生命哲學與荒誕邏輯:卡洛爾《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》與《愛麗絲鏡中奇遇》的德勒茲式閱讀

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系博士. 論文. Doctoral Dissertation Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 生命哲學與荒誕邏輯: 卡洛爾《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》與《愛麗絲鏡中奇遇》的德勒茲式閱讀 Biophilosophy and the Logic of Nonsense: A Deleuzian Reading of Lewis Carroll’s Two Alice Books. 指導教授：邱漢. 平博士. Advisor: Dr. Hanping Chiu 研究生：蔣裕祺 Advisee: Yu-Chi Chiang. 中華民國一百零一年七月 July, 2012.

(2) 生命哲學與荒誕邏輯: 卡洛爾《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》與《愛麗絲鏡中奇遇》的德勒茲式閱讀中文摘要本論文檢視路易斯‧卡洛爾《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》與《愛麗絲鏡中奇遇》兩本小說中的荒誕邏輯。在視荒誕邏輯為卡洛爾生命哲學的前提下，本文討論卡洛爾如何引發愛麗絲奇遇旅程中語言、主體性及時空記憶的荒誕，以達到顛覆愛麗絲的目的。時至今日，荒誕學派仍有大量文獻將卡洛爾兩本愛麗絲小說中的荒誕讀成封閉、自我指涉的語言系統。這本論文有別於以往讀法之處，在於檢視生命哲學與荒誕邏輯之間被忽略的關係。鑒於本研究所採取的理論立場，以及上述領域現狀的簡要回顧，本研究探索的問題是：荒誕邏輯在卡洛爾生命哲學的建構中，是否扮演重要角色?為了回答這個問題，我們假設眩暈效果是在愛麗絲的人類有限性之力衝擊到未然夢境中非人無限性之力時產生，而闖入的域外所造成的皺摺如潮汐漲落般刷洗掉兩波海潮間在沙灘上所畫的一張臉，並以迫近此刻的生命力來抵禦宿命，開啟生命哲學頓悟的契機。基於此項假設，我們希望能更了解「人可以怎麼存活」的存有倫理議題。本論文的主體分成三個章節。核心論述的主旨，在討論荒誕夢境如何以荒誕的眩暈效果解放愛麗絲的語言、主體性及時空記憶。第一章〈卡洛爾怪誕語言中的直覺譫慾力〉處理以下研究問題:何以像〈刧搏沃麒龍〉這樣的荒誕詩，會在愛麗絲無法理解的情況下，反倒激發她的靈感?一反荒誕學派將卡洛爾的荒誕詩讀成封閉、自我指涉的語言系統，我們主張他詩中譫慾役使的語言怪獸已回到地表，遊移於意義與荒誕之間的無人疆界，以直覺感知進行對角線式的橫貫運動。在意義的領域中，卡洛爾的荒誕詩過度生產沒有意義的意義，以達到意義的零度，並以詩作為反實現化力場，將已體制化的現狀流變回直覺式的未然。第二章〈「你是誰?」—域外之爪下愛麗絲的主體化過程〉，使用傅柯的域外理論及德勒茲在《傅柯》一書中所闡述的域外之爪，檢驗愛麗絲的主體性。本章旨在闡明，愛麗絲對自我視聽檔案的認知，不斷遭受如身形變化(可視感受圖式)及邏輯衝突(可述自發圖示)等域外之力的闖入而天旋地轉。另一方面，人的生命力所潛藏的狂熱的好奇心，驅使愛麗絲域內之力皺摺其他域外之力，使得主體化區域因不斷遭逢「域外內部化」而得以抗拒生命的僵斃，並建立對自我的倫理關係。第三章〈纏擾的記憶: 愛麗絲穿越的荒誕時空〉討論愛麗絲身處的混宇時空所造成的記憶暈眩。瘋狂茶會中時間的凍結及空間的置換，以及紅、白皇后的「兩個國度說」不斷提醒著愛麗絲，這位國家機器派來的城鎮量測官，已進入平滑時空的未然幽微世界。歷史的記憶及空間的經緯敵不過語言及口腹之慾的暴力侵襲，使愛麗絲只能記得，過去的「貧乏」記憶逐漸蛻變為忘卻現在、憶及未來的域外記憶。本章的結論是:愛麗絲越是從記憶中重述奇遇的「歷史」，她就越有可能因生出野性的記憶而丟掉地圖，走進地下與鏡中的「狼群」中。關鍵詞: 卡洛爾、德勒茲、愛麗絲小說、生命哲學、荒誕邏輯. vii.

(3) Biophilosophy and the Logic of Nonsense: A Deleuzian Reading of Lewis Carroll’s Two Alice Books Abstract This thesis examines the logic of nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Viewing the logic of nonsense as Carroll’s biophilosophy, the thesis discusses how Carroll generates nonsense in language, subjectivity, and spatiotemporal memory to unsettle Alice in her nonsensical encounters. Up to this point, a fairly large body of literature in Nonsense School still reads the nonsense in Carroll’s two Alice books as a closed, self-referential language system. This thesis distinguishes itself from its progenitors by examining the unacknowledged relationship between biophilosophy and the logic of nonsense. Given the theoretical position taken for the study and the status of the field as briefly reviewed above, the study aims to provide an answer to the following question: Does the logic of nonsense play a role in Carroll’s construction of biophilosophy? To answer this question, we propose a hypothesis that the giddy effects arise when Alice’s forces of human finitude encounter forces of inhuman infinity in virtual dreams, and the folding of the intrusive outside washes off Alice’s “face drawn in the sand between two tides” (F 89), and initiates a possible moment of epiphany with this now intimate power of life that helps resist life’s destiny. Given this hypothesis, it is hoped that in answering this question we may gain a better understanding of the ontological issue: “How One Might Live.” This thesis is divided into three major chapters. Our central argument facilitates a discussion of how the nonsensical dreams liberate Alice’s language, subjectivity, and spatiotemporal memory with the giddy effects of nonsense. Chapter One, “Power of Intuitive Délire in Lewis Carroll’s Monstrous Language,” addresses the question: Why does a nonsense poem like “Jabberwocky” fill Alice with ideas when she does not exactly know what they are? While Nonsense School tends to read Carroll’s nonsense poetry as closed, self-referential language system, we argue that his délire-driven linguistic monsters have returned to the surface to intuit the diagonal movements across the borderline between sense and nonsense. In the domain of sense, Carroll’s nonsense poems overproduce sense-deprived sense to reach sense degree zero, and serve as true sites of counter-effectuation that bring actuality (institution) back to virtuality (intuition). Chapter Two, “‘Who are you?’—the Subjectivation of Alice in the Claws of the Outside,” uses Foucault’s theory of outside and Deleuze’s book on Foucault to examine Alice’s subjectivity. This chapter predicates that Alice’s savoir of herself in audio-visual archive is snatched away by such intrusive forces from the outside as size alterations (the visible) and clash of different logics (the articulable). The study presented here illustrates how passionate curiosity in human power of life drives the forces within Alice to fold in other forces from the outside so that the zone of subjectivation constantly undergoes the “interiorization of the outside” (F 98) to resist life’s impasse and establish an ethical relation to oneself. Chapter Three, “A Memory That Haunts: Time and Space in Alice’s Dreams,” discusses Alice’s memory failures in chaosmic time-space. The freezing of time and substituting of space at the mad tea-party, and the issue of “two countries” brought up by Red and White Queens together serve as a constant reminder that the town surveyor Alice sent by the State Apparatus has entered smooth time-space in virtual dreams. The verbal and oral aggressiveness has inflicted violence upon the memory of history and the striation of space to shift Alice’s poor sort of memory that works only backward to memory of the outside that forgets the present and remembers the future. This chapter concludes that the more Alice retells the “history” of her adventures from her memory, the more likely she will throw away her map, and join the “pack of wolves” in two Alices. Keywords: Carroll, Deleuze, Alice books, biophilosophy, the logic of nonsense viii.

