A looking-glass is more commonly known as a mirror, but the phrase produces a different type of perspective than a mirror might normally. For example, “humans” arises certain meanings compared to a synonym like Homo sapiens sapiens. One connotates characteristics and behavior while the other refers to the human species’ classification and, in addition, the species’ biology. A looking-glass is known as a mirror, but an alternative definition is “opposite to what is normal or expected.” A mirror, on the other hand, is also defined as “a thing regarded as accurately representing something else.” These two words might easily be seen as signifying a certain type of object in the world, but actually construct different meanings.

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When Charles Dodgson, popularly known by his penname, Lewis Carroll, titled his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he found a title that fit well into his absurd world that Alice adventured into.  His title Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There is a metaphor for looking inward toward our inverse Self and seeing through to what the reflections means.* By grappling with the absurd reflection, the audience is forced to look back through the looking-glass with Alice, struggling to understand what sense exists in not only her reality, but their very own as well.

The Absurd

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At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

—Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

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When Alice goes through the looking-glass, she is not only confronting the backwards world of argumentative eggs, Rocking-horse or bread-and-butter-flies, knitting sheep, toves, borogroves, and fighting lions and unicorns, she is confronting how the absurd world that sits through the looking-glass turns its gaze back round, through to reality. The Absurd positions itself against any universal prescription to meaning. The Absurd is a product of how the universe is full of mindless, meaningless particles in fields of force and the crux, as Camus elicits, is that the human consciousness is hard-wired to seek out a universal scripture to one’s own existence:

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[I]f through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world . . . That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth, which is to be enchained. In this unintelligible and limited universe, man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning.

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The failure in nature’s design is that there is no universal scripture that come from on high. Nature made something of itself that is indubiously apart from it. And with respect, science, the modern-day hero, champion of just a certain type of truth, only explains existence, not why it is here. Thus, humanity is fated to make meaning out of a universe devoid of it. If there is universal meaning, it is impossible for mankind to ever ascertain it. All attempts to ascribe meaning, which is what humanity it doomed to perpetually do, is what is absurd. In this way, there is no other conclusion than to accept that human life is absurd.

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Absurdism shares groundwork with nihilism: that the universe is devoid of meaning, yet humanity is plighted to construct meaning upon it. Despite this foundation, absurdism attempts to champion nihilism, to rid its poisonous roots from society, an attempt that Camus took on personally. Though there might not be an inherent meaning in the universe, the struggle towards meaning can have meaning in itself, in a conscious understanding of the struggle. Camus challenges Man to accept the Absurd with complete awareness, to embrace it:

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Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt that validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.

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Absurdism presents a sort of attitude. The absurd attitude is defiant toward Man’s prescribed lot. It chooses to attempt authenticity. In this, Camus presents that Man can possibly find happiness despite the paradox of living without meaning: “Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it.”

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Camus claimed that art would not exist if the world were without the Absurd. “Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” Carroll follows Camus’ framework of absurd art as well. What can be seen in TTLG is easily explained by Camus: “Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending doom.” Carroll’s story allows the reader, specifically the child since that is who he aims as his audience, to engage with difficulties, to struggle with them. Bruno Bettelheim in his essay “The Struggle for Meaning” claims that a child should deal with the “existential predicament,” that the cruel troubles in life are inescapable: “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence—but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one can masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.” Although Camus doesn’t share the sheer hope that Bettelheim espouses, he does share an attitude of striving and a certain sense of overcoming.

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What can be seen through Alice is a struggling acceptance of the Absurd. It is not without stress and turmoil, as can be seen by all the disagreeable characters that Alice encounters. Still, she would not have it another way. She would rather strive toward the diverse, toward authenticity: “I’m not going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again—back into the old room—and there’d be an end of all my adventures!”

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The Sense of Real and Absurd Worlds

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As aforementioned by Camus, “Absurdism . . . has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley.” Alice, too, gets wiped clean by the absurd world: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are!” Alice’s mind as a blank slate stands in contrast to the knowledgeable and bossy (at least to her kittens) child the audience meets in the opening of the novel.

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In AW, the prequel to TTLG (although it is set in time after TTLG), Wonderland is presented as simply absurd, incongruous to reality. Wonderland has a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a French-speaking mouse, numerous deck card characters come to life, among other oddities. TTLG diverges in conversation. Almost every conversation, if not thoroughly absurd, is steeped in an argument Alice has with an absurd character, if not a complete refutation of the absurd stance to a silenced Alice. Carroll puts Wonderland up to the looking-glass for his sequel and makes the absurd world repetitively attempt to move backwards from reality.

