PAWN TO INFINITY
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Carroll's Looking-Glass problem is "cooked": it has overlooked early mates (3, Q-K3 mate), captures avoided by Red, and no plot reference to the White Rook at KB1. As Edmund Miller notes, "This chess problem is completely arbitrary and so does a wonderful job of organizing everything else in the nonsense book."7 If the puzzle-plot is considered as problem, the reader is confined to the limited perspective of the chess pieces which only know what they must do and little or nothing of the complete plot/solution. Alice (as Pawn) and the other chessmen see only some of the play; the Queens know the rules, but the other pieces do not speak of them. As Taylor points out, Alice never grasps the purpose of the game; at the eighth square she asks if the game is over.8 It is not over, of course, until later when she herself captures the Red Queen.
Martin Gardner is correct: "the mad quality of the chess game conforms to the mad logic of the looking-glass world" (172). The moves of the game (Gardner will call it a "chess problem" on p. 336) are correct and meaningful if seen within Alices' limits on the board—the logic is that of the moves laid out in Carroll's diagram; that is, the narrative plot and the chess problem are identical. As problem, only the placement of pieces and their "character" (narrative and chessic) determine its moves and thus limit our view to their own; the moves therefore do not matter as chess. The logic of the puzzle and of each piece makes the actual chess moves unobservable from within the problem, and the plot-moves seem both logical and real.
If we view our puzzle as absolute outsiders, as a chess game, the absurdity of the moves are apparent. Who is really playing the game is unknown, even to Alice; the Red King "was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!" (344). Whoever the unseen player may be—Carroll, God, Alice, the Red King—from his view mistakes, errors, blunders, lost chances, and illegal moves are obvious. In a chess game, rules are never to be violated willfully, foolishly, or made part of the puzzle.9
We have resolved the chess paradox: one puzzle is both game and problem, for we see it from both points-of-view at once—as player/reader, and as Alice/chessman. The puzzle has also resolved itself as a symbol of human existence. If Carroll had totally ignored the rules of chess, his allegory would then suggest human existence is blind, directionless, and meaningless, like a child moving chessman without purpose. But purpose is accomplished—the Red King is mated, though Alice is unaware until she is awake and outside the game (until, in human terms, she is wise and mature enough to see) and changes her point-of-view.
On the other hand, if Carroll had presented perfectly straightforward chess (game or problem), he would imply human existence lacks freedom, spontaneity, and charm. As a Church of England clergyman and as teacher of math and logic at Christ Church, Oxford, the Reverend Dodgson could not believe in blind chance or transcendental puppetry as descriptive of the nature of human life. He believed in God, logic, and science; and these beliefs he translated into a charming literary puzzle.
Carroll's story provides the same problems and resolution for the nature of human existence as Emmanuel Kant had done in his Critique of Practical Reason: man lives in two realms at once—the realm of Nature in which all facets of his existence are completely determined and explained by mechanical causation (the chess problem); and the transcendental realm of freedom in which he is a free, unconditioned cause acting on the world, bringing novelty and uncertainty into being (the chess game). For Lewis Carroll, the game of human existence presents a deep problem which he resolved in a happy ending in Through the Looking-Glass.
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FOOTNOTES
1Carroll himself admits changing the Black pieces to Red for the purpose of religious symbolism, though the change violates the color scheme of the pair of kittens (one white, one black) which were responsible for part of the character of Alice's "dream."
2Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), p. 188. Further reference to Through the Looking-Glass will be from this edition.
3A. L. Taylor, "Chess and Theology in the Alice Books," in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (NY: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 365-377; quote is on pp. 367-8.
4Ivor Davies, "Looking-Glass Chess," The Anglo-Welsh Review, 15 (Autumn 1970), pp. 189-91.
5Richard Kelly, Lewis Carroll (Boston: Twayne, 1977), pp. 97-99.
6Kenneth S. Howard, The Enjoyment of Chess Problems (Philadelphia: McKay, 1943), p. 3. Howard's definition confirms the idea that viewing our puzzle as a problem would confine our point-of-view to the board of character of the pieces.
7Edmund Miller, "The Sylvie and Bruno Books as Victorian Novel," in Lewis Carroll Observed, ed. Edward Guiliano (NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), p. 140.
8Taylor, p. 368.
9Davies finds that some aspects of our puzzle here are derived from an old form of chess using a "Marked Pawn," as described in a book owned by Carroll at his death; see "Queen Alice," Jabberwocky, 2(Autumn 1973),pp. 10-11.1 also reject A. S. M. Dickins' "Alice in Fairyland," Jabberwocky 5 (Winter 1976), pp. 3-24. Dickins, an international judge on Fairy Chess, uses these wilder rules of this chess offshoot to show our puzzle to be a "parody of chess morality."