Time and Stress - Alice in Wonderland

Time and Stress: Alice in WonderlandAuthor(s): Calvin R. PetersenReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1985), pp. 427-433Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709477 .Accessed: 07/02/2013 16:41

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TIME AND STRESS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND

BY CALVIN R. PETERSEN

Einstein, after struggling with the disharmony between nature and theory for many years, finally reached the insight, "Time is the culprit." He said later that following that realization it only took him five weeks to conceive the special theory of relativity.1 Yet Einstein was not the first to find that "time is the culprit," nor to discover that common sense may be no more than the product of our particular cultural prejudices. Lewis Carroll appears to have centered his work on similar insights.2 For example, K. C. Cole, in exploring the nature of sine waves, has found that in Alice in Wonderland, Carroll conceived of Alice herself as a clock pendulum in her encounter with the opposing forces of gravity during her back-and-forth fall through the bottomless rabbit hole.3 The loss of a comprehensible space-time frame of reference is also the first thing she encounters, setting the stage for the pool of tears and stressful events to follow. We should remember too that all is set in motion by the "Type A" behavior of the White Rabbit. Thus, following the trail of the Rabbit may provide important clues about the relationship of time and stress-if we have the proper eye for irony.

As conceptions of time have increasingly come to taunt common sense, it may well be the ironist who has the greatest insight into the modern relationship of time and stress. For instance, although the physicist can discern a relationship between Alice, time and sine waves, with the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, not only does he seem to have nothing to say about why the White Rabbit should have led Alice on such a stressful journey, but he even seems uncertain, like the philosopher before him, whether rabbits exist when Alice cannot see them!

The computer scientist, who seems to know more about "real time" than anyone, ought to be of some help here, and Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science, makes a fascinating attempt. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gidel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter takes on the paradoxical nature of time in a "metaphorical fugue of minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll."4 However, the path on which the reader is taken leads not from paradox back to common sense. Instead, there are even more encounters with creatures of Wonderland, only this time in more purely logical and mathematical form.

For the physician (being more practical minded, and in the interest of time, anxious to get on to the next patient) this is likely to seem nothing but a headache. Indeed, allergist Frederic Speer has found Alice's journey to be the product of

David Park The Image of Eternity, Roots of Time in the Physical World (New York, 1980), 118-119.

2 Lewis Carroll, Complete Works (New York, Vintage Books, 1976). 3 K. C. Cole, "On the Shape of Things," Discover (July, 1983), 53-53. 4 Douglas Hofstadter, G6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York,

1980).

427

Copyright 1985 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.


428 CALVIN R. PETERSEN

the premonitory stage of migraine headache, Carroll being one of history's more noted sufferers.5 Neurologist Oliver Sacks has gone so far as to associate Alice's experiences with Carroll's "Lilliputian" and "Brobdignagian vision" experienced during the migraine prodrome or aura.6

However, the literary critic is not likely to take this explanation at face value. Dwarfs and giants are the stuff of which fairy tales are made, and Carroll's work is hardly unique in that respect. Furthermore, in Gullivar's Travels we find similar evidence of perceptual distortions, logical contradictions and ob- sessive concern with time-the Lilliputians wonder, if Gullivar's watch is his god, considering the frequency with which he consults it-and so far as we know, Swift did not suffer from migraines. Yet Gullivar's first experience in Lilliput is that of intense pain, and it is well documented that Swift was plagued with gout, shingles, hemorroids, and life-long vertigo.7

For the depth psychologist, it is the loss of the space-time dimension that provides a key to understanding the unconscious. Carl Jung remarked that, "This liking for diminutives on the one hand and for superlatives--giants, etc.- on the other is connected with the queer uncertainty of spatial and temporal relations in the unconscious." 8 In psychoanalytic theory, it is the loss of linear perspective that is regarded as giving dreams and fairy tales a logic all their own. In this vein, it is of interest to note that Swift's work has been regarded as an exploration of the unconscious of Western Man. Normon 0. Brown has gone so far as to portray Swift as the satirist of the ascendant "Excremental Vision," with its satanic temporal, material and rational concerns.9 William Barrett, representing a more existential perspective, has taken a similar view in portraying Swift as the keenest critic of the emergent rationality." Swift himself may have stated it: "He gave the little Wealth he had/To build a House for Fools and Mad." Thus, swift, like Carroll, was a critic of common sense who also seems to have found that "time is the culprit." The answer to the following of Swift's riddles is "time."

Ever eating, never cloying, All devouring, all destroying. Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.11

In Carroll's version, Alice is trying to figure out who she is after her fall.

Frederick Speer, Migraine (Chicago, 1977), 43-44. 6 Oliver Sacks Migraine, Evolution of a Common Disorder (Berkeley, 1973), 88-89. 7W. B. Carnochan, "The Consolations of Satire," ed. Clive T. Probyn, The Art of

Jonathan Swift (New York, 1978), 34. 8 Carl G. Jung, "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales," ed. Violet S.

