What Art is Like, in Constant Reference to the Alice Books by Miguel Tamen (review)

This is that very rare book that dazzles and inspires even as it defies understanding. Like a fine metaphor, it hints at great insights without quite letting you in on its secrets. I have no idea what the point of this book is, though while reading I at times had the impression of encountering one of the most original philosophers of art since the late Arthur Danto. But, unlike in Danto, the references here are all to characters from the Alice stories rather than to prominent theories and those who champion them. It is significant that a book in conversation with Humpty Dumpty instead of Slavoj Žižek or Alain Badiou manages to feel so fresh and so clever.

Despite the title, this is not quite a philosophical reflection on the Alice stories, at least if by this the reader expects Miguel Tamen to do with Lewis Carroll what, say, Stanley Cavell does with William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. Nor does it attempt to cull from the Alice stories grand points that specify something clear and distinct about what art is like. It does this, but only obliquely, though in the darkness flashes of a powerful vision of art abound. The reader is given a mere analytic table of contents to aid in divining how the various chapters, enumerated by remarks à la Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), are “about” what the book’s title promises. The book is figurative from beginning to end, tucking into its discussion of the Alice stories great themes from the philosophy of art (apparently). There is no making it explicit here, and the reader must unearth for herself the relevance of the book to the question of the nature and value of art in characteristic passages such as the following:

§101 The Walrus-talk is neither trick nor nonsense. His call for papers comes across as a list of topics held together by the thinnest of alliterations. It would so appear that part of the ceremony is that you make verbal noises for no particular purpose. Nonsense, some people call this. This assumes that you deliberately make nonsense, as you could produce an opaque treasure map to your intentions. Well, if not nonsense, then at least topics put forth with the purpose of distracting and dazzling your putative meal … “This is a child!” Haiga explains as a means of introducing Alice to the Unicorn. Had he said ‘This is a serpent!’ then things, we know, would have been different.

(46)

But clearly there is something in this about what art is like. Perhaps something about the queerness of meaning in the context of fiction. Or perhaps not. There is no saying. Nonetheless, the reader who knows a little twentieth-century analytic philosophy—Tamen knows it very well—will feel that this passage gestures toward the legacy of positivism, which reduced all non-empirical uses of language, including the language of art, to mere fluff and pomp: to pretty or entertaining nonsense. In fact, it is hard to read passages of this sort without working through the very notion of nonsense and the great question of why the language of art, given its sheer creativity and semantic promiscuity, does produce meaning rather than mere nonsense. Surely the works of the author of Jabberwocky (1871) are a good place to explore this idea.

As one moves through the book, much the same happens in respect to the role of pretense in the appreciation of art, the relationship between art and the self, and the nature and limits of interpretation. Ultimately, the book is, or seems to be, a grand reflection on the relationship between art and life. The point is, Tamen’s odd book demands that the reader provide the frame of reference which makes manifest “what art is like.” I note that a mainstay of art theory since Theodor Adorno is that art engages with reality negatively and disruptively...