(4) Acknowledgements Please bear with me, my readers, if my acknowledgements seem lengthy. Read on and you will know why I have so much to say and so many to thank. First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Hanping Chiu, who always stood by my side during my thesis writing. My acquaintance with him dates back to two courses he taught—“The Postmodern Condition: Deleuze and Lyotard” in the Fall semester of 2005 and “Postmodernism” in the Fall semester of 2006—during which I began to take interest in the writings of a French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who is notorious for the impenetrability of his thoughts. It is imaginable that in my early apprenticeship, without a sturdy battering ram, it took “slow-witted”—to borrow Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s word, only mine was far slower—me more time to break through a little to have a smattering of Deleuze’s philosophy. It was at this difficult time that Professor Chiu invited me to attend a series of his Deleuze seminars held from September 2007 to January 2008 in Taiwan. Right after that, he further invited me to join the panel he organized to attend the First International Deleuze Studies Conference at Cardiff University in 2008, to be followed by the Second at Cologne University in 2009 and the Third at the University of Amsterdam in 2010. I owe my deepest gratitude to Professor Chiu, who nurtured my soul and broadened my academic horizon all the way here. Besides, I would like to show my unreserved gratitude to Professor Chun-yen Chen, Professor Han-yu Huang, Professor Ming Hung Tu, and Professor Hun-Chiung Li for their invaluable suggestions given during my final oral defense. I also wish to thank Professor Hanping Chiu, Professor Chun-yen Chen and Professor Han-yu Huang again for their insightful ideas about my thesis framework at the proposal hearing, and the appreciation further reaches back to six anonymous evaluators who bore the hardship in the middle of their research to help better my rationales before I took Ph.D. candidacy exams (two minors and one major). Thanks are also due to my enthusiastic professors who taught me during my novitiate. This thesis would not have been possible without Chairman Sun-chieh Liang steering my wife Yi-jung and me out of the gloomiest days of our lives. His help prevented us from losing our wits. I would also take this chance to thank Professor Chun-yen Chen again for being my tutor. Her research tutorial has been invaluable to me. Also, I want to thank Mu-han, one of the lovely and helpful teaching assistants at the English Department, for rendering Yi-jung and me practical assistance in administrative affairs. I am indebted to many of my colleagues who supported me during the pursuit of my Ph.D. degree, especially Bing-yong Chung and Jia-lin Lu, who made available their support in a number of ways. Thanks are particularly due to Bing-yong for lunching with and helping me let off steam by listening whenever I was on the verge of snapping. I also want to thank Hsiu-Ping University of Science and Technology for granting me a one year’s leave without payment so that I could concentrate on my thesis writing task. Special thanks go to my father, who went hiking with me and taught me with his entire ix.

(5) life’s experience not to sweat the small stuff—I learned that good health is the most essential foundation for any great achievement in life. Without it, nothing matters. A bleak point that I should mention in my acknowledgements is that my father, due to terminal lung cancer, passed away early in the dreary fall of 2011. May he rest in peace. I would also like to thank my mother, who was there for my father and eased my worries. This thesis would not have been possible without her affective and financial support during this project. Also, thanks are directed to my sister, my brother, sister-in-law, and my lovely nephews and nieces for their affection. I am also enormously grateful to my father-in-law, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, who helped Yi-jung and me in numerous ways to make our dreams nearer: countless rides to and from the bus or THSR (Taiwan High Speed Rail) stations in Taichung, talks over lunch to comfort and encourage us, not to mention their unreserved love and substantial assistance in every thinkable way. You are the best family one could ever dream of having. No words can express my appreciation to all of you. One year ago, Yi-jung and I asked for help from my uncle who happened to have a cozy, uninhabited house because we needed a quiet place for our intensive thesis writing. He and my aunt were more than happy to help. They let us live in their house free of charge. They even paid for the utility bills. All they wanted was for us to stay focused on our thesis writing. We thank our uncle and aunt for their kind help. A special note of thanks should be given to my amigo Valdis Gauss who edited my draft dissertation free of charge. Although I am pretty confident that my English writing did not give Valdis too much of a hard time, I still appreciate and admire greatly the finishing touches he added to my dissertation. Without which, the finished product would not have been as authentic in its expression. If any mistakes remain in my dissertation, I claim full responsibility. Also, I want to thank my partners in “Theory Study Group,” many of whom are already established scholars, for their insightful discussion of many critical issues in Deleuze’s oeuvre. Thanks are also due to Mr. You-zhi Chen and Catherine Zheng for gathering with me at cafés and discussing Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and The Fold. I also want to thank Professor Kuan-jung Cheng, Professor Frank Stevenson, Professor Chun-san Wang, and Professor An-chi Wang for their supportive ideas, Roger Ming-feng Wang, Yuyen Chang, Gao-cheng Liao, Chen-hsiang Chiu for their dissertations and words of encouragement, Yu-qun, Yi-ren, Daniel Spotzi, Bo-zhu, You-zhen and Dr. Ma, Steve Tsai, Di-jay, Zih-hong, Ms. Du, and all of my other friends for supporting me in one way or another during my dissertation writing. Last but not least, a special note of love and appreciation must go to my wife, Yi-jung, who accompanied me through so many thrilling years: all the happiness and bitterness we shared in life have been amazing. As Nietzsche said: “Whatever doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger.” (qtd. in Magnus and Higgins 2). My dear, no matter how hard it was, I am so happy that we finally made it!. x.

