Introduction: Nonsense as Method
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are usually approached as exercises in whimsy: playful nonsense, linguistic jokes, logical absurdities designed to delight or confuse. Yet, as with Escher, this surface playfulness disguises a far more rigorous enterprise.
Read relationally, Carroll’s nonsense is not the abandonment of sense but its systematic displacement. The Alice books explore what happens when local rules are enforced with absolute seriousness in the absence of a globally stable frame.
Carroll does not mock logic. He stages its limits.
1. Local Rules, Ruthlessly Applied
Wonderland is not lawless. Quite the opposite.
Every episode in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is governed by rules that are:
internally consistent,
locally binding,
and treated as non-negotiable by their enforcers.
The problem is not that the rules fail. The problem is that they do not commute.
What counts as sense in one conversational domain collapses in another. Definitions shift, quantities reverse, causes follow effects. Yet each move is justified from somewhere.
This is not chaos; it is plural local coherence without global arbitration.
2. The Refusal of a Master Perspective
Alice’s recurring frustration arises from a single expectation: that there ought to be a stable meta-rule capable of reconciling all local regimes.
Carroll refuses to supply one.
No authority steps in to explain Wonderland. No final interpretation resolves the contradictions. Even logic itself, when appealed to, merely becomes another local game with its own peculiar constraints.
In relational terms, Wonderland is ontologically open:
there is no privileged cut,
no global closure,
no perspective-free standpoint from which everything makes sense at once.
This refusal mirrors Gödel’s result and Escher’s constructions: the failure is not in the system, but in the demand for totality.
3. Language as a Site of Play
Carroll’s most famous manoeuvres involve language itself:
words that mean what their speaker chooses,
definitions that shift mid-sentence,
names that refuse to anchor identity.
These are often read as jokes about semantics. But more precisely, they are demonstrations of semantic actualisation without global stabilisation.
Meaning appears, works locally, and then evaporates as the perspective shifts. There is no underlying semantic bedrock waiting to be uncovered.
Carroll thus stages what our ontology insists upon:
There is no meaning independent of construal, only phenomena actualised within relational cuts.
4. Play Is Not Freedom From Constraint
A crucial mistake is to think of Carrollian play as anarchic. It is not.
Play, here, is disciplined:
rules are obeyed more strictly than in ordinary discourse,
violations are punished rhetorically or socially,
misunderstandings arise precisely because everyone is playing correctly—but in incompatible games.
This is why Wonderland feels oppressive rather than liberating. The play exposes the violence of insisting that one local system should govern all others.
5. Alice as the Victim of Misplaced Closure
Alice’s predicament is not that she lacks intelligence. It is that she repeatedly attempts misplaced closure:
she assumes stable identities,
she assumes conserved quantities,
she assumes that words ought to retain their meanings.
Each assumption is reasonable locally. Each fails globally.
In this sense, Alice functions as the reader’s proxy: she enacts the discomfort of encountering ontological openness without the conceptual resources to recognise it as such.
6. Carroll, Escher, Gödel: A Shared Discipline
Carroll, Escher, and Gödel are rarely grouped together, yet they share a common discipline:
Gödel formalises the impossibility of global closure in sufficiently rich systems.
Escher visualises the coexistence of incompatible local perspectives.
Carroll dramatises the lived experience of moving between non-commensurable rule systems.
None of them depict breakdown. All of them expose the cost of denying perspectival structure.
Conclusion: Play as Ontological Training
Carroll’s play is not escapism. It is education.
The Alice books train readers to:
tolerate incompleteness,
recognise the authority of local coherence,
and relinquish the fantasy of a final interpretive court of appeal.
In this light, nonsense becomes a method: a way of loosening the grip of totalising sense without abandoning structure altogether.
Play, here, is not the opposite of seriousness. It is seriousness freed from the demand for closure.
And that, perhaps, is why Wonderland remains so unsettling—and so enduring.
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