There is something Alice01: 05 27/02/2010, AS Byatt, books, culture, characteristics, Lewis Carroll, The Guardian, Guardian Unlimited

There is something Alice01: 05 27/02/2010, AS Byatt, books, culture, characteristics, Lewis Carroll, The Guardian, Guardian Unlimited

With its unforgettable creatures, play with language and logic and growing curious hero, Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is not intense, exciting, different from other imaginary worlds. Week In Tim Burton's film is released, AS Byatt takes another trip down the rabbit hole to celebrate classics which first enjoyed as a child

As a child, I think, I kept the books of Alice in a different picture in my mind of other books about imaginary children. I do not think that was read to me - there was a "war". I think they were surprised when I was seven or eight years younger than Alice Liddell was on the afternoon of the famous "gold" in 1862 when she and her two sisters reign of madness Bridge, Oxford, Godstow with 30 years of age , Lewis Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth office, and told the first version of the story. The imagination of a child reader lives in the world of a book in many different ways, depending on the book. She walks imaginary depths of the forest, which is in desperate animals, flirt with boys brave. The Harvard scholar Maria Tatar has wisely observed that children tend not to "identify" with the children of fiction - they are a little apart in the world of fiction and intensely watch the people and action. But the wonders and the world through the mirror, I always knew that, unlike other imaginary worlds. Nothing can be changed, although things in the ever-changing history. There was, so to speak, nothing happens inside the party off against the Mad Hatter tea, or beyond the garden gate of the Red Queen. Carroll moves to its readers as it moves the chess pieces and letters. This does not mean that the reader's experience of the world is alive, exciting and absolutely memorable. It's just different.

Spaces in these books actually happen with arbitrary real dreams, of the long fall through the earth to the room behind closed doors to the pool of tears. No other book in which both the sizes and distances are so problematic: Alice expands and falls, she has to learn to go backward to go forward when it is through the mirror, the progress in the world in search of glass is mad rushes and jumps too fast around the chessboard. As a child I realized that this was not a surrealist nonsense - it was some other type of order, as orders wonderful that we now see in the fractal geometry of chaos. Another thing that is rare in the reading of Alice is that readers - even readers of seven or eight - can not stop thinking about the language. The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes, including allegations of Humpty Dumpty of arbitrary power over their own words (a word means what I choose it to mean ") are the most striking. Alice is as much a part of this tissue as linguistic creatures she meets. As it falls through the earth does not feel the terror, she thinks, speaks for itself and analysis of what is happening and can happen. She is willing to give as good as it gets in arguments with pigeons, worms, frog footmen, smiling cats and red and white queens. The main emotion is trying to make sense against the increasing likelihood.

The emphasis on language in the experience of reading Alice is enhanced by wild poems. As a child I could sense that these are parodies of "real" poems respectable Alice tells you - you can feel "You are old, Father William" is relentlessly evil as recited. "Jabberwocky" haunts the rhythms of the brain, but the words have meaning nonsense, the reader is told time. Order and disorder are very close. Intellect offers more pleasure of the emotions - perhaps our first prolonged experience of intellectual excitement.

I put the books in my head with half mnemonics displayed. The Alice books sit separately as a kind of cat cradle of brilliant cubic thread colors - red, white, black, green grass. Now also think about the buildings and the impossible worlds in the drawings of MC Escher.

Alice in Wonderland was written in 1862 and published in 1865. Through the Looking Glass was published in 1871. Books for older children that shape the imagination of successive generations that followed and many were written around the turn of the 20th century. Kipling's Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill, E Nesbit stories of children meeting psammeads and phoenixes and other stubborn beasts, the tales of George MacDonald Curdie the miner and his princess, tales of L Frank Baum's land Oz, The Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mrs. Molesworth The Cuckoo Clock, by Kenneth Grahame Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan by JM Barrie, including Treasure Island, with children making their own lives and destinies in strange worlds beyond the everyday experience of family and school. The children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy, which is new in the literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and risks differently from those of any children in the real fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel) or in the novels of children who grow - Pip on the tombstone of terror by his parents, Oliver Twist at the orphanage, David Copperfield, tormented by Murdstone, Jane Eyre, in the Red Room, or angry, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

Some great characters in the books of children are orphans, orphans or partial, temporary or orphans whose parents have disappeared. Kipling, in his autobiographical story for adults, "Baa Baa Black Sheep", one of the best stories I have read, tells of children separated from their parents suddenly five years in India and sent to live with a tyrant religious dark, which pursues the boy and did not realize they are blind. One of the orphans more moves is Mary in the secret garden. Mary is double insulated. She was born in India to a mother who neglects flibbertigibbet fashion and leaves the care of officials. Her mother is killed by cholera, with most homes, not realizing that the child is found alone in the house of death. The fact that she does not quite understand what has happened raises the reader's sympathy from the beginning. She is a nasty, self-focus on the child, sent to stay in the house of an uncle in Yorkshire invisible, absent. My children's response to attempts to Mary to give meaning to the world was the opposite of my response to Alice. I felt protective towards her and at the same time, I did see the world from within. I was embarrassed with and for her. Shame is a great point of sympathy between reader and character. People (Alice is never really uncomfortable, but people are constantly trying Wonderland his unit in that state.) Officials and ordinary are a kind of Mary and teach your kindness. However, his malice and his ability to temper tantrums become a force when he meets the spoiled and careless Colin valid, another auto-focus on the child - seen by the reader, I think, through the eyes of Mary, hectares to be in ordinary life.

