Carroll, lewis: "Alicia en el País de las Maravillas"

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to interpret the literary surface of fantastic narrative from the hermeneutical standpoint of dialectical historicism by close reading of Lewis Carroll''s Alice''s Adventures in Wonderland(AAW hereafter), an epoch-making Victorian fairy tale otherwise known as 'fantasy' featuring the romantic escape motif. The hermeneutical horizon taken in interpreting the work, as will turn out, depends largely on Fredric Jameson''s Marxian dialectical literary theory demonstrated in his two seminal works Marxism and Form(1971) and The Political Unconscious(1981) which set History, exchangeable in semantic value with either Lacanian the Real or Marx''s Mode of Production, as the ultimate ground from which those determining forces upon the fantastic literary form can be traced back. Therefore, the interpretative procedures embedded in this political criticism must begin by 'seeing' the invisible or the absence out of the visible surface of fantastic narrative interwoven in allegedly distorted manner as in dream experience. I Prior to proceeding with the historicizing of AAW begins the argumentation that explicates the semantic supremacy of Marxian hermeneutics over other critical methods such as myth and ethical criticism, Russian formalism, and psychoanalytic approach. For example, Todorov''s early elaboration practiced in the Fantastic(1976), for all its extremely systematic formulation of the fantastic effect, is harshly reproached in this thesis due to the fact that it fails to provide the ultimate basis for that very feeling called 'hesitation' although he suggests a cognitive boundary of 'natural―supernatural' which, however, remains unexplained and trapped inside the prison-house of language-oriented level of interpretation. Another influential candidate, psychoanalytical discipline, in spite of its having developed the deeper view into the space of human consciousness, comes near to being authorized as a master framework, only to turn out highly flawed and limited in its view that the system of subject''s unconsciousness structured by symbolic chain is the ultimate determinant and that desire is the inner-subject energy, since the symbolic system can never logically be thought innate and desire in itself escapes the clear definition, left too ambiguous to be self-reliant concept. Contrary to these inadequate frameworks, interpretative act of dialectical way goes out of the limited scope set by both language and subject until the hermeneutical horizon called History comes into view, thereby led to the slogan that active readers of AAW must historicize the dream narrative by closely examining what it indirectly manifest, that is, the absence of the text, with only those scattered and fragmented evidences waiting for being rewritten into a gestalt image that narrowly describes the totality of society. Reading fragmented skin of dream narrative, as has been mentioned just above, includes seeing either the absence or the effect of History by touching upon the present or visible form of surface so strangely or disturbingly written as in AAW. This sort of interpretation can be labeled as 'symptomatic reading' specified in Reading Capital(1970) by Althusser who might have possibly been motivated by Freud and Lacan. According to this reading based on Marxian production model, reading text does not merely involve passive reception of literal meaning or poetic level as cemented on the surface, but active interpretation of implicit determinants having to do with the symptomatic hyper-transformation of reality and probability in fantastic narrative, with traditional mimesis all the more dismissed. For example, we are amused at the speech of animal, verbal mistake of Alice herself(20), reality-distorting behavior of Cheshire cat(67), mindless workers whose body are two-dimensional(79) and other day-dreaming features that usually become the turn of the screw upon those who are trying hard to catch up with the elusive texture of disorderly-changing situation in Wonderland. The symptomatic reading requires interpreter to go beyond the surface level of fantastic text wrapped in strange form while one needs to be equipped with 'historical dialectic' also known as Adorno''s Negative Dialectic with which reader can get out of good-and-evil evaluation practice generally done elsewhere for example, either in ethics or in pop-culture-oriented aesthetics. Dream narrative of AAW is first filtered through the poetics of fantastic established herein, in order at least to probe into the characteristics of textual feature, the most fundamental logic on which fantastic effect can be generated. The poetics of fantastic narrative in this thesis has been entitled 'trans-formation' whose splitting hyphen in-between accentuates on the textual peculiarity in which author''s hyper-representational reformation act, far beyond being