Saturday 16 August 2014

The Artistic Intention Behind 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'


Being the most prolific example of what some would call the 'nonsense' genre, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a rich haven of romantic symbollism. I can't tell you how much fun I had analyzing all the different events in the book, trying to make sense out of nonsense. The truth is that anyone who has managed to graduated from primary school can sit there and discover hidden message after hidden message, the lake of tears, the grinning cat, the hedgehog croquet balls, I could have gone absolutely wild when studying the intentions behind this book.

But I didn't, because in reality we already know Lewis Carrol's intention, he wrote the story in order to entertain specific little girls whom he knew individually, so what would be going inside this man's head as he is writing this story? Everyone knows what it's like to try to entertain children, it's a little daunting, because if you're boring them they'll soon let you know it, so entertainment had to have been one of the major factors that he wanted to bring to the tale, and indeed he certainly managed it, the bright and crazy world of Wonderland would have any child around that age on the edge of their seats, but does this mean that the symbolism of the book is arbitrary? Hmm, that I'm not so sure of.

Whilst writing this book, Lewis must have spent the majority of the time following his instincts, for only your instincts can lead you down a rabbit hole, through a shrunk door, and down the lane to play croquet with a sentient pack of cards. If all of that came from serious thought, Carroll would have been a lunatic. But there is wisdom and meaning in that kind of visceral artistic mess, a child might run his red paint brush across a sheet of paper angrily, not rather knowing what he's doing, and the image on the paper would be deemed valueless, but if you ask some people, the single, jittery brush of red symbolizes the child's strike of anger, of course, the kid was probably just bored. The point is, nothing is nothing, and everything is something, I believe that Carroll wrote this story with no great intention other than to entertain the children he adored, but hidden within that intention are the originators of his seemingly random ideas.

Let's put a pin in that, because for a very short while I want to address a point that many who read this article may find lacking, this is the idea that Lewis Carroll was a pedophille. It's not very difficult to see why the idea has become so popular, it's dramatic, it puts a disturbing twist on the story we all (vaguely) know. The idea of Carroll writing this story for children whom he was sexually attracted to, perhaps as a substitute for the impulses which he could never act on. But, let's cast that aside, because to put it bluntly, it's bullshit. The reason why people believe this is because Carroll used to take naked photographs of the children he knew, but what people fail to realize is, in the nineteenth century, naked children were not a problem. In modern society we teach children that their bodies are shameful and should be hidden, but in Carroll's time naked children were on postcards, it was completely normal. The photographs he took were always in an outdoor environment, he loved to have them be near trees or plants, undoubtedly because the theme of his photography was nature and purity.

Anyway, I'll waste no more time on that deluded theory, let's find that pin shall we? If Carroll was writing for these children, his motive certainly would have been to entertain them, but it soon becomes clear reading the book that he couldn't help but use the story as a way to teach the children things he thought they ought to know. “If you drink from a bottle marked poison, it is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later,” he writes early on, one can imagine he worried about the little girls drinking something dangerous and used this as an opportunity to teach them that. So with this established, are there any other lessons for children in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

Well, like I've said before, you could go crazy with the imagery, but I do think that the personality of the characters Alice meets are something of a warning from Carroll about what people in the real world can be like. “We're all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat grins, indeed growing up it often feels that everywhere we turn, people are mad, and that we are the only sane person left. This isn't a story where the girl runs around and has fun with every creature she meets, Alice has trouble understanding the motives of the others, she goes from creature to creature never really managing to fit in and always finding conflict, whether it's involving herself or not. When she meets the mouse, she finds a conflict that she has never noticed was there, that is the one between a mouse and a cat, Alice loves her cat Dynah, but feels great sympathy for the mouse, she learns that, like anything in Wonderland, conflict is not simple, and there is no good or bad side, sometimes it is simply there as part of the natural havoc of the world.

After she drowns in her own tears, converses with the mouse, watches as the critters engage in a pointless contest of which nobody wins, Alice makes a curious statement, she says that the room around her has changed of it's own accord, whilst she wasn't paying attention, her surroundings have transformed. You may call me overzealous but I do think this was written by Carroll to teach the children that their world will change, as you grow up, the aura of everything around you transforms completely, you can be in the same room you were in when you were four and feel like it was a whole other universe. The room had changed because Alice had changed due to her experience.

The most interesting message I picked up from the book is “Don't trust them.” As a child, you almost have no choice but trust the people around you, you are still discovering the world yourself, and this is exactly the situation Alice finds herself in. After the lake of tears, when the animals are trying to figure out what to do to dry themselves, they are all absolutely useless, each one of them radiates a sense of authority, that they know what to do, but they never do manage to dry themselves or anyone else, and Alice is wasting her time by listening to them. They organize a race which nobody wins, they do no thinking, but continue to act mindlessly. Let's face it, that's the majority of adults isn't it? Children do more thinking than adults, and often, they are much smarter.

As a writer, the most valuable thing I've learned from reading Carroll is the efficiency of very basic descriptive imagery and the importance having trust in the mind of the reader. Like any writer I have a tendency to be superfluous, when I edit my stories I spend most of the time trimming the fat, but I do still like the narrative to be thick and juicy. I think that's why I was so uncomfortable when I first began reading Alice, the prose was just so... basic, “The rabbit was white, it ran, it jumped down a whole, Alice jumped after it,” (please know that is not a direct quotation.) If it was me, describing that sequence would have been a few paragraphs, I would have wanted to make sure the reader was really paying attention and knew every detail, every sense that the characters was feeling, because the moment was so important. But Carroll? Pfft, he knows you can read, the rabbit jumped down the whole, there you go. It's the most magical image of the nineteenth century, but the magic wasn't written from Carroll's quill, it came from our minds.

He knew it was captivating, and fussing over the moment would have been a distraction. I think it is a very modern practice for literature not to trust in the reader's imagination, but instead to describe every single little detail, perhaps a trend originating from the television and film industry surrounding us in imagery all the time, books are often written as though they have to replicate these in language format, but they don't, they're stories.

At the same time, I feel that as a writer I am very descriptive at heart, and it comes from an honest place, so who knows how this revelation will effect my work. Though I don't think I will directly make an active decision against it, understanding a new perspective of artistry is an enriching experience that I always enjoy.


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