Another orphan in a strange world is Griselda in The Cuckoo Clock, who goes to live with two aunts - the reader of the works that this is after the death of their parents. This former home of the "stepmother" is kind and gentle, but the child is isolated and thoughtful - and again the child reader can sympathize with their isolation. She befriends a magical cuckoo a cuckoo clock that leads to strange worlds - not just "fairyland", as expected, but other places full of butterflies and nodding mandarins. Even visits to the ballroom of the old house in the past and sees her beautiful dancing, laughing young mother. Both the real and magical characters Griselda are anxious to show how they behave well, to make their classes, not to sulk, not the rebels. Again the child reader sees the world from the viewpoint of Griselda, learn as she learns, feels his pleasures and anxieties. Ms. Molesworth is a very present voice as a narrator: "For the fairies, you know, kids, however, charming, sometimes very strange to have to do with them. They do not like being intercepted, or treaties, except with great respect, and have their own ideas about what is right and what is not, I can assure you. "This is the voice of the narrator's Mother Goose, and serves to distance Griselda - we do not feel their pains or joys we feel strongly as those of Mary in the secret garden. We told a story successfully. We know we must and will end well.

Two lonely children thought when the search for analogies with Alice are very different from her and others. They are in Mowgli's Jungle Books and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is literally torn from his life, already orphaned with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas when a tornado takes her home, far from the Land of Oz, where land and kills the Wicked Witch of the East . As Dorothy travels through Oz, rescue the heartless Tin Man, the brainless Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, which might be thought to resemble Alice travel through the Looking Glass world in the company's white horse, sheep, and the Mosquito sad.

But Dorothy did not really have much character - least of his three companions, however do not provide room for the imagination of the reader to grasp. Oz, with its four corners, two Wicked Witches and two good witches, and the Emerald City of Oz in the middle, it feels like a construction and not a dream. It is said that an allegory of utopian socialism, and has said that a tract allegory against the commercialization of America. Undoubtedly, it is about America in a way very different from the way the stories of Mowgli, Puck of Pook's Hill, and Kim are on the British Empire. Baum was both a great storyteller and a writer with designs on their audience. I read a very compelling case for the idea that the yellow brick road and take the silver shoes Dorothy from the witch dead are an allegory of the 19th century disputes about bimetallism and the gold standard. Even the name Oz was presented for free silver one ounce of gold on the way to a freely. (The shoes were changed to Ruby in the 1939 film.) Jack Zipes has argued convincingly that the Baum 14 novels about the land of Oz is a critique of America of its time, its machinery, its products, its policy. Oz, with its witch-type and female powers, is the utopia that is against, not for the United States.

The way the story confirms the idea that is firmly controlled by the beliefs and meanings. Baum said he was removing the old world of fairy tales. This is his 1900 introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

However, the old time fairy tale, having served generations will now be described as "historic" in the children's library because it is time for a series of new "fairy tales" in which the stereotyped genie , dwarves and fairies eliminated, along with all the horrible incidents and blood curdling conceived by its authors to a fearsome moral point of each story. Modern education includes morality, and therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses and all unpleasantness.

"Amerika, Du hast es besser," Goethe wrote, comparing new U.S. clean the old continent, with its castles and decaying dark tales. European readers may feel that there are things missing from Baum's imaginary world. The mediator of this world for us in some ways similar to the way in which Mrs Molesworth average fairies and the shadows of The Cuckoo Clock. As Zipes points out, "Baum's own writing style and the style of government of the [good witches] Ozma and Glinda are strikingly similar: they are soft, and attentive to the wishes and needs peculiar to the characters." Zipes believes that the Oz books as examples of "psychological principles of object relations that are to guide parents in raising their children." Interestingly, this does not lead to the invention of characters whom the reader can insert his imagination. What is wonderful about Oz is the detail of things - yellow bricks, glasses emerald oilcans. Dorothy is right. Alice tries furiously to understand.