(6) Table of Contents Chinese Abstract………………………………………………………………….…..............…...vii English Abstract………………………………………………………………………..…………viii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….….......…ix Table of Contents……………………………………………………………...………..……..…...xi List of Tables………...………………………………………………………………….……........xiii List of Illustrations…...…………………………………………………………….……xiv Notes on the References and Abbreviations……………………………………………..…........xv. Introduction Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Literature: Why Begins with an M?……....…...…....1 Chapter 1. Power of Intuitive Délire in Lewis Carroll’s Monstrous Language……........…...43. 1.1. Language, Nonsense, and Desire……………………………………........……………..52 1.2. Life on the Outside of Monstrous Language……………………….………...…….…...60 Chapter 2. “Who are you?”—the Subjectivation of Alice in the Claws of the Outside…......95. 2.1. Curiosity, Knowledge, and Life…..…..………………………………….……...…..…106 2.2. “I” as the Folding of the Outside……………………..……….……………….…..…..126 Chapter 3. A Memory That Haunts: Time and Space in Alice’s Dreams….....….…………159. 3.1. Vertiginous Time and Space…...………………….………………………….……..…177 3.2. To Remember or to Forget?….……………………………………………........………203 Conclusion Life Is a Process of Folding Errors……….……………………..………………230. Works Cited…….………………………………………………………………………….....…..235 Appendix A: Prefatory Poems………………………….…………………………………..........246 Appendix B: Terminal Acrostic of Through the Looking-Glass………..………………...........247 Appendix C: Emblematic, Figured, or Shaped Verse (“The Mouse’s Tale”)………..….....…248 Appendix D: Parodies in Two Alices and Their Original Poems……………………....…...…249 Appendix E: Carroll’s Doublet…………………………………………………...……..…...….258 Appendix F: Nonsense Verse “Jabberwocky”………………………………………....….…....261 xi.

(7) F.1. The First Stanza of “Jabberwocky” in Reversed Form………..…………..…261 F.2. “Jabberwocky” Reflected from a Glass…………………………..………..…..261 F.3. New Nonsense Vocabulary in “Jabberwocky”………….…………………......262 Appendix G: Traditional Nursery Rhymes in Two Alices……………………………..…..…..265 G.1. “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”……………….…………………………..…...265 G.2. “Humpty Dumpty”…………………………………….…………………..…....265 G.3. “The Lion and the Unicorn”…………………………….….…………….….....265 Appendix H: Age Comparison between Alice and Carroll…………………………….…...….266. xii.

(8) List of Tables Table 1.1 Subject Comparison between Marine Day-School and Alice’s Day-School. 81. Table 2.1 Carroll’s Concern about the Ethics of Alice’s “Life”. 120. Table 2.2 Comparison between Knowledge and Power. 143. Table 2.3 Change of Alice’s Size. 147. Table 2.4 Clash of Different Logics. 153. Table 3.1 Comparison between Two Kinds of Narrative Structure Division. 160. Table 3.2. Comparison between Two Kinds of Space. 187. Table 3.3. Comparison between Geer’s Reading and Ours. 198. xiii.

(9) List of Illustrations Fig. 2.1.. Metamorphosis of a caterpillar.. 123. Fig. 2.2.. Diagram of the actual and the virtual.. 130. Fig. 2.3.. Foucault’s diagram of the outside.. 134. Fig. 2.4.. Carroll’s asterisks.. 150. Fig. 3.1.. Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.. 180. Fig. 3.2.. The dolphin sundial.. 181. Fig. 3.3.. Prime Meridian Line.. 181. Fig. 3.4.. Standard time zones of the world.. 181. Fig. 3.5.. Chessboard (8×8).. 196. Fig. 3.6.. Go board (18×18).. 196. Fig. 3.7.. Hourglass.. 205. Fig. 3.8.. Sundial and the wabe.. 214. Fig. 3.9.. Bergson’s first great schema (the memory circuits).. 219. Fig. 3.10.. Bergson’s second great schema (the inverse cone of virtual memory).. 219. Fig. 3.11.. Bergson’s third schema (two dissymmetrical jets in time’s splitting).. 223. xiv.

(10) Notes on the References and Abbreviations For this study, I have used the Norton Critical Edition of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark: Backgrounds and Essays in Criticism, ed. Donald J. Gray. 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1992). Following Donald Rackin’s convention in Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning, I will use AW (when referring to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), TLG (when referring to Through the Looking-Glass), and HS (when referring to The Hunting of the Snark) before the page citations. The other following abbreviations will also be used in giving references to more frequently cited works. Deleuze (and friends). Carroll. AO. Anti-Oedipus. AW, TLG,. Alice in Wonderland, Through the. ATP. A Thousand Plateaus. HS. Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the. B. Bergsonism. Snark: Backgrounds and Essays in. C1. Cinema 1. Criticism. C2. Cinema 2. D II. Dialogues II. Lecercle. DR. Difference and Repetition. DL. Deleuze and Language. ECC. Essays Critical and Clinical. FL. The Force of Language. F. Foucault. PLG. Philosophy through the Looking Glass. FB. Francis Bacon. PN: IVNL. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions. K. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. LS. The Logic of Sense. N. Negotiations. NP. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Others. PI: Life. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. AME. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. WIP. What Is Philosophy?. Bios. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. CGL. Course in General Linguistics. GDLS. Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. NSM. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and. Nietzsche BGE. Beyond Good and Evil. GM/EH. On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce. of Victorian Nonsense Literature VL. Through the Looking-Glass:. Homo GS. The Gay Science. The Violence of Language. Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning PI. Philosophical Investigations. VPI. Victorian People and Ideas. xv.

(11) Introduction Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Literature: Why Begins with an M?. If there’s no meaning in it . . . that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know . . . I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. (AW 95). Each generation has its own Alice to read. Although Martin Gardner’s definitive edition of The Annotated Alice in 2000 (after his 1960 and 1990 versions) manages to fill the gaps between Carroll’s Victorian wit and contemporary readers’ appreciation, the life and the Alice books of Mr. Charles Dodgson (the real name of Lewis Carroll) seem, according to Virginia Woolf in 1939, hard to grasp as ever.1 Carroll is said to be the most quoted author after Shakespeare (Philips, “Foreword” xvii), and his elusive yet immortal Alice phenomenon continues its glamour in media other than print publications like musicals, psychedelic songs,2 animations, video games, and television and film adaptations. Tim Burton’s 3-D action-adventure movie Alice in Wonderland released in USA in March 2010 is a recent tribute to Carroll’s two Alice books, which features a top biller commercial cast and an “empowered” heroine image. 3 This snowball effect is reaching its zenith in the 2010s because 2012 is the 150th Anniversary of the first telling of the story on that memorable boating trip, and 2015 will be the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This generation stands on the cusp of the rising Alice frenzy, and the way it reads suggests something about how we place Carroll’s life and the Alice books in our culture.. 1. As Woolf put it in 1939, “We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail—once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Reverend C. L. Dodgson—we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands” (47). 2 Grace Slick’s LSD lyric in Jefferson Airplane’s 1966 hit song “White Rabbit” in a sense reflects this generation’s popular psychedelic readings of Carroll’s Alice books. 3 For further discussion of Tim Burton’s Alice, see Larry Rohter’s “Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World,” Manohla Dargis’s “What’s a Nice Girl Doing in this Hole?” and Richard Corliss’s “Tim Burton’s Frabjous Alice.” 1.

