ALICE'S ADVENTURES AT THE CARNIVAL

Imagine a story featuring a dreamy descentunderground, grotesquely gigantic and dwarfish carnality, a prodigious pool of body fluid, cartwheels and pratfalls, cornucopian helpings of food and drink, antic playgrounds, riddling language and name games, repeated nonsense (re)verses, various negative capabilities, mathematical miracles, voyages of discovery, cycles of crowning and uncrowning, not to mention metalists like the previous catalogue in this sentence. It seems curious that this tangled tale, Lewis Carroll's in theAlices, has never been linked to the Carnival tradition typified by François Rabelais'sGargantua and Pantagruel(1532–64) even though our imagined story equally describes Rabelais's glorious epic. At least, it's never been linked much beyond Northrop Frye's suggestion that “[t]he Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley's]The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais” (310) and Martin Gardner's note toLooking-Glassthat Medieval and “Renaissance chess games were sometimes played with human pieces on enormous fields” as in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (135, n. 2). And yet, to spin William Empson's memorable take on Freudian readings (357), one has only to tell Alice's story to make it a carnival tale.