The Chaos of The Wonderland Quartet: Joyce Carol Oates, Lewis Carroll and Nietzsche

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-) is a prominent American critic and writer of fiction, whose texts encompass novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. Often called the “Dark Lady of American Letters”, sharing the tag with Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, Oates’ literary contribution meets with ongoing and well-deserved national and worldwide recognition. Through the postmodern lens, I consider Oates’ aesthetic inspiration in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) in the context of the American countercultural reception in the 1960s, which recalls the dark aspects of Carroll’s texts. The philosophical logic behind both of Carroll’s books resembles the postmodern interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of identity, which diverges from Walter Arnold Kaufmann’s model of Nietzsche that became popular in the 1950s. While the postmodern reading of Nietzsche advances the affirmation of chaos, Kaufmann’s reading proposes the internal organisation of chaos. I will employ these contrasting perspectives on Nietzsche to analyse characters’ development and their urge to succeed in different ways.