strong as soup

[ursula]

I read Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass again (for perhaps the thousandth time, I have documented evidence that I'd read these books before I started kindergarten). This time I read the Norton Critical Edition, which is useful for quotes of the various poems Carroll's verses parody, and occasionally extremely obtuse. There's a long note on transformations in pantomimes, for instance, when the White Queen turns into a sheep-- ignoring the fact that Looking Glass is a dream sequence, and therefore transformations are nearly de rigueur-- and the comments that characters with lower-class accents have accents are equally useless.

I also skimmed the critical essays, but was disappointed. Charles Dodgson never married, is not particularly famous today as a mathematician, and enjoyed taking photographs of little girls. The critical impulse appears to be to take these biographical facts and construct a man who was sad, stuck somewhere between repressed and morally reprehensible, and channeled all the misery in his life into the glory of Alice, while the rest of the time he contented himself with logic puzzles and Victorian sentimentality. I find this reluctance to take a writer on his own terms petty. Why not let him be the satisfied bachelor who preferred the pleasant rooms at Oxford with their twin turrets to the uncertainty of life as a country curate with a burgeoning family?

I objected particularly to the interpretation of Alice's declaration "You're all just a pack of cards!" and the way she shakes the Red Queen back into a kitten at the end of Looking Glass as "wish-fulfilment." Any child who reads these books knows that the ends of Wonderland and Looking Glass are frightening. They're frightening in the same way that dreams are frightening, when things are beginning to go wrong and the fiction is beginning to fall apart and therefore one is beginning to wake up. No child likes these endings, particularly: the dream-logic is persuasive enough that we aren't terribly upset when it turns out to be a dream, but any child with a smidgen of imagination objects to the end of the story and the intrusion of real life. Even if real life turns out to be a kitten.

The one exceptional essay was "What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism" by Michael Holquist, which reads "The Hunting of the Snark" as a precursor to Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, et al., as a story which uses nonsense to prevent an allegorical interpretation and force a reading of the text as fiction, as a work unto itself, not some shoddy correspondence to reality.

Comments

[gwacie.livejournal.com]

I think that it's an unavoidable disease of over-analising literature that invariably conclusions will be drawn about the author, their personal mental problems, what he or she was /really/ saying... when maybe they were just, ya know, writing a story.

[ursula]

There are different styles of literary analysis, and some of them are prone to incomprehensibility rather than personal vendetta . . . I like those sorts more and more, which is frightening.

in the midst of the words he was trying to say...

[hankshiny.livejournal.com]

I really want to read that article about "The Hunting of the Snark", which is one of my favorite poems of all time, and always seemed very modernist/absurdist to me, like a Beckett play except in rhyme and with jokes. I always fantasized about a dramatic production of it, with very low-budget costumes and lots of shouting and maybe a smoke machine.

Re: in the midst of the words he was trying to say...

[ursula]

And a large tail for the Beaver!