alice in wonderland and utopia

Orbis Litterarum 1990, 45, 1 3 6 1 5 3

Alice in Wonderland and Utopia Leah Hadomi and Robert Elbaz, University of Hafa , Israel

In this paper we study the ways in which Alice in Wonderland simultaneously reaffirms and transgresses the utopian structure through the consideration of the three basic productive modes of Utopia: the games, the language, and the dream which are essential to the utopian generic structure as a whole. Alice, we claim, constitutes an insecure form on the very limits of the literary production, and as such, i t hovers between sense and nonsense, repetition and difference.

This paper proposes to study the interface between Alice in Wonderland’ and the utopia as the expression of alternative worlds and realities and its later manifestation as dystopia. Alice, it will be shown, involves both dimensions: utopia and dystopia. In its hesitation to adopt a definitive generic structure, it problematizes the productive process of narrative forms. Alice as an insecure form sits on the very limits of the literary production, hovering between sense and nonsense, repetition and difference. The ways in which the utopian structure is simultaneously reafirmed and transgressed in Alice will be investi- gated in this paper through the analysis of what seems to be the three basic productive modes of utopia: games, language and dream are sine qua non to the very existence of the utopian generic structure. These three modes are not separate metaphorical entities; they combine to form both the utopian space in all its variety and the mental semiotic horizons of the characters inhabiting it. For in the absence of a new linguistic structure, a new definition of games (and all games are social) and the dream within which these patterns are deployed, the ontological gap between the real and the fantastic vanishes together with the possibility of a critical perspective and transcendence.

Tired and bored with the grey day, Alice is tempted to run after the rabbit and thus begin her adventurous journey, replete with dreams and games, into the depths of wonderland. The primary motivation to move from the realistic to the fantastic world is the fact that “she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it;” so, “burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it” (A 26). The rational motiva-

Alice in Wonderland and Utopia 137

tion, curiosity, no less than the escapist one, the dream, is what drives the character to accede to a world of magic, because “it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way” (A 33).

In the portrayal of this fantastic world, which necessitates a picaresque journey on the part of the character, are combined items from the concrete world (a rabbit, a watch), with a system of relations that is not built on empirical categories (a rabbit living by the watch). These basic ingredients which are manifested both in the structuration of the character and in the complex relationship that reality and the world of magic entertain, recall in a number of ways utopian fiction.

In the utopian genre, as in Alice, the main protagonist passes from the real world to another world. And the description of this other world involves elements from the concrete reality - objects, institutions, events - which maintain a set of relations different from those in the real world. Further, there are common traits to both Alice and the utopian hero, in the development of their relationship to that other world. Much like Alice who seeks to recover the dream of wonder from which she awakens, the utopian stranger- visitor, as well, aspires to comprehend the utopian world and even partake in it; in the end, however, he leaves it behind sometimes to tell of its greatness, and sometimes to return to it. Aside from these common points, there are of course many differences between Alice and the utopian genre as a whole.

The basic difference involves the speculative method whereby wonderland is constructed. The system of thought at the basis of utopia is that of rationality while that of wonderland is “nonsense”. In essence, nonsense is a-thematic (unless it is its own object of inquiry). The Alice Method rejects rationality as the systematic apprehension of reality and seeks to discover new modes of a different logic.’ We might say, then, that in Alice the method is in the lack of method; thus Alice’s world of wonder differs from that of utopia. And despite its inherent satirical-critical elements directed at the Victorian reality and all its institutions, its ethics, as well as the accepted norms of education, government, and law, this world is not based on a system of values different from the one prevailing in real it^.^ In the utopian world, on the other hand, the method is constructed on a criticism of the accepted norms of reality and on the transformation of the value-system that governs it.

