I. The Mock Turtle's Grief
I was seven when I first encountered the Mock Turtle, weeping on the shore beside the Gryphon, telling Alice about his schooldays under the sea. He described lessons in Reeling and Writhing, Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. The master was an old turtle called Tortoise—"we called him Tortoise because he taught us," the Mock Turtle explained through sobs.
I didn't understand the puns yet. I didn't know that "Reeling and Writhing" was "Reading and Writing," that the whole thing was a joke about Victorian education. What I understood was this: the Mock Turtle was crying about a past that never happened. He wasn't a real turtle—he was the turtle they make mock turtle soup from, a calf dressed up as something it wasn't, grieving for an education in subjects that didn't exist, taught by a teacher whose name was just a bad pun.
The grief was real. The past was nonsense. Both were true at the same time.
That double vision—being inside the system while seeing through it, feeling the weight of something you know is arbitrary—that's not a children's book trick. That's a survival skill. And it's the skill XR design has been fumbling toward without knowing where to look.
II. The Thesis: XR Needs Better Nonsense
Here's what I'm arguing: Extended reality doesn't need better stories. It needs better nonsense. It needs systems that teach you how to navigate when your name falls off, when the rules change mid-game, when you've already lost before you started playing. It needs the croquet match where the mallets are flamingos and the balls are hedgehogs and the Queen keeps moving the hoops while screaming "Off with their heads!" at no one in particular.
Fairy tales—especially Carroll's work, but also the deep structure underneath Perrault and the Grimms—don't encode meaning. They map where meaning breaks. They're instruction manuals for moving through systems that were rigged against you from the start, for holding two contradictory truths in your body at once, for acting when language fails.
The scholarship knows half of this. Propp gives us the grammar. Bettelheim gives us the container. Zipes gives us the critique. But Carroll gives us something else entirely: the maintenance manual for when the machinery breaks. And in XR—where NPCs glitch through walls, where quest markers point to nothing, where players lose their usernames in server crashes—the machinery breaks constantly. The question isn't how to fix the breaks. The question is: what if the breaks are where the meaning lives?
This essay will argue that Carroll's nonsense is not decoration. It is diagnostic. It teaches the reader to recognize when a system has stopped working at the level of meaning while continuing to operate at the level of procedure. It teaches the reader to keep moving through such a system without surrendering to it. And it teaches, ultimately, that the body remembers what the system cannot perceive.
I am writing this essay because the system once stopped working around me, and I needed twenty years to find the maintenance manual that had been sitting on my desk the whole time. The strange part is that the desk was inside the system. The manual was on the syllabus.
III. Propp's Empty Functions
Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) gives us the grammar. Thirty-one functions, deployed in sequence: the hero leaves home, an interdiction is violated, a villain causes harm, a magical agent is acquired, the hero is tested, the villain is defeated, the hero returns. Propp's argument is that the surface variety of fairy tales conceals a deep structural sameness. The functions are stable; the characters and settings are interchangeable.
This is true and it is useful and it is not enough.
What Propp cannot account for is the function that runs without its content. The quest with no object. The interdiction whose violation produces no consequence. The villain who is also the helper, or the helper who turns out to have been the test. Propp's grammar assumes that each function carries meaning. Carroll's Wonderland is what happens when the functions persist after the meaning has drained out of them.
The trial of the Knave of Hearts is a trial in every Proppian sense. There is an accusation. There is a court. There is evidence. There is a verdict. The function executes. The meaning is absent. The Queen calls for the sentence before the verdict. The verdict is determined before the evidence is heard. The evidence consists of a poem nobody can interpret. The trial is a trial only at the level of form.
For XR, this means: a quest is not a quest because it has a marker over its head. A relationship is not a relationship because the system says it is. A reward is not a reward because the loot table fires. The quest marker that floats above a corpse the system forgot to remove; the dialogue tree that continues to offer choices in a conversation that has ended; the loop that keeps speaking after the emotional logic has collapsed—these are not bugs. They are the Knave's trial in interface form. The function and its meaning can come apart, and players feel the gap before they can name it. The skill Carroll teaches is the recognition that the gap is real, that one is not crazy for noticing, that the system can continue functioning long after the meaning has left the room.
