Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Feb. 29th, 2004 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThis essaylet emerges from a conversation between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
radiotelescope and myself (in the comments to this post) in which I tried and failed to articulate the difference between a riddle and a question. And as I've been thinking about it, I've realized that I have rather a lot to say on the subject--although possibly no answers.
So, in honor of Leap Year, this very long post.
In pondering this issue, I am following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien--which, while not an infallible predictor of success, is at least a good omen. The riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark," hinges on exactly the definitional difference between riddles and questions:
This exchange shows us at once that riddles and questions are not the same--but that they can be confused for each other. And the fact that Gollum can't answer the question, whereas he was able to answer all of Bilbo's riddles, demonstrates that the two categories, while not widely divided, cannot be approached in the same fashion if one hopes for any kind of success:
Bilbo is treating a question like a riddle, which causes the transaction of riddles to break down.
Riddles are puzzles; when they are posed, it is with an understanding on both sides that the answer can be found with knowledge common to both parties. Tolkien demonstrates that, too, by the difficulty Gollum has with An eye in a blue face and A box without hinges (Tolkien 85-87). They are perfectly fair riddles, and Gollum does have the knowledge necessary to answer them, but that knowledge is no longer common (in the sense of ordinary) to him. Likewise, Bilbo only guesses Alive without breath by a fluke--Tolkien points out slyly that "he never had anything to do with the water if he could help it" (Tolkien 87)--but he, too, has the knowledge the riddle requires, if he can only think of it.
Therefore, with riddles, there are givens: that they have an answer, and that the answer can be found by reasoning alone. These givens are what Lewis Carroll contravenes with his famous Why is a raven like a writing desk? Alice tries to play by the unspoken rules: "'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles--I believe I can guess that' she added aloud" (Carroll 95). But the Mad Hatter and the March Hare aren't interested in the rules Alice thinks she understands:
Arguably, the Mad Hatter's riddle doesn't even deserve the name, for while a number of people have come up with solutions, Carroll himself said, "the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all" (qtd. Carroll 95, note 3). This sleight-of-hand is typical of the method in Carroll's madness; his creatures are always logical, but always operating on givens that poor Alice does not expect. In this case, the Hatter and the Hare are simply ignoring the contract between poser and respondent that a riddle must be answerable. Why is a raven like a writing desk? is as unanswerable as Bilbo's What have I got in my pocket?, although for very different reasons. The Hatter's offering has the markers of a riddle, but no answer; while Bilbo's question has an answer, it is not a riddle.
Tolkien was well aware that Bilbo was cheating--appropriate to a transaction involving the One Ring--although he points out that Bilbo had good reason:
Bilbo and Gollum are both cheating; Gollum's last guess ("'String, or nothing!' shrieked Gollum" (Tolkien 90--and one of my favorite lines in all of Tolkien)) is itself not fair, and Gollum does not abide by the agreement he and Bilbo made. One can argue that they both suffer for their dishonesty--Gollum by losing the Ring, Bilbo by gaining it--which suggests that the sacred nature of the riddle game is something that ought not to be trifled with.
The idea of the sacredness of riddles is where Tolkien crosses paths with Shakespeare. I wrote a paper, five years ago now, about Pericles and romance, in which I argued that, in Pericles, Shakespeare deliberately constructed the genre of romance as something antique, and that one of the ways he achieved that effect was through the use of riddles.
Pericles enters the play at a paradigmatic chivalric romantic moment; he has come to perform a task and win a princess. We meet him, in fact, as he begins his rite of passage, a moment which is heavily charged with fairytale resonances--the ostentatious evil of Antiochus resembles that of a giant or an ogre, or even the Sphinx of Thebes:
As an audience, we recognize this moment for what it is, just as Antiochus and Pericles do. It has the flavor of a ritual, which it is on two levels. On one, Antiochus has gone through this many times; it is a ritual, of a particularly macabre sort. On another, the structural level of romance, Pericles is participating in one of the proving rites of the chivalric hero; he knows his genre and his role. Northrop Frye, in remarking the importance of ritual to the beginnings of drama, says, "if archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Minoan or Mayan culture, it may not have plays like King Lear or The Alchemist, but it will almost certainly have plays like Pericles" (Frye 59). Leaving entirely aside whether Frye is right or wrong in this pronouncement, he is pointing to an important and deliberate feature of Pericles. It gives itself the air, which we may be right to suspect, of being old and primitive and somewhat naïve. Ritual is very important in Pericles, as is the equally ancient custom of riddles, a fact which both contributes to the antique effect of the first part of the play and is a structural principle of the whole.
Like Oedipus, Pericles is about to come a cropper--not over the riddle itself, to which, as a good chivalric hero, he finds the answer to, but over the answer:
As with Oedipus's catastrophic riddle, the answer to Pericles's is "incest"--an answer which Pericles refuses to speak--and this answer throws the entire project of chivalric romance in the play off the rails. It corrupts the somewhat vague but necessary category of "eligible maiden," and therefore the hero's quest to secure for himself a member of that category becomes impossible, and perhaps corrupted itself. Pericles is prevented from fulfilling the conventions of his genre; this scene, which Pericles constructs as the central scene of chivalric romance, has broken down.