This difference leads in utopia to an imaginary reconstruction of a world involving absolute values, a world which in its practices and institutions

138 Leah Hadomi and Robert Elbaz

surpasses our quotidian world. In Alice, on the other hand, the difference between the two worlds has to do with the transgression of the closed parameters of logical rationality. This is manifested in the description of a wonder world - based on an open and dynamic nonsense - that produces some kind of an utopia of logic. Thus the main difference between Alice and utopia is in the serious tone and didactic purpose of the utopian generic structure as opposed to the surprisingly humoristic tone of Alice in which the ethical-didactic dimension is negligeable. As suggested, the utopian world imitates, in many ways, the conditions of the life-world but operates a transformation of the laws which govern the relations between these conditions and social practice. Well-known phenomena, after they have undergone the utopian reformation, prove to be quite different: diamonds can turn into balls in the hands of playing children, and gold can serve to design chamber pots in the world of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516); work is measured not by economic achievements but only by creative ones, and is termed “the art of work” in the village community of William Morns’ News from Nowhere (1890); four hours a day is the work load in Thommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) and this is due to the modest needs of the inhabitants coupled with technological development. The birthrate is to be controlled and planned in order to protect the standards of living in H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia ( 1905). Man’s basic existential needs, therefore, resemble those of the known reality, but the laws that govern them are dictated by the utopian method that criticises reality and imagines its optimal reformation.

In Alice too the conditions of reality are reflected, but their modes of apprehension and linguistic inscription are twisted. Like every growing child Alice changes size and shape, but she does so without any proportion. Like any child she tries to measure up to objects in order to exercise control over them, to manipulate animals and plants but also to join in with them, but these change their shapes and ways of functioning (those with which she is empirically familiar) and thus abort the relational logic between them and humans. She meets with certain well-accepted habits, like the meeting with school peers, but in this encounter the graduates recall memories of particular fields of study: “Mystery, Seaography, and Drawling” (A 129). She is invited to a traditional British tea party, but this party never ends because “it is always tea time” (A 99). In wonderland she also encounters well-known institutions like Royalty and the court of law, but the laws of government and justice lack any recognizable rationale. The fantastic uniqueness of


wonderland is further emphasized by Alice’s insistence to keep to the logic and norms she knows from the real world.

Thus, Alice’s wonderland reflects objects and events from the real world, along with a separation from the prevailing rationality, while in utopia there is a rejection of the accepted norms and a rational construction of an imaginary and different life. However, much like the development in the utopian genre as a whole, the developmental process in Alice moves from utopia to dystopia. Alice’s (and the reader’s) enjoyment or infatuation with the utopian dreamworld of wonderland, which involves the fantastic riddance of the yoke of logic, is overtaken by anxiety and chaos. The liberation from rationality turns into the threatening anarchistic reality of a nightmare. In utopia the hero’s identification (and often the reader’s) with the utopian magic goes through a similar process. This world based on a fantastic organization of an ideal reality, closed, separated and harmonious, is likely, in its exaggeration or extremism, to become a stifling dystopian reality, static and totalitarian, which the hero (and the reader) experiences like a nightmare. Alice too goes from wonder to quiet disbelief and from there to outright rebellion until the end when she leaves wonderland behind. Alice’s experience, as a visitor who attempts to partake in it and then leaves it in the end, recalls the experience of the wonderstruck stranger, in the early stages of the genre, who later expresses criticism and sometimes rebells against the other world that has disappointed him or attempts to escape from it. Like the engineer D503 in J. Samjatin’s We, Bernard Marx in Huxley’s Brave New World and Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, Carroll’s Alice in the end expresses an antagonistic relationship to wonderland and awakens from the dream.

The Games Reflection on the essence of utopian thought and imagination and their expression has no doubt concerned their analogy to the essence of the game. The metaphorical description of the utopian world resembles a game performance incorporating the preference for value systems that modify visions of the ideal world. Further, much like a game, most often the utopia has no quest for the realization of its projected plan. There is, then, in the utopian imaginary an analogy to a closed game structure that sets its course according to its particular rules and goals which are not necessarily teleological.

More’s Utopia, for example, portrays the story of the ideal society as the


terms of a reflexive dialogical game that Thomas More is playing with his friend Petrus Agidius. The two engage in an intellectual amusement with simulated social games in order to investigate the optimal solutions to the problems of government, law, economics, and education. In his Mode Utopi- que, Raymond Ruyer claims that this kind of amusement is nothing but an intellectual exercise that offers further possibilities to the ordering of human exi~tence.~ To Ruyer, this game form of utopia is conditional upon the absence of ideological extremism, the belief, even partial, of the utopist in the structure of his game, and the consistent obedience to the rules of the game. Herbert Marcuse, too, bases his notion of the social utopia on the dimension of “the urge to play” (“Spieltrieb”).s To Marcuse, this drive me- diates between antagonistic forces in man’s soul in such a way that the sensual need is sublimated while rationality is liberated from a surplus of sublimation.