IV. Bettelheim's Leaking Container
Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976) gives us the container. Fairy tales, he argues, are therapeutic spaces. They externalize unconscious material, give it form, allow the child to encounter and integrate what cannot be addressed directly. The wolf is the predator inside; the wicked stepmother is the ambivalent mother; the forest is the unconscious. The tale contains the material so the child can work through it safely.
This is true and it is useful and it is not enough.
What Bettelheim cannot account for is the container that leaks. The story that hands the child the apparatus and then refuses to take it back. The forest you cannot leave because the path has been rewritten behind you. Alice does not work through her unconscious material. Alice survives a procedural environment that refuses to resolve, and exits not by integration but by waking up.
The leaking container is what most stories are, once you look closely. Bettelheim's apparatus pretends the work concludes when the tale ends. Carroll's apparatus admits that the work does not conclude—the Mock Turtle is still weeping, the trial is still in session, the Queen is still calling for heads. The reader leaves the book. The book does not leave the reader. The grief is real after the page is closed.
For XR, this means: the experience does not end when the headset comes off. The persistence is not a bug in the design. The persistence is the design. Build for what the user carries out, not for what the system can resolve within its own boundaries.
V. Zipes's Visible Cage
Jack Zipes's Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) gives us the critique. Fairy tales, he argues, are ideology machines. They naturalize hierarchy, discipline children into class positions, encode the values of the dominant order under the cover of enchantment. The princess waits to be chosen. The peasant becomes worthy through suffering. The witch is punished for desire. The story teaches the child to want the cage.
This is true and it is useful and it is not enough.
What Zipes cannot account for is the cage that knows it is a cage and shows itself. Carroll's Wonderland does not naturalize its hierarchy. The Queen's authority is visibly absurd. The trial visibly miscarries. The pecking order of Mad Tea Parties and croquet grounds is openly arbitrary. The ideology is on the surface. The system does not hide that it is rigged. It dares you to keep playing anyway.
This is a different and harder problem than the one Zipes named. Critique presumes that revealing the ideology will dissolve it. Carroll shows that revealing the ideology can be part of the ideology. The Queen knows you know. The trial knows it is a sham. The system continues. The visible cage is more sophisticated than the hidden one because it forecloses the very form of resistance critique was built to enable. Where do you go when the institution agrees, in advance, that its procedures are absurd, and continues to enforce them anyway?
For XR, this means: do not assume the user fails to perceive the system's contrivance. Build for the user who sees the rigging and continues. Build the visible cage and trust the user to find the seam.
VI. Three Impossibilities
Carroll's deepest pedagogy is three scenes in which Alice encounters an impossibility she has to keep moving through.
Losing your name. In the wood where things have no names, Alice forgets who she is. She walks beside a fawn that has also forgotten. They cross the wood together as friends. At the far edge, names return, and the fawn—remembering itself as prey, remembering Alice as human—bounds away in terror. The friendship was possible only in the absence of identity. The skill Carroll teaches: there are conditions under which you can move through the world only by not knowing what you are. Some of those conditions are gifts. Some of them are wounds. The body can learn to recognize the difference.
The game you've already lost. The croquet match is unplayable. The mallets are flamingos. The balls are hedgehogs. The hoops are soldiers who move. The Queen screams. The game continues. Alice plays badly because the game cannot be played well; she plays anyway because the alternative is to be beheaded for not playing. The skill Carroll teaches: there are games whose rules are designed so that you have already lost before you begin. You play not to win but to remain in motion. The motion is itself a form of refusal.
The grin without the cat. The Cheshire Cat fades, leaving only the grin. The signifier persists after its source has gone. The smile is no longer attached to anyone. Alice notes that she has seen many cats without grins but never a grin without a cat. The skill Carroll teaches: presence is not coextensive with the object presence is supposed to belong to. Something can remain after the thing that emitted it has left. A song, a wound, a memory, a citation, a body remembering what no longer exists.