(12) We read not to find an all-time definitive version of interpretation, but to put our gloss on the Alice stories unique to this generation. If this statement finds no objections, then the next question is how this generation can read Carroll and two Alices in its unique way.. Statement of Problem Nonsense has always been a much explored area by Carroll scholars. In fact, one of the major preoccupations of the Nonsense School critics has been investigating the nature of Lewis Carroll’s literary nonsense. In exploring Carroll’s nonsense, the Nonsense School from the 1950s to 1970s provides interesting views on order-disorder dialect, distinction between nonsense and non-sense, the order-conscious guerrillas begrudging and setting back the global centrality of language at a local level of warfare, and a strict self-referential framework not relatable to the everyday world. Curiously enough, there is a gap between 1980 and 2012. Although Carroll’s literary nonsense continues to be a challenging issue, the Nonsense School of Criticism becomes lackadaisical for the past three decades because their theories turn problematic when Carroll’s elusive nonsense is still enclosed within their high walls of language. In fact, it would be terribly mistaken to see Carroll’s madness stay at the level of language. In our reading, Carroll’s logic of nonsense can be viewed as his biophilosophy, which help us better understand our contemporary ontological issue: “How One Might Live.”4. Purpose of the Study To date, there has been relatively little research conducted on Carroll’s nonsense fiction in the light of biophilosophy. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the giddy 4. The new ontological question “How might one live?” is derived from Todd May’s 2005 book Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, which is aimed at the study of “what new foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings [life] is capable of” (25). All the subsequent references to the question of how one might live are credited to May’s discussion of Deleuze’s new ontology of difference. 2.

(13) effects of nonsense on language, subjectivity, and memory in time-space in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass through the lenses of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s theory of intuitive délire, Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of the outside, and Deleuze’s notion of smooth time-space and absolute memory to see if Carroll’s logic of nonsense plays a role in his construction of biophilosophy. How Carroll’s literary nonsense can construct his biophilosophy in two Alice books is the focus of this study. This examination is undertaken on the basis of a hypothesis: the giddy effects arise when Alice’s forces of human finitude encounter other forces of inhuman infinity in virtual dreams, and the folding of the intrusive outside washes off Alice’s “face drawn in the sand between two tides” (F 89), and initiates a possible moment of epiphany with this now intimate power of life that helps resist life’s destiny. In our reading, we observe that “the irrational break or the crack” (F 65) takes place not only between word and reference (language), but also between “Alice” the name and Alice the person (subjectivity), and memory of history in striated time-space and memory of the outside in smooth time-space (memory in time-space). These initially identical language, subjectivity, and spatiotemporal memory forces gush forth with dual splitting at a dizzy speed in Alice’s two virtual dreams so that the jet of formal order is increased to a maximum while the jet of referential order is reduced to a minimum. The further these two dissymmetrical jets burst, the wider they split. This dissertation is organized into these three chapters because an ethical account of “how one might live” ontology should be based on how a self relates to the world in language and memory. In Wonderland or Looking-Glass dream-world without God or man where anthropomorphic birds, beasts, playing cards, and chess pieces freely confront her, the forces within Alice enter into a relation with other forces from the outside to invest in a new compound or form “that is neither God nor Man. . . . which Nietzsche called “the overman”. Either God-form or Man-form is what imprisons life, whereas “the overman” 3.

(14) operates by superfold to set free forces within him. As Deleuze suggests, the advent of this new form for Foucault “is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept. . .” (F 132). What we need to do to the benefit of this new form is to replace the traditional ontology of “how one should live or act” with a new ontology of “how one might live.” It takes an impact, not an impasse, to make a change in such a concept, and the vertiginous effects of Carroll’s literary nonsense are what we need to carry out this project of living otherwise.. Carroll’s Nonsense Literature The kaleidoscope of nonsense unfolds itself as readers turn the pages of the Alice books. We are like the Guard in the carriage scene who looks at Alice through different optical lenses: “first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass” (TLG 130). Why does the Guard say at last that “You’re traveling the wrong way” (AW 130)? Does he imply that Alice is not supposed to go among mad people? If Alice slides through the looking-glass again to end her adventure (wakes up from her dream), then she will go back to her common and uninteresting way of life. We are fascinated with Alice’s adventures because, as Lecercle suggests, “reading nonsense texts [is] rewarding” (PN: IVNL 162). Nonsense does not bore us with “no meaning”; instead, it fascinates us with its “corkscrew”5 twists in our thoughts. Like what the King of Hearts says at the trial scene, 5. Carroll seems to have a liking for a “corkscrew.” In Looking-Glass, Carroll uses the image of a “corkscrew” three times. In Chapter 2 “The Garden of Live Flowers,” Alice complains that the path leading seemingly “straight” to the top of a hill near in sight twists curiously like a live corkscrew because every time the path turns Alice back upon the house (TLG 120). In Chapter 6 “Humpty Dumpty,” the master of language hears Alice’s recitation out before he begins to explain the first stanza of the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe” (1-4). Among the three kinds of curious creatures mentioned in the first stanza (toves, borogoves, and raths), Humpty Dumpty thinks the first kind of creatures “are something like badgers . . . something like lizards . . . and . . . something like corkscrews” (TLG 164). Tenniel’s illustration (TLG 165), with these three kinds of creatures wandering on the grass-plot round an artificial sun-dial, shows a striking contrast between chaos and order. In the same chapter, Humpty Dumpty forces Alice to hear him repeat a poem that begins with serene beauty of nature, but gradually edges into the Darwinian nature of oral aggressiveness. The speaker sends a message to the little fishes of the sea to express his implicit wish. When the speaker prepares a 4.

(15) there is some meaning, instead of no meaning, in nonsense. This “out-of-the-way” (AW 12) nonsense has irresistible charm because like Alice “[we] know something interesting is sure to happen” (AW 28). Even though we can not make out this something, “[s]omehow it seems to fill [our] head[s] with ideas” (TLG 118). This giddy but fascinating something in Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass world can be elaborated with the letter “M” in the chapter of “A Mad Tea-Party.” In the Dormouse’s impromptu fairy tale, there are three sisters Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie,6 who live at the bottom of a treacle well, living on treacle and learning to draw treacle and everything that begins with an M. . . . . “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—” “Why with an M?” said Alice. “Why not?” said the March Hare. Alice was silent. The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—. large kettle for cooking, someone comes to report that his fishes are all asleep. Then the speaker shouts his order to the man’s ears; he wants him to go and wake them up. The man agrees to do so only on an ambiguous condition. Apparently the deal is not done because the speaker says “I took a corkscrew from the shelf; / I went to wake them up myself” (35-36). In the first case, the corkscrew is about the twisted path that comes alive. In the second case, the curious-looking “portmanteau” creatures, toves, which partly resemble corkscrews, serve as a contrast with the man-made order of time. In the third case, the speaker intends to wake the little fishes up with a corkscrew. If these three cases have something in common, we can use Lecercle’s anachronic account in Philosophy of Nonsense to argue that Carroll’s intuitions of the nineteenth-century Victorian nonsense literature anticipate Deleuze’s Event philosophy because both “make pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak. . .” (LS 73). In this sense, Carroll’s corkscrew forces us to think the unthinkable. 6 After the previous allusion to three Liddell sisters at the end of “The Pool of Tears” chapter—Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell as the Lory, Alice, and Eaglet (AW 20), this is, as Donald Gray notes, another reference to the three girls: “Lacie is an anagram of Alice; Elsie is L. C. (Lorina Charlotte); and Tillie is Edith, who was sometimes called Mathilda in her family” (58). 5.