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Late in the novel, Alice encounters a lion and a unicorn fighting each other. One of the many classic collisions of the real and absurd worlds happens when Alice meets the unicorn:

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“What—is—this?” [the Unicorn] said at last.

“This is a child! . . . We only found it today. It’s as large at life, and twice as natural!”

“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?”

“It can talk,” said Haigha solemnly.

The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said “Talk, child.”

Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

“Yes, if you like,” said Alice.

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To the reader, it is the unicorn who is make-believe. In the real world, the monster, i.e. the unicorn, is the stuff human dreams are made of. To the absurd world, humans are the monsters, the stuff unicorns’ dreams are made of. Thus, it is Alice and the audience who must grapple with what a monster really is, especially seeing both characters being so agreeable to one another. This is one of the very few absurd characters that have hospitable exchange with Alice throughout the novel. This is not by accident since their conversation within the novel is just about this: two monsters who agree to believe in each other with a smile.

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The novel not only questions what exactly monsters are; moreover, it questions morality. Although TTLG can be seen in part as a satire of the structures of Victorian society at great length (e.g. characters representing possible political figureheads, the absurd in etiquette, etc.), the larger, over-arching transcendence of the dialogue leads the audience to question what constructs morals sit upon. The concepts of good and evil, how they’re represented, in black and white, or talking about in traditional archetypes of hero and beast, comes under scrutiny. These two worlds are used as the tool to show how unfit and unsettling these constructs are.

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Carroll’s most famous poem “Jabberwocky” comes from TTLG and within it, he makes good use of showing the Absurd in the moral constructs of a traditional tale. The poem has been too often resolved to simply be a nonsense poem and nothing more. Langford Reed challenged this view:

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So responsible and conscious a literary jester was Lewis Carroll that it is doubtful if there has ever been a more meticulous precisian in the use and intentional misuse of words, including those coined by himself. Every word, every comma, had to be printed exactly as he had planned in his development of the spontaneous idea upon which the particular story or poem was based.

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As Reed said, Carroll made intentional and conscious use of his own lexicon to communicate a story, if not larger ideas. In his essay, “Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’: non-sense not nonsense,” Adam Rose mentions how Carroll has even parodied a part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II to highlight “every student’s frustration with the host of ‘meaningless’ words found in the works of the Bard.” Ironically, Carroll might have followed more closely to Shakespeare’s creative invention of language than anyone in his era. Nevertheless, the poem is a straightforward narrative. A father tells his son to beware of the creatures in the woods, especially the Jabberwock. Thereafter, the son goes into the woods, kills the Jabberwock, returns to his father with the Jabberwock’s head, and they celebrate. The simple nonsense story is a parody of an old type of folktale, designated AT (Aarne/Thompson) 300, “The Dragon-Slayer.” One among many changes Carroll does is replacing the dragon with the Jabberwock. The absurd poem in the absurd world shares the exact structure of the many tales classified under AT 300. The poem doesn’t share in the glory that the real AT 300 stories have of slaying a dragon. Instead, it displays the absurd senseless killing by a supposed hero. Alice couldn’t understand most of the poem, but she said, “somebody killed something; that’s clear, at any rate.” It is the only thing she interprets of the poem and it is in this absurdity of senseless slaughter that Carroll turns the reflection back onto society at large.

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Carroll uses the ploy of the senseless death of animals, a reoccurring motif of innocence and youth in the Victorian era, again in the novel with another poem titled “The Walrus and the Carpenter” that Tweedledee recites. The Walrus and the Carpenter make friends with a group of oysters and tricked them to get out of breath, after which they ate all of them. Both characters act very nice, as do the oysters, but they are simply acting, unlike the oysters. The Walrus and the Carpenter just wanted to eat them. Alice said they “are both very unpleasant characters.” Again, the looking-glass is turned round, with Carroll forcing the audience along with Alice to reexamine the sincerity of people’s actions in the real world because the sentiments of the Walrus and the Carpenter are not oddities or alien to the desires of everyday Man.

Lisa Ede in “The Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carrol” further approaches Carroll on quantifying his text as nonsense or not:

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Nonsense both reflects and exploits man's fundamental ambivalence about himself and his role in society. Rather than arguing overtly for one position or another, [Carroll] presents these conflicting claims, balancing them so that neither side of the order/disorder dialectic overwhelms the other. The resultant tension is deliberately unresolved and creates the peculiarly uncomfortable effect often associated with these works. Even the use of the label of ‘nonsense’ can be seen as an attempt to cover up the subversive nature of much of [his] work.

