The Mad Tea Party: Conflation of Time
The meandering and nonsensical conversation with the Hatter and the March Hare starts to frustrate Alice. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she criticizes them, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.” This rebuke moves the Hatter to describe his relationship with time or, more accurately, an anthropomorphized “Time.”
“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”
Here we have a perfect example of Alice’s dream logic – the conflation of time as a way of measuring duration and time as a way of providing rhythm. In the dream world, however, these two different meanings of time become fused. It is at this point that Alice’s notion of time starts to completely fall apart.
“Ah, that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just in time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”….“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then – I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.”
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