(16) did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!” (AW 60)7 Is the letter “M” chosen at random? Is there logic that the letter “M” can put together four seemingly irrelevant words with: mouse-traps, moon, memory, and muchness? Yes and no. Nonsense is a game of repetitions and variations all at once. The relationship between form and meaning always implies an unattributable break. In “The Language of Nonsense in Alice,” Jacqueline Flescher writes: Meaning is intensified so that language is always in the foreground. Language can be emphasized, either by closing the gap between word and meaning and tightening the relationship, or, on the contrary, by widening the rift and weakening the relationship. In either case the balance between word and meaning is upset and the function of language becomes more apparent. (134) In our case of “M,” the alliterative metric pattern repeats itself in four M-words and three M-characters: mouse-traps, moon, memory, muchness, and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, whereas in the background, variations of meaning depend on the angle of deflection of the new direction from its intended meaning. The widening or tightening of the gap between word and meaning determines the degree of nonsense. More nonsense is achieved when the gap is wider, whereas less nonsense is reached when the gap is tighter. No matter to what degree the nonsense goes, the power of formal pattern is increased to a maximum, whereas “the power of meaning is reduced to a minimum” (Flescher 137). The four M-words are a disparate group of incompatible elements. They are simply a series of alliterative but unconnected words. If we broaden the pool to include three M-characters, we find that mouse-traps seem to be deadly threats to the story-telling Dormouse;8 the moon 7. The fall 2010 Concentric on the special topic of “M” features Frank Stevenson’s editorial essay “Things Beginning with the Letter ‘M’,” which cleverly introduces the following essays by means of his discussion of Dormouse’s four M-words. 8 In “Things Beginning with the Letter ‘M’,” Frank Stevenson suggests that “. . . ‘mouse-trap’ must have for the dormouse the greatest existential or ontological gravitas, signifying as it does the very means of his annihilation . . .” (4). Nevertheless, as Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone note in The Alice Companion, 6.

(17) might imply the lunatic nature of the three nonsense characters; the Hatter (as the King’s Messenger Hatta in Looking-Glass) is punished before really committing the crime in the White Queen’s memory that works forwards; and the colloquial British phrase “much of a muchness” might mean that the madness of the three M-characters is very much alike. However, looking back on our speculation that suggests the correspondence between word and reference, we seem to have stretched our imagination to justify the meanings of these four M-words. Therefore, Flescher is right about Carroll’s logic of nonsense that “[t]otal coincidence of word and reference is at the core of nonsense” (137). Nonsense hangs by a thread of formal structure while leaving all the beads of referential meanings dangling on their own. Carroll’s literary nonsense follows the logic of an altered version of the Duchess’s proverb: “Take care of the [sounds], and the [sense] will take care of [itself]” (AW 71).9 The alliterative metric pattern repeats its “M” rhyme to form the regularity, whereas the meaning deflects from its intended target to form the eccentricity. Carroll’s giddy but fascinating something fills our heads with ideas because our minds become unsettled in the paradoxical clash between two orders, among which the formal order in sounds is extremely predictable while the referential order in sense is terribly evasive.. Carroll’s Nonsense and Biophilosophy through a Deleuzian Lens How can Carroll’s terribly evasive sense relate to nonsense, and create its vertiginous effects? Carroll’s giddy nonsense takes place in “the irrational break or the crack” (F 65) between two heterogeneous series: a place of “non-relation” (F 62) that can be explained with Deleuze’s logic of sensation and logic of sense. If we compare Lewis Carroll the English writer to Francis Bacon the Irish painter, we can observe that both artists are not working on a. “In Alice’s day [dormice] were popular as pets—and are as passive as a pet can be” (72). If dormice were popular pets in Victorian England, naturally mouse-traps were not used for catching them in Alice’s day. 9 The Duchess’s original proverb is “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” 7.

(18) white surface because they need to fight with clichés to break with representation: Carroll needs to fight with meanings while Bacon needs to fight with givens. According to Deleuze, It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. . . . Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. (FB 71) In other words, “the task of the painting of the future” (FB 7) is not to reproduce these givens all over the blank surface, but to clear “[t]he entire surface [that] is already invested virtually with all kinds of clichés” (FB 12) first, and then “render visible forces that are not themselves visible” (FB 48). As Erwin Straus argues, “Perception . . . is a secondary rational organization of a primary, nonrational dimension of sensation (or ‘sense experience’ . . .)” (qtd. in Smith, “Translator’s Introduction” xiv). In his fight with the cliché, the painter must give sensation precedence over perception. Sensation has the disruptive power to deform perception that synthesizes the nonrational sense experience as an organic body. The artist needs to create a surface of “Body without Organs” that endlessly emanates sensations in a billowing artistic creation. In Deleuze’s logic of sensation, art is not figurative in light of Paul Klee’s famous formula “Not to render the visible, but to render visible” (FB 48). Artists do not render the visible givens (perception), but to render invisible forces (sensation). All the vibrations and spasms sent to perceptible givens are to make sure organic representation will not be sedentary. This gives full vent to Bacon’s logic of sensation that nomadic sensation should prevail over sedentary perception on his canvas because Bacon’s modern painting of the future is to “paint the sensation” (FB 32). In Deleuze’s discussion, there are two ways for 8.

(19) Bacon to speak of sensation: “Negatively, he says that the form related to the sensation (the Figure) is the opposite of the form related to an object that it is supposed to represent (figuration). . . . And positively, Bacon constantly says that sensation is what passes from one ‘order’ to another, from one ‘level’ to another, from one ‘area’ to another” (FB 32). Clearly, the logic of sensation (the Figure) is opposed to the logic of representation (figuration) in a static definition, but “passing in the middle” is a more dynamic description, and more pertinently characteristic of Bacon’s sensation. In “Literature and Life” of Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze argues that a writer’s writing is like “a witch’s line” (ECC 5) that creates a transforming power of becoming, and invents a passage of life within language. Writing is not to impose a form with the “delirium of domination” (ECC 4), but to exert “the power of an impersonal. . . . the indefinite” (ECC 3) to create a zone of proximity with “a bastard delirium” (ECC 4). A writer is not a mental patient who writes with neuroses or psychoses, but a physician who “possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him. . .” (ECC 3). But how does a writer turn literature into “an enterprise of health” (ECC 3)? To this point, Deleuze proposes three aspects of literature: “a decomposition or destruction of the maternal language,” “the invention of a new language within language,” and “language as a whole . . . being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language” (ECC 5). The third aspect of literature has a peculiar academic allure because it is a telling explanation of Deleuze’s “passage of life within language.” In order to force language “out of its usual furrows,” a writer must see and hear “Ideas [constituted by the passage of life within language] . . . in the interstices of language, in its intervals” (ECC 5). If Visions and Auditions, as Deleuze emphasizes, “are not outside language, but the outside of language” (ECC 5), we can use Deleuze’s diagram of the outside in Foucault to understand the relationship between these 9.