The portrayal of games as a way of life in the utopian world is prevalent in many utopias. The games of children with precious stones in More’s Utopia and the chess games in Orwell’s 1984 come to express laws different from those in the real world.6 In Utopia the game with precious stones reflects a new relation to property while in the dystopia 1984, the hero, Winston Smith, who is broken by the compulsive violence of the state which has robbed him of his thought and his ability to make his own choices, “picked up the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because ...“7

Alice too is, in many ways, an expression of this game drive that frees rationality from its constraining parameters. Carroll himself (the author- mathematician/philosopher Charles Ludwig Dodgson) often played a variety of games and even created logical, mathematical and linguistic games as well as some technical novelties.* In being a sort of utopist of logic in his own life, he emphasized in his creations and his textual production the imaginary dream game.

A multiplicity of games hold the center in Carroll’s wonderland and the world of mirrors. In Alice the heroine is in fact involved in a ceaseless round of social games with other protagonists, like language games, dance, cards and running competitions and croquet. Alice loves to indulge in games that involve an element of rationality and consistency and attempts to make sense of the laws that govern them. In her visits (walks) through wonderland she attempts to join in these games while trying to comprehend their unique rules


and their prevalence in the non-sense of this land. Let us consider the role of the game and particularly its reflection of the utopia/dystopia problematic in Alice by looking at three amusements defined as games in the book: the caucus-race, the game of croquet and the “card game” (the trial).9

In her book Play, Game, and Sport: the Literary Work of Lewis Carroll, Kathleen Blake elaborates a number of theories which define the game in its variety and in its relation to Carroll’s world. The most comprehensive definition, however, constituting in our view an exhaustive interpretational grid of the game episodes is found in Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense. To Sewell a game consists in:’’

the active manipulation, serving no useful purpose, of a certain object or class of objects, concrete or mental, within a limited field of space and time and according to fixed rules, with the aim of producing a given result despite the opposition of chance and/or opponents.

Most central to the game situation, then, are the existence of certain conditions (time and space bound objects), rules (that lead teleologically from the beginning to the end of the game) and players (who choose rationally among a variety of possible moves). These three criteria provide us with a comprehensive interpretation of the three central (social) games in the work, serving to account for the nonsense inherent in the games in Alice and throwing some light on the utopian dimension of the narrative.”

The first game, “a caucus-race” (Ch. 111) transgresses the accepted parameters of the game while attempting to fulfil its own inner logic which transcends it; that is, the drying of the animals that swam in the pool of tears. The logic of this game lies in fulfilling a practical purpose arrived at towards the end of the game: the drying of the animals has little to do with the rules of the game itself. In the end, having tried the Mouse’s “dry stories” and failed, they all dry afer the caucus-race. Hence, the Dodo indulges “in a great deal of thought, and it stood for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead” (A 48) to come to a decision as to who deserves the prize. Everybody deserves a prize, including Alice, for everybody fulfils the condition of being dry. Indeed, the game parameters are transgressed with regard to the time and space of the competition: “a race-course in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape does no matter,” it said,)” without beginning or end, and thus, “the Dodo suddenly called out, “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”” But this

142 Leah Hadomi and Robert EIbaz

transgression is qualified by the self-transcending dimension of this particular game.

The croquet game, on the other hand, fulfils the conventional closed frame of the game, for its purpose is self-enclosed. Here the non-sensical dimension of the game thwarts any attempt to play it. If the caucus-race depends upon the anthropomorphization of the participants, here the borders between the fauna and the flora are erased: “Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life: it was all ridges and fwrows: the croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches” (A 11 1). The absence of rules (the start, the end, the winners) is the product of its inherent non-sense. Here the rules are superfluous in the absence of a process of logical causality, and the players do not choose a logical course of action to fit the game frame:

“I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak - and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular: at least, if there are, nobody attends to them” (A 1 1 3).

The harmonious, tension-free atmosphere of the first game, in which everyone runs to his own pace and the goal is reached by everyone at the same time, is reversed in the croquet game. This “confusing” game in which the queen is both a player and a referee. where the players quarrel ceaselessly and the despotic order “Off with his head” is repeated time and again, thus contribu- ting to the predominantly anarchistic and violent atmosphere, the despotic authority is the winner and Alice is forced to recognize that the Queen is “likely to win that it’s hardly worth while finishing the game” (A 114).

