to play with there?”’; ‘"Oh, then I shall have playfellows at last!’; ‘Oh, where have you been all this while? I have/Been looking for you [for] so long, and I/Have been so lonely’; ‘“Dear me!" cried Tom. "And I know you, too, now’; ‘Miss Ellie, I will know why I cannot/Go with you when you go home on Sundays,/Or I shall have no peace, and give you none’; ‘Because I was all over prickles? But/I am not prickly now, am I, Miss [E]?’; ‘I am so miserable here, I'll go’; ‘How cruel of you to send Ellie away!’; ‘But, please, which is the way to Shiny Wall?’; ‘But what am I to do, ma'am? For I can't/keep looking at you when I am somewhere’; ‘I am not going west, as you may see’; ‘But can't I help you any other way?’; ‘“I should be glad enough to go,” said Tom’; ‘“Oh, Miss Ellie,” said he, “how you are grown!”’; ‘You are the Irishwoman who met me/the day I went to Harthover!’. Not everything Tom says disposes itself into pentameters; of course; but the proportion of his speech that does is too great to be explained by chance. More, the blank verse falls away during incidents when Tom comes closest to backsliding on his new mode of life.

SpongeBob WorldBuild

This is a post, really, about SF/Fantasy worldbuilding, and not about SpongeBob at all. But nonetheless I say: let his glorious, joyful face stand, there, at the head of this post, for all the world to see.

So, as you know already: SpongeBob lives in the undersea town of Bikini Bottom. Now, should we be disposed (and why would we not be) to consider the calibre of worldbuilding of the show in which he appears, we might note in it certain inconsistencies and departures from the commonly agreed conditions that obtain in the real world. Here are two kinds of these departures.

1. Despite being under the sea, the characters frequently light fires, and such fires burn merrily.

2. The cartoon world of the show is, in a hundred particulars, very clearly based on US life. Bikini Bottom is, as it were, a small US coastal resort, translated via the rubbery topological reshaping by which such cartoony things work, underwater. Nonetheless, we discover in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie that the people of Bikini Bottom are governed by a King. The people of the USA are not governed by a King. In one sense, that's kind of the whole point of the USA.

Now, there was a time when the first sort of 'inconsistency' about a SF text would have bugged me much more than the second. Indeed, I can imagine people who would not regard the second as an inconsistency of worldbuilding (based upon doesn't mean same as; no reason why this imaginary land might not be a monarchy; Neptune a recognised maritime mythic figure; and so on). Nonetheless, I am these days more put out by the second inconsistency than the first. The first doesn't seem to me to be an inconsistency worth fretting over, since it embodies the core representational logic of the show -- the comedy of incongruity integral to animated cartoonery. The second, however, violates the cultural logic of the text. It is the distinction between those fans who read texts only on the level of in-show content on the one hand, and those who read texts according to their codes of representation on the other. As far as that goes, it seems to me shows operate according to conventions. Darren in Bewitched is the spitting image of Dick York in the first five series and yet he looks extraordinarily like Dick Sargent in the sixth to eighth series. Despite this fact, the other characters at no time so much as mention his strange and upsetting physical metamorphosis. In SF, though, there is this grievous black-hole pull back towards the logic of the first type, above. When Doctor Who swaps actors, it has to be written into the text on the level of content, it has to be rationalised and explained. The problem with this attitude (widespread in SF, I'd say) is that it treats us, readers and viewers, as if we are all as idiotic as Hugh Laurie's Prince George at the Theatre ('Look behind you Mr Caesar!').

2013 Man Booker Shortlist

My review of this year's shortlist is over on Strange Horizons, now. The winner will be announced on Oct 15th, when I'll come back to this post and say a little something more.

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The 'something more' is only: that Catton, which I sort-of called, won.  And that (despite what I wrote in this post, penned before I'd actually read the shortlist) the list as a whole had a strong Fantastika flavour to it. Interesting, that.