«A CAUCUS-RACE AND A LONG TALE»: DODO, THE SOPHISTS, AND THE RHETORIC OF A WET WORLD

Abstract

The article offers a philosophical analysis of Chapter Three of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a model of the rhetorical production of social reality. It explores the relationship between language, collective order, and meaning in a situation where communication ceases to function exclusively as a mode of representation and acquires the capacity to organize social interaction directly. The central thesis of the study is that, in Wonderland, rhetoric functions not as a vehicle for transmitting pre-given meaning but as an autonomous mechanism for producing procedures, forms of community, and symbolic regimes of recognition.

Particular attention is paid to those episodes in the chapter where language demonstrates its productive power. It is shown that the Mouse’s “dry” lecture models a specific form of discursive ordering in which speech claims the ability to organize not only meaning but bodily reality itself. The Caucus-Race is interpreted as a ritual procedure in which rules do not precede action but emerge through the very process of enactment. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways collective order is sustained through repetition, participation, and the performative reproduction of shared practices, even in the absence of stable criteria of truth or success. The thimble-awarding ceremony is examined as a model of the symbolic production of value, where the status of an object is determined not by its intrinsic properties but by the ritual of public recognition. Attention is also given to the tale/tail episode, in which the language game moves beyond the level of semantics and assumes a spatial and visual form. It is demonstrated that nonsense here ceases to function merely as linguistic misunderstanding and instead reveals the material dimension of language, where meaning emerges through the interaction of word, image, and the spatial organization of the text.

It is argued that Chapter Three of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offers a philosophically relevant

model of social order that emerges through ritual, repetition, symbolic recognition, and collective participation. The article concludes that rhetoric in Carroll’s work functions not as an auxiliary instrument of communication but as one of the fundamental conditions of communal existence. This reading makes it possible to approach  Wonderland not merely as a literary text of nonsense but as a unique laboratory for investigating the mechanisms through which human communities produce and sustain their own social reality.