(20) two as the mutual grappling of the visible and the articulable, with no common form, no isomorphism between them. In this sense, Visions and Auditions are big and strong forces from the outside that can bring good health to literature. However, the question is whether we can see Carroll as such a writer who can invent a passage of life within language, and whose giddy but fascinating something can become otherwise to cause the irrational break between two wrestling orders in the interstices or intervals of language. In the analogy between the nonsense verse and the abstract painting, Martin Gardner, the annotator of Carroll’s two Alices, says: The realistic artist is forced to copy nature, imposing on the copy as much as he can in the way of pleasing forms and colors; but the abstract artist is free to romp with the paint as much as he pleases. In similar fashion the nonsense poet does not have to search for ingenious ways of combining pattern and sense. . . . The words he uses may suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all—just a play of pleasant sounds like the play of nonobjective10 colors on a canvas. (150) It should be noted that Gardner repeats the leitmotif of Carroll’s nonsense in this remarks: repetition of pattern (formal order) versus variation of sense (referential order). In Gardner’s argument, Carroll resembles Picasso in that both of their artistic means express evasive sense. It seems quite proper for us to compare Gardner’s realistic artist and abstract artist respectively to Deleuze’s figurative painter and modern painter of the Figure. However, although Deleuze maintains that a painter can move beyond figuration “either toward abstract form or toward the Figure” (FB 31), he criticizes both figurative painting and abstract. 10. It means “nonrepresentational art.” Admittedly, Martin Gardner opposes the abstract artist to the realistic artist in order to praise that Carroll the nonsense poet rivals Picasso the abstract artist in their nonrepresentational artistic merit. However, we need to further our discussion in the framework of Deleuze’s logic of sensation, in which nonrepresentational art can be subdivided into the abstract painting and the modern painting of the Figure. 10.

(21) painting for not being able to “pass through the brain . . . act directly upon the nervous system . . . attain the sensation . . . [and] liberate the Figure” (FB 32). Two issues thus arise: first of all, the role of abstract painting rests awkwardly betwixt the Figure and the figuration; secondly, Gardner’s analogy between the nonsense verse and the abstract painting makes us wonder if Carroll’s nonsense is only mediocre in terms of its transforming power of becoming. Bacon’s logic of sensation under Deleuze’s discussion is not as simple as two polar oppositions, with perception (figuration) on the one hand and sensation (the Figure) on the other. In addition to the modern painting of the Figure, abstract painting is another offshoot of the nonrepresentational art. It is superior to the figurative painting, and inferior to the modern painting of the Figure. Thus, the three forms of painting are introduced by Deleuze: “. . . the law of the diagram, according to Bacon, is this: one starts with a figurative form, a diagram intervenes and scrambles it, and a form of a completely different nature emerges from the diagram, which is called the Figure” (FB 125). From the figurative pole to the pole of the Figure, we have the figurative form (figurative painting), the diagrammatic form (abstract painting), and the form of the Figure (the modern painting of the Figure). In Deleuze’s Foucault, three ontologies in “Foucault’s diagram of the outside” are comparable to his three forms of painting in Francis Bacon: knowledge (figuration), power (diagram), and self (Figure).11 At each level, there are the articulable (a system of language) on one side and the visible (a system of light) on the other, and what distinguishes one level from another is how close these two sides are to each other: the tightest pair is in Knowledge-Being while the 11. In Deleuze’s critical writings, we juxtapose the three levels in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Foucault, and even The Logic of Sense: figuration, diagram, and Figure in FB, knowledge, power, and self in F, and proposition, sense, and sensation in LS. The three levels can be understood in light of a regressive movement from the tertiary order via the static genesis to the secondary organization, and then via the dynamic genesis to the primary order (virtualization), or the other way round (actualization). However, we must be reminded that in spite of their comparable three levels, the prepictorial Figure in FB, the pre-individual self in F, and the prepropositional sensation in LS all have their respective singularities to speak in painting, self, and language. 11.

(22) widest pair is in Self-Being. Knowledge-Being is a formal and stratified auditory (the articulable) and visual (the visible) archive; Power-Being is an informal, non-stratified diagram of function (spontaneity) and matter (receptivity); and Self-Being has such a wide gap between two sides so that the boundary between word and thing has collapsed. As with Carroll’s literary nonsense, a greater degree of nonsense takes place when the gap is wider, and a lesser degree of nonsense happens when the gap is tighter. “In either case,” Flescher maintains, “the balance between word and meaning is upset and the function of language becomes more apparent” (134). In other words, if the King of Hearts sees some meaning in nonsense verses, he actually sees the pushing-and-pulling of the unresting and dangling words that are resisting the “gravity” of his interpretation even though he stretches his imagination to picture their stillness. There is no correspondence between the formal order and the referential order; there is only coincidence, more or less, between them. Therefore, this explains the recurrent image of “wrestler” or “fighter” in Deleuze’s oeuvre. The battle between two adversaries can not end in a tie. There are always a power to affect and another power to be affected in a perpetual disequilibrium. A most contracted point that reduces the breadth between the articulable (statement) and the visible (light) is a human invention. “Between the two,” Deleuze observes, “there is no isomorphism or conformity, in spite of a mutual presupposition and the primacy of the statement” (F 61). A central fissure that problematizes a common form between the articulable and the visible perpetuates the battle of these two grappling fighters who exchange their threatening words and knockout punches in a non-place (F 64-67): lightweights for knowledge, middleweights for power, and heavyweights for self (coextensive with outside). In this sense, we say that Carroll’s giddy nonsense takes place in “the irrational break or the crack” (F 65) between two heterogeneous series. The more irrational the break is between word and thing, the giddier we feel. Can we put Carroll in a situation analogous to that of Bacon in painting? That is, can 12.

(23) we say that Carroll, like Proust, “did not want an abstract literature that was too voluntary (philosophy), any more than he wanted a figurative, illustrative, or narrative literature that merely told a story . . . [and] [w]hat he was striving for, what he wanted to bring to light, was a kind of Figure, torn away from figuration and stripped of every figurative function. . .” (FB 56)?12 From Carroll’s “M” (evasive sense) to Bacon’s paint (nonrepresentational sensation), both artists’ hands are trying to widen the gap between the representational targets and their new deflective directions in order to maximize nonsense and minimize meaning. At this point, we need to ask ourselves how Carroll’s evasive sense relates to his giddy nonsense, and how his logic of nonsense under Deleuze’s discussion reaches beyond language to life. Instead of using language uncritically, Carroll uses humor and terror to radicalize our opinion on the traditional view of language as representation. His nonsense language is on the one hand humorously enjoyable, but on the other monstrously disruptive. His aggressive playfulness is intent on expressing two ideas: first of all, language does not simply work within the confines of the representational categories; secondly, we can use language as laying our artistic hands upon life to feel its pulsing difference. In our argument, Carroll’s evasive sense can be viewed as biophilosophy because his giddy nonsense maximizes the irrational break between language and the world. The break is irrational because when we believe there is correspondence between them, the disruptive power of Carroll’s nonsense always undermines the link with coincidence. In Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Todd May tells us that “[t]here is always more going on than meets the eye” (162). The logic of representation proves untenable in Carroll’s nonsense land where the logic of difference reigns because the second logic is such logic-defying logic (or alogic) as Deleuze’s logic of sensation and logic of sense. In this understanding, Carroll is a philosophical physician who uses his giddy nonsense to. 12. Here the word “voluntary” means illustrative, narrative, whereas “involuntary” means nonillustrative, nonnarrative. 13.

