The spiritual world of 'Alice'

'If men could not distinguish between frogs and kings,
fairy stories about frog-kings would not have arisen' (Tolkien)

Since human beings first walked on the earth, they have told stories. Long before writing was invented, wall art and oral stories entertained people, conveyed ideas about existence and passed to other generations the traditions, values and beliefs of the family or tribe. The Bible is packed with stories, to convey truths that are too big for cold conceptual statements.

Today, we tend to treat stories as escapism, but while they should entertain us, they serve a bigger purpose than that. They can also make us think. We see different characters reacting to situations in ways that we might approve, or disapprove, and we wonder how we would fare in similar circumstances.

Stories feed our imagination, stimulate our mind, illuminate the world, introduce us to fresh ideas and outlooks, and enable us mentally to encounter the kinds of people and situations we could never hope to meet in reality. Storytellers don’t usually set out to teach something (didactic novels are usually contrived or boring), but their imaginations reflect and illustrate their view of the world and its challenges.

For Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, the storyteller at their best should provide ‘a clear, definite and fresh view of the universe’. To the American novelist Henry James, the storyteller is a ‘“watcher at the window” whose consciousness works on all it sees and presents to us its own version of reality’.¹

Recent research by Toronto University Professor Keith Oatley suggests that stories can improve our empathy with others. ‘Fiction can be thought of as a form of consciousness of selves and others that can be passed from an author to a reader or spectator, and can be internalized to augment everyday cognition,’ he suggests.² That may be asking too much of ‘airport novels’ – the chunky romances or action adventures we take to while away the hours on holiday. But it’s not too much to ask of others.

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories have charmed several generations and which begin with the strongly Christian themes of the conquest of evil through death and resurrection. He claimed that fantasy stories about animals led him ‘back to the real world with a renewed understanding of it because the story presented such realities as “food, exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion….The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. The excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.”’³

J.R.R Tolkien, the creator of Lord of the Rings wrote that the best fairy stories deal largely ‘with simple or fundamental things’.⁴ In another essay he wrote that ‘creative Fantasy is founded upon…a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and kings, fairy stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.’⁵ So let’s look at the (allegedly) children’s stories about ‘Alice’.

Alice in Bible land

Lewis Carroll, the 19^th-century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, was no fool. He was clever and talented. His real name was the Revd Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He wrote the Alice books initially to amuse the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson was an accomplished lecturer in mathematics.

He wrote other ‘nonsense’ stories and poems such as ‘The hunting of the Snark’ but also published several important academic papers on maths and logic. He wrote on broad philosophical and religious issues, too, was a proficient musician and entertainer, an inventor, and a noted portrait photographer. He was an ordained Church of England deacon and referred to his deep Christian faith in his diaries and letters. 

Having been brought up in a parsonage in the Anglo-Catholic (high church) tradition, which was also espoused at Christ Church, it is possible that he was never fully comfortable with its emphasis on ceremonial and preferred a simpler evangelical faith. This may explain why he was never ordained as a priest, although he used a speech impediment as his stated reason.

He wrote to a friend, ‘Most assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines you refer to – that Christ died to save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through his death, and that it is by faith in Him, and through no merit of ours, that we are reconciled to God; and most assuredly I  can cordially say, “I owe all to Him who loved me, and died on the Cross of Calvary.”’⁶ 

So it’s not impossible to regard the Alice books as more than the strange fantasies of a diffident and self-conscious academic. Indeed, they have long been regarded as satirical, and he was a contemporary of other fantasy writers at a time when the genre was becoming a popular vehicle for stories with a moral. Among them was George MacDonald, his friend and mentor, who was also a major literary influence on J.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (the Narnia stories). Charles Kingsley, another Anglican minister, was also a contemporary, with his moralistic fantasy The water babies.

The Alice stories are full of clever puns, word plays and allusions to writers and ideas some of which would have been beyond the comprehension of even a well-educated seven year old (the age of Alice in the books) in Victorian England. Through the Looking Glass is based loosely on a series of chess moves, which the author summarises at the start of the book (although he cheats with the order of play).

The Wonderland adventures begin with Alice shrinking in size in order to get through a door at the base of the rabbit hole. One of Jesus’ sayings was, ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to’ (Luke 13:24).

Entry into Looking Glass World is through a mirror. St Paul noted his own limited understanding of God: ‘For now we see only a reflection,  as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). But there’s more, softer, allusions to theology and philosophy.