These three scenes are the foundation of every argument this essay will make. They are also, I will confess, three scenes I had to live before I could read them.
VII. The Pivot Point
There is one Carroll move smaller than any of these and underneath all of them: the pun.
"Reeling and Writhing." "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." "We called him Tortoise because he taught us." Each pun is a single phonemic substitution that opens a second meaning under the first. The sentence functions in both registers simultaneously. The Mock Turtle is speaking literal nonsense and grieving an actual education. Both readings are true. Neither cancels the other.
The theorists have names for this. Wittgenstein says the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Derrida says meaning is constituted by différance—difference and deferral. But Carroll makes it tactile. You don't need the theory. You feel the pivot. You're reading the sentence, you know what "lessons" means, and then the Mock Turtle says they "lessened" every day and you feel the meaning slip under your feet.
The pivot point—the place where meaning slips—is where the real information lives. Not in the stable definition, but in the instability, the gap, the place where two meanings collide. This is metalepsis at the scale of a single phoneme. And it is the connective principle between Carroll's literary nonsense and what this book has been calling the thaumotrope: two images on opposite sides of a disc, neither visible simultaneously, the composite produced by the spinning between them.
The pun is the smallest possible thaumotrope. Two meanings on opposite sides of a single sound, and the listener's mind spinning between them.
This was the argument I could not finish at nineteen.
VIII. The Class I Failed
The course was taught in the English department at Oberlin. It was called Traditions of Metamorphosis. It moved through Ovid and through the Ovidian inheritance—Shakespeare, Milton, the medieval Ovid moralized, the Renaissance rewriters who folded the Metamorphoses into their own century's transformations. And it spent significant time on Lewis Carroll.
I got sick that semester. Not metaphorically. The body broke down. The trajectory I had been on—Horace Mann, fencing, conservatory discipline, the affluent New York life with its shape already prepared—collided with a body that could not sustain it. The illness was the metamorphosis the syllabus could not name. The body was already mid-transformation while the seminar discussed transformation as a literary trope. I had begun, without knowing it yet, the transformation that would carry me out of the world I had been formed to inhabit.
I tried to write the final paper anyway. It was the most complex thing I had ever attempted. The argument was that metamorphosis in Carroll is fundamentally linguistic—that the pun is the engine, that meaning slipping into nonsense is the form of transformation Carroll teaches—and that this links Carroll backward to Ovid, sideways to Apuleius and Gogol and Kafka, forward to a whole tradition of the punished body finding form for speech the official channels would not permit. Meaning is used as a series of stepping stones to escape from itself, I quoted. The Mock Turtle was Philomela. The trial of the Knave was the court that exiled Ovid. The pun was the smallest possible thaumotrope, though I did not have that word yet.
I could not finish it. Not because I lacked the will. Because the argument was bigger than my capacity to mount it, and the body that was supposed to mount it was failing. I reached for something at the edge of what I could think, and the reach itself broke me.
I failed the class.
The transcript says one thing. The body says the opposite. According to the registrar, Traditions of Metamorphosis was an academic failure—a course I did not complete, a grade that became a precedent, an institutional history of "failure to complete" that would matter later when the second crisis came. According to my life, it was the originating event of my scholarly identity. The course that introduced me to Ovid and to Carroll, that handed me the apparatus I would spend the next decade learning to use, that planted every question my work has been answering since.
The institution had no category for what had happened. It had a category for failed the course. It did not have a category for encountered a problem too large for the current body to solve, and the encounter became the body's central question for the next twenty years. The procedure ran. The substance evaporated. The Mock Turtle's grief, the Knave's trial, the cat without its grin—I was reading the maintenance manual and being judged by the very procedure the manual was describing. I just did not know that yet.
IX. The Lineage
The unfinished question did not stay unfinished. It metabolized.