Pericles solves Antiochus's riddle in the first scene; the problem is that he can't answer it, both because Antiochus will kill him and because, in some profound way, the play does not want that answer to the riddle to be the right one. One way to read the events of the play is as a great circle away from Antiochus's Daughter and toward Marina, whom Pericles describes as "Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget" (Per. 21.182). This is a singularly torturous formulation, but one that does indeed seem to offer an answer to Antiochus's "He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child." The first scene is replicated in order to be exorcised; as C. L. Barber says, "in Pericles, we begin with overt incest and arrive at a sublime transformation of the motive" (Barber 64). Pericles is both father and son; Marina is both mother and child. The fact that they do not complete the triad in their own bodies, that they do not become "husband" and "wife" to each other, I would argue, leads directly to Pericles’s reward, the clues Diana gives him about how to find his own wife. In point of fact, by the end of the play, Pericles will (still) be a husband, and Marina will be on the track to becoming a wife (Per. 22.9-11). The generics of riddles demand answers; Pericles, by the laws of this genre, has to answer the riddle before it can end, and the play is the record of a search for a viable and survivable answer.
Riddles are rituals. Questions are not. I think that's the formulation I've been trying to get to. Questions have no constraints; they can be answered, unanswered, unanswerable, intended not to be answered ... Riddles are predictable, asked and answered--thus the confusion we, with Gollum and Alice, are thrown into when we are asked something which pretends to be a riddle and yet which cannot be answered. It isn't so much that there is a "right" answer to a riddle--there are "right" answers to many questions as well--as that in riddling, question and answer are like lock and key, mutually interdependent and useless without each other.
And thus the satisfaction of answering a riddle is the satisfaction of having a key turn in a lock, hearing the click, and knowing that the door will open for you.
WORKS CITED
---
Barber, C. L. "'Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget': Transformation in 'Pericles' and 'The Winter’s Tale.'” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59-67.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Illus. John Tenniel. The Annotated Alice. Introd., Notes Martin Gardner. 1960. New York: Wings Books-Random House, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 2719-76.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966.
radiotelescope and myself (in the comments to this post) in which I tried and failed to articulate the difference between a riddle and a question. And as I've been thinking about it, I've realized that I have rather a lot to say on the subject--although possibly no answers.So, in honor of Leap Year, this very long post.
In pondering this issue, I am following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien--which, while not an infallible predictor of success, is at least a good omen. The riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark," hinges on exactly the definitional difference between riddles and questions:
"What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.
"Not fair! Not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?"
(Tolkien 89)
This exchange shows us at once that riddles and questions are not the same--but that they can be confused for each other. And the fact that Gollum can't answer the question, whereas he was able to answer all of Bilbo's riddles, demonstrates that the two categories, while not widely divided, cannot be approached in the same fashion if one hopes for any kind of success:
"Answers were to be guessed not given," he said.
"But it wasn't a fair question," said Gollum. "Not a riddle, precious, no."
"Oh well, if it's a matter of ordinary questions," Bilbo replied, "then I asked one first."
(Tolkien 93)
Bilbo is treating a question like a riddle, which causes the transaction of riddles to break down.
Riddles are puzzles; when they are posed, it is with an understanding on both sides that the answer can be found with knowledge common to both parties. Tolkien demonstrates that, too, by the difficulty Gollum has with An eye in a blue face and A box without hinges (Tolkien 85-87). They are perfectly fair riddles, and Gollum does have the knowledge necessary to answer them, but that knowledge is no longer common (in the sense of ordinary) to him. Likewise, Bilbo only guesses Alive without breath by a fluke--Tolkien points out slyly that "he never had anything to do with the water if he could help it" (Tolkien 87)--but he, too, has the knowledge the riddle requires, if he can only think of it.
Therefore, with riddles, there are givens: that they have an answer, and that the answer can be found by reasoning alone. These givens are what Lewis Carroll contravenes with his famous Why is a raven like a writing desk? Alice tries to play by the unspoken rules: "'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles--I believe I can guess that' she added aloud" (Carroll 95). But the Mad Hatter and the March Hare aren't interested in the rules Alice thinks she understands:
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "then wasting it in askinkg riddles that have no answers."
(Carroll 97)
Arguably, the Mad Hatter's riddle doesn't even deserve the name, for while a number of people have come up with solutions, Carroll himself said, "the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all" (qtd. Carroll 95, note 3). This sleight-of-hand is typical of the method in Carroll's madness; his creatures are always logical, but always operating on givens that poor Alice does not expect. In this case, the Hatter and the Hare are simply ignoring the contract between poser and respondent that a riddle must be answerable. Why is a raven like a writing desk? is as unanswerable as Bilbo's What have I got in my pocket?, although for very different reasons. The Hatter's offering has the markers of a riddle, but no answer; while Bilbo's question has an answer, it is not a riddle.