DeLaszlo, Psyche & Symbol (Garden City, New York, 1958), 79. 9 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn., 1970).

'0 William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, New York, 1962).

" Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed. Vol. III, ed. Harold Williams (London, Oxford University Press, 1966), 930.


ALICE IN WONDERLAND 429

To orient herself, she attempts to recite a popular hymn which, much to her surprise, comes out as a riddle.

How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws!

We can now get a better idea of why Alice pursued the White Rabbit on such a stressful journey. While she is sitting on the grass in her Sunday best, on a warm summer afternoon, with nothing better to do than to make her daisy chain, a bee alights on one of the flowers, and she is reminded of the hymn behind the parody above-which she also starts to recall in her conversation with the Caterpillar, when she is again struggling with the question of who she is:

How doth the busy little bee Improve each shining hour,

And gather honey all the day From every opening flower.

In works of labour or of skill I would be busy too,

For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.12

There is more than a hint here that, apart from her conception of time as effort, Alice is not at all sure who she is. Furthermore, the escape from time's devouring, "excremental" demands seems to result in a confrontation with madness. Since at the party it is always tea-time, a watch is being served, stuffed with butter and bread crumbs, and the Mad Hatter is host.13 In his study of the history of insanity, Michel Foucault sheds some additional light:

Until the Renaissance, the sensibility to madness was linked to the presence of imaginary transcendences. In the classical age, for the first time, madness was perceived through a condemnation of idleness and in a social immanence guar- anteed by the community of labor. This community acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of

12 Quoted by Robert H. Lauer, Temporal Man, The Meaning and Social Uses of Time (New York, 1981), 62.

13 Philip P. Wiener has suggested that Carroll as a mathematician and physicist at Cambridge knew that time is always represented by the algebraic symbol t in physics; hence it is always tea-time at the Mad Hatters party. See Jabberwocky (British Journal of the Carroll Society), 1983.



social uselessness. It was in this other world, encircled by the sacred powers of labor, that madness would assume the status we now attribute to it.14

This new definition of madness appears to have been one aspect of a fun- damental shift in the Western conception of time. Christian culture had pre- viously looked mainly backward to the original "timeless moments," but during the Renaissance the emphasis changed to the future. As Max Weber saw it, the assurance of predestined redemption under Protestantism became linked to evidence of worthiness through wordly striving and accomplishment. Then, as Puritan science followed Newton to the conception of God as a clockmaker, the paths to salvation and to scientific understanding of the physical universe converged. The millennium would be hastened through personal and scientific progress.

Reinhold Niebuhr described the enormous impact this had on modern con- sciousness by characterizing progress as "a single article of faith [that] has given the diverse forms of modern culture a shared belief." 15 Similar thoughts have been expressed by many others. Erich Fromm stated that the new "City of Progress" was to replace the "City of God." 16 Paul Tillich characterized progress as being a "quasi-religious symbol." 17 Will Durant expressed much the same idea: "Obviously the conception of progress is for industrial and secular civilization what the hope of heaven was for medieval Christendom." 18 Thus, it would seem that as Western culture shifted from sacred to secular time, salvation became increasingly a race against time.

In tracing the history of the idea of progress, Robert Nesbit has found that it attained its greatest power between the years 1750 and 1900, an era in which the idea was most strongly associated with earthly liberation or redemption.9 From socialist utopias to the building of the new City of God in settlements of the American West, the road to redemption was through worldly accomplishment. The arrival of the twentieth century-with its world wars, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, pollution, and counterculture-has taken a consid- erable toll on the idea of progress as the way to salvation. However, during this earlier "Era of Progress," reason and faith were already approaching their modern opposition, raising perplexing questions about where progress was lead- ing. In this context, it is of interest to note that Swift wrote at the beginning of the period, and Carroll, at the end. Both were also clerical scholars who focused much of their irony on the positivistic spirit of the age and all of the temporal, rational, objective, and orderly concerns such a nontranscendent view of reality entails. However, if transcendence belongs only to madmen or children, and common sense has nothing to raise it above absurdity except convention, there is indeed little room for consolation. The following two early verses of Carroll-churchman, Oxford Don, and devoted admirer of little girls that he

14 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), 58. 15 Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History (New York, 1949), 1-2.

16 Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be (New York, 1976), 2. 17 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. III (Chicago, 1963), 352. 18 Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy (New York, 1953), 241. 19 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980).



was-reveal much about the dilemma in which he was caught, and perhaps as much about the source of his migraines.

Punctuality

Man naturally loves delay, And to procrastinate;

Business put off from day to day Is always done too late.

