Meditations on the Alice in Wonderland Books.

 

I have always thought that Lewis Carrol projected onto the Alice character most of his own identity. A Michael Jackson-styled children's books author using his best pickup lines when taking "innocent" photos of children. I like to think of Lewis Carrol as a Rational man with irrational impulses. A wounded child that was wandering through a grown mans waking nightmare of sexual compulsion and understandable guilt.

That fascination leads to a kind of voyeuristic guilt in the reader (as the readers of this book are almost all adults looking with some undeserved sense of wonder and awe [in the real world] at a book aimed at children [written by a predator]).

The word games overwhelm the intellect of formerly educated adults. And when I read when I was twelve I felt like Alice/Charles Dodson was getting away with blasphemy by showing the absurdity of a framework (logic) that was incapable of justifying itself before a dangerously rebellious madness/nonsense.

There is an overabundance of meaning in this children's book of yin and yang talisman-like, rebellions to the coherent. More rational than reality in its ability to destroy sound arguments. More dangerous than the dream he uses to explain away nightmares. or the smoke screen of out-of-character (for the book, not the author) ending. Where it is all explained away as a dream though ironically ends in another dream where Alice is grown and undamaged looking for something worth saving.

I find this moral authority inside Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carrol) struggle with the Victorian purity ideal Vs the fallen creation we live in disturbing. In an age that presented childhood as a privilege, or an invention for the upper class. As something to be resented by jaded and confused logician's compulsions, strip away any fiction that claimed he was innocent and you are left with an old man in authority telling scary stories to naked children that he instructs on how to pose as he takes their picture. when Framed passed the brilliance of the language of the work and looked at it from a historical perspective it is no surprise that some have confused Lewis Carrol for Jack the ripper in their own wonderland of paranoid delusions.

What we are left with is the greatest work of meta-horror fiction in the English language. A precursor to DADA and surrealism as well as cosmic horror that was written by a Mathematician and logician with the assumed moral authority of a man of god.

One of the Great works of the English language is one of its more problematic ones (when being honest about the character of the author from a historical perspective.)

Lewis Carroll is the Jabberwok and Alice at the center of the nightmare/dream

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." - Neil Gaiman.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”