Tolkien was well aware that Bilbo was cheating--appropriate to a transaction involving the One Ring--although he points out that Bilbo had good reason:
He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws.
(Tolkien 90)
Bilbo and Gollum are both cheating; Gollum's last guess ("'String, or nothing!' shrieked Gollum" (Tolkien 90--and one of my favorite lines in all of Tolkien)) is itself not fair, and Gollum does not abide by the agreement he and Bilbo made. One can argue that they both suffer for their dishonesty--Gollum by losing the Ring, Bilbo by gaining it--which suggests that the sacred nature of the riddle game is something that ought not to be trifled with.
The idea of the sacredness of riddles is where Tolkien crosses paths with Shakespeare. I wrote a paper, five years ago now, about Pericles and romance, in which I argued that, in Pericles, Shakespeare deliberately constructed the genre of romance as something antique, and that one of the ways he achieved that effect was through the use of riddles.
Pericles enters the play at a paradigmatic chivalric romantic moment; he has come to perform a task and win a princess. We meet him, in fact, as he begins his rite of passage, a moment which is heavily charged with fairytale resonances--the ostentatious evil of Antiochus resembles that of a giant or an ogre, or even the Sphinx of Thebes:
whoso asked her for his wife,
His riddle told not, lost his life.
So for her many a wight did die,
As yon grim looks do testify.
(Per. 1.37-40)
As an audience, we recognize this moment for what it is, just as Antiochus and Pericles do. It has the flavor of a ritual, which it is on two levels. On one, Antiochus has gone through this many times; it is a ritual, of a particularly macabre sort. On another, the structural level of romance, Pericles is participating in one of the proving rites of the chivalric hero; he knows his genre and his role. Northrop Frye, in remarking the importance of ritual to the beginnings of drama, says, "if archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Minoan or Mayan culture, it may not have plays like King Lear or The Alchemist, but it will almost certainly have plays like Pericles" (Frye 59). Leaving entirely aside whether Frye is right or wrong in this pronouncement, he is pointing to an important and deliberate feature of Pericles. It gives itself the air, which we may be right to suspect, of being old and primitive and somewhat naïve. Ritual is very important in Pericles, as is the equally ancient custom of riddles, a fact which both contributes to the antique effect of the first part of the play and is a structural principle of the whole.
Like Oedipus, Pericles is about to come a cropper--not over the riddle itself, to which, as a good chivalric hero, he finds the answer to, but over the answer:
I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How this may be and yet in two,
As you will live resolve it you.
(Per.1.108-144)
As with Oedipus's catastrophic riddle, the answer to Pericles's is "incest"--an answer which Pericles refuses to speak--and this answer throws the entire project of chivalric romance in the play off the rails. It corrupts the somewhat vague but necessary category of "eligible maiden," and therefore the hero's quest to secure for himself a member of that category becomes impossible, and perhaps corrupted itself. Pericles is prevented from fulfilling the conventions of his genre; this scene, which Pericles constructs as the central scene of chivalric romance, has broken down.
Pericles solves Antiochus's riddle in the first scene; the problem is that he can't answer it, both because Antiochus will kill him and because, in some profound way, the play does not want that answer to the riddle to be the right one. One way to read the events of the play is as a great circle away from Antiochus's Daughter and toward Marina, whom Pericles describes as "Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget" (Per. 21.182). This is a singularly torturous formulation, but one that does indeed seem to offer an answer to Antiochus's "He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child." The first scene is replicated in order to be exorcised; as C. L. Barber says, "in Pericles, we begin with overt incest and arrive at a sublime transformation of the motive" (Barber 64). Pericles is both father and son; Marina is both mother and child. The fact that they do not complete the triad in their own bodies, that they do not become "husband" and "wife" to each other, I would argue, leads directly to Pericles’s reward, the clues Diana gives him about how to find his own wife. In point of fact, by the end of the play, Pericles will (still) be a husband, and Marina will be on the track to becoming a wife (Per. 22.9-11). The generics of riddles demand answers; Pericles, by the laws of this genre, has to answer the riddle before it can end, and the play is the record of a search for a viable and survivable answer.
Riddles are rituals. Questions are not. I think that's the formulation I've been trying to get to. Questions have no constraints; they can be answered, unanswered, unanswerable, intended not to be answered ... Riddles are predictable, asked and answered--thus the confusion we, with Gollum and Alice, are thrown into when we are asked something which pretends to be a riddle and yet which cannot be answered. It isn't so much that there is a "right" answer to a riddle--there are "right" answers to many questions as well--as that in riddling, question and answer are like lock and key, mutually interdependent and useless without each other.
And thus the satisfaction of answering a riddle is the satisfaction of having a key turn in a lock, hearing the click, and knowing that the door will open for you.
WORKS CITED
---
Barber, C. L. "'Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget': Transformation in 'Pericles' and 'The Winter’s Tale.'” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59-67.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Illus. John Tenniel. The Annotated Alice. Introd., Notes Martin Gardner. 1960. New York: Wings Books-Random House, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 2719-76.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966.
