.

“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”

“I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone. “Sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, “I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin” (p. 108).

When is a feeling not a feeling? Perhaps when you want to share a feeling that you can’t. Alice’s feelings and her conversations go nowhere because they have no one to go to. Alice generally experiences her emotions by herself—that is, her emotions, like pity, are usually rapidly substituted by a chain of dissatisfaction and worry. For this reason, they appear shallow and unreal.

INEDIBLE PUNS AND WORDPLAY IN WONDERLAND

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.” (p. 219)

It is not surprising that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, like any drama about growing up, is also a drama of the arbitrary, nonsensical, and unending transformations and erasures that characterize games, conversations, and literature. Thus Alice is a novel of growing up that is populated with twins and twinned occurrences, speakers who repeat exactly what another says, people appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, birthday presents that don’t feel like presents, and Carroll’s parodies of conventionally didactic school verses. Many of the characters in Alice don’t just speak in rude puns and insoluble riddles—they are puns and riddles that have been transformed into characters. Both characters and narrative events are at times indistinguishable from nonsensical linguistic transformations. In the Humpty Dumpty chapter in Looking-Glass :

The egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when [Alice] had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It can’t be anybody else!” she said to herself. “I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!”

To which Carroll disingenuously adds: “It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face” (p. 214).

Growing up, like writing a pun or falling in love, is the occasion for perhaps some of the most absurd of human feelings. These feelings are suggested by the non-conversations, questions answered with riddles, and wordplay of the Alice books: paronomasia, linguistic substitution, antanaclasis, anagrams, punning, palindromic progression and erasure, repetition with minor variation, spurious etymological derivations, and reverse mirroring. These linguistic “events” take place in a time that is not clearly the present (“in about half no time!” [p. 106] as the Queen puts it ) but which seems to reference an endless becoming. Such activities are related to Alice’s erroneous multiplication tables, the “sweet little nothings” whispered by lovers, Alice’s unwitting jibes, and the unforeseen appearance of the Cheshire Cat’s grin. A short excerpt from one of the Duchess’s speeches in “The Mock Turtle’s Story” is exemplary. The passage begins with an injunction not to imagine something, passes through the vicissitudes of understanding, and finally ends with an entreaty to not speak; this series of transformations is similar to growing out of childhood itself, which is suggested here by a birthday present one doesn’t want to have:

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’ ”

“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I ca’n’t quite follow it as you say it. . . . Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.

“Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.”

“A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad people don’t give birthday-presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud (p. 105).

Growing up, which is what Alice is in the midst of, is a strange, nonsensical, and paradoxical event in which boredom and interest, possibility and probability, childish fantasy and adult reality intermingle. If possibility is about desire, then probability is about its limitations, the things Alice can’t say or do. And that is where nonsense, which is where the probable becomes indistinguishable from the possible, comes into play, along with anxiety, misunderstanding, puns, and death.