Q. Discuss the linguistic dilemmas that Alice faces in the fantasy world.

How does she overcome the challenges?

The novel “Alice through the looking glass” written by Lewis Carroll
portrays Lewis’s uses of nonsense words and language games. Alice
encounters fantastic and perplexing adventures in the journey of through the
Looking Glass world which destabilize her sense of self, space and time. Alice is
a fictional character of Carroll who faces trials and tribulations on being
immersed in a narrative space that is constantly re-organized by the logic of
dreams, delusions, free associations, and nonsense, bound by rules. In Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass World, language has the capacity to anticipate and
cause an event to happen. Alice recites her nursery rhymes to Tweedledee and
Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn which initially
made them perform the events just like she recites in her rhyme. Words give
rise to actions simply by being spoken, rather than recording or describing
events that have already happened. Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s quarrel
only begins because Alice recites the rhyme about the broken rattle. They
fought not because they want to but because, in effect, the rhyme says they
do, and therefore they must. They are forced on by some special sort of fate,
the sort most appropriate to a work so largely dominated by preoccupation
with language. In Humpty dumpty’s case, Alice started to recite the classic
rhyme and Humpty was aware of the king’s word of sending an army of
soldiers to pick up his broken pieces, which sounds like an event that Humpty,
himself can’t avoid just because Alice have stated in her nursery rhyme.
Language leads to events taking place, rather than simply describing them in
the Looking Glass world. The flowers fortified this principle by explaining that
the tree growing in the middle scares away enemies with its “bark”. In our
language, there is no relationship between the bark of a dog and the bark of a
tree, but in Looking Glass World, this linguistic similarity results in a functional
common ground. Trees that have bark are able to “bark” just as fiercely as
dogs. Humpty Dumpty expresses how language functions best in Wonderland
when he explains to Alice

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it
means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so
many different things.”

“the question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s

all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a Humpty Dumpty
began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs: they’re the
proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can
manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

“Would you please,” said Alice, ‘what that means?’

‘now you talk like a reasonable child.” Said Humpty Dumpty, looking very
much pleased. “I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that
subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next,
as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

Language is the medium through which nonsense, memory, and dream are
interpreted and communicated from one individual to another. In the Looking
Glass world, Alice learns a lot of nonsense words which somehow makes sense.
When she encounter each and every single character in her journey, she
always seems to puzzle while interpreting with their speech.
Quoted from Metalanguage essay-
Alice notes that ‘the name of the song is’ is equivalent to ‘what it is called’ and
the white knight adds, ‘and it is only what it is called,” thus clearly relating the
function of naming to a subject or a group of subjects i.e to enunciators. The
white Knights explains to Alice that the name of the name is ‘what the name is
called”? Carroll seems to point out that metalanguage is also language since it
is related to enunciation and to a subject. The difference of level between
name and object or the name and the name of the name implies that the
object can only be referred to by an empty signifier or by a name related to a
category, which only allows one to construct it partially but never to express or
reach its essence or being.
Quoted from logic and language-
Carroll’s world of fantasy is most profoundly, in its semantic aspects at least,
the sort of world for which such logician as Charles Dodgson might yearn; a
world of truth and order. That it seems disorderly is a condemnation of the
ordinary sloppy traditions of his language; the apparent disorder concealing
deep logic is an effective satiric weapon. The unavoidable suggestion is that
our everyday use of language is largely arbitrary and unaccountable. In the
Looking Glass world, jam every other day means never jam the today ---- for
“today isn’t your other day, you know.” Alice who sees nobody on the road, is
vastly admired by the white king: accustomed to a more severely logical world
than hers, he can only see somebody. All of these were extremely confusing
for Alice, as confusing as dreams usually are. Yet the confusion is really the
product of her own initial commitment to the ordinary world: she, not her
Looking Glass interlocutors, is actually illogical.
If Humpty Dumpty’s technique would end by making communication
impossible, at least he is clear-sighted enough to know what he is doing. In our
world, failures of communication from similar causes are complicated by our
unwillingness to recognize high-handed dealings with language.

Alice’s adventures are an educative process but even after her encounter with
Humpty dumpty, she never becomes quite weary enough. She is unprepared
for the vagaries of the White Knight, who reveals her that what the name of a
song is called, the name of the song itself, what the song is called and what the
song really is, can all be different. She is accustomed to a world in which
language is used more loosely; it is never used loosely in Looking Glass Land.
Words have power, this is demonstrated in the woods where things have no
names. Alice forgets her name once she enters the wood only because the red
queen warned her about it. Similarly, the white queen recalls an accident
happened to her, how thunderstorms were so frighting that made her forget
her name. Alice reflects on this saying she should never try to remember her
name in the middle of an accident.
Another similar incident is when Tweedledee and Tweedledum showed Alice
the Red King sleeping under a tree and is dreaming of her
“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course” said Alice.
“Not you” Tweedledee reported contemptuously, “You’d be nowhere. Why, you
are only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum “you’d go out-bang --just
like a candle!”
The conversation continues until Alice starts to cry only to be told that she
won’t become realer even if she cries, further questioning if her tears were
even real. The main question is who it was that dreamed it all? Alice or The
Red King? And the narrative ends with a sentimental poem “Life, what it is but
a dream”
Alice did not overcome the linguistic dilemma but rather she tried to cope up
with the narratives of the characters she encounters with. She tries to blend in
the language that is used in the Looking Glass world. Every time she starts a
conversation with the characters of Looking Glass, she is left with a puzzle of
how the language used there and in the real world. She, instead of objecting
her thoughts, tries to go with the nonsense conversation. In the Looking Glass
world, everything seems to be alive, even the door which had “Queen Alice”
written on. When the old frog came up to Alice and asked “What is it, now?”
Alice simply was asking for the servant who is supposed to answer the door
but the old frog replied ‘What was it asking for?” as if the door is alive and is
asking for whoever calls for the door. These narrative implies that every word
we use in the real world can be used for anything that seems fitted in the
Looking Glass World, nothing ever has a definite rule in the fantasy world that
Carroll introduced.