Background:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym (pen name) Lewis Carroll.

This work tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantastic realm populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends (and enemies), and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre.^[1]

The book is commonly referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland, an alternative title popularized by the numerous stage, film and television adaptations of the story produced over the years. Some printings of this title contain both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequelThrough the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.^[2]

Clip from Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland: Humpty Dumpty sing the song of the Walrus and the Carpenter:

Through the Looking-Glass:

In this adventure, Alice begins by talking to her kitty about her chess game. She imagines her kitty to become a queen. However, her Kitty will not play the part of the red queen properly and as punishment, she holds up a looking-glass or mirror "so that it might see how sulky it was" (130). Then her imagination continues to escalate: 

"I'll put you through to the Looking-Glass House. How would you like that? . . . Now if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-Glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass--that's just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair--all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! i do so wish I could see that bit! . . . Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend he glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare!" (130-131). And with that, Alice climbs through her mirror and into another world. 

A clip from Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland:

Now, just as Alice In Wonderland was centered around a deck of cards, Carroll uses a chess game as his central theme. All the sections of the chapter in this book correspond to chess movements across a board. Alice starts as a pawn and moves steadily across with the hope of becoming a queen. The characters she encounters, as you may well imagine, are in some way connected to chess pieces. Sections of the book are divided by streams or rivers. When Alice crosses a stream there is some notable shift in action or change of scene within the chapter. As you probably may be able to guess, these brooks divide the chessboard squares. When Alice crosses one, suitable to her status as a pawn, she advances one square.^[3]

The White Queen:

You may be wondering, why on earth would we read an excerpt from this book in a course about Time Travel?  As mentioned briefly in Week 2, Carroll provides one of our earliest examples of what it means to be an interdimensional traveler. Indeed the mirror that Alice steps through, acts as a wormhole. This imaginary world for Alice may be a 4th dimension (see below for more information).  However, this dimension is slightly odd as befits the idea of literary nonsense. 

Alice encounters the White queen and very kindly helps her adjust her shawl. In a very silly conversation where the White queen takes everything Alice says quite literally, she reveals that she lives backwards. 

This introduces a nice wrinkle to our concept of what it means to be a time traveler. So far, we can group our time travelers into two categories: those that use some form of technology to travel and those who have some latent ability within them, usually explained as somewhat psychic, or it is simply apart of their existence. The White queen, on one hand, conforms to the latter category but unlike any time traveler thus far, doesn't live following the same direction of time.

To fully live back in time, in other words a complete reversal in the direction of time, it may help to think of it this way: if you are walking in a straight line to the bus stop, she is walking what appears to you backwards from that bus stop. Her past is your future, her future is your past. Now the White queen is still able to interact with Alice and the issue of how she remembers is a little tricky to wrap your head around. The questions however is: is she a time traveler? She is not intentionally moving through time alternatively, it is simply her existence. For her this is the normal flow of time. Now, Carroll introduces this idea in a very silly kind of way and it doesn't quite make sense as the White queen explains it, but of course it shouldn't really make sense as this book is about nonsense.

However, take this section and go to Bearing An Hourglass and you see the concept of what it means to live backwards become fully realized.

Alternatively, many of you may be familiar with the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) directed by David Fincher. To be clear, I would not classify Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) as a time traveler, though it is debatable for certain. He is living his life chronologically from his birth to his death. He is not experiencing the larger movement of time any different from those around him. It just so happens that another phenomena is in place where the aging process is reversed for him, he grows younger.

The 4th Dimension In Art and Literature

Georg Bernhard Riemann in a lecture in 1854 "overthrew two thousand years of Greek geometry and established the basic mathematics of the higher, curved dimensions that we use even today.

"^[4] Reimann's discovery was soon popularized as "the fourth dimension."

We live in three dimensions that are length, width and height: "No Matter how we move an object in space, all positions can be described by these three coordinates . . . with these three numbers we can locate any object in the universe, from the tip of our noses to the most distant of all galaxies."^[5] But what if there existed a fourth spatial dimension, one we would obviously be unable to see with our naked eye? Historically, the fourth dimension was mere curiosity, the fodder for science fiction but in 1919 physicist Theodor Kaluza wrote a paper that hinted at the presence of higher dimensions.^[6] Using Eisntein's theory of general relativity, Kaluza placed it in five dimensions: "one dimension of time and four dimensions of space . . . if the fifth dimension were made smaller and smaller, the equations magically split into two pieces. One piece described Eitnstein's standard theory  of relativity but the other piece becomes Maxwell's theory of light! (Maxwell is known for a set of equations which accurately describe all the properties of light)"^[7] Physicists asked the question "if light is a wave, then what is waving? Light can pass through billions of light-years of empty space, but empty space is a vacuum, devoid of any material. So what is waving in the vacuum?"^[8] Kaluza's theory answered this problem "light ripples in the fifth dimension" and thus Maxwell's equations emerge as describing waves traveling in the fifth dimension.^[9]

I won't go into too much detail but what is significant for this class is to see how this idea of another dimension, co-existing beside our own, as mentioned above has been taken up by artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers in ways you may be unaware of.

For example, I mentioned Alice above but what other artists and writers?

Even Oscar Wilde in "The Canterville Ghost" depicts a haunting from a ghost in the fourth dimension.^[14] H.G. Wells utilizes ^[15]the fourth dimension in The Invisible Man, The Plattner Story, and the Wonderful Visit, and parallel universes were also explored by Robert Heinlein in The Number of the Beast, where four brave individuals jump across parallel universes in a mad professor's inter-dimensional sports car, and don't forget about Sliders of course.

Proceed to questions >>>

posted by JM Venturini (instructor1) on 6/21/08, updated 6/20/09