This article discusses topics related to sexual abuse. My focus will be a discussion on ‘Alice’s Last Adventure’, a short-story from the ‘weird fiction’ writer Thomas Ligotti. I don’t particularly like trigger warnings. To me, if a shocking subject appears on the page, the writer should have already earned the right to address it. Good writing, after all, should have built the literary space necessary to engage with the topic at hand. It’s not dissimilar to when you unveil a shocking truth to a friend in a deep conversation; you’re willing to go there, because mutual trust has already been established. I suppose the purpose of such a warning is to reduce unintentional harm. I suspect, however, that it probably acts as more of a literary hook; the voyeur leans in, curious as to what will be said.

           In my previous article, ‘A Taste of Deeper Things’ I spoke on taste in relation to four pieces of art I “like”. Given that these are all substantive pieces that I endeavor to cover in a few paragraphs, I couldn’t possibly have done them or my own taste justice. In makes me wonder how granular critique should be? How close should one stand? A paragraph away, a sentence, should I pontificate at length on the feelings evoked from a single word?

           I heard recently that if several people hum the same familiar tune, their brain scans would reveal a distinct, individualized thumbprint of neural activity. The reason for this might be rather obvious: each word, each sound, causes within us a unique set of associations, unique firing of brain activity. Take a piece of instrumental music. If we were to self-examine our own emotional response, we could probably identify melodic shifts from one chord to another that touch us most intensely. With the use of neural imaging technology, perhaps entire pieces of music could be composed that speak to our particular neurological makeup.

           Why merely stand close, when we can enter minds? But maybe this wouldn’t work; it summons thoughts of the 19th Century English painter, William Turner, who’s later work took on such an expressionistic style that in close proximity all one can discern is a confused blur of color, but far enough back, and you’re looking upon his masterful landscapes. John Ruskin described them as being able to “stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature”. Could it be said that stepping back weakens our appreciation? Obviously not. I think also of the 20th Century American abstract painter Mark Rothko. In reference to his most famous works, his Color Field paintings, he recommended (I imagine whimsically) that his viewers position themselves eighteen inches from the canvas. He wanted his work to envelope you; this is why he made them so big, in order to create intimacy.

           Of course, in a way the prose writer does enter the mind. I can feel so much dumber when I’m not reading good prose. Having thoughts of one’s own, and reading the thoughts of others, can feel very similar. Is reading not like going on a thinking simulation, where your interior voice becomes the writer’s voice, closer even than breath? I mentioned ‘voyeurism’ above, and I think there is something voyeuristic about the reader/writer relationship. My most intimately present reality is the thoughts that I’m having, and when I write, the page becomes an extension of my thought world. The reader penetrates my mind. I know they’re there in the abstract, but I don’t know who’s there, I don’t know who is closer than breath. Perhaps you could even say, in this moment, it doesn’t seem like there is any distinction at all; there is no reader/writer boundary, there is just the thought held here in mind.

           Now to turn to ‘Alice’s Last Adventure’ by Thomas Ligotti. Thomas Ligotti (born in 1953) is a contemporary American fiction writer, in the dark, horror, weird fiction genres, with an eye towards philosophy and psychology. The story can be found in one of his short-story collections, “Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe” (2015) - a friend recommended it to me. It feels very reductionist to say that you like something. Saying as much actually annoys me on an irrational level, what does ‘you like something’ even mean? Hence my current monomaniacal investigation of taste. Take a joke: you wouldn’t say you “like” a joke, well you might, but don’t. Rather, if it merits it, you laugh at the joke, or you at least give it a knowing smirk. Once the joke is out there, you can then discuss it, the mechanics of it, the form, the setup, and so forth, and you may even explain the joke to those who don’t get it. An essay on a short story feels a lot like that - an exercise in explaining the joke. Isn’t that the role everyone secretly wants?

           Ligotti’s story draws inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s most iconic works, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ (1871). Lewis Carroll himself is barely discussed in the short story, but his identity goes to the very core of it. So, first, let me paint myself into the frame. My name is Lewis, and I am named after Lewis Carroll, and like the protagonist in the short story, I too have memories of my father reading ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ to me as a child. So, there’s a curious sort of paralleling at play, though, obviously, devoid of all the dark undertones I will discuss.

           Lewis Carroll was his pen name; his real name was Rev. Charles Dodgson (1832 – 1898). He was a writer, a mathematician, photographer, and a lifelong childless bachelor. He came close to being ordained a priest in the Church of England, but ended up a rather reluctant lifelong deacon. In 19th Century England the norm was for all Oxbridge ‘dons’ (fellows and tutors) to be Anglican Clergy; this requirement began to loosen in the latter half of the century. For most of his life he lectured at Christ Church, Oxford, and even in later life when fame and fortune came, he continued his lecturing in mathematics.