That winter I took a course on mythologies. The next summer I went to Hunter College and spent an entire term inside Shakespeare's Roman plays, focusing on Titus Andronicus—the relationship of Ovid to Shakespeare, the Philomela story moving from Latin verse to early modern stage to Julie Taymor's late-twentieth-century film, the transmogrified body, the problem of violence as spectacle and how it deprives the spectator. I came back to Oberlin in the fall of 2009 and entered what I still think was the best seminar of my undergraduate life: Shakespeare and Metamorphosis, taught by a visiting medievalist from Harvard whose work concerned literary traditions of automata. She was a real radical scholar—queer theory, gender theory, modes of analysis I had not yet encountered—and she opened registers in me I did not know I had access to.
For her seminar I wrote what I still consider my masterpiece undergraduate essay: a paper on the Petrarchan blazon as a poetic mode that amputates the beloved's body in order to describe her, and on Marcus's response to Lavinia in Titus Andronicus as the pure case—rhetoric draped over a ruined body, description as a continuation of the violence done. I took an incomplete in that course because I could not bear to finish the paper cheaply. I spent winter term in New York, pulling books and journals at the NYPL, trying to mount the argument at the resolution it required.
The next semester I enrolled in a course called Ovid in the Middle Ages, co-taught by my two favorite professors at Oberlin: Kirk Ormand, the department head, and Jen Bryan, the medievalist. For the final paper, I returned to material I had been working with for two years. I wrote on Philomela, transmogrified bodies, and Ovidian framing. The paper recycled a section from the blazon paper—the same passage, the same argument, citations that had grown in the soil of the prior essay's scholarly ecology.
I thought I was continuing a thought. I had been doing what serious thought does: returning to an obsession at deeper levels, with new texts and new tools, across semesters and institutions and professors. Metamorphosis became mythology became Roman plays became Titus became Lavinia became Philomela became the blazon became Ovid in the Middle Ages. That is not a sequence of repetitions. That is an intellectual current forming.
The institution had another name for this metamorphosis.
X. Carmen et Error
I was accused of plagiarism.
What mattered was not whether I had tried to steal. I had not. What mattered was that the institution possessed a procedure capable of transforming a chain of transmission into an act of theft.
The proceeding had the form of a trial. The form ran perfectly. The room was institutional in the way only academic institutional rooms are—old wood, new fluorescent light, a table large enough that no one had to sit close to anyone else. A document was on the table, with my paper inside it. The content was a passage I had written that meant what I had meant by it and that the system was reading as something I had not meant. I tried to explain that the passage had grown in the soil of two prior years of scholarship, that the citations belonged to a lineage, that the migration was the way scholarship lives. I watched the words I was saying land in the room as evidence of guilt. The more I explained, the more the proceeding produced the version of me it had been built to produce. I had mistaken continuity for rigor. The institution mistook continuity for theft.
There was a redemption assignment. I was to write on Chaucer without consulting secondary sources. I went to a professor in the library—an older scholar whose office was a sanctuary I had not yet learned was haunted—and asked for guidance on the medieval material. He gave me the bones of an argument I did not realize had ancestry. When I submitted the redemption paper, the institution recognized the ancestry. His guidance had passed through sources, and those sources had passed through him. The attempt at purification became another contamination. I failed again. I was suspended. I appealed the suspension. A year later, my case was reviewed by a body of my peers, the honor society, as though the wound had been waiting for the proper ritual calendar to reopen.
The cure had been designed in such a way that any attempt to survive it could be re-described as relapse.
For a year I avoided the department I loved. I avoided the halls where my favorite professor might appear. I avoided the place where Ovid had once felt like permission.
The section title is from Ovid. Carmen et error—the poem and the error—the two grounds Ovid himself gave, in his exile poetry, for why Augustus had banished him from Rome. The exact nature of the error he never named. The poem was the Ars Amatoria. The error was something else, something darker, something the system had chosen to read as evidence. The exile was real. The grounds were partly nonsense and partly real and the two could not be separated.
