Our desires, like puns, are absurd to think about, imagine, speak, or exchange. Moreover, our desires are almost impossible to realize. The things that happen in the Alice books are not quite events or exchanges; they are more like meta-events, things that are logically conceivable within a specified range of actions (possible) or things that are logically likely within a range of actions (probable). All events in the Alice books thus feel like non sequiturs. What kind of sense does growing up make to the child trapped in a present that has not yet become future? “I don’t know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time!” (p. 190). Freud noted in The Interpretation of Dreams that “in the unconscious, nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.” 8 As Adam Phillips notes, for children, “answers merely interrupt questions.”9 The opposite of endless waiting may be endless and infinite becoming, with Alice growing larger one moment and shrinking the next. If Alice’s wishes were merely boring repetitions of things she already knew, rather than nonsensical re-expressions or puns of her never-ending desires, she would have nothing more to be curious about or quibble with—in others or in herself—and not being able to do these things, she would be left with something anomalous and inhuman.

In the second “fit” of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, the poet calls attention to the division, seen as a kind of “interruption,” inherent in the (verbal) definition of a thing. The narrator of the poem proposes “one” of the characteristics of a snark but like a magician ends up by specifying two: “It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: / And it always looks grave as a pun.” With its doubled meanings contained (accidentally) in a single word, the pun suggests the inexpressible, a kind of irreducible argument that takes shape as a single word which, rather than repeating its meaning, splits violently into two senses. Like desire, the pun is inexpressible. Its meanings sprawl endlessly, non-purposively, and violently. Our wishes, which take grammatical form as questions,10 are a kind of metaphysical nonsense about the unspecified things they may become. Childhood desires exist to be transformed into something else: a book, a pet kitten, a lover, a grown-up sister, even a Cheshire Cat or a White Knight.

The story of Alice is a story of what her desires, her curiosity, will find and how, in the process, they become something else.” Elizabeth Sewell notes of nonsense words, “If a word does not look like a word . . . , the mind will not play with it.”11 Yet nonsense, like fertility, “has a fear of nothing.”12 Or, as Jacques Lacan noted, “the signifier is stupid” and in the pun engenders “a stupid smile.”13 In a world where desires are like puns, the dispute between true versus false becomes absurd, like a puzzle without a solution, a game without rules, effects without causes, desires without satisfactions—or a grin without the cat. Such a condition is grave; the Queen, upon witnessing the chaos of a croquet game, demands to trump the untrumpable by having “everybody executed, all round” (p. 99). Carroll conceived of the Queen “as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.”14 Thus much of the nonsense, curiosity, and desire of the Alice books can be answered only with silence or death—or other radical misinterpretations. But, of course, one wants to know if death is a misinterpretation of nonsense—or is it the other way around? To put it in terms relevant to Alice, is death nonsensical, or is nonsense a cloak for death? The Mouse’s tale is at bottom something to read. It is an emblematic poem about injustice, shaped like a mouse’s tail. It begins on a Monday morning with Fury having “nothing to do” (p. 37) and culminates with the unspeakable: Fury’s illogical persecution of and condemnation of a mouse to death—a deadly joke about the literal and figurative end of a tale/tail, which is to say a joke about nothing.

Unlike the endless substitutions of the pun, death “confronts us with the fact that, despite the capacity for substitution that development, in psychoanalytic terms, depends upon, there are no substitutes.”15 The joke and pun put up a shabby, even stupid resistance to things that must die, and so they are a paean to continuing misinterpretation. The pun is grave; but so is all language, which ceases at the borders of rudeness in order to conceal the fact that after a certain point, there are no more things to be said, that talking is a nonsensical covering for the rude silence that cannot be concealed. As Freud noted, unlike the child, the “civilized adult . . . can hardly even entertain the thought of another person’s death without seeming to himself hard-hearted and wicked.”16 Alice mentions her cat Dinah and unwittingly brings silence to her interlocutors. Alice is not yet fearful of death or bodily changes. She is learning that to be subjected to the desires of others is to be subjected to unbearable puns and nonsensical commands.