Alice and the Wasp Lost and Found

By Stefan Kanfer

LEWIS CARROLL, THE WASP IN A WIG: THE "SUPPRESSED" EPISODE OF THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Lewis Carroll Society. Clothbound, $10. Paperback, with $10 membership in the society.

On June 1, 1870, Illustrator John Tenniel sent his author a letter of complaint. "Don't think me brutal," he wrote, "but I am bound to say that the 'wasp' chapter doesn't interest me in the least." He found that depicting an insect with a golden wig was "altogether beyond the appliances of art." Reluctantly, Lewis Carroll expunged the episode of the wasp from his manuscript of Through the Looking Glass. For more than a century even scholars assumed that the chapter was lost or destroyed --until 1974, when an inconspicuous entry appeared in the London catalogue of Sotheby Parke Bernet: "Dodgson (C.L.) 'Lewis Carroll.' Galley proofs for a suppressed portion of 'Through the Looking Glass.' "

Bidding for this rare item--owned and hoarded anonymously--was astonishingly low: a dealer purchased the pages for -L- 1,700, then about $4,000, for Manhattan Collector Norman Armour Jr., who has just allowed the Lewis Carroll Society to print a clothbound edition of 750 copies plus a paperback version. The little volume is introduced and amplified by Martin Gardner, author of the classic Annotated Alice.

To Gardner, "the discovery is an event of significance not only for Carrollians, but for anyone interested in language, humor, the adventures of Alice or, for that matter, wasps." The insect in question is a rheumatic old party who speaks in allusions and complains in rhyme:

And still, whenever I appear They hoot at me and call me "Pig!" And that is why they do it, dear, Because I wear a yellow wig.

The encounter starts benignly as Alice reads a newspaper to her six-legged acquaintance. But the double-entendres soon begin. Whenever Alice encounters a creature, the reader can hear a pun drop. The wasp, for example, mistakes Alice for a bee because she has a comb. Typically, wordploy is incessant, and terror lurks just beneath the surface. At one point the wasp takes off his wig and stretches out one claw toward Alice "as if he wished to do the same for her." "The cutting off of hair," writes Gardner, "like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol of castration. Interesting interpretations of this will surely be forthcoming from psychoanalytically oriented critics."

Indeed they will, along with those of unaffiliated amateurs rediscovering an eminent Victorian fantasy. As the wasp clearly demonstrates, the Alice books, like Finnegans Wake, are novels in the form of dreams, granting wit to animals and game pieces, annihilating space and natural law. The Rev. Charles Dodgson considered these volumes mere entertainments. Most of the author's adult life was spent as an Oxford don, pursuing the arcana of mathematics and logic.

(According to legend. Queen Victoria, enchanted with Alice in Wonderland, asked for the author's next book and received a copy of Condensation of Determinants.) Sufferer from migraines, hypochondriac and lifelong celibate, Carroll continually formed attachments to prepubescent girls, some of whom he photographed in the nude. His greatest attachment was to ten-year-old Alice Liddell. Her older friend wanted to freeze her in time, to protect the child from the ravages of age. Alice became the muse of Wonderland and turned a professor of numbers into a man of letters. Dodgson had written earlier humorous works, but the appearance of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 sent seismic reverberations through the English language.

Surrealistic Metaphors. His words "chortle" and "galumph" found their way into dictionaries; his parodies outlived the objects of their satire; his characters, from Humpty Dumpty to the Jabberwock, are as varied and indelible as Dickens'; his surrealistic metaphors and phrases proved even more applicable in later years. Hardly a 20th century executive lives who has not at one time quoted the Red Queen of Through the Looking Glass: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." During the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, it was Carroll and not Kafka or Orwell who was most frequently quoted. Some even sought to explain the tapes with Looking Glass references:

" The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, never forget!' 'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of it.' " The wasp interlude may not propel neologisms into the national vocabulary or provide new references for political commentary. Yet it is likely to burnish the Carrollian reputation. For even if the author excised it from his final version, he would have been pleased by the chapter's tardy appearance. The mark of a classic is its ability to present the reader with something fresh. This unique lost and found item presents its readers with a classic Alice ambiguity -- something literally new -- plus an in sect, a girl and a tale that can never age.

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