Puzzles, truths and more reasons to re-read Alice in Wonderland as a grown-up

Ideas and expressions like down the rabbit hole, curiouser and curiouser, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, grinning like a Cheshire cat, mad as a hatter, off with their heads, what a strange world we live in, and even the word “wonderland” itself have come to us through the Alice books. (Photo by Nicole Baster via Pexels)

The world knows July 4 as American Independence Day. But the date also marks a momentous event that has nothing to do with nations or revolutions. On July 4, 1862, a 30-year-old mathematics teacher at Christ Church College, Oxford, took the three young daughters of the dean of Christ Church on a rowing trip up the river Thames, a six-mile round trip with a lazy picnic on the riverbank at the village of Goswick.

To keep the children entertained, the man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, made up a whimsical story featuring one of the sisters, Alice Pleasance Liddell, then 10 years old. The girls were enchanted and asked Dodgson to write it all down. He did, and three years later, encouraged by his friends who read the story, published it under the pen-name Lewis Carroll. Thus was born Alice in Wonderland, certainly the most famous children’s book of all time. In 1871 came Alice Through the Looking Glass, as good as the first one or perhaps better.

In India, everyone who has read English storybooks as a child has heard of Alice in Wonderland. A majority of them may have even read at least bits of the book. They would certainly claim to have done so.

Many of the ideas from the books are part of the language now and most users may not even know the origins. For example, down the rabbit hole, curiouser and curiouser, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, grinning like a Cheshire cat, mad as a hatter, off with their heads, what a strange world we live in; in fact, the word “wonderland” itself.

The cultural influence of the books has been immense. In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that if he takes the red pill, he will be able to see how deep the rabbit hole is. Lady Gaga’s song 'Alice' is just one of many—Jefferson Airplane’s 'White Rabbit', Taylor Swift’s 'Wonderland' and so on—that refer to Alice; it starts with the chorus “My name isn't Alice, but I'll keep looking for Wonderland”.

In his classic TV show Cosmos, astrophysicist Carl Sagan used the Mad Hatter's tea party episode from Alice in Wonderland to illustrate the effects of higher and higher gravity, culminating in a black hole. The massively popular TV series Lost contains many references to Alice's world. The Season 3 finale was in fact titled “Through the Looking Glass”.

The structure of James Joyce’s most difficult novel Finnegans Wake—a long and apparently nonsensical dream—is inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Many authors have used phrases from Alice as titles of their books, from O Henry—Cabbages and Kings—to P.G. Wodehouse—Pigs Have Wings. Countless video and computer games have been either directly based on the Alice stories or refer to them or have used ideas from the books.

Why are the books so popular 150 years after they were published? Quite simply, the quality of Carroll’s whimsical imagination—playful, bizarre and unpredictable. It makes the stories as fascinating for an adult as they are for any child. But the most incredible thing about Carroll’s creation is that it is actually a bottomless rabbit hole. One can spend a lifetime—as many serious academics have done—plumbing the books’ depths.

Let me mention here just a few facets of the books that lie beneath the surface. For readers who truly want to take the red pill, I recommend The Annotated Alice edited by the late American polymath Martin Gardner—Carroll’s text with embedded explanatory notes that rely on a century of multi-disciplinary research.

As a mathematician and lifelong lover and creator of puzzles, Carroll covertly inserted quite a few riddles in the books, and the enjoyment of the books is in no way reduced if the reader does not notice them or does not know the answers. But the biggest puzzle that Carroll set up for himself is the underlying framework of Alice Through The Looking Glass. The story is in fact a chess game with Alice as a white pawn who checkmates the red king in 11 moves. The full table of the moves in the game appears on the first page of the book.

Every turn that Alice takes in her journey through the looking-glass world is actually that of a pawn advancing, square by square. All the characters are chess pieces and all the rules of chess are followed. At no point, for example, does Alice exchange words with a piece that is not on a square adjacent to her. Queens move around, while their husbands—kings—stay more or less immobile. The erratic behaviour of the White Knight—including falling off his horse periodically—fits the unique way a chess knight moves, two squares forward and one square sideways.

A nonsensical fantasy that is also a game of chess—one of the most clinically logical human activities? This is an absolutely unmatched achievement.

(Representational image by Becerra Govea via Pexels)

Let’s move on to the philosophical aspects of Alice. Here are a few quotes that may make you think about what they could mean. Or appreciate truths that are just throwaway lines in the books.

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

“But it’s no use now to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

“If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.”

And this passage, which is open to explanations and confirmations from myriad philosophies—both religious and secular:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

In Through The Looking Glass, Alice meets a young deer in the “woods where things have no name”. They walk out of the forest together and the deer immediately realizes who it is. “The Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. ‘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, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.”

Says Gardner: “The wood in which things have no name is in fact the universe itself, as it is apart from the symbol-manipulating creatures who label portions of it because—as Alice earlier remarked with pragmatic wisdom—‘It’s useful to the people who name them.’ The realization that the world by itself contains no signs—that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by the way of a mind that finds tags useful—is by no means a trivial philosophic insight.”

We have no way of knowing whether Carroll wrote these words with a subtext in mind. But he must have been conscious of the many scary references to death and apocalyptic visions in the Alice books.

For instance, Alice thinks of dying all the time and the Red Queen keeps calling for random people to be beheaded at the drop of a hat. But just one poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, in Alice Through The Looking Glass, is sufficiently representative.

The walrus and the carpenter sit on a beach and serenade a horde of oysters to come up to them and then eat them. Today’s environmentalists may find some extra meaning—which Carroll may not have thought of—in lines like these: “The sun was shining on the sea/ Shining with all his might/…And this was odd, because it was/ The middle of the night.” “The sands were dry as dry/ You could not see a cloud, because/ No cloud was in the sky/ No birds were flying overhead/ There were no birds to fly.” And the seas were also “boiling hot”.

The poem is as horrific as anything that Stephen King has written in top form. The walrus and the carpenter engaged in pleasant chitchat with the oysters, while eating them up with bread and thick slices of butter with a dash of vinegar and pepper. The poem ends with these lines: “'O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,/ ‘You've had a pleasant run!/ Shall we be trotting home again?'/ But answer came there none—/ And this was scarcely odd, because/ They'd eaten every one."

Tweedledee had been reciting the poem for Alice and when he stopped, Alice said: “I like the Walrus best, because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”

“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see, he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took.”

“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”

“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.

“This was a puzzler (for Alice)”, writes Carroll.

One could go on and on. Like all great literature, the Alice books keep revealing new layers on every reading. And it does not matter whether the author worked in those layers as part of his plan. We will never know. But these mysteries are what make us revisit a work of art again and again, from The Great Gatsby to Guernica.

And the final mystery about July 4, 1862. Carroll referred to it as a “golden afternoon” he spent with Alice and her sisters. But weather reports say that the day was cloudy and rainy. Who can tell what is the truth, if such a thing does exist?