The card game involves the King and the Queen who are about to judge the tarts stealer (Chapters XI and XII). The purpose, then, is to carry out justice for a well-defined crime. All the conventions of the judicial process are layed out here and quite known to Alice, although she had never been in court before: “she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there” (A 144). The judge with his wig, the accused, the jury-box and jurors, the reading of the accusation, the cross-examination, the evidence and the verdict all point to the realistic effect of this court. Yet it is in this game that we apprehend the weight of Carroll’s logic of nonsense, for here it is the rules themselves that create the nonsense: the first witness,


the hatter, is cross-examined on matters totally irrelevant to the trial at hand and his answers do not correspond to the questions. The nonsensical dimension of the trial culminates in the declaration: “Sentence first-verdict afterwards” (A 16 1).

There seems to be a progression in these games with regard to their inherent logic of nonsense: in the “caucus-race” the end of the game lies outside the parameters of the game; in the croquet game, the conditions themselves make for the nonsense and €or the inability of the participants to stick to the rules. Finally, in the card game, it is the game itself in all its components that contradicts its inner rationality - the law.

It is quite evident that Alice’s relation to the game changes with its progressive nonsensical modification. In the first game, Alice is a mere curious spectator interested in the race and ready to give out prizes to all spectators and even to herself; in the second game, she is not only a witness but an active participant, despite her disappointment with the aimlessness of the game and the violence of the Queen. She even begins to worry about her destiny: “to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute” (A 112). In the third game, Alice becomes a defendant and is forced to participate actively, while her inner opposition to the anarchy and violence surrounding her gradually increases. The autonomy of her will and thought finds its expression in Alice’s ability, for the first time, to grow by her own efforts without depending on any external mediation of food and drink. Her rebellion against the presumed legal authority of the King and the Queen and the nonsensical practices of the court in an attempt to protect herself and those surrounding her become more and more antagonistic. She commits herself to the fight and establishes the rule of her own sense-making process over the figures around her by declaring: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (A 161). Thus, she exits the game and wakes up to her own reality.’’

We may find in this progressive modification of the logic of nonsense in these three games and in Alice’s relation to them a parallel to the modification that the utopian generic structure undergoes in its transformation into a dystopia as manifested by the hero’s integration into the imaginary world which he subsequently reJects.13

Utopia, as suggested, consists of an imaginary-intellectual game the purpose of which is to ameliorate man’s condition through the consideration of the twisted aspects of reality. The description of the utopian world puts the


emphasis on the social/organisational or material/technical harmony of a new reality to the point where this harmonious ordering is no more a means toward social progress but rather an end in itself. Similarly, the consciousness of the hero undergoes a parallel transformation: from a mere curious and reflective stranger who aspires to be integrated into the new world so different from the one he left, in the utopian text, to being a citizen in an imaginary world, aware of the insuperable contradictions within the absolutism of the utopian method that loses sight of its purpose, in dystopia. The ideological scepticism and particularly the emotional drive accompanying the hero’s personal independence increase to the point of incredulity and even open rebellion, or to a failed attempt to leave this world turned dystopian. This transformation is undergone by Alice as well who appears as a curious stranger in this wonderland seeking to decode all its signs, uncover all its meanings. Thus, she involves herself in all the events, actively participating in the games. In the end doubt takes over, drives her to rebellion and to her final departure from this wonder world. In dystopia, in 1984 and Brave New World, for example, the hero struggles against the utopian rationale and its realization particularly because of its totalitarian or technological hegemony that undermine the humanistic values and the autonomy of the individual. In Alice the rejection of wonderland is due primarily to the heroine’s refusal of the arbitrariness of the nonsense that institutes anarchy over the individual and the social.

Language Language constitutes a central issue in the utopian text and in A1i~e.I~ In many utopian worlds we witness the birth of a new language that better fits their normative imperatives. Since these imperatives remain irreversible, they require a linguistic system the ingredients of which are static and monolithic in correspondence with the description of an ideal mode of life. The utopian language denies all ambivalence or doubt and spares the speaker all anxiety of meaning; the multilayeredness of our language is discarded to the benefit of a language with clear-cut unequivocal significations. Thus, in More’s Utopia in which rationality is based on Renaissance aesthetics and political constructivism, we have the expression of harmony and completeness in an adequate language devoid of all hesitation. The necessity of a new language


in a harmonious and humanistic universe is well put by H. G. Wells in the introduction to his A Modern Utopia.

