The Riddler Speaks - Casefile #0126 (Patreon)

EDWARD: Before I answer this question, I would very much like to apologise. Due to a clerical error, I have lost the username of the person who posed this question to me. However, I shall answer it to the best of my ability. 

Unknown asks:  Glad to hear that confidence in your voice again, Edward; you were sounding rather empty without it. Not that it wasn’t without reason, we were all just frightened for you. At any rate, onto a less depressing topic; Can “Because Poe wrote on both” truly count as the answer to Wonderland’s famous riddle when the man who wrote it has stated that the riddle isn’t meant to have an answer? That’s always bugged me something fierce. Glad to have you back - Brain Teaser  

Such a loss of confidence arose from my own grave deception by that which I value most highly – my brain. However, upon recognition and subsequent elimination of the true deceiver, I have rediscovered complete confidence without the need for undue prudence. Truly I was a shadow of my former self throughout this irksome ordeal; were my personal recordings not the property of the estimable LexCorp, I would have them all destroyed. That I should debase myself so publicly loans me a vile cloak that I hope to eventually expunge. I thank you not to bring up this matter again, for I will entertain its existence no longer. 

And now for your query: oh, that cursed riddle shall dog me until the end of days as if it were me who wrote the thing, rather than Carroll. Trouble lies here in the categorization of it as a riddle rather than merely a direct question. I doubt that Carroll meant this to be answered conclusively, and without doubt concerning the correct response. In the story, Alice is not able to answer the question before the conversation moves on. Had a more literal author followed through on this original conversation, Alice would have thought long and hard about her response, and more than likely would have said that she did not know. Whereupon the Mad Hatter would have responded in kind, that he did not know either. Alice would have gotten angry at being deprived of an answer, and so on. Perhaps it could have ended there. But those building blocks of language, how we tinker with them as toys. The question is a non-sequitur in a veritable wonderland of incongruousness; surely the reader did not expect one thing to make sense? I give praise to Carroll for the creation of a phrase that still bears repeating so many years past, for the greatest singular work was its creation, not the pursuit or possibility of a response. That Carroll invented his own unsatisfying solution indicates only that he wished people to finally shut up and stop asking. His response was guff about flat notes that reeked of his desperation to close the chapter once and for all. The Poe answer was someone else finding the common threads; give me a few moments and I could find common threads in anything you felt fit to present me. You see that the author consented to give you a solution, and yet still you are unsatisfied. There is no satisfying solution. Is that clear enough?

Yet I doubt that this will satisfy any of you. If the Riddler says that a riddle has no answer, then what kind of Riddler is he? Not one that needs to answer to any of you, at any rate. I did not craft the damn thing, but I can say for relative certainty that it does not have a glib answer. Surely if one says that there is no answer, then they must be a dullard who merely plays at riddles. It is a block of blurted rhetoric, not a riddle. The deeper problem here is that humans need answers, and to every possible question, without any respect paid to the discovery of the question or what the question could possibly mean. You are all engaged in such a damnable chase to the finish, first to the red light, I was first, hah hah hah. Perhaps, occasionally, you could dwell happily within the unanswerable, content with intelligent discourse and with no desire to scurry for some right answer? Surely if you had answers, you could be happy. Surely if all things made sense, then your existence would not be some jolly fluke of chemistry.

Therefore: my most fervent wish is not that Carroll never crafted the question, as you might expect. No, I would prefer that he was never indulgent enough to come up with some kind of answer to a vain attempt to placate you monkeys. It would have been better to leave you all scrabbling in the mud.