Alice - Initial Thoughts

What makes a book a classic? What makes it worthy of study, commentary and respect? What reactions will I have to such a work?

After hearing the Great Course on Imaginative Writing, taught by Dr. Eric S. Rabkin, there were several books that I was motivated to read. Among them were the Lewis Carroll books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. To help myself get the most out of them, I wanted to read a version which would include the books themselves, and would also contain analysis and commentary. For this purpose, I chose the Norton Critical Edition edited by Donald J. Gray.

I have completed reading the two "Alice" books, which Dr. Rabkin describes as forming a composite novel. A full review will follow when I've gotten through all the supplementary material, but I wanted to get down my thoughts and reactions before reading the final half of the Critical Edition.

Two novels: Though it's presumptuous of me to disagree with my instructor, I see the two stories as separate in several important ways. To me, Through the Looking-Glass is clearly a sequel. Oh, it stands on its own I suppose, but it only has its full meaning when a reader has first experienced Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. And each story has a beginning, middle and end of its own.

Accidental vs. Intentional: Wonderland begins as people who have seen the Alice stories would expect -- Alice chases after a white rabbit and falls down a rabbit hole. From the very beginning, her adventures are accidental. She doesn't know she's dreaming, she doesn't know what's happening, and while she uses her intelligence to try to make good choices, things happen that are unpredictable in a very nonsensical way. Looking-Glass is different, because Alice, having experienced Wonderland once, chooses to go there again. While she does not know exactly what to expect, she does have expectations. Alice has decided that the world through the mirror is Wonderland, and its "reverse" nature will work in certain ways. To be certain, she finds nonsense she does not expect, but the entire adventure is more organized, with a clearer goal.

The difference in themes is characterized by the game pieces which become the primary inhabitants of Wonderland each time. Wonderland's characters are a deck of cards. Cards are random. Chance plays a huge part in the kinds of games which use playing cards. Looking-Glass is peopled by chess pieces, and in fact the whole story is organized around a chess puzzle. Chess is a completely non-random game, in which plans are formulated, puzzles can be created and solved.

Youth vs Adulthood: In my mind, Charles Dodgson was truly Lewis Carroll when he created Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He was creating a world for the Liddle children, so he took on a persona and played with them. There is plenty for adults to enjoy in Wonderland, but the story doesn't mind leaving nonsense as unexplained, because to the smart child, it's fine to have some things that we just accept.

By the time Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass, Alice and her siblings were much older, so even though the character of Alice is only six months older, she walks into Wonderland on a quest to become an adult -- progressing from pawn to Queen as a clear goal. To me, it seemed that Dodgson was letting go of the youths he loved and letting them grow up. In Wonderland days, Jabberwocky could have been left to stand as a nonsense poem. Because it falls in Looking-Glass, it needs some attempt at explanation, even though Alice finds out that sometimes people who claim to know don't really know at all.

In Looking-Glass, Alice also deals with more confusion related to participating in the adult world. Manners are more important in Looking-Glass. Meaning what you say, and understanding various meanings of words and how they might be misconstrued is dealt with more frequently. Wonderland is more concerned with including the fantastic from a child's repertoire of experience and mixing true nonsense into it. Alice tries, in Wonderland, to force some sense into the Mad Hatter's tea party, she tries to play croquet by the strange rules, but is thwarted, and that's just OK -- she somehow always knows she can grow big at the end and take care of things. In Looking-Glass, she needs to become a Queen, and then she can take control.

One of the disservices that the film versions of the Alice books does is to mix the two stories so liberally, blurring the distinction in atmosphere and theme. Though, to be sure, I would not want to cut the Hatter, the Tweedles, Cheshire Cat and Caterpillar from a film by leaving out Wonderland, and I would not want to miss Jabberwocky, Humpty-Dumpty or The Walrus and the Carpenter from Looking-Glass.

Math: Math? One of the things I had always heard about the Alice books was how much "math" there is in them. I don't see it yet. I hope to get more of an understanding by reading the commentary. Oh, I see some logic, and that's a basis for math, but there's not much of it, and as for typical math, the only real references I recall are to addition, subtraction and division when Alice is with the Queens in Looking-Glass, and even then it was more about word-play than math.

So, I still have things to learn.

Which is nice.