(24) palpate difference rather than represent identity. As soon as language is used not to communicate, its dark side begins to howl, but the howling nonsense is part of complex workings of language so it should not be rejected as non-meaning, and because nonsense speaks its own sense of life out of bounds of language, nor should it be reduced merely to Elizabeth Sewell’s closed, self-referential system of language which has nothing to do with reality. It has been long noted by several critics that Carroll’s literary nonsense is not non-sense or pure nonsense (non-meaning). For example, both Walter de la Mare’s “sober-sided order of nonsense” in his 1932 article “On the Alice Books” (60) and John Ciardi’s “second sort of performance” in his 1959 article “A Burble through the Tulgey Wood” (260) are proposed to salvage Carroll’s nonsense from non-meaning. In de la Mare’s view, both Alice stories of playing cards and chess abound in Carroll’s “ingenious design” that “we scarcely notice,” and he bids us not to neglect the “intellectual thread” running through the Alices on which “their translucent beads of fantasy are strung. . .” (58). Obviously, Carroll’s nonsense has its own vital sign, and requires further elaboration. Carroll once wrote, “I am very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense. . . . But since words mean more than we mean to express when we use them. . . . whatever good meanings are in the book I am very glad to accept as the meaning of the book” (qtd. in Mare 58). Like Humpty Dumpty who dangerously straddles a narrow wall, Carroll’s nonsense maintains a fine balance in fear of tilting to its irrevocable doom. It reminds us of Elizabeth Sewell’s theory of nonsense balance in her essay “The Balance of Brillig”: “Nonsense is a game with words. Its own inventions wander safely between the respective pitfalls of 0 and 1, nothingness and everythingness. . .” (387). It can be surmised from Sewell’s theory that Carroll’s nonsense language game holds a fear of nothingness or non-meaning while it shies away from everythingness or meaning. Sewell, as Richard Kelly notes in his 1977 book 14.

(25) Lewis Carroll, regards Carroll’s nonsense universe as a closed, self-referential language system which taboos two things: global order and everyday references (49-50). In Sewell’s order-disorder dialect, disorder has order in mind, but begrudges order first of all by laying emphasis on the parts instead of whole and multiplying a subsequent interpretation upon a work that steadfastly denies any consistent reading to avoid any fusion or synthesis, and secondly by cutting off anything relatable to the everyday world so that no interpretations from outside can be applicable to the world of nonsense. Nevertheless, two protests against Sewell’s taboos must be raised here before we get back to Carroll’s “good meanings”: first of all, sense and nonsense are not distinctly separable, nor are they in a relation of One and Many; secondly, Carroll’s elusive nonsense might have logic of its own, but it does not necessarily have to be an entrenched and isolated language system. Sense and nonsense, according to Deleuze, have a curious way to be paradoxically co-present (LS 68). Oftentimes, sense and nonsense in Nonsense School are conveniently subject to an exclusive dialectic law: global meaning of everyday references on the external side (sense) versus regional meaning of closed, self-referential system on the internal side (nonsense). Meaning can be opposed to non-meaning, but sense and nonsense, not subject to the law of exclusion, are, according to James Williams, “two interdependent but irreducible sides of . . . a disjunctive synthesis” which is “parallel but asymmetrical” (GDLS 27; emphasis original). Hence, on this point, the “or” in “sense or nonsense,” as Williams suggests, “should not be read as an exclusive ‘either, or,’” but rather “best read as ‘together, differently’” (GDLS 53). This kind of inclusively disjunctive relation between sense and nonsense indicates their paradoxical co-presence. Nonsense is watching for its chance to fold back upon sense to have its own logic of sense expressed. Nevertheless, the sense it expresses is not being precisely that it hasn’t any. . . . When we assume that nonsense says its 15.

(26) own sense, we wish to indicate . . . that sense and nonsense have a specific relation which can not copy that of the true and false, that is, which can not be conceived simply on the basis of a relation of exclusion. . . . The logic of sense is necessarily determined to posit between sense and nonsense an original type of intrinsic relation, a mode of co-presence. (LS 68) If the production of sense, as Deleuze suggests, is a function of nonsense (LS 72), then we can assume that in the eyes of Deleuze, Carroll’s literary nonsense, rather than having precisely no sense, is a sense-producing machine. Nonsense’s logic of sense is not the domain of truth that gives meaning, but a domain of sense that produces sense. Meaning is comprised of good sense and common sense while sense is paradox “which destroys good sense as the only direction . . . [and] which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities” (LS 3). There is no denying that meaning is exactly what Carroll’s monstrous language wants to tear off, but once removed from its throne, what remains is not a hole of lack for other meanings to fill, but, using Deleuze’s example, Henri Michaux’s dehumanized schizophrenic table of overstuffed additions that lends itself to no function (AO 6), from which an abundant excess of meaning springs forth to flood the Euclidean grid. How does such a stalled engine work in terms of positive production? Admittedly, we draw upon Carroll’s two Alice stories for reading pleasure, but somehow the anarchy that strikes back always puts its readers deep in contemplation. If Alice’s two adventures are simply whimsical excursions, we could have just laughed them off as nonsense and stuff, but somehow Carroll’s nonsense language fills our heads with ideas even though we can not make sense of it on the instant. Apparently, this engine starts all over again after it gets stalled. Interpreted in a relation of One and Many (or One-All), Sewell’s regional guerilla still thinks in terms of identity. Her dyad Whole/Parts works when a consistent sense of reading is constantly beset by subsequent readings that swarm in. By unceasing self-denial, this process 16.

(27) of fragmentation stops a Whole or One from appearing to reign. In response to this kind of thought, Deleuze proposes the concept of multiplicity to oppose the transcendent dyad of One and Many. In Bergsonism, Deleuze most notably proposes two types of multiplicity: One is represented by space . . . . It is a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers. (B 38) As far as Deleuze’s virtual and continuous multiplicity is concerned, Jonathan Roffe further explains: A multiplicity is . . . a complex structure that does not reference a prior unity. Multiplicities are not parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented, and they cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single concept or transcendent unity. . . . The concept of multiplicity makes no reference to a transcendent realm of the world that contains the structures or laws of existence. (176-77) To think in terms of actual identity remains within the realm of extensive numerical multiplicity where “space . . . can be divided up into parts” while to think in terms of virtual difference belongs to the realm of continuous intensive multiplicity which “cannot be divided up without changing in nature” (Roffe 176-77). The difference in degree in the first type of difference is what Todd May suggests as “the distinction between two identities (which would subordinate difference to identity) or the negation of one of them (which would think of difference only negatively)” whereas the difference in kind in the second type of difference 17.