This is the metaleptic structure I want to name carefully, because everything in the rest of this essay depends on it.
The course that taught me the tradition of punished speech was housed in the department that prosecuted my speech. The apparatus and the wound came from the same place. The institution that gave me the words to read what was being done to me was the institution doing it. This is not irony. Irony would be the same place giving and taking. What happened is more specific: the curriculum crossed a frame it was not supposed to cross. The tradition of punished speech, taught in a seminar room, became a tradition enacted on the body of the student who had been studying it. The level-frame got violated. The student became the case study.
This is metalepsis at the scale of an education. The same move Carroll makes when the Queen's "Off with their heads!" stops being a phrase in a children's book and starts producing an actual courtroom in which actual judgment is rendered. The same move the thaumotrope makes when the two images on opposite sides of the disc fuse and the bird enters the cage. The apparatus crossed a boundary it was not designed to cross, and what had been a frame became a fact.
And it happened twice. The first time, the institution misread an illness as an academic failure—a body in transformation processed as a student in default. The second time, it misread continuity as theft—a scholarly lineage processed as an act of fraud. Both readings were the same shape. Both were procedures running perfectly while their content went void. The first wound built the precedent the second wound was enforced against. I had been writing about violated bodies and the rhetoric draped over them, and the honor code performed on my scholarship the structurally identical operation—amputating a passage from its scholarly body, displaying the severed part, calling the spectacle judgment.
The institution could not read this metaleptically. It could only read it procedurally. The body remembered what the institution could not perceive.
XI. The Columbia Citation
Two years later, at Columbia, I wrote my final paper for a graduate seminar on Greek tragedy and transvestism. The paper cited a book by the Oberlin professor who had presided over the honor code proceeding. The book was Exchange and the Maiden. The citation was accurate. The citation was attributed. The citation was, in the formal sense, exactly the kind of scholarly gesture the Oberlin proceeding had decided I was incapable of.
I have thought about this gesture for fifteen years. I am still not sure what it was.
It was not vengeance—the professor would never read the paper. It was not exorcism—the wound did not close. It was perhaps a private ritual, performed at the only register I had access to, that the system the institution operated could be made to work correctly with the same materials the institution had used to break it. Citation as it was meant to be used: acknowledgment, continuity, inheritance, relation. I did not erase him. I did not refuse him. I cited him. I restored him to his proper position—not judge, not warden, not accuser, but source.
If the metalepsis of Oberlin was the curriculum crossing into the body, the Columbia citation was the body crossing back into the curriculum. The body that had been written by the institution wrote the institution back. Not as triumph. The proceeding had already happened. The wound was already permanent. But the citation was a move the body could still make. And the system, in the small precinct of one graduate seminar paper at a different university, worked.
The gesture was also a continuation of the Traditions of Metamorphosis method. Reading texts across traditions. Letting sources migrate. Treating scholarship as a tradition you metabolize rather than a container you obey. The institution that punished me had been betraying the discipline it was supposed to teach. Citing Ormand at Columbia was me doing the thing the original seminar had taught me to do, in a room where it was finally legible as scholarship rather than violation.
The grin without the cat. The function without its object. The Cheshire smile persisting after the cat has gone. The citation persisted as a gesture even after the institution that had broken citation could no longer be reached by it. The gesture was for me. The body remembered, and the body answered, and the answer was a footnote nobody who needed to read it would ever read.
XII. The Survival Skill
I started with the Mock Turtle because that is where I learned the skill: holding two truths at once. The grief is real. The past is nonsense. Both are true.
The skill is not a coping mechanism. It is a perceptual orientation. It is what you do when a system is operating perfectly at the level of procedure and incoherently at the level of meaning, and you have to keep moving through it without surrendering either to the procedure or to the incoherence. You do not pretend the procedure makes sense. You do not pretend the incoherence is not real. You move.
