To the Queen’s frantic calls for a beheading, and to her query about why people are lying face down on the ground, Alice responds:

“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no business of mine.”

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming “Off with her head! Off with—”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent (p. 93).

Alice is not surprised by what she doesn’t know because she has no desire to know it (“It’s no business of mine”), and this serves as an antidote to the Queen’s fury. But fury may be no less and no more expressible than the other emotions Alice has. One can no more choose to be or not be angry than worried or curious. Among many other things, good manners may be Alice’s pragmatic way of living within her own wishes. Saying no is merely a polite way of saying no to more nonsense than the mind can bear.

INDETERMINISM AND THINGS NOT EATEN

“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” (p. 195)

A world consumed by non-stop punning is an indeterministic world where chance rules and creates what the nineteenth-century French statistician Poisson termed the very rare event—what became known as the Poisson distribution. Following such a mathematical curve, all events in the Alice books are equally unexpected concatenations, and many characters are improbable hybrids of animals and people and insects, most of whom speak reasonably well. Being a pragmatist, Alice wonders, and then worries, about what she will eat. She also, less normally, wonders and worries if she will be eaten, though she fails to realize that for something to eat, something else must be eaten. Thus she mentions her cat Dinah to a mouse and birds. Many of the creatures behave like strange recipes for inedible foods, food that would prefer to talk back than be consumed. The tove is a badger with the “short horns of a stag,” and a borogrove is an extinct “kind of Parrot” that “lived on veal.”17 Wonderland and the world beyond the looking glass is home to a Rocking-horse-fly that is made of wood and swings from branch to branch, a Dragon-fly whose body is formed of plum pudding, and a Bread-and-butter fly whose wings are thin slices of bread and whose head is a lump of sugar. Edible lobsters dance the quadrille. The chief ingredient of Mock Turtle soup sings a rather sad and piquant song, and Alice travels in a carriage compartment that holds a goat, a gentleman dressed in white paper, a horse, a beetle, and a gnat that is large as a chicken but whose voice sounds like that of a horse. All this follows upon Alice’s seeing a “regular bee” that was quite irregular: “in fact, it was an elephant” (p. 177).

These cross-pollinated creatures are sui generis beings who resemble another strange creature in Carroll’s works: the portmanteau word—the highly individuated, one-of-a-kind linguistic phenomenon that is predictably unreliable at communicating meaning. Like most things whose actions are improbable, such creatures can hardly be believed. They appear to be governed neither by rule nor by law. In this sense, very little can be inferred about their nature or their genus. The contemplation of life forms turns out to be frustratingly abstract; the creatures are as unpredictable as unsolved problems. And like most anomalous specimens and unappeasable desires, they seem to have gone extinct before their proper time, as witness the Dodo and borogrove. Yet such is the accidental nature of organic life itself, the life of desire, which the French philosopher Bichat noted defies “every kind of calculation, for it would be necessary to have as many different rules as there are different cases.”18 In this sense, Wonderland is a belated nineteenth-century ecosystem, a pastoral mathematical formula on the verge of logical extinction. In this system, determinism, as an immutable law, is being subjected to the twentieth century’s “laws” of chance. There is a simpler way to state this: Many creatures in the Alice books are edible things that remain inedible to Alice: lobsters, mock turtle soup, a rabbit, a duck, a pig, a fish, oysters, a whiting, an egg—Alice has no desire to eat them. Our appetites are arbitrary. If our desires are not surprising to ourselves, they probably don’t work very well as desires. One of the first things Alice eats is something that is, from a botanical standpoint, neither living nor dead and so, from a logical standpoint, incapable of having desire: a mushroom.

For all her worrying, Alice does little eating, and this suggests three things: that her desire to eat remains unresolved (a kind of self-punning on her wants); that her consumption patterns are anarchic rather than habitual; and that she is too reasonable with her appetites, conversing with foods (that she should be eating). Being a pragmatist with one’s emotions is dangerous play.