driven by realism''s protocol 'probability', is revealed to be the essence of generating fantastic narrative mood. The myth of probability in daily life unconsciously aims at coordinating the social collective praxis of each individual''s parole into the normal language production guideline that ceaselessly imposes the goodness of 'good sense' upon us so as to forbid subject to get derailed from the certain limitation of reality. The poetics of fantastic presupposes that there are two kinds of signifiers, one '+ referential', the other '- referential', through which interpretive act concerning each clause or phrase cannot help being oscillated between 'fantastic' and 'realistic' thus the fantastic narrative coming under the strong-fantastic form with the weak-realistic representation being 'a minority' inside such a fantastic world. As may be pointed out, this thesis 'intentionally' fails to provide the ultimate poetics of fantastic in its entirety. Instead of going on with walking in the water of linguistic circulation unlimited, dialectical historicism manages to read symptomatically the invisible out of the visible forming inside the very spatial fabric of social bind. The poetics of fantastic 'trans-formation' in itself repeats 'nothing more than' what Todorov did in his making vain efforts to expound 'the effect of language' only through 'language' itself. And also the human subject who decides whether the sentence one reads is fantastic or realistic, can never be perfectly autonomous such that one cannot originally and innately has the yardstick for that very judgment on the text. In order for the interpretation of the fantastic to get off the ground, the dialectically-trained readers must have a broader vision, strengthened by dialectical historicism, of what has had collective individuals for long time bound linguistically and epistemologically. That is 'History' inside which so-called reality is produced and reproduced from the time immemorial into the future. The reality or symbolic order is construed as a predominating Text that are instilled in the invisible form of Ideology deep into the consciousness of collective subjects locked up in the reality itself. It means that the linguistically-and-epistemologically-bound subjects are to suffer from the 'invisible reality' inevitably repressive upon the individuals in the society highly civilized, with the grisly fact about reality itself having 'incompletely' been concealed. Accordingly, tracing back History or sub-text from the surface of fantastic means moving from commentary up to a whole new level of interpretation called Jamesonian Meta-commentary. Deriving truly from and stepping outside of Freudian interpretation, Jameson''s Political Unconscious reveals the cognitive limit of other critical methodologies which are in his view not much semantically rich, due to their disregard of History, the ultimate hermeneutical horizon in which human-beings are ideologically-driven. Ideology is informing process, something like untouchable phantom, that is both the driving force of life and most fundamental world-view by which human action and utterance are determined. And social process, based on purely material process of things, is doomed to massively generate such limitless clusters of 'meanings' that they are sometime forged into myth, divinity, truth, miracle, law, institution, and political system in a rationalized refinement process as in 18c Enlightenment or the theory of the divine right of kings. These fabrics of meaning, so stiffened over time, become the Holy Grail or the Holy Cross which you do not easily dare to ignore, since they symbolize the truth. Then, the symptomatic reading must grasp Carroll''s AAW as his self-consciousness of the totality of History in which functional subjects, as contrary to thinking subjects, are brought up to believe in what has in fact been socially-fabricated meaning which are in service for the interest of the oppressor or for the strategy of containment of History. Caroll''s consciousness of this invisible wholeness of nothing more than 'signifier circulation' that monopolizes the Real, might have been motivating himself to write AAW against the reality wide-spread and invisible. And the literary form he takes is the dream narrative in which he can put the normal world and its normal language at his disposal by rearranging or trans-forming the reality discourse, thereby creating the wonder of wonderland. Reader''s receptive response may well be in general 'confusion' and 'queerness' from which we may suppose Carroll''s wonderland itself could be the 'symptom' that insinuates the effect of History as absent cause, which cannot be formed if Carroll was not deeply conscious of the invisible structure. The queerness Carroll''s text generates within us also signifies that there is coordinating force of History upon language which necessitates subjects to follow the good sense. So we must read the effec