Through the Looking Glassand What Alice Found There was first published in 1871, six years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Although the two books are often discussed as if they formed one whole, in actual fact they are quite different.  Wonderland is decidedly more nightmarish, and most of the bizarre characters that Alice meets there are aggressively rude towards her.  In Through the Looking Glass, Alice tends to be less bewildered, and from early on in the book she has a clear purpose–to advance to the eighth rank and become a queen.


 

One thing the two books share, though, is a delight in quirky humor much of which exhibits Lewis Carroll’s enjoyment of jokes that rest on twisting logic and language in ways that make us aware of the often peculiar ways in which we think and speak.  This is why philosophers have long found the books to be a rich source of amusing examples to illustrate philosophical points.  Two passages in the first chapter concern mysteries and explanations

The explanation of mysteries

An incident that occurs soon after Alice's entry into the Looking Glass world illustrates well how she is much more in control of events than she was in Wonderland.  She is observing some chess pieces that are moving around.   The White Queen hears her daughter Lily, one of the white pawns, in distress, and she rushes to help her, knocking the White King over into the fireplace before trying to climb up on to the table where Lily is crying.

“Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was very nearly screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen and set her upon the table by the side of her noisy little daughter.

The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through the air had quite taken away her breath, and for a minute or two she could do nothing but hug the little Lily in silence.  As soon as she had recovered her breath a little, she called out to the White King, who was sitting sulkily among the ashes, ‘Mind the volcano!’”

Alice proceeds to pick up the White King and place him on the table too.  Although she does it as gently as she can, and even dusts him off a little, the bewildering experience terrifies him: “I turned cold to the very ends of my whiskers!”

The chess pieces can neither see nor hear Alice.  So to be picked up by her, swept  through the air, and placed on the table would be to feel themselves under the irresistible influence of some mysterious force.  It would be as if something came at us and manipulated us out of a fourth spatial dimension of which we have no awareness. 

Interestingly and amusingly, the Queen immediately assumes that the force that has propelled her onto the table is one she is familiar with–namely, a volcanic eruption.  In explaining a mysterious event by reference to something familiar, she thus does what human beings have always done in the search for explanations.  E.g.  Earthquakes were explained as expressions of a god’s anger, mystical experiences as messages from God.  In the Queen’s case, though, her immediate explanatory hypothesis is naturalistic rather than supernatural.

The White King does something similar a little later.  He decides to record how he felt when he was whisked through the air by writing in his memorandum-book.  But Alice plays a joke on him by taking hold of the end of the pencil and making it write words of her choosing rather than his.

The poor king looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out, ‘My dear!  I really must get a thinner pencil.  I can’t manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend––'

Here again, we have two perspectives on a mystery.  The king can’t perceive the force that is controlling the pencil, so he explains it as the result of the pencil being too heavy for him.  We readers, however, occupy a privileged standpoint: we are aware of what that force is, why the king is baffled by it, and why he seeks the sort of explanation he does. 

In the history of science, when a puzzle has been satisfactorily solved–e.g. the mystery of why there are seasons–we find ourselves in the same position as Alice when we look back on earlier attempts to solve the riddle.

Linguistic mysteries

Near the end of Chapter One, Alice comes across what is now one of the most famous poems in the English language–at least most of it is in English!  The poem, ‘Jabberwocky,’ begins:

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borooves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

This sort of poetry is commonly called nonsense verse.  Yet it is not sheer nonsense.  Most readers grasp immediately that these first four lines perform a scene-setting function: more specifically, they indicate the weather, and describe the behavior of various small animals.  Later in the book, Humpty Dumpty offers precise translations of the unfamiliar words.  E.g. He says that “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”; to “gyre” is “to go round and round like a gyroscope.”

The fact that we can grasp in a vague way the sense of the “nonsense,” shows something interesting about the way language works.  We don’t understand the meanings of words purely by our knowledge of what they refer to.  Our understanding of words also rests on their place in a sentence (their syntactical role), and on their connections with other words.

This is also demonstrated by the rest of the poem, which even though it contains many made up words, conveys an intelligible narrative.  A youth is warned about the Jabberwock, a dangerous beast; he sets off in search of it in order to kill it; he eventually encounters the Jabberwock in the forest, kills it, and is joyously welcomed back by his proud father.  We aren’t sure just what a “vorpal blade” is, or what it means to stand in “uffish thought.”  Yet we get the gist without too much trouble, rather as we might understand speech in a foreign language that we are less than fluent in.  Jabberwock is thus both a great poem and a case study in how we understand utterances.

 

Related links

Why philosophers love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The problem of personal identity in Alice in Wonderland

Two kinds of Absurdity in Alice in Wonderland

Philosophical humor in Ch. 5 of Alice in Wonderland

Alice's conversations with the Cheshire Cat