A Reader on Reading

A book becomes a different book every time we read it. That first childhood Alice was a journey, like the Odyssey or Pinocchio, and I have always felt myself a better Alice than a Ulysses or a wooden puppet. Then came the adolescent Alice, and I knew exactly what she had to put up with when the March Hare offered her wine when there was no wine at the table, or when the Caterpillar wanted her to tell him exactly who she was and what was meant by that. Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s warning that Alice was nothing but the Red King’s dream haunted my sleep, and my waking hours were tortured by exams in which Red Queen teachers asked me questions like “Take a bone from a dog: what remains?” Later, in my twenties, I found the trial of the Knave of Hearts collected in André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir, and it became obvious that Alice was a sister of the surrealists; after a conversation with the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy in Paris, I was startled to discover that Humpty Dumpty owed much to the structuralist doctrines of Change and Tel Quel. And later still, when I made my home in Canada, how could I fail to recognize that the White Knight (“But I was thinking of a plan / To dye one’s whiskers green, / And always use so large a fan / That they could not be seen”) had found a job as one of the numerous bureaucrats that scurry through the corridors of every public building in my country?

In all the years during which I’ve read and reread Alice, I have come across many other different and interesting readings of her books, but I can’t say that any of these have become, in any deep sense, my own. The readings of others influence, of course, my personal reading, offer new points of view or color certain passages, but mostly they are like the comments of the Gnat who keeps naggingly whispering in Alice’s ear, “You might make a joke on that.” I refuse; I’m a jealous reader and will not allow others a jus primae noctis with the books that I read. The intimate sense of kinship established so many years ago with my first Alice has not weakened; every time I reread her, the bonds strengthen in very private and unexpected ways. I know other bits by heart. My children (my eldest daughter is, of course, called Alice) tell me to shut up when I burst, yet again, into the mournful strains of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” And for almost every new experience, I find a premonitory or nostalgic echo in her pages, telling me once again, “This is what lies ahead of you” or “You have been here before.”

One adventure among many does not describe for me any particular experience I have had or may one day have but rather seems to address something vaster, an experience or (if the term is not too grand) a philosophy of life. It takes place at the end of Chapter 3 of Through the Looking-Glass. After passing through her reflection and making her way across the chessboard country that lies behind it, Alice reaches a dark wood where (she has been told) things have no names. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she says bravely, “after being so hot, to get into the — into the — into what?” Astonished at not being able to think of the word, Alice tries to remember. “‘I mean to get under the—under the—under this, you know!’ putting her hand on the trunk of a tree. ‘What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name — why, to be sure it hasn’t.’” Trying to recall the word for the place she is in, accustomed to putting into words her experience of reality, Alice suddenly discovers that nothing actually has a name: that until she herself can name something, that thing will remain nameless, present but silent, intangible as a ghost. Must she remember these forgotten names? Or must she make them up, brand new? Hers is an ancient conundrum.

After creating Adam “out of the dust of the ground” and placing him in a garden east of Eden (as the second chapter of Genesis tells us), God went on to create every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called every living creature, “that was the name thereof.” For centuries, scholars have puzzled over this curious exchange. Was Adam in a place (like the Looking-Glass Wood) where everything was nameless, and was he supposed to invent names for the things and creatures he saw? Or did the beasts and the fowl that God created indeed have names, which Adam was meant to know, and which he was to pronounce like a child seeing a dog or the moon for the first time?