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Ede subtly states what is, at this point, obvious of Carroll’s writing—that despite the text’s higher order of nonsensical lexicon, the foundation and structure of the text not so much tells of a plethora of meanings, but shines light on the Absurd of the real world, using those absurdities to question where morals and meaning come from and, moreover, if they’re at all legitimate.

 

The absurd duo of Tweedledum and Tweedledee draws out the tension that arises from the absurdity of war. Tweedledum is adamant about going to battle with his brother Tweedledee over a new his rattle being broken:

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Tweedledum and Tweedledee

     Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

     Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

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In The Rebel, Camus claims that the absurdity of war is tantamount to Man’s ignorance of war and the construed reasoning, specifically, for him, of rebellion, that propagates it:

 

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition . . .  demand[ing] order in the midst of chaos . . . Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate . . . It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.

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The whole argument and preparation of the battle plays on these absurdities of unjustness, the irrational, and demand for order within chaos. Tweedledum has reason to be, to some degree, upset that a new possession of his was ruined by Tweedledee. It is absurd to battle over this trivial irritation though. Tweedledee isn’t even excited about their forthcoming encounter.  It seems far more absurd to battle against an unwilling, passive foe. Tweedledum, in fact, holds hands with his supposed foe, his brother, and walks into the woods so they can retrieve stuff for battle.

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If it isn’t obvious by now, Tweedledee and Tweedledum are metaphors for two people, different peoples or city-states or countries, two collections of bodies that decide to go to battle with each other. There serve as a metaphor for the absurdity of humans throughout history figuring out the wrong ways to come to a solution, often in the bloodshed of thousands or millions. The reasons are repeatedly absurd. And, there’s countless cases of an unwilling party war. And, what Carroll alludes to is that humanity as a species is like a brotherhood, who should be holding hands when on the precipice of war. Carroll does more to mock the whole real world of war by having Alice, a seven-and-a-half-year-old girl, dress the brothers up in “bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish covers, and coal scuttles.” The brothers, like Man, seem absurd when fully suited in the arms of war, whether they’ve put billions into posturing supposed enemies or dressing up with household items. Living out their written tale with Alice, it was just as quick as the battle was proclaimed that it had dissolved:

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Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

     As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

     They quite forgot their quarrel.

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The irrationality of war in the real world follows suit. Wars are ended without any resolve for the conflict which initiated the war. The so-called purposes of war have changed from day-to-day until one forgets why the war even started.

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As Alice is telling her sister of her adventures in the looking-glass world, she recalls about the fun she had with the absurd duo prior to their squabble: “But it certainly was funny . . . to find myself singing ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’ I don’t know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time!” Carrol might have not been ignorant to the legend that the song had originated at HM Wakefield prison amongst female prisons who would exercise around a mulberry tree. So, the routine of washing one’s face, combing one’s hair, brushing teeth, and putting on clothes was part of the prison’s regime. By singing the prisoner’s routine over and over is to allude to all humanity, with Alice as the metaphor, working on a cycle, continually repeating one’s actions over and over for long long time. It is, in fact, mankind and not just the prisoners at HM Wakefield that are caged. As Camus said “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time.”

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While the whole practice of attempting to elucidate examples of Carroll turning the critical mirror on society through the Absurd seems inexhaustible, the whole attempt to write without sense is futile. Philosopher John Searle said:

 

There is in varying degrees a sense of familiarity that pervades our conscious experiences. Even if I see a house I have never seen before, I still recognize it as a house; it is of a form and structure that is familiar to me. Surrealist painters try to break this sense of the familiarity and ordinariness of our experiences, but even in surrealist paintings the drooping watch still looks like a watch, and the three-headed dog still looks like a dog.

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Nonsensical literature draws rich thematic associations with surrealism. Not only do they both struggle with human consciousness as a part of their ideological framework, they both also strive to go beyond the limitations of reality. As Searle points out though, the efforts of Surrealism, and in turn nonsense literature, will never be fully accomplished. As prescribed as human’s design is toward meaning, there lies a prescription toward any attempt of understanding life outside the world, that is, through the rose-tinted glasses of the world. Even if all the aforementioned examples were completely mistaken, which would be difficult to navigate away from, Carroll is still forced, inevitability, to talk of the world, even if he were to attempting not to. Nevertheless, what can be seen is Carroll’s inescapable logical structure to talk about the world, and his conscious, meticulous craftsmanship of finely shifting the lens from into looking-glass to looking out from it, defeating socially-constructed morals and so-called realities.

