The Mad Tea Party: The Capricious Nature of Personified Time
Not only is time not synchronized between the characters (Alice and the Hatter) it can also be sped up, slowed down and even stopped altogether. In Wonderland, time is not regulated by the physical laws of the universe. It is a person, Time, who controls durations and acts in accordance with his whims and moods. When Alice asks the Hatter if he cajoles Time in the way described on the previous page, the following exchange takes place:
The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarreled last March – just before he went mad, you know -- ” (pointing with his teaspoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing
‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!How I wonder what you’re at!’
You know the song, perhaps?”“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way: --
‘Up above the world you fly,Like a tea-tray in the skyTwinkle, twinkle --’….
“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the queen jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’”“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”
The absurdist dream logic has now settled into a new equilibrium. Time is duration, but this duration is not cold and detached, rather it is the product of a person named Time who manipulates it depending on his mood and the dynamics of his relationships. It is this capricious nature of personified time that accounts for the seemingly nonsensical temporal divergences at the Mad Tea Party. In such a state as this, devices for objective measurement are rendered useless – and might as well be repaired with butter and bread crumbles. As with Dali and Schulz, the breakdown of the dominance of measured and measurable time is central to the architecture of Alice’s dream world.
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