ALICE IN WONDERLAND
BY JANINE DESPINETTE
4TH July 1862: A teacher at Oxford University called Charles Dogson tells a story to three little girls, while rowing them across the River Isis, not far from the secondary school where they all used to live.
1865: he publishes this story as Alice in Wonderland, signing it with his pen name Lewis Carroll. Just with this book for children he became an author known throughout the world... by adults.
History of a book:
The history of a literary book is often interesting. And Alice in Wonderland offers the reader a whole world of study, particularly through its illustrations and illutrators. As a moralizing tale, Alice was written by an honourable yet young maths teacher at Oxford for some little girls. This story made clear refence to other children's English literary books, with characters borrowed from Nursery Rhymes and with fashionable songs in the reign of Queen Victoria. A tale in which the events were invented after oral improvisation and with sequences of English and even British words with double meaning. Alice is, even after 100 years, not only one of the literary books that has charmed many people --be them illustrators, painters or film-makers--, but also a source of inspiration for various artists belonging to different Art Schools. Alice has been translated to more than 50 languages --including Braille, Corean, Esperanto, Hindi, Lithuanian, Swahili and Thai, just to name the less common ones. And up until now, Alice has been illustrated by at least 250 artists.
Graphic interpretations:
To begin with, we find the English speaking artists: from John Tenniel, illustrator of the first edition for MacMillan, to Anthony Browne for the last appearance in Walkers (London 1988).
Then there are the others: Latin, German, Slavic, Asian illustrators.
in France : Nicole Claveloux (Grasset-Ruy-Vidal 1974) and Rico Lins (Hachette livre de poche 1980)
in Spain: Lola Anglada (Mentoza 1928 - Juventud 1971)
in Sweden: Tove Jansson (Bonniers 1966)
in Brasil: Darcy Penteado (Companhia editora nacinal 1970)
in Slovakia: Dusan Kallay (Mlade Leta 1981)
in Russia: Kalinovsky (Detskaya literatura Moscou 1977/1980) and Maj Mituric ( Chudozestvennja Litteratura Moscou 1977), just to give some significant examples.
When you have the possibility --as I had in autumn 1983 thanks to the exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris-- to contemplate all its graphic interpretations, you will surely wonder at the magic of a text that has driven many artists to draw, a character who is nothing but a little girl and a tale that is nothing but a child's dream.
Literary Analysis:
The work of Lewis Carroll has often been analysed on a literary basis, but also from a phylosophic, theologic, psychologic and sociologic point of view. The heirs of Romanticism find in Alice a worshiping innocence and an ingenous soul. Scientists are interested in the mathematic logic of Dogson (alias Carroll). Sociologists see in the story all religious conflicts and political controversies that the author may have found in his University environment. Psychoanalysists relate Alice's adventures underground to birth traumas and surrealist artists consider her initial journey as "an accomplished pattern of dreams". Both Gilles Deleuze in his work La logique du sens and jean Gattéegno in his introduction to the translation of Alice, they have opened up the way to a modern thought on the great influence that our childish readings have.
However, there is still little work done on the influence of Alice's character and her adventure on artists such as Salvador Dali or Dagmar Berkora. Is that so because the wonderings and anxieties of a 7-year-old girl searching for her own identity and role within our society have always found a friend in the artist who, by nature, questions every new piece of art? Or rather because the artist finds in Carroll's words his/her own professional questionings? Body distortions, visual inversions, no temporal or spatial notion, verbal expressions that bring about new mental images... all this is indeed the imaginative world of the man of images.
Lewis Carroll, man of images:
In my opinion, an analysis of Alice would be fascinating if done through the sensitive and universal language of the IMAGE, for Dogson (alias Carroll) was himself a man of image. He draws and takes pictures almost everyday (his photograph albums are already published). Thanks to his photography and logic, Alice's author has disguised the symbolism of "this unfinished part of Chess game of dreams" into non-sensical games. And leaving it unfinished, he is leaving it open for others to interpret it again. To begin with, let's see Alice's PORTRAIT.
Alice never described:
Today we know the drawings of Alice's Adventures Underground that Carroll offered as a Christmas present to the little girl Alice Liddel. These drawings are perfect proofs of his creative originality and his avant-gardism, like the tale, much ahead of his time. As a sensible photographer, Carroll managed to personify the heroine of his story through images. She is presented with an inquiring look and a smile even before the tale begins, but but she is never described to the reader. She can also be always the same and different altogether, according to the eyes that rest on her. Lewis Carroll will never determine memories through words.
"Alice, sitting on the grass, was getting tired of having nothing to do. She took a look at the book that her sister was reading, but the book had no images or dialogues at all. And, she thought, what's the use of a book without images or dialogues? Thus she stayed there, thinking (as far as possible since the heat of the sun made her mind dull) whether the pleasure to plait a garland of daisies would make for standing up and fetching them, when suddently a pink-eyed rabbit run over to her..."
Space-image: it's Alice and her realtionship with the others.
Space-text: it's Alice's point of view on the others and on herself that Carroll tries to explain.
As if he was taking pictures, Carroll makes every effort to represent his heroine in situation:
Curious ALICE, crying ALICE, ALICE talking to the rabbit, the mouse, the dog, the cat, the pigeon, to the kings and queens of playcards, to chess pawns. Alice and her metamorphosis: excessively small, excessively big. But always as actress or audience. And whatever the size of the image might be or whatever role this image might play on the page, Lewis Carroll always focalises the reader's attention on his heroine's point of view. And this point of view of hers, surprisingly fixed somewhere else, that the reader cannot see, is so inquiring for Carroll that he shows it in the text so that we can fully read the story.
Artists's reading:
After 100 years, artists have answered the call of seung beyond "the visible" and they let themselves be tempted to create what Carroll just suggested but Alice's eyes saw.
In Visages d'Alice, Christiane Clrec explains that, in a context where photographic reality and vivid fiction are intrinsicatelly mixed, the fact of comparing illustrions and docuament and reading comments, drove her to bring to the fore different cultural approaches and education concepts. It is said that there was also an extraordinary movement towards appropiation and continuity of a work through visual equivalence games, which changed according to generations and countries in a global dreaming scene. It was imperiously necessary to relate graphic connotations to the geographic environment of the reader through translatiojns and new editions. Alice's power is certainly based on interpretative shifts depending on sociological and topographical situations, which are undoubtedly related to the illustrator rather that the "so-called" universal stereotypes of films.
In the visual conception and production of Alice's Adventures Underground, Lewis Carroll is known to have assumed the literary marginality of children's literature. Anyway, in 1996, we can now assert that Carroll opened up the way for new generations of artists who, confident in success, dare to specialize in graphic arts and in a new kind of books where image and text have both the power.
And in this confrontation for Alice's portrait, the illustrator's choice may tend to search for an art aesthetically valid at the new generation's eyes.