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In the Queen's Court
Wonderland makes ideas about the artificiality of the play of meaning explicit. Alice's trip down the rabbit hole landed her in another context entirely, one where the rules of nonsense (rather than common sense) organized her play. Her life outside of Wonderland had its own set of rules and meanings. Adapting to life inside Wonderland meant transitioning into a radically different context with its own rules and procedures for representation. It is very much like entering into the magic circle of a game. When we play a game, we are doing more than just shuffling signs drawn from the domain of the real world; instead, we are shifting to another domain of meaning entirely. In the play of meaning, movement occurs both between signs and contexts. The magic circle is therefore a kind of Wonderland. Let's look at another game Alice plays during her visit: Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in all her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up to stand on their hands and feet, to make arches. The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself around and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that this was a very difficult game indeed. [5]
Alice calls the game "very difficult indeed." But what is remarkable are which things Alice finds challenging. Consider that her chief difficulty was not imagining that a live flamingo could be used as a Croquet mallet, nor hedgehogs as balls. These she accepted easily as fitting into the representational logic of Wonderland. Her difficulty was simply in trying to play the game—in hitting a hedgehog with the head of a flamingo. It was not in recognizing this strange system of signs as "Croquet." By this point in the story, Alice has largely accepted the nonsensical rules of Wonderland as her own. She has stepped into the magic circle of Wonderland and adapted her actions accordingly. Although the constant wanderings of the live game pieces across the Croquet-grounds made the game extremely challenging to play, their behavior in no way compromised Alice's status as a player whose actions had meaning within the space of the game. In accepting the rules engendered by the magic circle, Alice acts within a field of representation. As with the example of the race, the meaning of the Croquet game occurs on two levels. First, despite the ergonomic difficulties, the game of Croquet was an internally consistent game. It was never the case, for example, that a hedgehog was used as a mallet to hit a rolling flamingo. The game had its own rules, rules that Alice desperately tried to follow as she played. Second, the overall meaning of the game to the reader relies on a reader's knowledge of the normal play of Croquet. This larger context allows the reader to make sense of an otherwise nonsensical depiction of the game. Poor Alice. Although the game of croquet might fail to provide her with meaningful play, it provides us with much insight into the machinations of play and meaning. Alice's inability to play the game in any logical way was, in fact, one of the points of Carroll's "design." Carroll was a master in the play of meaning. His use of game structures, whether that of playing cards, Chess, or Croquet, demonstrates the mechanisms of sense-making, revealing how the fields of representation denoted by games are ripe for playful interpretation. [5]Ibid. p. 176.