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Semiotic Dissonance and Identities

 

Ferdinand de Saussure’s standpoint of the structure of a linguistic sign is composed of a signifier and signified. And, although a linguistic sign might direct the user of a language toward objects in the world, the understanding of that relationship cannot be accepted. Within the structures of signs are concepts that change not only over time, but across people and societies as well. Furthermore, the signified does not even have to be a real object in the world. It is accepted as the internal concept of its perceiver. In Course of General Linguistics, Saussure states that the first principle of a sign is the arbitrary nature of the it: “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.”

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This disassociation of reality and language, the tool humanity uses to sift through reality, has been a tension across time, if not all human history. Decades before Saussure altered the landscape of linguistics and, in turn, philosophy, psychology, and a host of other disciplines, Carroll highlighted this absurdity of language, this disconnect that was carried for arguably all preceding human history. Carroll eloquently expressed in TTLG the tension of what Saussure clearly laid out in his discovery. The dissonance of language that Saussure brought to the world simply adds another layer to Absurdity and the unintelligible state of existence in an irrational universe that has constructed the interpretation of the text thus far.

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The absurdity of giving an object any given name, the dissonance of it, is illustrated during Alice’s encounter with the White Knight when the he wants to sing her a song in an effort to comfort her:

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“The name of the song is called Haddocks’ Eyes.”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name is really ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On A Gate’: the tune’s my own invention.”

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In this exchange, unlike a standard conversation, the signified is understood prior to the signifier being known by Alice. The flow of linguistical structural is put up to the looking glass to make clear the absurdness of it. The signified, the song, can be looked at being approached in different contexts, which can allow different signifiers. Even though the White Knight can structurally allow four different signifiers en route to the same signified, the reader is left with the absurdness of attempting to decipher why there should be four different means of signifiers for the same signified, especially for a song. The absurdness is left because the name of the song is normally the name the song is called and the name the song is called is what the song is called and what the song is called is what the song is. Any four of these means of signifying can be put together and the result will remain: that the signified, the song, is the same. For years following her excursion into the looking-glass world, she nostalgically and vividly remembered the scene, this scene with the White Knight and him singing to her. And, it’s possible that her character held the scene with such nostalgia because it did to the character, and hopefully, in turn, the audience, what Camus hoped absurd art would do—liberate the mind and reinforce its limitations.

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Upon Alice’s arrival at the wood, she spends time with the Gnat. She tells the Gnat that no insects talk where she comes from. “What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they wo’n’t answer to them?’ ‘No use to them,” said Alice; ‘but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?” 5 What Alice is expressing is angst toward the state of human existence and language, specifically human existence existing with language. What she is confronting in her absurd existence is that, without choice, nature had made language, something that is birthed from nature, but wholly apart from it. And with this absurd language, one inescapably exists with self-referentiality and consciousness.

 

While dissonance has been described and demonstrated thus far, a new slew of questions arises when the same practical application is turned toward the Self. Alice comes face-to-face with this through the novel, but directly confronts this tension of Self during her conversation with Humpty Dumpty. “My name is Alice, but—‘ ‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty interrupted impatiently. ‘What does it mean?’ ‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.’ What Alice seems to understand is Saussure’s first principle of a linguistic sign, namely, that “the linguistic sign is arbitrary.” What she is called, her name, is arbitrary. This, however, in no fashion, attempts to state that one’s signifier to any given society or environment can dictate, on any level, how that person interacts within it. What she does bring to light is that the state of the signifier in and of itself is in no way derivative of the thing in reality. What Humpty Dumpty demonstrates is what can be confusing about identity and Self through language: “Of course it must” said Humpty Dumpty with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.” What Humpty is confused about is the fact that language works one way: it conforms to reality. Overall, Alice does with Humpty what she does throughout the novel, which is to question her identity as means of moving forward. It is necessary for her to be humble toward all the characters she meets along the way if she is to get to the end, to be a queen. It is also Man who must constantly question its identity in order to move on in an absurd world without committing philosophical suicide.

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Life as a Dream

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Carroll uses many methods to talk about life metaphorically through his tales of Alice. In AW, life is talked about as a card game. Throughout TTLG, life is like a game of chess. In these absurd worlds, life is dictated by rules, as people are in a given society, but there’s no universal precedent to them. The absurd rules reflect rules that govern people’s lives in the real world. TTLG ends with Alice panicked, unsure about whether she was in her dream or the Red King’s dream while in the looking-glass world. And, the impersonal narrator asks the reader “Which do you think it was?” This is an old philosophical concept, known as Descartes’ evil demon, the brain in the vat, or, more modernly, the Matrix. The problem isn’t to poise the reader to figure out if Alice is dreaming, or, moreover, if Descartes experienced the world, if the reader’s brain is in a vat, but to poise the reader to question the very foundations of their absurd world.