Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
In light of the new Tim Burton film I though it providential that I have arrived at the letter 'C' in my semi-alphabetical exploration of my bookshelf. Hopefully next week's post will be about the film which I hope to have seen by then but today I am writing of the particularly confusing opus of Lewis Carroll's known as Alice in Wonderland (and we'll go ahead and include Through the Looking-glass as well).
This book is one of the most special books in my collection as it was a gift from my late grandmother, the woman to whom I can attribute a great portion of my love for reading. What's more, as you will see from the picture below, she seems to have anticipated my love of reading and of books before anyone else. When I was quite young Grandma Jane used to pick me up from school every Wednesday, bring me home, and read with me. Unbeknown to me each week she had spent nearly the whole week prior deliberating over what book she would read with me. Though I have books that are older and even ones that have been in the family longer it is particularly heartwarming to know that this was the first ever book in my collection (by that standard I have been collecting books for 25 years!).
Since I've started at the beginning so far I have to not that the first experience of this book that I ever had were its pictures. I'm not sure of John Tenniel or Henry Holiday's status among readers of Carroll but their art has defined for me the quintessential look for the book's pinafored protagonist. Before I could understand the book (an ironic statement which I will discuss below) I used to flip through its pages just examining the confusing but expressive features of each of the strange characters depicted there. I even remember wondering how the Jabberwock fit into the plot. Now that I have read both Alice books, I smile wryly at this notion.
When I first read Alice I could not help but hope that there was something really important going on, as if the convoluted plot and colorful cast held some deep secret that could be unlocked with the proper key. I have since been dissuaded from this opinion (which I still feel is a loss-of-innocence moment for me) and rather consider wonderland and its inhabitants to merely represent an early exploration of modernism or absurdism in which the point is that there isn't one. Being at this point a medievalist and tending to study literature with a sort of Ent-ish view of the written word (medieval writers don't tend to say anything unless its worth taking a long time to say) Carroll's narrative is a bit disappointing and even somewhat annoying. That said; I want to clarify that it doesn't make me love Alice any less since her and her hatters and mock turtles are a fun crew for leisurely reading. But if someone out there has this key that I mentioned that will unlock the absurdist mystery I would love to hear it.
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Carroll, Lewis. The Best of Lewis Carroll. [city?]: Castle, 1983
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