The language of utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences in quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of thought.Is

In the transformation of utopia into dystopia, language is portrayed as a means to subject the individual to collective purposes as in 1984, or as limited to the needs of a bio-technological society as in Brave New World. The language in dystopia is univocal and serves purposes that transcend it; i t is an appropriate means to a specific end. In 1984, Syme, one of the producers of Newspeak, says:

You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone (p. 44).

The gradually diminishing vocabulary becomes unidimensional to serve the total integration of the individual in Oceania in which “in fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now” (p. 45). In Brave New World, Helmholz Watson, the writer/philosopher, claims that language subscribes to the ideological imperatives of the dystopian reality and points to its productive limits:

I’m pretty good at inventing phrases - You know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump ... But that does not seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make of them ought to be good too (p. 60).16

In Alice’s wonderland, language aims at the liberation of rationality from its logical constraints and its non-sensical organisational structures transgress the truth-value of language and communicational adequacy. The characters, as well as the reader, are ceaselessly seeking the ‘proper’ decoding of the signifiers. The linguistic structures are transgressive of grammatical and syn- tactical rules; they are multilayered and make use of linguistic riddles as well as metaphorical coins. These linguistic patterns reflect the difference between the language in Alice and that of dystopia - the multilayerdness of language and its cognitive relation. In dystopia the aim is to produce a manipulative language that erases all gaps between self and the world, in which the


individual consciousness is immersed in external phenomena, thus losing its autonomy. In Alice the language games are not self-transcendent and seek to investigate the semantic and communicational performance. Indeed, in Alice, language is its own object of inquiry, hence its qualification as a meta- language; the games are primarily socio-linguistic games.

However, Alice and dystopia share two common linguistic features: the breakdown of referentiality and the use of plurisignificative expressions. These two linguistic patterns hamper the communicative process among the characters. But the transgression of the referential dimension carries a different message. In dystopia, 1984, for example, the problematization of the referentiality reflects insuperable contradictions: the Ministry of Truth, Minis- try of Peace, and Ministry of Plenty - all denote their exact opposites: the propaganda that makes an abstraction of facts and people, the bureau which starts wars, and the bureau that organizes social lack and poverty. Here the dissociation between signifier and signified shapes the world view of the individual in accordance with the imperatives of the state.

In Alice, on the other hand, language liberates the thought process from the chains of rationality: language and the logic it structures constitute the very signified of the text. Language here questions its own performance. The linguistic sign is not related to an ideal signification, nor to a concrete reality transcending it. The “orange marmalade” label on the empty jar initiates Alice’s linguistic reflection, for it refers to an absent referent. In her conversation with the cat, the latter claims he is mad since he differs from the dog that is not mad because “now I growl when I am pleased, and wag my tail when I am angry. Therefore I am mad” (A 89). This type of deductive logic is inacceptable to Alice who suggests that the performers must be differentiated according to a corresponding linguistic referent: “I call it purring, not growling” (A 89). To which the cat replies: “call it what you like,” (A 89) suggesting that words/signs do not make much difference.

A more elaborate example of the problematization of referentiality is found in Ch. XII, “Alice’s Evidence”. The evidential poem at the center of the court episode was supposedly written by the Knave himself; the nonsense begins with the lack of correspondence between the Knave’s handwriting and the writing of the poem. And while the King claims that the lack of correspondence is due to the prisoner’s intent to mislead the court, the poem is taken as solid evidence “that proves his guilt” (A 157). The nonsensical ingredient in the poem’s content lies in the reference to another sentimental poem and


also to another of Carroll’s poems.” The nonsense derives here from a lack of correspondence between the form of the poem, the rhymes and stanzas that connote order and signification, and the inherent lack of signification in the content. The various components of the poem, the stanzas, sentences, words that fulfil grammatical rules can be dropped or exchanged in the poetic sequence without affecting the signification. As a consequence, this poem has no referential or communicative value. And the King knows it, for he elaborates on the nonsense by dishing out personal pronouns that have no clear referents; thus in the absence of a distinct criminal the guilt moves from one character to another in a circular pattern. The nonsense is further manifested by the mixture of identities (we, I, he, they, theirs, to you, ...) which ends with the arbitrary attribution of guilt to everyone involved in this judicial process (jury and witnesses included) without differentiation whatsoever.

