Submission and Agency, Or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderla

Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Virginie Iché To cite this version: Virginie Iché. Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, Montpellier : Centre d’études et de recherches victoriennes et édouardiennes, 2016, 84, pp.Texte intégral en ligne. 10.4000/cve.2962. hal-03062880 HAL Id: hal-03062880 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03062880 Submitted on 27 Apr 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. 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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 84 Automne | 2016 Object Lessons: The Victorians and the Material Text Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Soumission et agentivité, ou le rôle du lecteur des premières éditions d’Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) et Through the Looking-Glass (1871) de Lewis Carroll Virginie Iché Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/2962 DOI: 10.4000/cve.2962 ISSN: 2271-6149 Publisher Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée Brought to you by Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier Electronic reference Virginie Iché, “Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871)”, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [Online], 84 Automne | 2016, Online since 01 November 2016, connection on 19 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/2962 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2962 This text was automatically generated on 19 March 2021. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modiﬁcation 4.0 International. Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lew... 1 Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Soumission et agentivité, ou le rôle du lecteur des premières éditions d’Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) et Through the Looking-Glass (1871) de Lewis Carroll Virginie Iché . what can one poor voice avail Against three tongues together? —Prefatory poem, Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1 Lewis Carroll’s nephew, Stuart D. Collingwood, was the first to document his uncle’s predilection for games (19–20) and his capacity to invent card games, board games, word games, and games of logic (431–32, 436–37, 439–40, 442–43). Carroll’s fascination for rules is probably as well known as his tendency to subvert them in his fiction—the most famous example certainly being the prefatory chess problem in Through the Looking-Glass, where ‘[t]he alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be’ ( Complete Works 126) to quote Carroll himself. As I have argued elsewhere, a tension between rules and freedom characterizes the Alice books; the virtual reader’s participation in the Carrollian text is extremely constrained, as she is implicitly expected to fill in very limited textual ‘blanks’, as defined by Umberto Eco—that is to say, to make the ‘already said’ that has been erased reappear (see Iché 210–18). Nevertheless, the real reader, as interpellated by the Alice texts and their Author, can take on the role of what I called (after Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s theory of interpellation)1 an Imposter Reader. Such an Imposter Reader, while never able to reject completely the textual structure that Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 84 Automne | 2016 Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lew... 2 interpellates and thus captures her at a certain place, can all the same counter- interpellate this structure and become, through this process of subjectification, an active reader (Iché 219–37). This article takes up the role of the reader of the Alice books by examining the layout of the first editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I will argue that, although Carroll did minutely plan the reader’s interventions, he also wished her, at times, to play a more active role. Exploring the layout of the original editions of the Alice books will show that though they sometimes require the reader’s submission to their ploys, they also not infrequently empower her. 2 The preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gives its reader a taste of what lies in store. Not only does it relate the legendary origins of the tale of Wonderland, but it also subtly introduces the role of the reader in the Alice books. The preface presents what Martin Gardner calls the ‘rowing expedition up the Thames’ (7), upon which Lewis Carroll and his friend, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell sisters. The boat trip can, however, be otherwise interpreted as a metaphor for the author’s reluctance to direct the narrative (Iché 175). As is made clear by the two verbs in rhyming positions in the first stanza, the point is not to ‘guide’ but to ‘glide.’ The boat/narrative drifts away, since the author’s persona repeatedly denies his authority over the text and lays emphasis on his weakness (‘one poor voice’) and limited role in the outcome of the tale, as indicated by the passive form in the sixth stanza: ‘its quaint events were hammered out.’ While, in the first stanza, the repetition of the word ‘little’ and the focus on body parts (‘arms’, ‘hands’) seemingly disconnected from their owners’ bodies imply that the three passengers are too frail to influence the course of the boat/narrative, the rest of the poem stresses the girls’ crucial role in ultimately determining it. The anonymous passengers are suddenly given Latin names in the third stanza (Prima, Secunda, and Tertia) and are interpellated as a commanding entity (‘Ah, cruel Three!’). They subsequently use their rhetorical power to issue orders and determine the course of the tale. The tone is set in this programmatic piece: the narratees of the tale of Wonderland, far from being merely passive and meek listeners, are portrayed as active participants in its construction, while the author seems to be no more than the recipient of the narratees’ injunctions. This authorial, or autographic, preface, as Gérard Genette would call it (178), belongs, therefore, to a category that defies the already diverse categories laid out by the French critic. It can be said to be ‘authentic’ (179) in the sense that the attribution of the preface to a real author2 is confirmed by the other paratextual signs (in this case, the title page), but it is more difficult to determine whether the preface is ‘assumptive’ or ‘disavowing.’ In a ‘disavowing’ preface, Genette explains, ‘the real author claims—here again without really inviting us to believe him—not to be the author of the text’ (185). This is not exactly the case here, since Carroll does not pretend that someone else actually wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nor, as we have just seen, does he completely assume responsibility for the text he wrote, as should be the case in an ‘assumptive’ preface (Genette 184). It is crucial, however, not to take this assumptive-disavowing preface at face value, as this rhetorical prowess may ultimately conceal Carroll’s wish to assert his authority over his text and trick its recipient into thinking that she is not subjected to its structure. 3 Two elements of the publication history of the Alice books in particular suggest how important it was for Carroll to maintain a large degree of control over his productions. First, Carroll decided to publish his various Alice books on commission (Cohen 36–37). According to Simon Eliot, this was one of the four main ways of getting a book published Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 84 Automne | 2016 Submission and Agency, or the Role of the Reader in the First Editions of Lew... 3 in the Victorian period (55–56). The author paid the publisher ‘as an agent to organize production and publication; he or she also paid all the printing, binding and other costs’ (Eliot 56). While this way of publishing a book was not rare, by no means was it the most widespread; as Eliot points out, ‘half-profits and outright sale were the most common arrangement between publishers and novelists’ (56). Publishing on commission meant that Carroll paid all the expenses—and stood to gain the bulk of the profit, as his books turned out to be successful—but, more importantly, he also ‘perform[ed] the roles and made the decisions usually played and made by the publisher’ (Cohen 36): ‘he was to determine the size of the book, the quality of the paper, the size and style of the type; he would select the binding, engage the printer, the engraver, the illustrator; he would decide what price was to be charged for the book and the extent of the advertising’ (Cohen 36–37).

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