           The Alice books are obviously what he is best known for. These books were inspired by his relationship with the ten-year-old girl, Alice Liddell. Dodgson was a family friend of the Liddells. Alice, while out on a rowing boat trip with Dodgson and others, asked him to tell her a story; he constructed a fantastical narrative about a girl called Alice who fell down a rabbit hole and went on many wondrous adventures. A few months later the story was written up into the manuscript, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. There has been much speculation over the years as to whether Dodgson had an erotic interest in children.

           Although a relationship between a single male adult and a little girl in today’s world is only acceptable in the narrowest of domains, such was not the case in 19th Century England. As I said, Dodgson was a photographer. He took many portraits of artists, celebrities, and friends, but he enjoyed most of all taking photographs of Alice Liddell and her sisters. He spent a great deal of time with these girls in his rooms and going on outings. He was enlivened in the company of children. Indeed, he also had a collection of drawings and photographs of nude children, often in risqué postures. Again, although by modern standards this would be unacceptable, in Victorian England it was not controversial. So, was he infatuated? In love? Did these relationships go further than friendship? We do not know… But I will quote Will Self, who says, “It’s a problem, isn’t it? It’s a problem when someone writes a great book and they’re not a great person” (The Secret World of Lewis Carroll, BBC, 2015).

           Because of the nature of such speculation, people are of course inclined to have strong opinions one way or another. I don’t know what Thomas Ligotti personally believes; it’s not really relevant, but given his pessimistic view of humanity it’s probably fair to assume he imagines the worst. Regardless, however, I believe his short story operates on the presumptive premise that Charles Dodgson was indeed sexually abusing Alice Liddell. It is never said, but I don’t think what follows makes much sense otherwise. As well as the Alice books, I believe the story is also influenced by Vladimir Nabokov’s work, in particular ‘Pale Fire’ (1962), and ‘Lolita’ (1955). ‘Lolita’ is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the protagonist, Humbert Humbert. It is a memoir about his sexual interest in a twelve-year old girl; in other words it’s written by the abuser, and everything is filtered through his first-person perspective - a perspective which has a self-serving agenda. Everything about the girl, the abusee, as such, comes to us through this unreliable filter.

           You could see the Alice books in a similar light. The narrator’s voice is the voice of the abuser, who is Lewis Carroll. The titular character, the idealized girl, who is the simulacrum of Alice Liddell, is Carroll’s plaything. She sits within the fulcrum of the abuser’s fantasy world. The abusee therefore only comes to us mediated, a marionette doll, silent.

           Ligotti’s ‘Alice’s Last Adventure’ follows Alice, whose father affectionately calls her “little moon face” and reads her ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, the book from which she has been named. Writing in the first person through a journal, Alice’s narrative echoes Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’ and ‘Lolita’, where unreliable protagonist/narrators frame reality through their warped perspectives. Like Nabokov’s characters, Alice’s story demands attention to the unsaid, as her account is clouded by bias and distortion.

           Now an older woman, Alice became a fiction writer, shaped by her father’s influence. Her protagonist, Preston Penn, is a mischievous boy modeled on a childhood friend, who is forever frozen in childhood— in the course of her books we’re told he enters an upside-down and sinister universe, paralleling Carroll’s Wonderland. Alice’s father, a philosophy professor, revered Carroll, viewing him as a “psychic supreme” who willed Wonderland’s Alice into being and controlled her fictional realm. This reflects how he then saw his daughter: a creation of his will, existing within his world for his pleasure. Subtle hints—his “childlike” demeanor and fixation on her as “his Alice”—suggest disturbing undertones in their relationship. She writes, “When I got older, my features became more angular, an involuntary betrayal of my father’s conception of his little Alice,”. In other words, or at least my sense of this passage is that her father is a pedophile, and that as Alice got older, he lost interest in her. Even after his death, Alice appears trapped in a state of arrested development, seeking to embody the child he adored. This psychic paralysis shaped her career, leading her to write about childish things, preserving a sense of herself as deserving of his love.

           Alice describes a life scarred by trauma: breakdowns, failed marriages, addiction, and widowhood. While we’re not told the explicit reason for this, these struggles seem rooted in the childhood trauma. In her journal, she shifts to recent events, noting a creeping strangeness over the past year—a “lack of tidiness” in her life. This phrase connects to earlier discussions of the mirror in ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, where the world on the other side is “not as tidy.” Carroll’s Alice recognizes this; Ligotti’s Alice does not. She fails to see that she has already gone through the looking glass. She is now in that upside down and sinister realm. By her own reckoning, all this is down to the fact that she is drinking heavily again. So, she’s writing to try and make sense of all this. Unlike Nabokov’s protagonists who are trying to persuade the reader of something, it is unclear if she is even writing with a reader in mind, and as such, I’m not sure she’s trying to convince anyone of anything, apart from perhaps herself. This arguably brings us even closer into her mind, into her misshapen neurological makeup.

