In comparison with the ever-sane Alice, it is the various Wonderland creatures who appear to be ridiculous, coiners of abstract word games. Quests for mastery are continually frustrated in the Alice books. What comes after for Alice? Near the end of Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice, "Something's going to happen!" More important, she is eminently more reasonable than her own feelings will allow her to express. She is wiser than any lesson books are able to teach her to be. For when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she is already the most reasonable creature there. The books are not conventional quest romances in which Alice matures, overcomes obstacles, and eventually gains wisdom. But Alice's quest for knowledge, her desire to become something (a grown-up) she is not, is inverted. Yet because the books were written by a teacher of mathematics who was also a reverend, they are also concerned with what can and cannot be taught to a child who has an infinite faith in the goodness and good sense of the world. This quest, as in many great works of literature, unwinds against a larger backdrop: what can and what cannot be known at a particular historical moment, a moment that in Lewis Carroll's case preceded both Freud's speculations on the unconscious and Heisenberg's formulation of the uncertainty principle. But mainly their subject is what comes after, and in this sense the books are allegories about what a child can know and come to know. From Tan Lin's Introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-GlassĪlice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There pursue what lies beyond and down rabbit holes and on reverse sides of mirrors.
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