(28) is “a difference in itself, a pure difference that forms the soil for all identities, all distinctions, and all negations” (21). The virtual intensive multiplicity is Deleuze’s highly-appraised multiplicity without transcendent “from on high.” By the same token, Deleuze’s “philosophical concepts” in What Is Philosophy? are similar to virtual intensive multiplicities so that the elucidation of the first may shed light upon our discussion of the second at issue here. Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up. They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of a dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All . . . that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane. It is . . . a plateau . . . the plane of immanence of concepts. . . . The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts. . . . If one were to be confused with the other there would be nothing to stop concepts from . . . losing their singularity, and the plane would also lose its openness. (35; emphasis mine) Deleuze’s multiplicity is corrective to Sewell’s dyad Whole/Parts. To conclude his fight against this kind of Platonic thought, Deleuze argues: “In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected” (WIP 47; emphasis original). If Sewell has already cut off her nonsense universe from every references, isn’t that an irrational break between language and the world, and aren’t our giddy effects achieved by this operation of mutual exclusion? Sewell’s reading of Carroll’s nonsense as a self-referential language system that is no longer relatable to everyday references is debatable. After the 18.

(29) irrational break, we need a relinking, a mutual grappling between fighters or wrestlers in a non-relation, or a non-place. As argued earlier, Carroll has a fear of nothingness (“didn’t mean anything but nonsense”) and everythingness (“I say what I mean”). His monstrous power of terror disrupts everythingness, whereas his delightful power of humor comes from the widening or tightening between the formal order and referential order. Carroll’s aesthetic playfulness puts usefulness aside, and skirts along the border between sense and nonsense. Language and life should be in a metastable status of disequilibrium. As with his primacy of the virtual over the actual, Deleuze does not preserve the virtual (difference) by doing away with the actual (identity). The point for Deleuze is to “make pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak” (LS 73). Therefore, on the one hand, we need to have impersonal, virtuality, nonsense, and outside prevail over personal, actuality, sense, and inside, and on the other hand, we also need to keep them in a paradoxical mode of co-presence. They are meant to encounter in a no man’s land to cause the vertigo of immanence and to ignite the sparks of life. They are related to each other as two sides of “a Möbius strip on which a single line traverses the two sides” (ECC 21).13 But what does Carroll mean by “good meanings in the book” and how do they work as an ingenious sense-making machine not confined within the bounds of language? In our opinion, Carroll machine14 is neither a predetermined maze journey where one only needs to 13. The Möbius strip is originally a mathematical model that was first proposed by “the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.” A Möbius strip can be easily created by giving a paper strip a half-twist, and then “joining the ends of the strip together to form a loop.” The curious property of the Möbius strip is its “non-orientable” one-sidedness. If a mini motor car were to race along its one single continuous curve, “it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge.” There is no distinction between inner surface and outer surface because there is only one single line traversing the two sides. Different from the philosophical appropriation of dialectical bind or inversion, Deleuze uses the Möbius strip to mean the conversion of inside and outside. See “Möbius strip,” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, Inc., n.d. Web, 13 Aug. 2012. 14 Deleuze and Guattari applied the concept of “machine” they initiated in Anti-Oedipus (1972) to Kafka (1975) to dehumanize a writer, and let the desiring-production in him starts to flow. “We believe only in a Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic. We believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience. . . . A writer isn’t a writer-man; he is a machine-man, and an experimental man. . .” (K 7). Five years later, it echoed again in A Thousand Plateaus (1980): “A book itself is a little 19.

(30) add up everything along until it builds up to a complete picture with the last piece of puzzle and finally discovers the way out, nor a withered land where he has uprooted every tree so that others may well plant their own. Carefully, Carroll’s elusive nonsense steers a steady course between both extremes, and sails beyond language. It is the fine balance that keeps his effort of nonsense from speaking none of its sense and reaches beyond language to life. It would be wrong to assume that Carroll anticipates some kind of reader-response criticism welcoming all readers to contribute their “good meanings.” The key is not which uttering subject contributes what good meanings to Alices, but “words mean more than we mean to express.” That is, monstrous language has shaken off its straightjacket, and begins to operate off the human grid. Not surprisingly, the more we try to close in on Carroll’s literary nonsense, the less likely it will remain tamed within representational categories. One of de la Mare’s remarks is worth further thought. . . . Carroll’s Nonsense in itself, in Dryden’s words, may be such that it “never can be understood,” there is no need to understand it. It is self-evident: and indeed may vanish away if we try to do so. Precisely the converse is true of the sober-sided order of nonsense. The longer we ponder on that, the more hollowly the tube resounds, the drabber grows the day. The Alices lighten our beings like sunshine, like that divine rainbow in the skies beneath which the living beings of the world went out into radiance and freedom from the narrow darkness of the Ark. (60) Mare’s statement can be understood as the fact that the sober-sided order of Carroll’s nonsense can be approached, but can not be understood. Our pondering on his elusive nonsense only makes things worse. The universe of Carroll’s nonsense is “endlessly. machine. . .” (4). Except for the fact that in What Is Philosophy? where the concept of machine is no longer present, this concept appears in all three co-authored books: AO (desiring-machine), K (writer-machine), ATP (abstract machine). 20.

(31) explorable though never to be explored” with human understanding (Mare 60). Logic of representation sees nonsense through the lens of knowledge, only to find nonsense dead drunk in their narrow darkness. “Representation . . . .” as Deleuze notes, “mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing” (DR 55-56). To sit basking in the warm sunshine, one might try to “palpate” Carroll’s elusive nonsense. In contrast with the analytic tradition engaging with the project of knowledge, continental philosophy has been concerned with the problem of life. Its project of living otherwise is not about “what there is,” but about what new vistas life can have. Ever since Nietzsche announces “God is dead” (GS, §108: 167), the vertigo of groundlessness has haunted us till this very moment. Among those continental philosophers who address the question of “how one might live,” Deleuze distinguishes himself from others “not by abandoning ontology, but by embracing it” (Todd May 15),15 but for him the only kind of ontology worth doing is the project of difference (Todd May 18). In his ontology of difference, Deleuze challenges two assumptions: ontology of discovery and the identity of what is (conceptual stability) (Todd May 18). Deleuze’s ontology rests upon a hypothesis that a vital life of difference shifts into high gear not by being anchored in a haven, but by becoming unsettled in a wild, stormy sea. To back up his ontology of creation, Deleuze often invokes Leibniz’s famous remark: “Having established these things, I thought I was coming into port, but when I started to mediate upon the union of the soul with the body, I was as it were thrown back onto the open sea” (qtd. in N 104). In his opinion, the question of how one might live should be dealt with by an ontology of creation and difference that widens our possibilities of life with problems, rather than an ontology of discovery and identity that constricts and impoverishes our being with unquestioning conformity and solutions (Todd May 15-17). Deleuze’s life philosophy wants 15. Throughout this dissertation, we cite from Todd May’s Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction and Leila S. May’s “Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass.” In order to distinguish one citing source from the other, we need to use their full names in the parenthetical reference to avoid unnecessary confusion. 21.