SOURCE: Marret, Sophie. “Metalanguage in Lewis Carroll.” SubStance 22, nos. 2-3 (1993): 217-27.

In the following essay, Marret examines the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark in conjunction with Dodgson's nonfiction work on symbolic logic.

The modernity of Lewis Carroll's literary work lies in the reversal of his own theses in the field of logic. Indeed, his intuitions about the role of the subject, discernible in his literary writing, seem to condemn rationality, which nonetheless is one of the foundations of the Alice books. Symbolic Logic, the handbook to which he devoted the end of his life, would thus appear as an ultimate attempt to save ontology, imperilled by his literary work.

The mathematization and formalization of logic that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century tried to extricate this science from natural languages and to free it from their ambiguities. This resulted in a complete...