Many homonyms in the text develop further this nonsensical structure through the use of binary combinations: tale/tail (A 50); to draw (from the well)/to draw (A 102); don’t fit you/to have fits (A 160), and consequently signification moves from one side to the other of this semiotic configuration leading sometimes even to the threat o’f a death sentence, as in the argument between Alice and the Duchess over the earth and its “axis”: “Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!” (A 84).

The anxiety involved in the lack of communication that derives from a different encoding of phenomena turns in the end into deception and violence. During the court session, the hatter attempts to justify himself to the King: “I am a poor man your Majesty, he began,” “You’re a very poor speaker, said the King” (A 149). This lack of communication increases toward the end of the story and the declarations of violence are thus multiplied. The signification of these linguistic patterns that turn to metaphorical ambivalence or idiomatic confusion undergoes more and more transformations. The clari- fication of this logic of nonsense is carried out through humoristic dramatiza- tion of the categories of Reason. But the threat of this language that twists our conventional conception of the sign and alienates the signifier from the signified is felt at the end of the narrative in the court episode when Alice becomes aware of the abysmal gap between this language and reality, for the supposed language of justice twists the judicial process. Thus, the utopian dream of liberation from the rationality of our empirical world turns into a dystopian nightmare where nonsense reigns without any possibility for language to order it.


In effect, the role of language changes with the generic transformation of utopia from that of a conventional language spoken by a tension-free and harmonious society to that of a univocal, dystopian language serving the purposes of a totalitarian or technocratic state. Understanding the complexity of linguistic expressions is “an important crime” in 1984. There is also a type of discourse termed “duckspeak” made up of “interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise” (p. 47).

Thus in opposition to the linguistic practice in Alice that is tested for its signification and communicative potential, in dystopia the understanding of the word and the relation to the speaker are established on the basis of an identification with the values of the state. The inalienable bond between the social structure and the word that subscribes to its ideological needs pertains as well to Brave New World in the two exclusive realities the text describes - the new world and the Indian reserve. If the Shakespearian language of John the Savage contrasts with both the verbal patterns of the Indian reserve and with the discourse of the new world, words like “father” and “mother” so pervasive in the value system of the Indian reserve, suscitate ridicule and laughter among the citizens of the new world that has cancelled the institution of the family. In the new world language is referential and denotative; it is devoid of multiple significations, aspiring to a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. Its signs are simple and univocal. The poet who might venture to write about loneliness - a forbidden feeling in that world - is liable to be reported and punished by the state (p. 144). Multilayeredness too is absent in the world of 1984; dichotomous expressions turn into syno- nyms by decree of the state. Thus, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” (p. 7). In his conversation with Winston Smith, Syme says: “Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten” @. 45).

But while the twisted logic of the interrogation in I984 is based on the contradiction inherent in the collective syllogism installed by the governing party, in Alice, on the other hand, the investigative arguments are personal and subjective and, of course, lack the violent sadism germane to Orwell’s world. In Alice the subjective interpretation of expressions is one of the basic characteristics of the creatures of wonderland. In the end, however, here too there is a gradual movement from the leisure and intellectual openness to a


growing lack of communication deriving from the breakdown of the discur- sive sequence and increasing fear and violence.

The Dream Utopia as dream is not a mere reflection of escapism, a fancy of the imagination with no practical purpose. For while utopia remains an unrealizable structure it constitutes an exploration of alternative ways to shape reality, distant and unreal as it may be; utopia questions our social practices with the aim to reform them. It is a dream, but a dream projected into a distant locality or into the future, a dream that seeks realization. Utopia coincides with that point on the horizon to which we aspire ceaselessly in order to reach social amelioration. Utopia, we might claim, incorporates a primordial function of the imaginary which is to deconstruct what is there, to break down the constraining walls of reality in order to project other possibilities.