           She looks up at the clock; it has stopped at eleven p.m. It transpires that she is writing on Halloween night, having returned from a local library’s Halloween party, where she had given a reading from one of her Preston Penn books. This was an annual tradition. The year prior, however, she had to cancel, because she went to a funeral. The funeral was for the unnamed childhood friend who had inspired the Preston Penn character. She says that she had not seen him since her twentieth birthday, which was soon after her father had died.

           The funeral is being held in the town she’s from; it feels to her as if she has gone back in time. I think the idea is that this town is the realm that was willed into creation by her father, a sinister realm that is populated, like Carroll’s world is, with a cast of oddballs. Some of these characters are like-for-like, mirrored versions of Carroll’s characters. Take, for example, a man with a walrus mustache who serves ice cream to two big-bellied children. This imagery recalls Tweedledee and Tweedledum singing to Alice the story of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, in which the Walrus and the Carpenter coax young oysters along the beach, only to devour them. I picture a sinister reimagining of the Pied Piper of Hamelin luring children away with his magic pipe in order that he might “devour” them.

           After the funeral home viewing, she goes to a nice hotel; there she meets a man who she has dinner with and takes back to her room. At some point in the night, she awakens. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to interpret events through what we would typically recognize as a normative sense of reality. She wakes in the night to some odd movement, makes her way over to a mirror, which appears for a moment to show a corpse’s head, until she realizes that it is her own face looking back at her. She sums up her sense from the year that is passed as “half-conscious perceptions, and the distortions of memory”, before turning her attention back to today: Halloween.

           After a sleepless night, she had found herself in the bathroom, washing and creaming herself, and there sitting on the toilet tank is her cat, “Chessie” - once again, a nod to Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. The cat that, probably most pertinently to all this, says, “You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.” Ligotti’s Alice then talks about having seen something squiggle around in the toilet, something that startled the cat. This all has to do with, as I said before, her having gone through the looking glass. If we think of Carroll’s Alice, she is a matter-of-fact girl who is in her right mind, reacting to this very odd world into which she has been thrust. Ligotti’s Alice, on the other hand, is a woman or girl who is unable to integrate the horrors of the “real world” she is experiencing. And as such, in Jungian terms, she, without knowing, represses that material. It now resides within her unconscious mind, in the shadow world, or might I say in wonderland.

           So, what is really going on? What is this horror? I only have a sense of that; I think one possibility is that whereas Carrolls’ Alice, in going down the rabbit hole, escaped a mundane second-rate reality to arrive in a surreal and illogical one, Ligotti’s Alice goes down the hole to escape the surreal and illogical, to escape the world of her father’s making, a world of systematic abuse. She escapes into a world where she is a successful author, with money, who does recitals, and perhaps in this world she will even be able to please her father, not through her form, but through the content of her mind. But now her wonderland is crashing up against reality; they’re bleeding into one another. But we’re unable to step back, unable to gain any perspective. We’re enveloped here in this confusing blur.

           She’s now getting ready to go to that Halloween party to give her reading. She says that the children make her nervous, and that’s why she’s never adopted any. Having them was never an option, as she was infertile. Given my interpretation, I’ll allow you to imagine why that might be. The only way she was able to cope with the recital at all was a lot of pre-drinking.

           Having arrived and done the necessary pleasantries, she’s led to where she will perform. In the final section, the blur, the weird, is at peak crescendo; sexual inuendo is thick on the page. She’s led not to the children’s section where such readings ordinarily took place but down into the basement. “A small auditorium of sorts.” You can hear screaming. Is this the bedlam of children? Now on the stage, “the half-crocked lady author was about to deliver a half-cocked oration.” The lights were switched off. There’s a commotion, one of the children faints, “the poor thing hyperventilated or something like that.” It seems that some of these children were making a mistake that Alice was not, they were entirely present. “Amazing how children can put things right out of their minds and recover so quickly.” Perhaps this is the nightmare of some kiddie orgy that’s coming flooding back, or perhaps she’s still there now.

           But she’s writing in her room. She notices that the moon is turned the wrong way, everything is wrong. There is a sound of giggling in the hallway; she doesn’t know if it’s inside or outside her head. All the boundaries have been dissolved, is it an interior or an exterior sound? It is such a familiar laugh – “I’ve been good. I just got old, that’s all. Please stop.” But her father’s abuse didn’t stop.