Abstract
This chapter interrogates the widespread assumption that the Alice books engage in a game with the virtual (child) reader. A close analysis reveals that the virtual child reader constructed in both Alice books is actually extremely constrained. Carroll’s virtual child reader, then, is more akin to Eco’s Model Reader, whose participation is pre-constructed by the author, than to Iser’s implied reader, who truly communicates with the text. Accordingly, although the virtual child reader is apparently invited to give in to what Caillois calls paidia (the impulsive manifestation of a play instinct), she is actually tricked into strictly adhering to ludus (the need to conform to rules). I nonetheless show that real adult readers seem to be able to take on the role of Impostor Readers—a term coined after Lecercle’s theory of imposture (1999)—and imagine unforeseen realizations of the text, thereby combining paidia and ludus. Child readers could then be thought to be able to similarly playfully circumvent the rules laid out by Carroll’s textual structures/strictures.
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Notes
- 1.
French philosopher Colas Duflo identifies a seemingly similar tension at the core of play in his book Jouer et Philosopher (1997). He coins the concept of “legafreedom,” which helps him define play: for him, indeed, “playing consists in inventing freedom within and thanks to the bounds of the law” (57, my translation). Duflo’s definition though ultimately relies on a conservative vision of play—freedom always remaining within the confines of the law. I believe Caillois’s proposed continuum between paidia and ludus is more encompassing, as it does not favor one pole over the other—some activities can be more “ludic” than “paidian,” others more “paidian” than “ludic” but all of them will be defined as “playful,” provided they are both “ludic” and “paidian.”
- 2.
Gubar nonetheless shows how Carroll himself doubts the possibility of such a collaboration—the power relationship between adults and children being hard to deconstruct, and children being always more or less consciously coerced by adults and children’s literature. For Gubar, there is hope in “reciprocal aggression” only (97–98).
- 3.
An older child in Through the Looking-Glass, but still a child.
- 4.
The Opies remind us that the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme was originally a riddle although few people think of it as one now since Humpty Dumpty has become a popular nursery figure (252).
- 5.
- 6.
In the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , the second verse was only composed of the first two lines of the eight-line verse quoted here. The full verse, which Carroll wrote for the theatrical version of Alice in 1886, was included in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from that moment on. This quotation is therefore taken from The Annotated Alice.
- 7.
As Donald Reichertz puts it, the prose conclusion to this chapter “takes metrical shape and becomes the first line of an absolutely regular seven-syllable, four-beat trochaic couplet” (56).
- 8.
Lecercle borrows here Eco’s concept. As Lecercle reminds us, Eco draws a distinction between the dictionary (which is an ordered “system of lexical semantics in a given language,” 207) and the Encyclopedia (which is “a set of loosely structured referential fields” (211), a heterogeneous system of knowledge that speakers share whenever they communicate). According to Lecercle (and Eco before him), no reader can have an unmediated, unfiltered access to the Text she is reading—she always has in mind a diachronically constructed background of Encyclopedic knowledge that helps her to make sense of, interpret, and interpellate it.
- 9.
The members of this interpretive community are in theory adults and children alike. However, very few child readers’ interpretations and interpellations have been recorded and/or published. I nevertheless believe that the following analysis is valid for child readers as well—for reasons discussed below.
- 10.
For instance, well-known poems such as Isaac Watts’s “How oth the Little Busy Bee” or Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” are parodied and respectively become “How Doth the Little Crocodile” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and “criminals” are sent to prison before committing any crime in Through the Looking -Glass.
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Iché, V. (2021). The Child Reader’s Playful Adventures in Wonderland. In: Deszcz-Tryhubczak, J., Kalla, I.B. (eds) Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67700-8_2
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