In this regard, utopia as a social dream differs radically from the function of ideology." For while ideology aims to legitimate the real world as it is, and reflects basically the views of those holding power, utopia, before its transformation into dystopia, is the dream of the powerless in particular who seek to change the way things are. If ideology is hegemonic, then utopia is oppositional and the alternative. Although both are creations of the human imagination, ideology looks to the present and the past while utopia remains futuristic in essence. .

Further, the dream constitutes a primordial structural ingredient that often sets the narrative parameters of utopia, and in Alice too the narrative is enclosed within a dream.I8 The dream, as a structural element, would seem to constitute a mediator between this reality and the other world; if one could accede directly from the one to the other without mediation, we would be speaking of the same reality. It is the ontological gap between the two spaces that makes for their difference, and the dream is one of the basic structuring patterns that hypostatizes this difference. A dialectical relationship between the two worlds obtains only if they are kept apart, and the dream does keep them apart.

However, dreams and nightmares do play a no less important role in delineating order and lucid rationality from chaos and disorder. Dreams, and especially nightmares, would involve, in this case, the transgression of all rationality. The operational logic of the socio-linguistic game carries a tend-


ency to disorder, best illustrated by the dream situation, and especially by nightmares that create a twisted reality, a threatening unified totality in the dystopian narrative in which one cannot distinguish between cause and effect, the part and the whole. Order, on the other hand, is best expressed in linguistic structures that maintain a regularity in the relation between word and world, which is alien to the dream situation. In the utopia that primary rational and social ideal can be overtaken by the unified totality posited in the text, thus losing all contact with the real. For while utopia’s presupposition of an ordered and harmonious system defined by a particular humanistic rationale evolves, in the dystopia, into a totalizing unification devoid of all difference, it loses its primary role of constituting a critique of the social structure, thus reaffirming in the end what it set out to reform. Hence the tension we find in Alice and utopia between the nonsense of the games and the dream and the presupposed parameters of the social world.

The dream functions as a fantastic element in utopia but it allows ali the same for the reflexive aspects of the text as well as the relationship to reality.20 In Well’s A Modern Utopia and Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the protagonist meets with that wonderworld in a dream. The ambivalence of the dream and its multiple structural and metaphorical signification involve simultaneously the fantastic, the realistic, and the reflexive. Through the dream the hero moves from this world to that imaginary world the value of which is established on a judgment regarding the essence of what is and what oughr to be. In the dreamy world of utopia the fantastic dimension is inherent in the description of the harmonious completeness of an ideal world that is sustained due to the categorical imperative of .the utopian methodic rationality. In dystopia, on the other hand, the fantastic functions in the description of the totalitarian/technological state that affects the positive values of utopian humanism. The dreamy/fantastic element in the dystopian narrative (1984 and Brave New World, for example) does not cohere with the narrative parameters themselves but consists of a characterization of the protagonist fighting for his inner private world. In his dreams he recalls private memories, feelings, and fears for the future that characterize humans in general; he attempts but fails to rebel against or escape from the dystopian system that is forced upon him. Thus the dream in dystopia is reducible to the individual subjectivity.

There are, then, some commonalities regarding the role of dreams in utopia, dystopia, and Alice. In Carroll’s work emphasis is put on the pleasure


inherent in the game within the dream world of nonsense. The quasi cyclical closing of the narrative combines the utopian and dystopian dimensions that we have pointed to throughout this paper; we have both the utopian dream as a basic human need that is repeatable, and to which the utopian hero can return: she who aspired to “the loveliest garden you ever saw ... and wanders about among those beds of bright flowers and the cool fountains” (A 30) does dream that “she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower beds and the cool fountains”, but finally, disappointed of it “half of fright and half of anger” (A 162) wakes up in her sister’s lap. And after her sister is told of her “strange adventures ... she too began dreaming after a fashion” (A 162). The utopian dream in the end can only be recaptured through a tale that initiates a dream, for as she recalls the moments of Alice’s nonsensical dream, “she sat on with closed eyes, and half believed herself in wonderland though she knew she had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality” (A 163), but all the same she seeks a return to tell (”many a tale, perhaps even with the dream of wonderland of long ago” (A 164). Dream and reality alternate and repetition constitutes the walkabout we crave to live in wonderland; it is in the end the mere repetition of the story that makes for the imaginary movement from utopia to dystopia and back again to utopia.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Lewis, Carroll, The Annotated Alice, with an introduction and notes by Martin

Gardner, Forum, (New York, 1965). References will be made in the body of the text initialled ‘A’.