Mowgli and Kim, unaccompanied children living in Kipling's India is, moreover, wise, witty and brave. The worlds they inhabit are open to the reader's imagination. I was surprised, on rereading the books of the forest, how much of the forest and its people who had done it myself, events and places which were not in the original tales. Not exactly what I "was" Mowgli. I have a disproportionate resistance to the idea of "identification" with anyone, fictional or real. Mowgli is unique in a world with its own strange rules and inhabitants, as Alice is not alone. You have to make sense of it, and quickly, the Bandar-log rolling chatting with snakes. He is both self-reliance and love for the creatures who are not their fathers, or allegories of the human family members, but the animals in a world of talking beasts. But as reader lives, along with Mowgli - or for that matter with Rikki-Tikki-Tavi chase snakes through bathrooms. There's nobody like Kipling smells and sounds, and the peculiar placement of a compensation or a garden bungalow so that the reader knows that the world extends far beyond what can be equally full of interest, excitement, fear . I did not want to return Mowgli to humans. I cared so much and so little about his mother as he did, although he needed to save them from ugly and stupid villagers cooperation. It's made to look through the eyes of Mowgli (though not exclusively), you can not get into Alice.

The lone child accompanied by others as a shadow clings to Jim in Treasure Island. Theirs is a first person narrative, which is the frequency of detachment as is participation. However, the smells, the fear, the effort, the attempt to read the face strange and dangerous, and seemingly minor, become part of your consciousness. The reader can walk into the unexplored parts of the Treasure Island, you can imagine being abandoned. Jim comes to his history as his father dies and her world is precarious, like Mary in the secret garden. Jim's mother is that at first, having nothing but his gold coins because the dead pirate's treasure. The story of adventure begins when Jim leaves home.

In English fairy tales the human characters are often dragged to the place where fairies live in a tunnel, between the roots of trees. In the tales of George MacDonald on Curdie, The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie is a miner, elves are underground and the princess makes a trip without fear save Curdie. Alice goes down the rabbit hole, the Darling children are in the underground lair Lost Boys' in Neverland. The other place where children between two types of reality tend to move it along endless corridors of the rooms with closed doors - and Griselda Mary Accordingly both looking for a way in. Alice's adventures in the underground, as in The Cuckoo Clock, and differently, in The Secret Garden, to find a way to places full of brightness and color in the gardens. Where are dark in color because they are themselves. Mary comes from India, Kipling's world is rich and bright, but it becomes dry and yellow - as she is beige and yellow. Dorothy and her dog Toto away from Kansas to the Munchkins blue gray, the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City (although its brightness is an illusion given by the emerald-colored glasses). Ms. Griselda Molesworth writes: "A girl in a gray suit and beaver hat Merino gray, and gray gloves tippet - gray together, even in the eyes, all but her round face and brown hair bright pink. His name is still rather gray, since it was Griselda. "

Alice looks through "a small step, not much bigger than a rat" in "the most beautiful garden you've ever seen. I wanted out of that dark hall and wander among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains, but she could not even get his head out the door. "

Griselda, with the cuckoo, Butterfly visits Earth, a world in which the flowers of every color imaginable and unimaginable are arranged in regular order, and where the butterflies are diligently gathering flowers paint colors darker "than down "in the world of Griselda. Ms. Molesworth constant mix the Protestant work ethic with magic - the butterflies of work to the point of exhaustion. In the real world of Secret Garden Madonna shows the key to the walled garden, buried for 10 years, a friendly Robin, and restore the garden to life and gray as the winter to spring, with the assistance of Dickon, a boy from people like Puck or Pan, which has a following of wild creatures - squirrels, a tower, a rabbit. The "magic" in the garden, also restores the hypochondriac Colin to health and color. I think the idea of what Morris calls "a small garden near / Set thick with lily and red rose" is particularly English. American children are released from the prairies (or Central Park, forms magic) and Australian children discover inside.

Imaginary worlds are full of imaginary creatures. Real fairy tales are full of talking animals (horses, donkeys, pigs) and animal assistants (sturgeon, pigeons, foxes) that come and go as the needs of the plot and then disappear. MacDonald elves are accompanied by all sorts of ugly and deformed beasts; Curdie in a later book has an army of them, including Lisa, a dog with elephant legs and shark teeth and leg-snake, which has a head with wings, a long sinuous body, and four short legs, near the tail. Gillian Beer has written about these in terms of Darwin's speculation about acquired characteristics. The creatures in the Alice books are talkative and argumentative. They have human characteristics, but are not human. The White Rabbit is a rabbit in a waistcoat with a pocket watch, the Dormouse is a baby, the monstrous crow is a crow. Alice packages humans and animals as well as "creatures" and think they do keep talking so much. In The Wind in the Willows, all characters are creatures - badger, mole rat, toad - while English are unmarried have grown and children and rural areas. Mole got up from his own black hole and sees the gleam of the river and ducks, or walks through the Wild Wood fear of weasels and stoats. Especially in the Books in the jungle, the creatures are the characters and creatures. A wolf pack hunting as a pack of wolves, snakes move like snakes.

