"When I was young, my ringlets waved
And curled and crinkled on my head:
And then they said “You should be shaved,
And wear a yellow wig instead.”
We all know how much our dear Alice, with her wonders and looking-glass puzzles, has become one of the most iconic figures in Western culture. Whether in the underworld, in Wonderland or other side of the mirror, Alice has multiplied in a large kaleidoscope, always finding admirable characters who come up with conundrums that still challenge our minds. First immortalized in the canonical illustrations of the illustrious Sir John Tenniel, her worlds unfold in vertigos, paradoxes and metamorphoses. Surrealistic? Mercantilistic? Psychedelic? Allicedelic? Alienated? Alicinated? Instead of the question “Who is Alice?, many ways for who Alice might come to be unfold in today’s world.
We must not forget that the other side of Alice’s mirror is full of secrets, dream spirals and reversals of all sorts. In this crazy and nonsensical new world, the girl came upon a curious and despicable character, a wrinkled wasp in a shaggy, blowsy yellow wig, sighing in the woods, brainless and abandoned under a crackling tree. Such a bizarre figure, present in the sketches of Lewis Carroll’s text, was excluded from the final version of the story because it had hurt the fine sensibilities of the sophisticated, aristocratic illustrator. Tenniel said the episode didn‘t interest him at all. A wasp in a wig? That would be contemptuous of all good taste and proper sense!
All evidence points to this insect being poor, ugly, unhappy, scruffy, grumpy, old, hypochondriac, and waspish: a human insect, an excluded. But it had its grace. The elegant and well-mannered Alice even tried to fix the creature‘s inadequate appearance, but it was useless. The wig was not only bright yellow, but tied with a handkerchief because it was all tangled and tumbling sideways like a pile of seaweed. Totally inadequate! Alice gave up on the Wasp, as did the writer and illustrator. How often we give things like this up in our history and storytelling? With exceptions, among academic studies and appendices, the Wasp is not in the movies, nor in the operas, fashion, theatre, or any of Alice’s vast iconographic universe and its alicinatory apparitions.
Though a sleazy and despicable creature, what is remarkable and unique about him is his yellow wig, the colour of wasps and jaundice. But that is the cause of much of his problems. In five stanzas he tells Alice of his terrible mistake in letting friends persuade him to shave his head for a wig. All his subsequent misfortunes are attributed to this unwise recklessness. He submits to the demands of his manipulative social group, and then admits that he became ridiculous: his wig doesn’t fit, he can’t keep it straight. He takes offence when they laugh at him, and suffers bullying and rejection. Although he does not accept help, he is happy to tell his story, and so it is retold. Exaggeratedly and extravagantly, of course.
Faced with this sad figure, we can remember that he is, above all, a Looking-Glass animal. And as the rules prescribe, everything is reversed, or at least completely different, as Alice suspected it would be when she considered the world beyond what she could see through the mirror in her living room. While crossing the mirror into our world, the Wasp becomes another, transverses and reverses itself in the post-mirror culture that crosses quantic wormholes daring the estrangement, the entanglement, the nuisance, affirming the difference in the margins of canonical culture and the fake- make-believe reality. The totemic creature of the bewigged Wasp travels the world, welcoming and pollinating the unreasonable and metamorphic, man and woman, divine and monstrous, wild animal and humanoid, tiny and giant, elder and child, sweet and cruel, overflowing, transclassifiable.
The Wasp observes that Alice’s eyes are so close that she could have arranged herself very well with one eye. He mistook Alice for a bee, as so many other characters in both Wonderland and Looking- Glass Land destabilize the well-behaved girl, sometimes as a snake, a flower, an insect, perhaps even another girl, a piece of a game for which she does not know the rules and where she loses her name, sometimes at the risk of losing her head. She was despised by the egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty, who considered her too banal. It would be more cubist, for instance, having two eyes on the same side of her face, or a mouth on the forehead, something more extravagant, astonishing, nonsensical after all. Challenged by a caterpillar smoking a hookah, Alice ate a mushroom that butterflyed her mind. Alice asked the caterpillar if after becoming a chrysalis and then a butterfly, it would feel a little queer. Not at all!
If male wasps are harmless, females feed on other insects, such as caterpillars, spiders and flies, which they paralyze with their stingers. With their strong jaws, they remove the victim’s head, legs and wings, then the victim’s body becomes pulp that feeds their larvae. Bewigged wasps live on the margins of society, devouring what others regard as worthless, useless, weird. The act transforms, displaces, resignifies. They disturb gender and species, with paradoxical bodies, unimaginable images, at once Alice and a fabulous monster, which reflect and blend into an impossible mise en abyme. Alice doubts the sameness and wonders, "If I’m not the same, then who am I?" In the Wasp, the excluded and rejected returns and unfolds into new games beyond being or nonbeing, revealing new faces of the enigma.
Wigs have a long and curly history, rich in codes and breakdowns. They have marked professions, social classes, genders, sexualities, standards, also giving way to subversion and free expression. In the culture of hair straightening, they refute the commandments and the confined haircuts. Wasps wear stupendous, whimsical, freakish or impossible wigs, inwardly-growing wigs, upside-down, lunatic. They infiltrate the subconscious like multidimensional magical insects, traversing dadaist happenings, expressionist nightmares, surrealist bestiaries, ancestral circuses, grotesque monster B-movies and non-Darwinian genetic and poetic mutations. Powerful shamanic animals attack the fear of ridicule, separate the different from the different and all their inventions, inversions and interventions. They curl and overflow their hair in the underground night of queer wasp power, where the boundaries of the acceptable, good taste, common sense, and right or wrong are dismantled, blurring boundaries in the adventure of post-identity. And the boundaries of the ugly, the untameable and the unnameable, the fringes of Alice’s virtuous path in search of an impeccable and ideal self that always escapes the borders.
On a journey that defies logic, the Wasp became an activist of monster culture, a sphinx who defies light and shadow, multiplies in mirrors and woods where beings reinvent their names and believe in the most impossible: the truly possible. A walking metamorphosis, losing the old opinions formed about everything. An attack on the obvious existence of things all the time. Becoming queen at the end of a Looking-Glass adventure, Alice returns to her old world, apparently, disturbingly, contrariwise. Between life and the dream, Alice doubts whether she dreamed her own dream or if it was someone else’s dream or even the great dream we all partake. An invitation to re-dream ourselves without limits, in the kingdom of the gardens and forest of enigmagic alicinations, an alicescope of winging wigs. Queerer and queerer!
The moral of this is: Being different is not different if everything is different; and yet, do not be indifferent. Or: Likely always like to be unlike.
Allish Waspeculate [alias Wasp Inawig]
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