2. Klaus, Reichert, Studien zum literarischen Unsinn, Hansen Verlag, (Munchen, 1974). See especially pp. 1-23 regarding the conception of nonsense as a new ordering and not the reversal of conventional rationality.

3. Henry Seidel Canby, “An Introduction to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” in D. Rackin (ed.) Alice’s Advenfures in Wonderland, (Belmont, 1969), p. 228. “Mora- lity was more durable than brass, there was a general agreement that everyone knew what was reality.” On the context of the period and children’s literature see Jan B. Gordon, “The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood,” in: Aspecfs of Alice, R. Philips (ed.) Middlesex, 1971, pp. 127-151.

4. “Exercice mental sur les possibles lattraux,” in Raymond Ruyer, L‘Utopie et les utopies, P.U.F. (Paris: 1950). p. 9. Concerning the utopian method as an intellectual game and its relation to dream, see pp. 9-24.

5. Herbert, Marcuse, Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1979, pp. 184-194.


6. See B. Suits, The Grasshoppers: Games, Life and Utopia, New York, 1978, with regard to the importance of the game activity in utopia and its satirical performance as releasing the individual’s libidinal drive.

7. George, Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 237. 8. Kathleen, Blake, Play, Game and Sport The Literary Work of Lewis Carroll,

Cornell, U. P., (Ithaca: 1974). See especially pp. 56-64 on Carroll’s concern with games.

9. The Lobster Quadrille is seen by the Mockturtle as a game but he later defines it as a dance, on the other hand, the Caucus Race and the Crocket game are competitive games and are conceived of as such.

10. Elizabeth, Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, (London, 1952), p. 27. 11. K. Blake, p. 108. Blake claims that in Alice all games are social and that even

when Alice plays by herself she posits the other as a concrete partner. 12. See K. Blake regarding Alice’s games as adult games with constraining rules.

Further support is given to our claim by Roger Henkle’s “The Mad Hatter’s World,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, IL, 1973, pp. 99-177. Of course, our contri- bution here is to see this development in terms of the generic structure.

13. Opinions are divided as to the development of Alice in the text. Elsie Leach claims: “It is doubtless fitting that the scene in court (in both senses of the phrase) should come last, but Alice’s ‘progress’ cannot be described in meaningful, spatial, temporal, or moral terms.” “Alice in Wonderland in Perspective,” in: Aspects of Alice, Robert Phillips ed., Penguin, 1974, pp. 121-126. Support for the developmental view of Alice can be found in Donald Rackin’s “Alice’s Journey to the End of the Night,” in: Aspects of Alice, pp. 452483.

14. For a detailed analysis on the relationship between nonsense and language, see Robert D. Sutherland, Language and Lewis Carroll, Mouton, the Hague, 1970.

15. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, London, 1905, p. 21. 16. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 63. 17. See The Annotated Alice, pp. 158-159. 18. See in this regard Paul Ricceur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, (Columbia U.P.,

New York, 1986) which is a most complete analysis of the relationship between ideology and utopia as two basic structures of the human imagination.

19. E. Sewel1,’The Field of Nonsense, pp. 44-54. 20. Erick S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, Princeton U.P., 1976. “While fairy

tales use the World of Enchantment as their location and are therefore highly fantastic, a true Fantasy, such as Alice continues to reserve its ground rules time and again.” p. 37.

21. A book that deals with the signification of nonsense written in the spirit of Carroll’s work as a game between author and reader is Francis Huxley’s, The Raven and the Writing Desk, London, 1976.


Robert Elbaz. Born 1948. Senior lecturer at the Department of French, the University of Haifa. Ph.D. (McGill University). Has published: The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse, (London and Sydney: Croom- Helm Publishers, 1988) and Le Discours Mughribin: Dynamique Textuelle chez Albert Memmi. (Longueil: Le PrCambule, 1988).

Leah Hadomi. Born 1925. Senior lecturer at the Department of Comparative Litera- ture, the University of Haifa. Ph.D. (Hebrew University). Has published: Shadow Heavy as Lead: The German Novel after the Nazi Period, (Tel-Aviv: Poalim, 1983) and Between Hope and Doubt: The Story of Utopia, (Tel-Aviv: Kibbutz Meouhad, 1989).

alice in wonderland and utopia

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