Let every hour be in its place Firm fixed, nor loosely shift,

And well enjoy the vacant space, As a birthday gift.

And when the hour arrives, be there, Where'er that "there" may be;

Uncleanly hands or ruffled hair Let no one ever see.

If dinner at "half-past" be placed, At "half-past" then be dressed.

If at a "quarter-past" make hast to be down with the rest.

Better to be before your time, Than e'er to be behind;

To ope the door while strikes the chime, That shows a punctual mind.

Moral

Let punctuality and care Seize every flitting hour,

So shalt thou cull a floweret fair, E'en from a fading flower.

My Fairy

I Have a fairy by my side Which says I must not sleep

When once in pain I loudly cried It said "You must not weep."

If, full of mirth, I smile and grin, It says "You must not laugh;"

When once I wished to drink some gin It said "You must not quaff."

When once a meal I wished to taste It said "You must not bite;"

When to the wars I went in haste It said "You must not fight."



"What may I do?" at length I cried, Tired of the painful task.

The fairy quietly replied, And said "You must not ask."

Fairies, like other inhabitants of Wonderland, never give comprehensible answers to questions about the sense of things. "You must not ask" because you might discover that Wonderland is a dream from which there is no waking.

Is all our Life, then, but a dream Seen faintly in the golden gleam Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe, Or laughing at some raree-show, We flutter idly to and fro.

Man's little day in haste we spend, And, from its merry noontide, send No glance to meet the silent end.20

Writing during Carroll's lifetime, Friedrich Nietzsche could have been de- scribing Carroll himself when he characterized the "temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar" as a flight from pessimism. Nietzsche further suggested that it is the ironist who signals "the glow of a sun about to set."21 That may be what the Rabbit senses. He is always late because irony is late-representing the last stage of decay in the mythical conception of time, forcing humanity, as Carl Jung put it, to "exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock." 22 For literary critic Northrop Frye, irony and satire are representations of the "Mythos of Winter," the attempt "to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence."23 Similarly, Normon O. Brown suggests that it is "an interlude of farce" that precedes "closing time."24

Carroll obviously deeply felt this secret of irony, whether or not he ever fully admitted it to himself. The "Era of Progress" had brought neither the millennium nor utopia, but an "all devouring, all destroying," "dark resistless stream." It may be that the stream and the conception of time which it carries that bring on the stress of modern existence-life ever rushing from its own perplexity, progress as a thin veneer against a darker truth.

This Latter Day Saints' hymn, written at the time of Carroll's death (and still popular today), may say a great deal about what keeps the Rabbit going: 25

20 Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno," Collected Works. See note 2 above. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans.

Francis Golffing (Garden City, New York, 1956), 4. 22 Carl G. Jung, "The Soul and Death", Collected Works 8: The Structure and Dy-

namics of the Psyche (Princeton, 1960), 800. 23 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1973), 223. 24 Normon 0. Brown, Closing Time (New York, 1973). 25 The Latter Day Saints, or "Mormons," have been the most successful of the

American millenarian movements.



Improve the shining moments Don't let them pass you by Work while the sun is radiant Work for the night draws nigh We cannot bid the sunbeams To lengthen out their stay Nor can we ask the shadow To ever stay away Time flies on wings of lightning We cannot call it back It comes, then passes forward Along its onward track And if we are not mindful The chance will fade away For life is quick in passing 'Tis as a single day 26

One day recently after putting down Carroll's Complete Works, I took my children to a restaurant for lunch. As we sat next to a plastic clown, watching the crowds consume their "fast food," I thought for an instant I saw a large cat high on the wall, surveying the scene, smiling enigmatically.

Utah State University.

26 R. B. Baird, "Improve the Shining Moments," Deseret Sunday School Song Book (Salt Lake City, Deseret Sunday School Union, 1899).


Article Contentsp. 427p. 428p. 429p. 430p. 431p. 432p. 433

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1985), pp. 307-464Front Matter [pp. 326 - 434]Ancient Psychotherapy [pp. 307 - 325]The Hobbesian Conception of Sovereignty and Aristotle's Politics [pp. 327 - 347]Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature: The Theological Foundations of Descartes' Philosophy of Nature [pp. 349 - 362]Motion and Morality: Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes and the Mechanical World-View [pp. 363 - 379]Thomas Traherne and the Art of Meditation [pp. 381 - 403]The Novel between 1740 and 1780: Parody and Historiography [pp. 405 - 416]NotesMontaigne on War [pp. 417 - 426]Time and Stress: Alice in Wonderland [pp. 427 - 433]The Quaker Background of William Bartram's View of Nature [pp. 435 - 448]

Review ArticleKepler's Early Writings [pp. 449 - 454]

Books Received [pp. 455 - 464]Back Matter

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Time and Stress - Alice in Wonderland