Film productions of the Alice books, and much psychoanalytic comments tend to dwell on the frightening aspects of incomprehensible creatures - the execution-obsessed queen, the big boy in the small room. Alice Jan Svankmajer's surreal 1988 film takes place in a dark house, with peeling paint dead, menacing teeth and threatening beasts of scissors and knives. It's a good movie, but not Alice, moving safely through the brilliant time. Martin Gardner, editor of the splendid Annotated Alice, points to a series of jokes about death in the stories. The first is when Alice comments "Why, I would not say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!" and ironically the narrator adds that "it was very likely true. But Alice is not thinking about death and neither does the reader. She is not afraid in the woods, where all things lose their names - will figure things out. Both Gardner and Jonathan Miller, in his remarks about his 1966 film, television Alice in Wonderland, decline the insistence of the Freudian interpretation that begins with holes and keys. Miller, a very successful given to all creatures as human beings - the foreign versions of Oxford University professors and chargers real Alice would have known. It has a wonderful cast of actors virtuous - Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter, Michael Redgrave as the caterpillar and, best of all, John Gielgud and Malcolm Muggeridge, the sea, the dance of the lobster squad. His Alice, as Alice acted all have seen, is the wrong side of puberty and can look bad mood against annoying.

Fear goes with evil beings, and dangerous landscapes. Blind Pew, and smiling, treacherous Long John Silver taught me about fear, about the possibility of real danger. Kipling's The Jungle, which Grahame Wild Wood was a relationship of innocents, they also taught me the fear - as it actually did Beatrix Potter Tom Kitten, lost in the tunnels of the fireplace, wrapped in dough with a rat, terrible. We need, we like fear. Kipling has a wonderful story in The Jungle Book - "How did fear" - and a poem that used to sing "The Song of the Little Hunter," with its refrain "It's fear, O little Hunter is fear." Kipling knew, as MacDonald and Stevenson knew, the human emotion of fear in a landscape that is more than human, full of dark and dangerous creatures. Rereading what I have now read like a frightened child in wartime what I feel is pain, sorrow for the lost forest, the overflow of the oceans, forests decline.

The opposite of fear, in the Victorian and Edwardian tale, is cloying sentiment. Curiously, this does not harm the story of Little Lord, a child with an American mother called "Dear", whose generosity and goodwill towards everyone, turn their evil, cynical grandfather, who supports his mother to a distance in a home for widows. Burnett writes with complete conviction about this boy type, and takes the reader with her. But what are we to make of that disastrous work of Lewis Carroll himself, Sylvie and Bruno? The narrator, a man in and out of real life in the world of fairy tale of sweet children, Sylvie and Bruno, who is full of sickly baby talk and bad jokes. As a child, I tried so hard to read. I gave him the benefit of the doubt - this was the master of storytelling and humor - and even as a child I was embarrassed for him. Barrie sentimental tales are more sinister. The Little White Bird, "was the story of Peter Pan in which he made his first appearance. There is talk of Kensington Park, where children fall off their prams and no one notices, and dead babies become fairies. Peter Pan is not more than seven days old. The crusty bachelor finally gets to fulfill her dream of spending the night with a young boy who cares, in his bed. It's all about the sweet innocence - as Sylvie and Bruno - and makes the reader more restless and anxious that lack heavy.

The creatures in the Pooh stories are animated stuffed toys, which are quite adequately represented by EH Shepard drawings. The child reader is wiser and smarter than all of them and also wiser and smarter than Christopher Robin. This is a gentle, pleasant, wood circumscribed, and maybe that's why I do not care too much and to representatives of Disney, but I've never seen the film through. In the 1970s Alison Lurie was writing about the Disneyfication of Americans (and therefore the British) imagination. Fairy tales, their power and mystery, were said to be killed by the princesses and dragons blink of saccharine sweet comic. Disney's first film as I ever saw was Snow White, which contributed greatly to my wonderful experience of fear and terror, even though the heroine was a doll. This, I am told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories. The film Bambi reduced the real meaning of forests and the creatures he found in the book. It was unbearable filming of the Jungle Books. Disney cartoons using the proportions of the human baby faces - eyes, chubby cheeks that respond automatically. The black panther hunting, strong terrible serpent, the wolf pack and howl, the tiger became servile dolls and toys as Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore, and some crucial imaginative space was irretrievably lost.

Tim Burton has solved the problem of Alice, the child actors and puberty, making her 19. Alice is both fortunate and resilient when made into films. Much of the original recitations and performances, the big boys can and do, do new and amazing. The space of his world is in the head, and can be done with games and visual tricks. The version in my memory is intact.

Alice in Wonderland opens nationwide on March 5.

Lewis Carroll
AS Byatt


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