Alice becomes an allusion

Beyond the looking glass, Alice discovered a very strange world. To begin with, everything was back to front. She soon got used to that, except when trying to cut a cake. The cake had to be eaten before it could be cut. There’s a lot in Christian faith that’s back to front as far as conventional wisdom is concerned, like valuing giving before getting.

Once she got her bearings, she realised the creatures she met viewed her very differently to how she viewed herself. To the gossipy flowers, she was just another plant with peculiar petals whose looks and views existed only for the onlookers to pass judgement on. They are the embodiment of today’s gossips on street corners, school playgrounds, social media, reality TV programmes and in magazines and newspapers.

To the shop-keeping sheep, with its limited experience of the world, she was a goose, the only category of creature it could conceive that walked on two legs and flapped its arms. We’re very fond of categorising people according to our knowledge, not according to their real selves. Humpty Dumpty thought she looked just like all the other humans. We often fail (or refuse) to see that people are different: ‘Men! They’re all the same!’ Actually, they’re not.

As for the unicorn, he didn’t believe she existed at all. Most of us have encountered unicorns. They inhabit some government departments, commercial call centres and web system algorithms. These unicorns tend to regard people as a homogenous mass and not as a varied collection of individuals. They tend not to regard disembodied voices or electronic keystrokes as emanating from living humans with feelings and needs, but just as a number to be crunched or a case to be unpacked. They’re trapped in a mythical database.

Then there was the small matter of the Red King’s dream. Was it Alice who was dreaming about Looking Glass World? Or was she just a figure in the Red King’s dream, so that when he woke up she would disappear, just as Tweedledum and Tweedledee so confidently predicted?

That of course is a long-standing and deep philosophical question. Do we really exist at all?  Is what I perceive actually real, or just a freak combination of neurological sensations? Or is someone else (a god, perhaps) imagining it all, or controlling a game in which we’re just helpless players? Are there, as some physicists are now suggesting seriously in ideas once restricted to sci-fi books and films, parallel universes in which we or our doubles live differently?

Besides, in Wonderland, Alice considers (more than once) who she really is. As she seems to change with alarming frequency, she asks, ‘If I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!’ Let’s face it, each of us is a different person in different situations. (If you doubt it, just think how you live at home compared with how you operate at work.) The question of personal identity has become even more acute in our impersonal clockwork society than it was in Carroll’s era when the industrial revolution and scientific discoveries were taking off.

Of course, each reader will see in a story something different, but if we gloss over the allusions we can be missing a point. They illustrate – they simply show, without the author having to describe – an important and unique part of being human. We have an imagination and we can roam way beyond the confines of our bodies without ever leaving our minds. So far as we know, no other creature can do that. And that mental agility is closely related to our spiritual faculties.

Leland Ryken, a former English Professor at Wheaton College in America, suggested that ‘My conviction as a Christian is that to explore the world of imaginative literature is to explore part of God’s created reality…. Studying that world will tell us things that are just as crucial to human well-being and to God’s glory as an exploration of the physical world around us is.’⁷

Think and talk

1. Why did Jesus tell stories? See Matthew 13:10-17 and ask what is he really saying about human imagination and the nature of spiritual truth. Is he deliberately misleading some people, or being deliberately obscure, or do his words mean something else more profound about human nature?

2. Why do you think the author of Judges spent so long on the trivial pursuits of the tribal leader (and rogue) Samson? See Judges 13-16. Note also the general introduction to the book in Judges 2:6-23.

3.  Read Romans 15:1-7. What sort of things can we expect to learn from past events about God, about human nature and human behaviour?

4. When did you last read a story (of any kind) and discover thought-provoking ideas and insights? Share them with your friends and find out what they have learned from stories too.

References

1. Miriam Allott, Novelists on the novel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, pp. 116, 131.
2. Keith Oatley, ‘Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 20, Issue 8, pp.618–628, August 2016.
3. Leland Ryken, Triumphs of the imagination, InterVarsity Press 1975, p.96. He is quoting Lewis ‘On stories’ in Essays presented to Charles Williams.
4. Quoted by Ryken, Op.Cit.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, Unwin Books 1966, p. 50.
6. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The life and letters of Lewis Carroll, T. Fisher Unwin 1898. It is cited in the Wikipaedia entry on Dodgson.
7. Ryken, Op.Cit. p.77.

© Derek Williams 2016. Material in this post is part of a book in preparation and should not be reproduced in part or whole without the author’s permission.