To Play or Not To Play: The Reader's Adventures in Wonderland
Résumé
This talk proposes to examine the assumption that the Alice books engage in a game with the reader. Such a claim has repeatedly been made by various critics: Robert Sutherland argues that Lewis Carroll was ?deliberately setting linguistic ?brain-teasers? for his readers to puzzle over? (15) and consequently ?quite literally playing games with his readers? (16); Kathleen Blake mentions ?a playing-with-the-reader attitude? in the Alices (15); Robert Polhemus posits that the reader plays with language as much as Carroll does (369). This assumption raises a number of questions: how can we say that a reader plays with a text, and what type of games can s/he play? After examining how the virtual reader is constructed in the Alice books, I will provide a qualitative analysis of the actual responses given by some of the members of what Stanley Fish would call the interpretive community of the Alice books. Thus, I will show that although the Alice books are scattered with seemingly response-inviting strategies (such as blank lines, blank pages, dashes), which give the impression that the virtual reader's active and playful cooperation is elicited, these strategies turn out to be response-controlling expressions. Carroll's virtual reader, then, seems to be more akin to Umberto Eco's Model Reader, whose participation is planned and so to speak pre-constructed by the author, than to Wolfgang Iser?s implied reader, who truly communicates with the text. This seems to indicate that, although the virtual reader is apparently invited to give in to what Roger Caillois calls paidia (the impulsive manifestation of a play instinct), s/he is actually tricked into strictly adhering to ludus (the need to conform to rules). I will nonetheless suggest that real readers seem to be able to take on the role of Impostor Readers'a term coined after Jean-Jacques Lecercle's theory of imposture in Interpretation as Pragmatics?and imagine unforeseen realisations of the text, therefore combining the two aspects of play defined by Caillois, paidia and ludus.