A meeting, twelve years later, conducted remotely. A company devoted to therapeutic VR—an organization whose external product was built on the premise that immersive environments can hold difficult human experience safely, with scaffolding, with care. I had been hired to build a design framework for a project. The project, in some meaningful sense, already existed: it had a prior build, prior assumptions, prior implementation choices, and a buried institutional memory. New to the company, still onboarding, I did the thing any rigorous designer does when asked to formalize the logic of an existing system. I studied the prior build. I read its grammar. I worked back from the artifact to the principles it implied.
The procedure had another name for this. What I had done as professional due diligence was reframed as ethical violation. The room—the screen, the small panel of faces, the recorded session—ran the form of an evaluation while operating the function of a verdict. The vocabulary was care. The grammar was compliance. I tried to describe the conditions under which the choice had been made: the inheritance, the orientation, the absence of any other map. I watched the description land as confirmation. The more I named the structural situation that had produced my behavior, the more the room could hear the naming as a worker who would not take responsibility for what he had done.
I recognized the shape before I had words for it. The body recognized it. The body had spent twelve years calibrating instruments for exactly this. I did not say what I saw. I said the thing the meeting was built to receive. I closed the laptop and walked the apartment and noticed that the walking was a thaumotrope—Oberlin on one side, the present meeting on the other, my mind spinning between them and producing a composite image of an institutional grammar I would not have been able to perceive if the older proceedings had not happened. The wound was the instrument. The body was the apparatus. The grin remained after the cat had gone, and the grin was how I knew where I was.
The irony was almost too exact. The company existed to build containers in which difficult human material could be rehearsed and made survivable. When the container had to hold one of its own workers moving through an actual embodied learning curve, it stopped being a container and became a courtroom. The product understood that context matters. The institution did not. The apparatus knew the theory outwardly. The institution could not practice it inwardly.
It was not Oberlin again. No one had summoned the same court. No one had spoken the same charge. But the shape was old. A body asked to operate inside an inherited structure was judged for touching the inheritance. Continuity was misread as contamination. A procedure designed to evaluate performance could not perceive the conditions under which the performance had been produced. The institution that taught traditions of metamorphosis had failed to read metamorphosis when it appeared. The company that built therapeutic VR had failed to build a therapeutic container around me. Same shape, twelve years later. The wound recognized the room before I did.
That is the survival skill. The body remembers what the institution cannot perceive. The remembering is not a wound to be healed. The remembering is a perceptual capacity the institution's procedure produced by trying to suppress it. The Cheshire Cat is gone. The smile remains. The smile is how you read the room.
Alice wakes up. Carroll gives her the exit. The dream was a dream; she returns to the bank, to her sister, to the ordinary afternoon. But the book does not let the reader off as easily. The reader closes the book carrying the Mock Turtle's grief, the trial's procedure, the cat's grin. The reader does the work the dream framing pretends to resolve. The reader is the body that remembers.
We have to do the same for the people we build for. We have to give them the exit. In XR, this means designing not only for immersion, but for aftermath: for the trace, the misreading, the body that leaves carrying more than the system can log. We also have to trust that what they carry out of the experience is more than the experience knew it was giving them.
The grief is real. The past is nonsense. Both are true at the same time.
That is the maintenance manual. That is the survival skill. That is what the body remembers when the system stops perceiving.
XIII. Coda: The Palace Becomes the Jukebox
One last image, because the body that remembers does not only remember in prose.
Wonderland is a palace where the rooms will not stay put. A memory palace that shifts under your feet. What happens when you cannot walk through the palace anymore? When the architecture collapses, when the rooms are gone, when all you have left is the trace?
You get music. You get the three-minute song that holds the entire architecture in compressed form. You get George Jones's "The Grand Tour" giving you a walk through a house that is not there anymore. The verse is a room. The chorus is the hallway. The bridge is the moment you realize the tour is of an absence.
The palace becomes the jukebox. The room becomes the song. The architecture you walked through becomes the melody you carry. The grin without the cat becomes the song without the house.
This is what the next essay is for.